Interesting (and poorly paraphrased) story about a successful Linux migration:
spoiler
Several years ago someone made a post or cross-posted on r/sysadmin where OP (lead sysadmin) was in meeting with management and they complained about windows and the licensing costs.
OP jokingly passed a comment about switching to Linux and management actually thought he was throwing out a real idea.
Upon explaining the much lower cost due to FOSS and maybe only requiring a small contract for consulting/support, management actually agreed to his idea.
He successfully transitioned the entire company to OpenSUSE which he determined was the best enterprise distro for desktop use.
The other important part was how he handled the transition. iirc he got it going by first offering it to tech savvy departments who were ecstatic to get new stuff, so he lined it up with a hardware upgrade.
Naturally the rest of the departments heard about it and also wanted the new stuff which locked them into using Linux.
There were several holdouts clinging to Windows, but with the majority showing success, management forced them to change as well.
For his use case, most of the employees were using web apps, so almost no additional desktop apps were required.
Offices have way more power to convert the world to Linux than even gaming does.
And ofc, Microsoft is well aware and is not interested in letting that happen.
Correct. Bavaria once tried the same thing, but then MS went to the local politicians, sucked their dicks a bit and boom, back to MS products it is! Hopefully the north doesn’t fall for that kind of shit, and they likely won’t because Bavaria is a backwards piece of shit of a Bundesland while Schleswig Holstein is kinda cool.
Bavaria isn’t even Germany. I also hope, that our country isn’t falling for this MS bullshit.
Love your username and your comment 🥰
Hopefully this at least forces Microsoft to rethink riddling their bullshit with ads. I feel sorry for people who are still stuck with that trash for whatever reason.
I’m pretty sure the enterprise version of Windows does not and will never have ads. So not super relavent when talking about a transition to Linux in an office setting.
Edge “new tab” default is hellishly full of ads and “news”, the Taskbar has stock price information alongside weather and sports, and search in the start menu still shows internet searches. Even on enterprise.
You can remove the stock ticker even on home edition, on enterprise you can make it go away by default for new installs as well. And with enterprise, you can disable edge entirely and unlike home edition it won’t re-enable on upgrade.
None of these things should exist in the first place. Edge will stay disabled until Microsoft feels its been long enough since the last time they got slapped for it, then they’ll push it again.
Back then I read an article about how M$ is crippling the ability of other office packets to read their docx and xslx formats which are supposed to be open formats, but in reality are written in a way never to be fully integrated by competing products. More information about their pseudo open standard: https://fsfe.org/activities/msooxml/msooxml.en.html
Munich in the past have used Linux PCs for quite some time until eventually switching back to windows. Back then they were citing the same incompatibilities to open and read and display M$ office files correctly. So Microsoft is definitely abusing their position as a market leader and trying to cripple competition as much as they can.
So fine them and require all governemtn documents and legal documents of anybkind to be in a true open format. Its only a compatibility problem if people continue to use their format.
In the past, some people have expressed dissatisfaction when I’ve sent them files in .odt format. However, it’s the superior format in terms of support and functionality, so I always make them aware of that and of the fact that I will never use some shitty ms product…
That’s unlikely to happen in every country where they’re popular. Microsoft can just be like “oh you’re gonna fine us? We’ll pull out and you guys will be completely fucked. Have fun!”
They got into the enterprise sector so early that most offices wouldn’t function without Microsoft products/support.
We’ll pull out and you guys will be completely fucked. Have fun!"
Don’t threaten me with a good time! /s :)
They don’t need to fine them in every country. Just in Germany. If they pull our of Germany, they need to pull out of the EU. They are not doing that. They will make their document open, for real.
Iso allowing itself to be coopted into fast tracking standarizing ooxml in 2008 continues to be horrible. Ms can point and say: see ooxml is a true open format.
There was criticism at the time, but the people who had to work with it every day. welcomed it after a very short time. The end of the Limux project happened all by itself, because Munich’s mayor is an MS fan boy and said so openly at the time. It was not because of technical problems or anything else. It was just a huge kindergarten child.
It didn’t end
They actually flip flop a lot.
2006: Migration to LiMux begins
2008: 1200 out of 14,000 have migrated to the LiMux environment
2013: Over 15,000 LiMux PC-workstations (of about 18,000 workstations)
2016: Microsoft moves german HQ to Münich
2017: Dumping Linux https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/munich-city-government-to-dump-linux-desktop-84307.html
2020: Going back to Linux https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-is-shifting-back-from-microsoft-to-open-source-again/
2023: Microsoft opens new Experience Center in Münich https://www.munich-business.eu/meldungen/neues-microsoft-experience-center-emea.html
2023: Analysing what needs to be done to switch to Win10 before new vote https://www.tweaksforgeeks.com/ditching-linux-for-windows-after-wannacry-is-too-risky-for-munich-green-party-warns/
https://lemmy.world/comment/7251741Notice the “Microsft does X” bits and the reactions.
Totally not quid pro quo.
The software etc. continues to run. But as an official project of the state, Limux is dead and so are the subsidies etc. How far it will still be maintained is questionable. However, this does not mean that the topic of Linux and Open Source has become irrelevant. But even now, with the future plans, I strongly assume that something like this will happen again. But who cares… But it’s only the taxpayer who has to pay for it anyway…
For the downvoters. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
LiMux Client version 6.0 is based on Kubuntu 18, KDE 5.44, GIMP 2.10, LibreOffice 5.2.8, WollMux 18, Google Chrome 80 and Firefox 60 ESR and 68; Okular is used as a PDF viewer instead of Adobe Reader, which was discontinued for Linux.[44] Like the previous versions, it was not multi-session capable. First rollout was done in April 2019 and is estimated to be fully rolled out in 2020.
Official LiMux URL. https://www.muenchen.de/rathaus/Stadtverwaltung/Direktorium/IT-Beauftragte/LiMux.html
So good to read this, the 2016 coup d’etat represented, among other things, a huge rollback of our infrastructure that was being passed on to open source systems for years, good to know that we are resuming the right path
Are there updates?
He posted this update a few months ago, it seems to be progressing well!
Fuck yeah. Biggest employer in Europe NHS England needs to wake up and do this too. In one single licensing agreement they handed Microsoft £163.1 million. Imagine what that could do if spent on linux development instead, or heaven forbid on actual healthcare. It actually boggles my mind that the NHS doesn’t have it’s own distro and do its own development.
They don’t need a new distro, unless they hire a lot of highly skilled packagers. I’d take say Ubuntu or OpenSuSE … but it would be RedHat with Oracle for the NHS - they just can’t help losing money.
For my tiny company, I’m going Kubuntu … bear with … Ubuntu means:
- Multiple “enterprise AV” are available (ESET and others)
- Secure Boot
- Full disc encryption is available
Those boxes ticked gets you on the way in the rather naff enterprise security word of tick boxes. Without those - give up now.
The K(DE) bit gets you a lot of configurability and its reasonably easy to get an environment out of the box that Windows users can get to grips with. Besides, I like KDE/Plasma.
I then tack on this rather fine project: https://cid-doc.github.io/ for AD, SYSVOL, “Drive letter” etc integration. Evolution with EWS does email.
My test machine is my desktop (it used to run Arch (actually), my laptop still does) - I started off with Kubuntu 22.04 and wired up all the above and then whilst in a Teams meeting kicked off the upgrade to 23.04 for a laugh. Sound stopped after a while because the kernel modules switched out. Anyway, all good after a reboot.
Seeing as I am competing with something that has GPO, I’ll allow myself to use Ansible.
PS - I should point out that an Arch box can run one of the ESET for Linux products OK (I have). You can get it to do secure boot and it can do FDE. So can Gentoo but I spent 15 years constantly fixing my Gentoo pets too.
From what I’ve heard, the problem with IT in the health industry is with equipment manufacturers. MRIs, x-ray machines and other equipment that have control software that’s written not just for windows, but a particular version of windows, and won’t work without it. So you end up with a patchwork of different OSes that need to be updated and secure. Unifying that into one OS, even if it was to a pre-rolled Linux distro would be a nightmare, if not impossible.
It breaks my brain every day of the week thinking about how much money could be put to better use in so many industries if they just switched to Linux, but big organisations are like big ships; they move slowly and are hard to steer. And they regard software licences as the cost of doing business 🤷♂️
Yeah it’s a shame about that. I wonder if a customer the size of the NHS could make it worth releasing Linux versions of the software though. I mean, if I can get an appimage or flatpak of some small open source cross-platform project surely someone like Canon could release one for their new ultrasound stuff. Especially if they’re being offered an order to roll it out across an entire nations health service?
It would be pretty funny if they just ran it using Wine though!
bro you need to wake up. this is not how software works with government. NHS is not going to write their own Linux distro. that’s crazy even for a company to do. its gonna take them a recurring budget every year just for maintaining the system. it’ll balloon way past the Microsoft number easily. 163mm pound is a tiny TINY budget for an undertaking like building a healthcare OS that they plan to maintain forever. they’ll have money to hire contractors once, then they’ll pass it to their internal teams that are staffed with people trying to pass time until they collect pension.
also no way will any agency take the liability of building a custom OS for their health infra. health tech is honestly one of the hardest, most expensive things to dev just due to all the regulation and red tape behind it. you can’t just build health tech for the hell of it, even if you’re the NHS. it takes years and years and crazy money to have your systems certified to handle health data even if you’re building internally.
What I predict will happen is that Microsoft will offer them Windows for free or bribe the relevant decision makers with free Surface Pro laptops (for “evaluation”) or other Microsoft paraphernalia.
That’s not how they do it, of only because it would tank Windows PR image as “free stuff”.
What you do is arrange it with the government to alocate huge budget sums to purchasing Windows and other stuff from Microsoft at normal market value, then return half the money to the government officials under the desk in whatever form you care or can get away with, straight up bribes if you can swing it.
Microsoft gets to remain dominant, Windows appears to have been purchased at normal value and gets to keep its clout as fancy expensive stuff, and the decision makers get mad money out of it. Everybody wins.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_licensing_corruption_scandal
Or with creating Microsoft offices in their cities, like they did with Munich.
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I keep seeing people say they will they move to Linux instead of Windows 11. I wonder what will happen to the market share.
Worse case we could see developers becoming harassed by people demanding features
History tells us that 85% of these people will move to Windows 11 despite what they say.
There is a real opportunity here for companies though.
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Move employees to Office 365 online today ( see how many truly need the desktop apps )
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Start moving early adopters to Linux ( still using Office 365 online )
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Work to identify and replace any other software that is Windows only
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When Windows 10 goes end-of-support, move everybody else to Linux
The few that really need Excel desktop could probably run it in a VM or via a virtual desktop ( thin client ).
You could probably stop there. Honestly, I doubt it would even bother Microsoft that much. Office and Azure is the business now.
From there, you could try to advance further if you want.
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Move early adopters off Office 365
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Drop Office 365
Honestly though, for many companies, you could almost get Office 365 for free just be combining it with your Azure spend and getting a discount.
Companies that use Windows and Azure are locked into it by their use of things like AD, Intune, Exchange, OneCloud, SharePoint, Hello etc., on the infrastructure and ops administrative side, not necessarily by Office365. It’s almost impossible to make a clean break from all that for any company past a certain size.
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I love Linux but I’ve seen so many of these efforts fail. I did a move where we moved an entire election system onto centos. the move was a quarter billion dollars for them, but a couple years later they came back needing us to move to Redhat… then back to windows eventually.
the reason is governments are never willing to figure things out for themselves. if there’s any error at all that happens that might make some gov officials look bad, they need a support line to call immediately and threaten breaking contracts. maybe these guys are fuckin with Canonical but Linux support is so shit from my experience.
as much as I hate Microsoft, you can pay them enough and they’ll elevate your tickets to engineers who actually can do something and fix your shit. THAT is what governments actually want. somebody to sue or blame when their tech hits the fan.
That makes so much sense. That’s probably the best explanation I’ve ever heard of why windows is so hard to get rid of in large organisations.
Since the huge push to SaaS I’ve seen plenty of companies that essentially run thin clients.
The local workstations are just thier access to login to X website that host thier apps and data.
Zero reason for them to switch to win11 or buy new hardware due to “incompatibility”.
These end users can be trained to use mint or Ubuntu and be just as productive at work.
Not even trained. Same browser, same login…
Funnily enough, this is what a chromebook was made to do. A computer that was only a browser. Unfortunately, the hardware was severely underpowered, and the custom software wasn’t as flexible as a simple Linux desktop is capable of. (Almost no software support outside of Google)
I saw a “gaming Chromebook” for $649 (USD) at the big box electronics and appliance store today.
At first I was astounded, but it did have a high refresh rate display and some type of GeForce iGPU. Apparently designed around cloud gaming. Which is na interesting use case.
