The Maß Is Empty: Munich Switching Back To Windows After ~14 Years With Linux

[AdamOne]

As long as icons are all in the same place on the desktop, none will panic.

i was talking about never ending loading after boot, huge consuming background processes, you know

[SystemCrasher]

I wonder if they're okay with Win10 keylogging features and so on. Or maybe they failed to consider it? Or maybe someone got paid to fail to consider it? That's how MS likes to do their things, we've seen how it works when it comes to e.g. ISO office document standards. Foul play is a hallmark of MS.

[quikee]

Yeah, exactly what I was saying all these years. Doing your own distro is hell, just use something good and supported. SUSE is from Germany, for crying out loud, they probably even could do on-site support.

They didn't do it's own distro from scratch. They took debian/ubuntu and modified it to their needs. They had their own repository where they pushed packages in when they tested them, they also put in their custom apps and their own install disks with basic packages and settings - that was LiMux. Generally what they did is just something any linux admin would do if he has to maintain a large number of computers to make his life easier. What kind of distribution they made and what they used it for is widely misunderstood by people.

OTOH, I agree that it was a bad choice for them to not have a support contract from one of the enterprise linux distributor.

[edwaleni]

Geez, when we dropped Novell/Netscape for Windows way back when, everyone and I mean everyone cried foul. We were accused of taking bribes, taking subsidies, political underhanded deals, blah, blah, blah. It got really boring.

We did a really good bake off, published our requirements, asked them all to comply and tell us how much it would all cost. At the time MSFT did all we needed at the same cost. Instead of dealing 3 or 4 vendors for support, we got it down to two.

Today, I couldn't care less. My Websphere team can trouble shoot an issue on RHEL 7.x just as fast as the .NET team can Windows Server 2012R2. Don't give a rip what the app runs on as long as it meets the requirements. We recently decided to switch an application back to Windows from RHEL because the vendor notified us (for the first time) that they did all of their initial compiling and testing on Windows before they ported it to Linux. Because of it, we should see an 10-15% performance bump on Windows across all the same release intervals. We wanted that 10% and it made sense financially. So Windows here we come.

On the flip side, some pinhead wanted a 96 core SQL Server because they said it was the only way to scale it out. We called BS, had it retested on Oracle on RHEL 6.x on less than half the cores and it practically sleepwalks.

We made a choice to use a open source based Hadoop implementation, and the exec pushing HortonWorks on Windows had a literal cow. Instead of embracing the many tools to integrate SQL Server into Hadoop, he resigned and took his Visual Studio with him. Which is unfortunate as he could have become a leader in data integration. Religion can force odd decisoning.

As for me, the OS is not a religion, its merely a means. Amen!

[F.Ultra]

I doubt there's any "bribery". In an enterprise environment when dealing with 100s, if not 1000s of machines, Windows is still easier to manage than Linux.

I'm a Linux user, and still have ended up using Active Directory + Windows over anything Linux when needing to manage many computers. Group policy, sso, software management, automated driver installation, roaming profiles, folder redirection, shared printers etc > anything Linux has.

Oh, running a bunch of shell scripts on login/boot to try replicate the above is not a proper solution.

One problem with your theory is that this decision was not done by the people managing the system, in fact AFAIK the admins where 100% behind LiMUX.

[F.Ultra]

Geez, when we dropped Novell/Netscape for Windows way back when, everyone and I mean everyone cried foul. We were accused of taking bribes, taking subsidies, political underhanded deals, blah, blah, blah. It got really boring.

We did a really good bake off, published our requirements, asked them all to comply and tell us how much it would all cost. At the time MSFT did all we needed at the same cost. Instead of dealing 3 or 4 vendors for support, we got it down to two.

Today, I couldn't care less. My Websphere team can trouble shoot an issue on RHEL 7.x just as fast as the .NET team can Windows Server 2012R2. Don't give a rip what the app runs on as long as it meets the requirements. We recently decided to switch an application back to Windows from RHEL because the vendor notified us (for the first time) that they did all of their initial compiling and testing on Windows before they ported it to Linux. Because of it, we should see an 10-15% performance bump on Windows across all the same release intervals. We wanted that 10% and it made sense financially. So Windows here we come.

On the flip side, some pinhead wanted a 96 core SQL Server because they said it was the only way to scale it out. We called BS, had it retested on Oracle on RHEL 6.x on less than half the cores and it practically sleepwalks.

We made a choice to use a open source based Hadoop implementation, and the exec pushing HortonWorks on Windows had a literal cow. Instead of embracing the many tools to integrate SQL Server into Hadoop, he resigned and took his Visual Studio with him. Which is unfortunate as he could have become a leader in data integration. Religion can force odd decisoning.

As for me, the OS is not a religion, its merely a means. Amen!

That is cute and all but have no connection with this story what so ever. The initial change to Linux and this new change to Windows 10 was 100% political.

There is an interesting interview at LWN with the FSFE President Matthias Kirschner at https://lwn.net/Articles/737818/ which among other things cotains these little tidbits:

That all ended in 2014. The old mayor did not run for reelection, so a new mayor, Dieter Reiter, from the same party was elected. Reiter did not like Limux and was quoted in some articles as being a Microsoft fan. He ran partly on the idea of switching away from Limux.

From then on, Kirschner said, "Limux was the cause of all evil in Munich". For example, iPhones did not work with the city's infrastructure, which was blamed on Limux though it had nothing to do with the desktop client. A mail server outage was also unfairly blamed on Limux.

The city government paid for a study to look at the IT problems that the city was having. It was done by Accenture, which is a Microsoft partner, so the FSFE and others expected the worst. It turned out not to be what they expected, he said. The study identified several problems, one of which was about an old version of Windows that was still in use, but the biggest problems were organizational rather than technical.

It turned out that there were fifteen different operating system versions in use throughout the city administration. Upgrades could be blocked by departments if they didn't like the update or didn't have time to do them. That meant there were users who were dealing with bugs that had been long fixed in LibreOffice (or OpenOffice before it). The study recommended that those problems be fixed.

[newwen]

As a matter of fact, Linux was working fine for their own needs. The problem was when they needed to communicate with other municipalities or federal bodies, they were being requested to send everything in (wait for it) MS Office compatible format.

To me, this is not a sign of Linux not being up to the task (quite the opposite), but of how strong MS's vendor lock in actually is. I also don't know how well the decision to make their own distro worked out in time.

The only solution for it is that the Federal goverment or the senate mandates that all communications among public administrations in the whole country be made in a vendor neutral open standard such as OpenDocument. Since MS Office supports this, it shouln't cause any problems, which it does using Microsoft's OOXML crap

[edwaleni]

That is cute and all but have no connection with this story what so ever. The initial change to Linux and this new change to Windows 10 was 100% political.

There is an interesting interview at LWN with the FSFE President Matthias Kirschner at https://lwn.net/Articles/737818/ which among other things cotains these little tidbits:

Point made was no one really gives a rip what the OS is anymore. That was the connection to the story. The surface may call it politics, the rest of us just say so what. As long as Munich gets what they need, who cares? Just look for the next opportunity.

[OneBitUser]

Sad face.

I wonder what justification they have for spending 50 million on it

München's switch to Linux was very poorly carried out, in my opinion.
They had a terrible system to manage, as they never fully transitioned to Linux and did not use a major vanilla distribution.
They had Ubuntu-based LiMux machines as well as Windows XP, Vista, and 7 boxes... seems like a nightmare to administrate and support such an IT infrastructure.

München arguably would have been much better off if they had just stuck to a pure Ubuntu LTS or CentsOS system, say with a simple pre-configured ISO with all necessary configuration included, distributable via their network.

So there are some objective reasons for the switch, but not near enough.
Still, one of their current city leaders (AFAIR the mayor) actually does have close ties with Microsoft.
A part of the explanation the new city leadership has given was the MS Office document incompatibility that made it difficult for them to interact with other government divisions... open document formats should be mandatory in any and all government offices, seeing that they are available free-of-charge,

By the way, the 50.000.000€ mentioned here only covers the cost of the switch. By the time München has completed the switch, they will have additionally paid Microsoft about the same sum for support fees and software subscriptions.

[CrystalGamma]

The only solution for it is that the Federal goverment or the senate mandates that all communications among public administrations in the whole country be made in a vendor neutral open standard such as OpenDocument.

IIRC, there is such a law, but administrations just ignore it …