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

[starshipeleven]

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.

Aaaand you're wrong. Linux has its own AD equivalents, this for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeIPA

A totally unexpected RedHat project, btw.

[Michael_S]

Britoid
I admit, I've never had to manage a fleet of machines used by staff, I've only ever managed fleets of servers.

But wouldn't LDAP plus one of Chef, Puppet, Ansible, or Saltstack work just fine? If not, why not? I use Saltstack at work and it can manage accounts, permissions, drivers, network shares, etc... From one server I can see resource usage, disk space, network connections, current processes, and so forth on everything. What does Group Policy and Active Directory offer that this does not?

[Leopard]

Because of LibreOffice i guess.

Did you ever try opening some pptx files on Libre? It is a mess.

Main reason of Windows usage is not Windows itself , their solutions just dominating the market and became standart.

They're also serving Microsoft Office for MacOS but they're doing it without worries because people can't put MacOS on their existing machines easily.

However , if they do the same thing for Linux ( which they won't ) why office users want to pay for Windows itself too? They will just put a Linux distro and buy Ms Office for Linux.

[Britoid]

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.

[starshipeleven]

This is something that will be a sore awakening for the workforce, once theyre on Windows theyll propably panic.

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

[AdamOne]

The Linux use wasnt defended vigorously enough probably.
I'm a Linux user I have a hard time defending its use other than - "but Windows is so sh*t!!"

This is something that will be a sore awakening for the workforce, once theyre on Windows theyll propably panic. Which is why Linux use must be defended by the users in cases like this.

Sad!

[treba]

Well, it definitly didn't have anything to do with microsoft moving their german head quarter to munich last year....

[molecule-eye]

There is a real problem with libreoffice compatibility issues, and while there is Office 365, it's no replacement for Word. Still, I doubt it was so bad they couldn't just live with the few compatibility problems they had here or there.

[bug77]

Sad face.

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

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.

[WolfpackN64]

The way I see it, stuff like this is why we should at least give technocracy a try...

If you're not familiar with why this took place, the main reason for it is that Microsoft promised a number of influential local politicians that they'd move their German headquarters back to München if they ditched Linux and open source. Microsoft obviously couldn't bribe officials directly, not after Lockheed was caught bribing the West German minister of defense into buying the disastrous F-104 and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that was created as direct response to it and number of other times Lockheed had bribed foreign officials to buy their planes. However this way the politicians can boast about bringing high paying jobs to the city and use that to get more votes so it's still essentially a bribe even if money didn't change hands.

Technocrats are not necessarily good officials. A good minister makes good discicions based on the information that's available to him. We have a minister of economy in Belgium that is a doctorandus in economy and he's doing a very poor job.