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- cross-posted to:
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Schleswig-Holstein, one of Germany’s 16 states, on Wednesday confirmed plans to move tens of thousands of systems from Microsoft Windows to Linux. The announcement follows previously established plans to migrate the state government off Microsoft Office in favor of open source LibreOffice.
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Isn’t this like the third time they’ve done this and it lamsts until Microsoft backs a dump truck of money up to the government?
Don’t get me wrong though. I hope it sticks! Fuck Microsoft.
Yes, but the last times it was just one city, this time it’s a state.
More or less, yes.
Germany and France have been trying this for more than two decades.
But every time, there is pressure from the US government (the stick) and Microsoft arranges a short-term deal to make Windows cheaper than the cost of transitioning (the carrot).
But this time, the EU is serious about decoupling from the US, so I think it will actually happen.
I really hope it sticks. Then something decent will have come out of this shit (US) government.
Instead of mass migration, they should just institute small changes to small sections or areas or groups … just slowly erode the windows userbase over a period of about four or five or even ten years. Once it reaches a critical mass at some point … then you can just cut the cord altogether and change over everything and everyone.
That’s what they’re trying to do.
It makes most sense to switch the email+office users to Linux and reserve MacOs and Windows for users who really need to run specific applications.
Good way to
extortget Microsoft to offer competitive prices. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯But yeah, it was the city of Munich that had a few goes at this. Now it’s the state of Schleswig-Holstein.
Linux has come a long way since then. And hopefully so the employees
Well, as the other person said, it was not a failing of LiMux. It was political. Munich had been ruled by one coalition throughout the lifetime of LiMux and after it went to a different coalition, they announced the switch back.
The manager of Munich’s IT department also publicly stated that they were surprised by the decision, because there are no larger technical problems and compatibility is resolved by providing virtualized MS Office, where necessary.
Coincidentally, Microsoft also moved its German headquarters from just outside of Munich’s tax region into Munich around the same time.
It’s not the competitive pricing that is the issue, it the forced upgrade cycle and invasive user policies.
(Except for system admin costs and Mail/File Hosting) a Linux-based solution is literally Free. I would assume that Mail and File hosting for Governmental Entities should be hosted in-house anyway.
What about user managment like active directory? Is LDAP a viable alternative?
You have FreeIPA if you want a ”product”.
But honestly, if I, as a Linux admin, would do this kind of thing at this scale, I’d probably elect to remain on AD.
AD is just LDAP with extra steps.
Yeah but those extra steps are important ones.
Not really. It can all be faked. Virtual Directory Servers are a thing. Live javascript transformation of data from a non MS LDAP server, functioning as AD. Just match up the schema, and go. You get real multi master replication (no idea if MS has this now, but they didn’t at the time) and an actually performant server. Plus all the logs just pipe over to your syslog server so you don’t have to rdp into a server and look at event viewer. It can all be done from the shell on the jump server you use to manage everything else.
Munich tried this 20 years ago. They reversed that decision in 2017.
I’m sure the newly built Microsoft Germany headquarter in munich had nothing to do with that. There was a lot of lobbying and badmouthing of limux at the time.
In 2020 there was a new decision in munich to go with open source wherever possible.
Was going to say just that. The CDU / CSU is known to be very
lobby friendlycorrupt.
I am certain that the software has improved a lot in 20 years.
Back then it was a bold move. Today, doable? I’ll be following this.
20 years ago desktop Linux wasn’t nearly as good as it is nowadays. They were also influenced by Micro$oft lobbyists, who threatened to move their headquarters out of Munich, causing millions of lost tax revenue for the city.
Because they went about it the wrong way. They made their own distro, their own office suite etc. I believe they would have been successful, if they just used already existing stuff, instead of reinventing the wheel and taking on all the development obligations.
What Schleswig-Holstein is doing, is using en established distro, with established office suite and established cloud solution. They only maintain the servers and maybe patch-fix issues, which they could then upstream.
They actually did a study on it after rolling back to Windows, and it turned out to not have failed due to technical difficulties at all.
If I recall correctly they stated that something like 80-90% of all issues reported during the period were due to badly designed processes - processes which were the same as in Windows, and the number of technical issues actually dropped.Certainly, the fact that Microsoft promised to build a fancy new HQ in the city if they switched back to Windows can’t have had anything to do with the choice to roll back…
Because Microsoft bribed them by moving their German HQ there.
This article is from 2024. Hopefully it worked out. 😆
This prob what trump thought he was doing by “putting tarrifs on penguins”
Every worker moved is another worker more likely to use Linux at home. In my experience you’re most likely to use the computers you work with (school or otherwise) and exposure to Linux is going to demystify it in ways social media cannot.
Most exciting is probably the IT management side. I wonder how many distros are hardened for end users who do general office work - where people are more likely to tinker and mess about either for fun or to optimise things.
You gotta love the thumbnail being a bunch a penguins and the headline being “30K workers migrating”. Gave me a good chuckle.
I hope they go immutable. No maintenance.
Wonder what distro they’ll use. Didn’t see it in my skim of the article. Love to see them ditching Microsoft across the board!
Can’t believe nobody noticed this article is a year old. 🤔
Was literally about to post about that. Going into this I was hoping the new trade war shit would’ve reignited the desire to switch, but alas: disappointment 🙃
Not only that, but it keeps getting re-shared every week like it’s breaking news.
Like, I get it’s exciting to see an European government giving the middle finger to a huge US multinational for once, but we need to move on. If anything, these examples should be given to pressure other governments to do the same.
Yeah, I remember reading this last year.
i’ve seen this movie before
Every year will be easier than the last I guess. I’ve been reading about attempts for well over a decade. LibreOffice is way better than it was a decade ago. I felt like Google Docs would eventually be the downfall of MS Office because how schools were using it and everyone getting used to exporting as PDF to submit
Ideally we keep snowballing the idea of using open source art tools over American proprietary ones as at least a means of national self-resolve. So like Blender, Krita, Kdenlive, Ardour, etc
As another comment mentioned, this article is just over a year old.
However, the stage government reiterated it’s intent to transition to open source software just a few days ago Google Translated link
