they will save 188,000 € on Microsoft license fees per year
Fingers crossed that this will be an indisputable success. 🤞
Allegedly a similar project in Munich went really really well, but was shut down when the right wing came into power.
For some reason the right wing of Munich doesn’t like freedom. 🙄Munich racist shitheads (a.k.a. CSU) absolutely do love that sweet “freedom money” a.k.a. bribes though. Corrupt fuckers…
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While I don’t necessarily disagree, wasn’t it mostly less bad than the rural areas all around?
Microsoft supports genocide which also makes them attractive to fascists.
The German Microsoft headquarters are in Munich.
This is the sort of adoption we need to bring Linux into the mainstream
This and software companies openly supporting Linux. For example, if Adobe and AutoCAD among others would build some tars then you could see it.
Ironically, Game Engines are ahead of the curve on this. You could build Unreal Engine from the github page on Linux for many years now and we also have Godot and Blender. I think several PCB design and also architecture tools already exist on Linux as well, so there is definitely room for a lot of industries and businesses to shift away from Windows as long as they can find a competent tech guy to maintain everything with minimal downtime.
Blender got ported to Linux in 1998, to Windows in 1999. The modal interface and key command language is no accident, it literally is a 3d vi.
Linux is generally strong when it comes to 3d graphics workstations, it inherited IRIX’ market share, plenty of artists around, especially in the film industry, who’d go on a strike if you took away dragging windows with alt+LMB. Graphics, that is, CAD is dominated by Windows as CAD started out as 2d sketch software which ran on cheap DOS machines.
Houdini is also Unix-native and Blender’s only surviving competitor (considered by features, not industry inertia), Maya started out as cross-platform IRIX+Windows.
It’s gonna be a rough few months for the IT department
Just wait for Microsoft to start astroturfing the initiative.
Embrace, extend, extinguish will accelerate.
What makes you think FOSS cannot use the same strat ?
Mostly because the FOSS community doesn’t have a single point of leadership that is maniacally focused on becoming a total monopoly.
And that’s a good thing
Yeah but we can aspire for FOSS to take over the world right ?
Didn’t the Trump admin suspend enforcement of foreign anti-bribery laws? Microsoft just has to write a check to the right person to kill this.
Let’s hope it sticks when Microsoft backs up the money truck.
It would be nice to see the European governments start a genuine effort on funding open source development, and start laying the foundation for a migration to their own Linux distro. Microsoft isn’t trustworthy. Hell, most American big tech is untrustworthy. Moving your government offices to an in house developed OS is going to be paramount for their security in the future.
from what i know Germany already does this
I switched to Thunderbird about a year and a half ago.
Last week I had to help a coworker with their Outlook and holy shit is it so much worse than when I dropped it. There is so much AI garbage in every little thing and bad design getting in the way of just sending and receiving emails.
Same thing for the other office products
It’s horrendous. Can’t even explain how bad it is now.
Yup. I switched to linux on my home computer and now the more time I spend with it, the more I pity my work computer for the cancer it has to deal with.
I have an Outlook account from when I decided to use it specifically to receive and interact with clients as a freelance artist.
My freelance gig didn’t launch, so I kinda forgot about it. This week I remembered that account and logged on… Only to find the most disgusting interface a user has ever seen! There are (almost) no shortcuts, not a gram of intuitiveness to be found…
Horrible horrible platform
Germany has done this multiple times before. Microsoft has historically swept in with some sweetheart deal to lure them back.
Hopefully it sticks this time.
I can’t see a reason why Linux distro wouldn’t be enough for 99% of office machines. Unless deployment is really that much better and easier with Windows and MS Office. And whatever proprietary apps they use that need running on certain OS.
Those proprietary apps are the really big factor. A lot of stuff is run from a browser these days, but some systems are just too expensive to replace.
Things are slowly starting to get better in a lot of the fields I interface with.
Payroll and accounting software? Many great browser-based offerings. Unfortunately that also means the backend is running in the developer’s servers, but these applications were generally proprietary to begin with.
EMR company I’ve done a lot of work with (used to be an engineer there), has essentially halted progress on their Windows-only native client (and it was DEEPLY entrenched in Windows) and is now browser based, retaining 99% of functionality. This one always connected to a proprietary backend anyway.
Own a VW, Audi, Seat, Škoda, Bentley or Lamborghini (depending on model year for some of those)? The popular 3rd party diagnostic software for those, called VCDS, now has a mobile variant if you buy the wireless dongle instead of the cable - it runs a server in the dongle itself that you connect to via wifi, and it displays the sofware as a website. Of course it’s available for non-mobile browsers too.
Common theme among all of these is that none need to do heavy data processing on the client - though nowadays that is also solvable using WASM.
I mean, at my work we mostly have operating apps that just run inside browser anyway. Our mail clients also run in browser. Only some internal apps are something specially that feels like JAVA designed or something that should run on Linux as well. We could easily use some Linux distro and with KDE or Cinnamon/MATE/XFCE it would be roughly similar to Windows 11. Most people have no clue what version we have, they just know it’s Windows. You could just tell them it’s special new version of Windows for companies and they’d just eventually adapt to it not knowing it’s not really Windows at all.
Windows + office + account and identity management all come with Ms 365 business in the first tier past family. For about $15 or $16 a month you can use InTune to set up logins and select enrollment with MFA as well a provision computers and management with InTune including Boyd self enrollment for laptops, Android, and Apple. All your files get rbac, backup, and recovery from day 1. You can, and I would recommend strongly against this, even manage your osx devices from InTune.
It’s very slick and there is a reason business use it. This thread is somewhat delusional on how easy it is to manage and how terrible office 365 is.
UntilI can log a user on and have all their stuff automatically sync or download on Linux. Microsoft can have office computers. But please, please let Linux take over gaming.
It’s not.
The problem is that one percent that does need Windows.
Unicorns suck in IT. It’s a small number of systems that take a disproportionate amount of admin overhead.
So IT leadership has to decide if they support a separate OS for a small percentage of users, or one OS that works for everyone (Windows).
Those boxes will be unicorns no matter what, though, also, they’re not necessarily part of the general IT infrastructure. Someone in catastrophe defence might be running fluid simulations using some god awful expensive windows-only software but chances are they can manage their own box, and if not, the ministry will still have IT staff who can deal with that kind of thing.
IT absolutely does still have to manage those things though. At my company we have all sorts of obscure boxes controlling things like diagnostic readers and CNC machines. Things that the mechanics/engineers [imo] should be able to manage, its still on us.
Plus they usually still want those things to access the internet (because they require it) or access to file shares (to get gcode files and whatever) which is firmly an IT task
I mean… my condolences and/or yay you get to be a honorary machinist?
Unless deployment is really that much better and easier
In staging, i made a batch script to run the shortcuts on desktop we had to run to check if setup was successful. But i couldn’t just run the command of the shortcut but had to run the shortcut itself, because that made a difference.
In short: no.
I sometimes wonder what if everyone who spends money on licensing fees instead takes the same amount of money and puts it into FOSS. Imagine what we could achieve? Likely the money would be used more efficiently because they could donate it to non-profit companies which don’t need to pay tax.
And there could be insight into whether the money is actually used for developing the relevant application.
LETS GOOOOO
This is great! I hope it succeeds, and shows others that it is possible.
Would love to see further movements towards foss software in many other governments
Moreeeee MOREEEE preach it
it is just step 1
we will get rid of all closed source shit.
weak bavarians failed after successfull transistion to “LiMux” (their linux fork) they got bribed with 8k M$ jobs in munich.
but not the state of schleswig-holstein! we will prevail.
All I know about Bavaria is that their sheep seldom wear spectacles. Do sheep wear spectacles more often in Schleswig-Holstein?
Lie to me once Microsoft shame on you, lie to me twice shame on me.
