Munich's IT Lead: 'No Compelling Reason' To Switch Back To Windows From Linux (techrepublic.com) 203
"The man who runs Munich's central IT says there is no practical reason for the city to write off millions of euros and years of work to ditch its Linux-based OS for Windows," reports TechRepublic. Long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino summarizes a German-language article:
Karl-Heinz Schneider, lead of Munich's local system house company IT@M, goes on to claim, "We do not see pressing technical reasons to switch to MS and MS Office... The council [in their recent plans] didn't even follow the analysts' suggestion to stick with using LibreOffice." Furthermore, Schneider stated that "System failures that angered citizens in recent years never were related to the LiMux project, but due to new bureaucratic procedures..." and apparently decisions by unqualified personnel at the administrative level, as Munich's administration itself states.
Translation (Score:2, Insightful)
Windows paid off the right people to switch back.
That said, open source software is great until you have to use it. OpenOffice, GIMP, KiCad...all needlessly convoluted.
Re:Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Translation (Score:4, Informative)
Visual Studio crashes on a whim? Weird, I use it every single day across multiple machines and virtual machines (Win 7,8.1,10, x86 and x64) when debugging Qt applications, and for writing tools for the Windows side of the house - the last crash I experienced was in a 3rd party plugin for Visual Studio 2010 over 5 years ago. I've been using it on the Windows side for decades (all the way back to Visual C++ 1.5 days when I used it and Borland C++) and never had problems with crashing (not that it never crashed, but it rare.)
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A lot depends on how you use it. The people who crash Visual Studio are obviously using it wrong ;-)
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I'm obviously using it wrong. Well it crashes when I use it, so using it is wrong.
Re:Translation (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe you're moving your mouse around too rapidly. The telemetry service cannot keep pace!
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The solutions to this problem have been known for years:
Solution 1)
Reinstall windows from scratch, then install VS.
Solution 2)
Run windows in a VM. I found that windows works much better if you only let it see some kind of generic hardware.
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good choice!
this works fine for me with something like: /usr/bin/ionice -c 2 -n 7 /usr/bin/nice -n 5 \ /bin/su qemu -c "qemu-system-x86_64 -m 2048 \ /var/run/qemu/win2012.pid -enable-kvm \ /home/win/nobk/windowsDVD/dummy.iso \
-smp 1 -net nic,model=virtio,macaddr=$MAC_WIN2012 \
-drive file=win2012.0.0.img,index=0,media=disk,cache=none \
-net tap,ifname=${TAP_WIN2012},script=no,downscript=no \
-display vnc=127.0.0.1:${VNC_WIN2012} -daemonize \
-pidfile
-cdrom
-boot menu=on,splash-time=15000"
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That said I have used QEMU before.. but even though I doubt I'd use it over vnc.. I probably would investigate the new GPU virtualization support they've been talking up.
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Maybe because reinstalling your OS and applications typically means several hours of "wasted" time up front, and at least several days of getting all the little details you forgot about dialed in again.
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I'm looking foward to having an SSD sometime in the future... and usb 3.1..
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For the last 20 years I have almost never reinstalled a OS unless it was a fresh build, on a my production equipment. You know what the key to that is? Don't load weird shit from back ally sites on to your production equipment.
My current load of windows on this machine is 5 years old. Granted it started as a windows 7 machine and worked its way up to windows 10. The linux load on the bitch box behind me is 3 years old.
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That's kind of funny because I had heard there were problems with vs 2012 - especially the betas, but they'd been fixed by the time is moved to it. That was about 8 months into it's lifecycle. Never experienced your problems - again, on all the OS variants I have to support today. Kind of curious that you're using vs 2012 when it's 2017 and anyone who paid for MSDN was eligible for 2013. If you're using the express version, that's even weirder. I'm not aware of any libraries or frameworks that are stuc
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Frankly the only reason I haven't been upgraded is I havent' worked on one of the newer jobs where I needed to be upgraded yet (we've been on 2015 for around a year I think but I've been working on other projects).
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It depends on the version. VS 2010 was solid, but MS royally screwed something up in VS 2012 when they rewrote the IDE, as it was highly unstable (especially with large projects), with VS 2013 just a bit better. VS 2015 has been quite stable, fortunately, and hopefully VS 2017 will continue the trend.
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I had horrible problems with GCC for a long time and with Swift and it's impressively bad compiler front end... honestly, how hard is it to write a parser that actually can tell where it had problems parsing. It's like seeing a parser writing by a lazy oaf.
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It is fairly stable but it does screw up occasionally. Sill not "on a whim", though, I agree on that.
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Libre/OpenOffce perhaps, GIMP for sure, and KiCAD a little... but they aren't that bad. I have used very expensive software that was no better... OrCAD for instance (whatever it is called now, Xilinx's toolcina etc..Visual Studio crashes on a whim...
Why is Office 365 so much easier to use than Libre? This is surprising to me. Gimp just doesn't have the tools I need, but Microsoftt Office is at the bottom of my Office suite list.
Re:Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Translation (Score:5, Interesting)
Usually the people who complain that software B is hard to use have been using software A for 10 years and B is just different enough to throw them off constantly.
Exactly. I made the transition from Microsoft's suite to AO and LO almost seamlessly. I had to look up some things in their spreadsheet, but that might have taken up 15 minutes. since then. On the other hand, fixing documents from Windows to OSX was a regular part of operation, I probably spent months overall.
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To each his own I say. I use MS office in work environment because of compatibility issues with libre office. I know it has gotten so much better in 5.x now, but still I will stick to MS office there. I can lose a contract just because some client can't open a proposal in their copy of word. Not worth the chance to me.
I use libreoffice 5.x for personal writings. I like the feel of librewrite over ms word. Librewrite reminds me of the word processors I used to use on the Amiga back in college.
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I can lose a contract just because some client can't open a proposal in their copy of word. Not worth the chance to me.
You really really should be sending your proposals as cryptographically signed PDFs. Both because of the aforementioned problem and because you want to have the ability to prove the customer still has what you sent, days or weeks later. PDFs display the same everywhere, including Android and iOS, and any decent PDF viewer makes them easy to annotate as well.
And... guess which office suite it's trivially easy to export a PDF from, for free? Yeah, LibreOffice.
As for compatibility issues when editing the sa
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Actually, I find LO to be easier to use than MS Office (365 or otherwise). Office has buried many things in places where you have to use the Help (which only works when online) to find it. LO still has them on menus that can be accessed the way they always were, if you can't find it on the ribbon/taskbar. LO does take up space on the local disk, but that's a Good Thing if you're using it on a tablet or laptop where the internet connection isn't Always On.
After having to obtain a fair knowledge of both ribbon and menu during the days of transition when both the menu and ribbons were in use. The problem with the Ribbon is that unless you use it for hours a day, the menu is faster, because you can find the items much more easily.
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Office user here: I feel the pain on this. For that random thing you use once in a blue moon it can be a PITA to find it on the Ribbon or Menus. Office 2016 has a "tell me what you want to do" box above the ribbon now. I use it a lot instead of trying to find the button to insert data from an ODBC source or convert text to columns.
Full disclosure: I work for Micro
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Had to chuckle - I'd probably type in "tear my air out" some days........
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Even better when paired with something like Ubuntu's Unity desktop environment which puts the menus on a search hotkey.
Tap <alt> and type part of the command you're looking for, presto! It even remembers the ones you use the most, I think. There's a reason editors like Atom and Eclipse, etc, have something like this baked into the program itself (and it's not just because Atom with a bunch of plugins has more menu items than the food court at Disney).
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cause they are m$ shills. Most people use google docs. I use libreoffice.
Yeah you're right. I kinda asked the question already knowing what the answer was. 8^)
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I know several people that use libreoffice for work. Mostly die hard penguins that use linux for work too.
I don't know any one, at all, that uses google docs for anything. Not even personal use.
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Re: Translation (Score:2)
Windows paid off the right people to switch back
"Windows" did? Is that what they're calling people from the Frankfurt consulate these days?
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Re:Translation (Score:5, Informative)
at said, open source software is great until you have to use it. OpenOffice, GIMP, KiCad...all needlessly convoluted.
I can see that with gimp. It has one of the worse interfaces for any software that I have seen. I don't know about KiCad as I have never used it. Openoffice is several years out of date. Do they still maintain it?
Libreoffice 5.x+ is what you want to use. 4.x and below I always seemed to have issues interfacing with the rest of the MS office world. Not so with 5.x+ and above.
Re:Translation (Score:4, Informative)
I've used GIMP and Photoshop over the years. Photoshop tends to be ahead on professional oriented workflow automation, GIMP tends to be on-par for more casual image editing. Both have a steep learning curve. Neither is worth thousands of dollars, but one will charge you that.
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Photoshop is geared for professionals where time is money. If you can get a photo done with a push of a button that will save you hours of work. That is a good thing.
Re: Translation (Score:4, Informative)
Ten years of Photoshop rentals is $1198.80*
Ten years of GIMP is still $0
hope this helps.
--
BMO
*Only if Adobe keeps the fee structure the same.
"I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further."
Re: Translation (Score:4, Informative)
I was about to retort with some interesting fact about the version of Photoshop I was using still working just fine but ...
As of January 9th 2017 you can no longer buy Photoshop and it's now exclusively available through a creative cloud subscription.
Fuck em.
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What part of "We've terminated your subscription for $arbitrary_reason" do you fail to understand?
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Please learn what "arbitrary" means. Then get back to us.
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Photoshop might be more polished, but do I need those extra features ? The gimp serves me fine for selecting part of a photo to make another one; this is just about all that I need/want to do. No: I am not a professional photographer, but then most of us are not.
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If you find yourself processing a set of 100 images, doing the same repetitive 27 operations over and over, you probably could benefit from Photoshop.'
If you mostly just crop, clone, color balance and blur - you don't even need GIMP, but you may as well use it for the rare occasion when you want to build a layered image.
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What point are you trying to make?
Others are making much hot air about gimp not being as good as photoshop. My point is that gimp is good enough for a lot of people, give them photoshop (at whatever cost) and they won't use the extra features.
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I've been using Photoshop since 1999, GIMP since 2003, 18 years of subscription would be closer to $2000.
Re:Translation (Score:4, Informative)
> nor is it so difficult to transition from on to the other.
I use BOTH Photoshop and GIMP.
While they BOTH suck GIMP's lack of native layer blend modes still suck more compared to Photoshop. Namely:
Gimp's lack of native 16-bit greyscale, and 32-bit / channel also make it suck.
But for the "most part" the two are functionally equivalent.
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My daughter thinks GIMP is great and Photoshop is crap ; but she started with GIMP. It is largely about what you've learned and overcoming the "yuk" factor of having to learn a different way of doing things.
I get the same feeling when I have to use Windows, or OSX, for any kind of productive work when for the last decade I've been using Linux.
millions of euros and years of work (Score:3, Interesting)
Um, it cost that much to switch to Linux? This can't be encouraging to other cities / governments. Exactly how was the money and time spent? Inquiring minds want to know!
Re:millions of euros and years of work (Score:5, Interesting)
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The cost of buying computers over the last decade adds up to a bit no matter what you put on them.
I'm willing to bet that the cost isn't for hardware, it would be the same hardware whether they were running Windows or a Linux variant. The cost probably went into development of their version of Linux, the packaging and testing of the OS and apps, the development of a support system, and training. All of this requires labour, which tends to be more expensive than software (i.e. most of this would be off-the-shelf software in the Windows world).
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Also you don't seem to get that administration costs for non-MS systems are low due to replacement being far more trivial than even re-imaging. Throw a drive with an installed system in just about anything and you are good to go, no mucki
Re: millions of euros and years of work (Score:3, Funny)
Licenses... $0
Anpassung... $2,000,000
Transexuellen Waschraum für Linux-Benutzer.... $2,500,000
Prostituierte und Kokain... $3,500,000
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Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing. Hardware and software had to be spec'd and tested. Software had to be written, people had to be trained, etc etc. It certainly isn't as easy as installing Linux and then sitting someone down and saying "here you go, carry on".
Where is the User choice in all of this (Score:2, Interesting)
Whenever I read stories like this, ie. Windows vs. Linux vs. OSX vs. it seems to always be from the perspective of the implementers or those looking to make a point about whether it can be done. Why not offer choice? Why the constant insistence that users must have the flavour of the day foisted upon them?
There is complexity in running an estate with multiple OS on offer but the truth is, any sysadmins capable of running a *nix infrastructure and operation should find supporting and mainlining other OS est
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Because it's driven by salesfolk who focus on the very short term.
Yes. Also X Windows and RDP things make it easier to run stuff where it will run well and display it on whatever the user has, even a phone or tablet if necessary. Some of the third party RDP things even have similar functionality to X where they can export a single applic
Re:Where is the User choice in all of this (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you rejoice when you get an email about an upgrade of the vending machines in the company cafeteria, or do you worry about the new machines not carrying the kind of soft drinks or candy bars you're used to? That's basically how a typical office worker feels about computers. Spend a week working helpdesk and you'll understand that very very clearly.
That's why when you manage a large pool of workstations you want the bare minimum that users need to do their work, and why you want that bare minimum to be set in stone. Otherwise you're just annoying users and adding more support tickets to your queue.
Re:Where is the User choice in all of this (Score:5, Insightful)
Whenever I read stories like this, ie. Windows vs. Linux vs. OSX vs. it seems to always be from the perspective of the implementers or those looking to make a point about whether it can be done. Why not offer choice?
If you use Microsoft office, you put a straitjacket on your system. Not compatible with OSX version of Office, no software at all for Linux.
Choice is nice, but why choose the most limiting OS and Office Suite? I run LO, and my Mac shows the same as my Windows shows the same as my Linux shows the same.
That's why I use it.
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If you use Microsoft office, you put a straitjacket on your system. Not compatible with OSX version of Office
That comes as news to me as a Mac OS user in a mainly Windows based office environment. There are no serious compatibility issues between the two versions of Office in my considerable (more than 10 years) experience of use g the Mac versions.
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But your LO document doesn't show the same as your co-worker's MSOffice.
Right. That's my point. MSO is the outlier, the program that just isn't compatible with anyone else, and often not with itself. My answer was to the question of why the users shouldn't just pick and choose their Office suites.
Unless you are going to dictate the platform as Windows only, and dictate MSO down to the version level, and dictate the printer used, you're going to be spending some time fixing documents that shouldn't need fixed.
And that's a pretty good reason to use software available on mu
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"no software at all for Linux."
I'm assuming you mean desktop Linux, because Microsoft Office is available for Android and is free on that platform.
What do you think I meant?
Android has what, 99.9% of the Linux market?
Well now! It also has 100 percent of the Android market! It's pretty much a stretch to call Android Linux, and toys are not included, except for the masochistic.
Amazing the lengths some folks will go to just to make an argument. Someone is trying to make me talk about those cute little toys. But they're still toys and not production devices other than for trying to prove people wrong. Dunno if anyone is going to write a War and Peace type novel on their smartphone.
BTW, my Samsun
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> It's pretty much a stretch to call Android Linux
Android is as much Linux as Red Hat or Ubuntu, they all use the same Linux (which is the kernel). Your confusion is because you don't understand that Linux operating systems destined for the desktop are not just 'Linux' (the kernel) but also contain hundreds of other pieces of software and should be refereed to by their brand name.
I'm going to go run all my linux apps on my Android tablet. Afdter all It is exactly Linux. Who knew? Thank you for clearing up my confusion.
It's all 1's and 0's, so all operating systems are the same.
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As I've posted a number of times already, some people even had the choice between an installed LO Writer and Word. And they chose LO because the interface was more constant (i.e., commands were easier to find).
Now LO is offering a ribbon for people to use and learn why it is not better.
That last brings up another point for me. One of the odd side duties at work I ended up with was as computer fix-all for the suits. Microsoft Office allows customization of the interface. This isn't necessarily bad, but this customization came along with documents. So here we were, having a meeting, and some suit has a problem with his or her PowerPoint. So its up to me to get it running right.
All this customization meant that if I didn't have a menu fallback, I had to figure out how they had their stuff
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Why not offer choice? Why the constant insistence that users must have the flavour of the day foisted upon them?
False dichotomy. The users should be given the best tool for the job, when all requirements are considered. Standardizing on one platform makes many things simpler, so it should surprise no one that people would like to do that. Hell, I avoid running any Unix other than Linux simply so that I don't have to remember a whole other set of tools. I'm going to have devices running Linux, why complicate things?
In my personal life I make good use of all 3 mainstream OS and at work I have a choice which is made available all users too.
It's nice when that makes sense, but it costs more to do things that way in many if not all cases, and i
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Why not offer choice?
As an IT technician, I'm more than happy to take away your a PC and give you a box of crayons to get your work done. The employer provides the equipment to get the job done. Not every job requires a PC. Some people can get by with a typewriter, a pen or crayons. I once had a boss who gave me a box of crayons and I embarrassed the hell out of him by presenting my finished report in crayons to his boss.
Re:Where is the User choice in all of this (Score:5, Insightful)
The trouble is that Microsoft don't like their users to have choice. They bake-in proprietary features and incompatibilities that prevent users from sharing documents and files across operating systems or going outside their software walled gardens. How many prosecutions against Microsoft for anti-competitive practices will it take to convince you? They don't want their users to have choice, they want their users to be stuck with using their products and services and unable to easily switch to others.
I can see that for people whose jobs are doing stuff other than ICT will see the transition from one OS and office software to another as a problem. It's one transition, once. Anyone who's experienced Win10 can attest that it's so different to previous versions and that they've changed around MS Office so much lately, that the learning curve to switch to Linux is comparable. So why not? Also, there's the privacy issues with Win10 (Microsoft calls their key-loggers and spyware "telemetry") that all governments should be wary of. Keep your privacy and control with Linux as well as save a few € in the process.
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Also, there's the privacy issues with Win10 (Microsoft calls their key-loggers and spyware "telemetry") that all governments should be wary of.
I'd change the last part of that sentence from "that all governments should be wary of" to "that all people/businesses should be wary of"... I'd bet all of this
"telemetry" crap is *not* just desired by MS but was requested by the government.. After all the NSA needs *something* to fill that giant Utah datacenter they spent so many billions on....
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I'd change the last part of that sentence from "that all governments should be wary of" to "that all people/businesses should be wary of"... I'd bet all of this
"telemetry" crap is *not* just desired by MS but was requested by the government.
Not necessarily by the Munich government.
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There is complexity in running an estate with multiple OS on offer but the truth is, any sysadmins capable of running a *nix infrastructure and operation should find supporting and mainlining other OS estates relatively straightforward.
Salty Linux & Solaris SA: If you can afford a *nix sysadmin team, you can afford a contractor to install and run Windows management infrastructure while you look for a permanent hire.
Anyone's capable of learning Mandarin, and it'd be swell if everyone learned another language, but don't tell me to start doing "just" half my work in it next week... "cause you're smart." I'm not that stupid.
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Whenever I read stories like this, ie. Windows vs. Linux vs. OSX vs. it seems to always be from the perspective of the implementers or those looking to make a point about whether it can be done. Why not offer choice? Why the constant insistence that users must have the flavour of the day foisted upon them?
Because the cost of maintaining one system is far less than half the cost of maintaining 2 systems.
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And productivity is lost again on the mixed working case.
Also that's not evidence, that's an appeal to authority fallacy. I speak from experience myself but that is the exact same fallacy.
Obvious solution: (Score:4, Funny)
Obvious solution: switch to ReactOS. Or, if that seems too time consuming, just install Gentoo.
More Corruption (Score:4, Informative)
This is a glaring example of corruption at work. Microsoft bribes the council into shoveling millions back into Microsoft. I wish I could say something like, "how are these clowns not being thrown out of office?!" However, this is standard operating procedure in corrupt governments around the world.
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Oh please get a grip on yourself.
This is a glaring example of personal preference taking over a group agenda nothing more. It's like I know that I won't be offered an Android phone anymore through my company when this one breaks because the 2IC to our current CTO is an Apple fan not a multiple choice fan, and our CTO is near retirement. People in power drive agendas without need for bribery or corruption. Heck sometimes you promote these people to those positions specifically to incite change.
At the very wo
Is that his job? (Score:2)
Usually that job is to _advise_, but not to _undermine_ his bosses. Advising is something you do internally, not publicly.
Look, I get he cares about this. But if his bosses tell him to make sure application or OS get installed, it's his job to make it so - and not to bitch about it in public. If he doesn't like his job, I'm sure there are plenty of other people who will do it without complaints.
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Usually that job is to _advise_, but not to _undermine_ his bosses. Advising is something you do internally, not publicly.
Look, I get he cares about this. But if his bosses tell him to make sure application or OS get installed, it's his job to make it so - and not to bitch about it in public. If he doesn't like his job, I'm sure there are plenty of other people who will do it without complaints.
His bosses are the tax-paying citizens of Munich. If he has the idea that the process by which the os was chosen is wrong, he almost has an obligation to express his opinion.
There are reasons why certain decision-making is private, but especially in a public organisation, there shouldn't be too many. I don't see why a decision on windows vs linux shouldn't be transparent for everyone.
The real reason (Score:2)
Alternative explanation (Score:2)
2. IT Lead implements alternative to MS software that doesn't meet the needs of the users
3. Users say "this doesn't do what we want, lets go back to how it was"
4. IT Lead blames shift back to MS software on the users; "System fails [were] due to new bureaucratic procedure"
Ie, IT Lead implemented something the users didn't need or want and is blaming the users for that.
It might be an unpopular opinion on a tech site;
Re: LibreOffice (Score:2, Insightful)
Better than Micro$oft Office 365.
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Better than Micro$oft Office 365.
By a country mile.
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LO may be a better editor.
It's terrible at being compatible with MS Office though, which is sadly the number one must-have feature of an office suite. And only MS Office nails it, and then only within the current version.
LibreOffice is probably better at being compatible with old versions of Office than modern versions of Office though. Many's the time I've seen old Office documents rescued by being loaded into LibreOffice and saved as a more modern format that the current version can understand.
As long as
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The document format where you absolutely must have the proprietary software package would be PDF these days - while you can open most PDFs in any old PDF reader, some places will send you documents as interactive, heavily scripted PDF files that
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The telling phrase there is "And only MS Office nails it, and then only within the current version."
That's a dead giveaway that you don't have a document, you have an artifact of a very specific release (and possibly even very specific maintenance) of a certain software product. Not exactly something you can enjoy through the ages.
Back before soft fonts were the norm, we used to have horrible problems in my office with documents that when passed from one person to another would completely lose their page in
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Is there a "word processing mode"?, or "content mode"?
When we hit return twice to space out paragraphs, it's because that's easier and in the mean time the paragraphs are spaced out, like we intend to.
If we're not supposed to do that, so much as it's considered harmful, maybe there should be a GUI mode where you're constrained from doing that. You hit enter and it doesn't let you go down one more line unless you do something "right" like introduce a new paragraph, section, page break etc.
If word processors
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WIH Are you even using Word instead of simply using Windows Notepad?
The whole point of having a word processor over a simple text editor is because it provides a smarter, more powerful way of creating and maintaining formatted documents.
When you want to double-space between paragraphs, you hit Enter twice between each paragraph. And, of course, subject yourself to random format changes when you port the document.
When I want to double-space between paragraphs, I edit the paragraph style and change the spa
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I was describing the common use case for common people, i.e. 90%+ people only use a word processor infrequently to write a curriculum and don't know about the features, that's all. Maybe the Clippy assistant was a good idea but I've never really encountered it.
Anyway blogs, wikis and emails replaced writing word processor document in the 2000s, for common home users. Or the lazier alternative of not writing any documents at all.
In the late 90s/early 00s I might have written letters maybe, but my parents had
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Depends on what office environment you are in. Everyone in my company uses office 2013 and up. All our documents come across as docx. I hardly ever see a plan doc, document in the wild any more.
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Not everybody needs complex spreadsheets, but even simple ones can be made a lot better with couple key features from Excel that seem to be missing in Open/Libre Office. The major missing thing is defining tables. It makes things so much easier to work with in Excel and OpenOffice has no equivalent feature.
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The major missing thing is defining tables. It makes things so much easier to work with in Excel and OpenOffice has no equivalent feature.
Is there any benefit to that over simply adding another sheet/tab to the spreadsheet, besides making it prettier? That's not useless, but generally speaking if you are approaching the level of complexity where it matters, wouldn't you be better off with a webapp? I don't want to hand a user a spreadsheet they can break, ever, and I'm smart enough to select a different tab and enter some data into it.
Re:LibreOffice (Score:5, Interesting)
Business people live and breathe Excel. They know what they are doing.
I've seen plenty of evidence that they don't.
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To be fair we can say the same thing about app developers :-)
Re:LibreOffice (Score:5, Informative)
Apparantly you are wrong, https://www.google.com.au/sear... [google.com.au] leads to https://ask.libreoffice.org/en... [libreoffice.org]. Wow that was really so hard.
Next step in this story should be a in depth investigation of why the new incoming politician pushed so hard on this apparently with zero consultation with his IT staff. Most probable, M$ paid them a bribe (campaign contribution) to push it, so the arse holes at M$ could use if for marketing purposed and the stupendously invasive POS windows anal probe 10, dies a slow grim death.
Re:LibreOffice (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
LibreOffice is actually what I use, because I don't have to use it very often (10 times per year). For that, I don't want to pay for MS Office and I have moved away from piracy as I've gotten older. I probably still have a cracked Office 2007 on a DVD around here somewhere...
Honestly, it's fine as long as you don't have to use it that often, e.g. when someone insists on sending you .doc/.docx files. But I imagine the city of Munich has to use it quite a bit more than I do. If Office-related stuff is a regul
Re: (Score:2)
Because they'll be given it for free by Microsoft for them to switch back. MS would probably even give them free professional services / support for them to make the switch.
Re: (Score:2)
Well thank God Munich woke up! Believe it or not, I still like Windows.
Great, now that's the spirit! Let's have a good 'ole fashion German sing-a-long:
Die Partei, die Partei,
Die hat immer recht
Genossen es bleibt dabei,
Denn wer für das Recht kämpft,
hat immer recht
Gegen Lüge und Ausbeuterei.
Wer das Leben beleidigt,
Ist dumm oder schlecht,
Wer die Menschheit verteidigt,
Hat immer recht.
Denn aus Lenin'schem Geist
Wächst von Stalin geschweißt
Die Partei, die Partei, die Partei.
The Honeckers, Mielke, Schalck-Golodkowski and Windows . . . let's bri
Re: (Score:2)
What's withe the downmods? It's almost like Germans don't have a sense of humour or something.