City of Barcelona Dumps Windows For Linux and Open Source Software (europa.eu) 255
An anonymous reader quotes Open Source Observatory:
The City of Barcelona is migrating its computer systems away from the Windows platform, reports the Spanish newspaper El País. The City's strategy is first to replace all user applications with open-source alternatives, until the underlying Windows operating system is the only proprietary software remaining. In a final step, the operating system will be replaced with Linux... According to Francesca Bria, the Commissioner of Technology and Digital Innovation at the City Council, the transition will be completed before the current administration's mandate ends in spring 2019. For starters, the Outlook mail client and Exchange Server will be replaced with Open-Xchange. In a similar fashion, Internet Explorer and Office will be replaced with Firefox and LibreOffice, respectively. The Linux distribution eventually used will probably be Ubuntu, since the City of Barcelona is already running 1,000 Ubuntu-based desktops as part of a pilot...
Barcelona is the first municipality to have joined the European campaign 'Public Money, Public Code'. This campaign is an initiative of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and revolves around an open letter advocating that publicly funded software should be free. Currently, this call to public agencies is supported by more than 100 organisations and almost 15,000 individuals. With the new open-source strategy, Barcelona's City Council aims to avoid spending large amounts of money on licence-based software and to reduce its dependence on proprietary suppliers through contracts that in some cases have been closed for decades.
Barcelona is the first municipality to have joined the European campaign 'Public Money, Public Code'. This campaign is an initiative of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and revolves around an open letter advocating that publicly funded software should be free. Currently, this call to public agencies is supported by more than 100 organisations and almost 15,000 individuals. With the new open-source strategy, Barcelona's City Council aims to avoid spending large amounts of money on licence-based software and to reduce its dependence on proprietary suppliers through contracts that in some cases have been closed for decades.
In breaking news.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In breaking news.... (Score:5, Funny)
If that truly does happen, can you imagine what the headlines the next day would be?
Yep, every other city in Europe suddenly announcing a move to Linux.
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Re:In breaking news.... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, it sounds like Barcelona has learned a thing or two from Munich's experience. They're not switching to Linux - or at least, not until the last Windows-only app is pried from users' cold, dead hands. They are going to standardize on the Windows versions of open source apps, like LibreOffice. And presumably some open sourced email and scheduling software. And they're going to plow the savings on Office and Exchange into getting replacement software written for whatever other stuff they need.
Seriously, if they standardize on web applications for everything except perhaps stuff like LibreOffice, which exists on just about every platform - they're already way ahead of Munich. Munich made a valiant effort back in the day when desktop software was still king. Switching to Linux - and then trying to get all your desktop software rewritten for your chosen Linux target (another Munich problem - LiMux, whatever that is) turned out to be a recipe for partial success at best. But sticking with the Windows OS until you really don't need it any more for anything is a much better approach. And using Windows pretty much the same way you'd use a Chromebook (i.e. to access apps running on a server) is another way to save a bunch on IT support costs. Good luck, Barcelona.
Re:In breaking news.... (Score:5, Funny)
To avoid the Munich muck, Barcelona will have to more than replace Microsoft specific apps with cross platform and WEB based equivalents. Munich had pressure from the computer users, IT staff, politicos, businessmen, and a lot of the tech industry, not just Microsoft. It's hard to abandon the world standard.
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They did it in Munich. They move their headquarters there. And then politicians were very thankful and killed the LiMux project.
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Re:In breaking news.... (Score:4, Interesting)
So, Windows-based networks can cohabit with Mac and Linux devices just fine, but Linux-based networks can't do this? That seems a little hard to believe.
Re:In breaking news.... (Score:5, Interesting)
My understanding is that Munich had to keep a fraction of machines under windows, because some of their proprietary software was not easily migrated to open source. But they still wanted to (mostly) avoid the expense of migrating to a new version of Windows, which would have required hardware updates as well as new licenses. So they went ahead and got into some technical difficulties, as well as push back from users.
Overall, I think Barcelona has the better strategy here, even if it will take them longer. Both in terms of a smooth transition on the technical side and in terms of less excuses for unwilling users.
Because if you replace the software in smaller increments, the claim the whole system sucks does not work anymore. Instead, you can require people to be more specific with their complaints. Such as Joe Shmoe saying "Libre Office does not work with my documents". Then a support guy can visit Joe and ask him to demonstrate the problem, and how to fix it will become more obvious.
- If only Joe did not understand how to use that feature in Libre Office, show him.
- If many employees have problems using Libre Office, your training program might suck. Improve it, maybe invest in more training time for each employee.
- If it is a genuine bug, work with the Libre Office developers to fix it. Maybe actually hire some developers for that.
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You buy a one-off license for those people, just like you would for Photoshop, MATLAB, AutoCAD, or any other specialist app. Everyone else just asks the sender to send in another format or suffers through the bazililon conversion methods. Most people still use returns, tabs, and spaces to format their documents - they certainly don't need anything more powerful than what is available for free.
Re: In breaking news.... (Score:2)
Word is a word processor, not a layout tool. If you needed to maintain a layout you would use LaTeX or PDF.
MS Word can't keep its own layout together between Word for Mac, Word 2013 and Word 2016 not to mention the O365 online version actually rendering different between Internet Explorer, Edge, Chrome and Firefox and any of the latest are failing to render Word 2003 documents with pictures altogether, which is even documented as "rebuild your document with new pictures"
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Try adding autofs to the mix. I have had both MPD at home having issues with NFS and a Nextcloud server at work accessing SMB shares. I use autofs to mount SMB, NFS, and SFTP shares. No problems. No more funky timeouts. Graceful degradation when a share is really offline. It is really the best way to deal with file sharing on a network.
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Looks like you hit a nerve and got some mods panties in a wad. Some people don't like to see the truth. Truth is samba is a nightmare to set up on any system beyond the basic file sharing. Once you get it set up it works rather well, but after you get it set up it falls under the "get it working and leave it alone" software type.
Re: In breaking news.... (Score:2)
Lol, you must never have delved into the AD details, even AD works if you're willing to go to the terminal and hand writing LDIF. It all boils down to LDAP and Kerberos, if you understand how those work and how to adjust schemas you can simply switch between the different softwares.
Samba is great, if you really don't know what you're doing, there are plenty of really nice fully packaged solutions, some will even take over your AD in the same process as if you were upgrading from Windows AD 2008 to 2012.
Re: In breaking news.... (Score:2)
Linux runs on more hardware than Windows and even Microsoft's productivity runs in the browser now.
People switch from Microsoft to Google Docs to avoid overbearing IT departments, the problem is not the users or the software usability.
Re:In breaking news.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Most IT shops do not know the answer to three questions
1) How much (all up, everything) do we pay microsoft in licence fees per year
2) How much do we pay other vendors for licence fees
3) Over 3 years how much have we paid for software- all up, including lawyers, audits, and licence management packages, and administrators who add nothing to the bottom line ensuring 'compliance'
Looks like one city has asked these questions, and cost per seat is visible. The main haters of open source are click and pointers who can't learn - and they need to go.
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> I can manage 10, 100, 10000 desktop using the same armchair tools. Hell, I don't even need to leave my desk to remote wipe and clean image a desktop/server...or 10, 100, 10000, etc.
I've done these sorts of tasks for much of my career. And no, there are many tasks you _cannot_ scale this easily. They include system and network performance performance monitoring, backup, high availability., and remote console access.
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I understand that putting your head in the Lion's mouth gets a lot of applause - but not because it is a sensible thing to do!
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Linux is not ready for the business admin world.
If eating poop as you described it is required, then it may never be.
Re: In breaking news.... (Score:3)
Trust me, once you glue in Excel to the average IT department nobody will want to use it. Excel is a symptom of bad (IT) management, a "solution" that users build on their own because they can't get an IT person to help them or the 20 year PeopleSoft/SAP implementation will never be completed.
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All computers suck, generally in different ways.
I like programming on Linux, but still have to admit that visual studio offers a better integrated development experience than any other. (Qt is a close second)
I hate the fact that every time I upgrade Ubuntu, I'm never 100% certain I'm going to have a pain free experience with my video drivers.
I also hate that Libre office still cannot allow me to select columns by clicking on the header when entering in columns expressions like =sum(A:A) the way Excel does.
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Vote this up for being the most offtopic post of the day.
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Whereas I work in a Windows Shop and am the only system admin and only Linux user. Using the same fluxbox setup for the last 15 year. I can RDP, VNC, or SSH into any system in the building. I am more productive in Linux and have been for more than a decade.
We do work with government bids and have to have absolute 100% fidelity with Excel. With that said 95% of the time my users are in Outlook, Excel, File Manager, and Google Chrome. Most of them would notice less of a difference in their workflow moving fro
Here's an idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe Barcelona and Munich could just meet up and swap all their computers!
Re:Here's an idea (Score:5, Interesting)
It would appear that Barcelona may have planned their migration to Open-Source much better than Munich did. Per TFS, Barcelona began using Open-Source applications within Windows, long before they took the step to replace the underlying OS. That way, they had all their staff trained on the Open-Source tools, so the switch of the OS would be less onerous.
This will be worth watching. I wish them luck.
Re: Here's an idea (Score:5, Funny)
You don't need to plan. Just get one of the experts on here to do it all. It'll just take a weekend apparently.
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Your joke is funny but most people couldn't tell you what operating system they are using.
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*whoosh*
Re: Here's an idea (Score:2)
Catalans planned something better that Germans.
Now I heard everything.
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Well, the WSJ weekend edition just had an article on German military procurement. It turns out they've sucked at that for several years with badly planned systems, cost overruns, etc. It is enough to put a dent in their reputation for engineering prowess. Then there was the lying about vehicle emissions from Volkswagon.
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Think about this: why any German organizational mishaps immediately become news?
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Yes, but part of the problem is staff that requires 'training' to figure out off the shelf consumer level programs. An average school kid will usually figure out a word processor on their own. And if they have used Office before, the already (hopefully) understand the concept of a document, spreadsheet etc. So moving to another program that uses the same concepts shouldn't be difficult.
The second more specific problem for a huge number of business people is that there is really NO alternative to Powerpoint.
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The second more specific problem for a huge number of business people is that there is really NO alternative to Powerpoint.
You say that like it's a bad thing. [nytimes.com]
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It's a bad thing because it is what people want. It is what the older generation of bosses is used to. I am promoting the merits of Powerpoint. I am underscoring its immense popularity and bemoaning the lack of a worthy alternative.
Spectrum (Score:2)
Re:Spectrum (Score:5, Funny)
The whole customer service departments of all three aren't on MS Office now? That's like.. four... people? SUCK IT MICROSOFT!
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Next (Score:5, Funny)
All the city's computers swich their locale settings to ca_ES.UTF-8, annoying the shit out of everybody. Then they hold a referendum to propose disconnecting from the internet and dumping their .es top-level domain name. Then the main server flees to Belgium.
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.cat is already a TLD.
Should ue a custom release . . . (Score:2)
I propose they use Manuel. It is from Barcelona.
And if they are smart, all of their servers should be Fawlty resistant.
And to change horses in mid-stream I can say I didn't get where I am today without having servers that were Fawlty resistant.
Certainly not . . .
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He put BASIL in the RATATOUILLE?
Thanks to the cloud (Score:5, Insightful)
What really makes this possible is the cloud. Typically industry specific software will make it really difficult to migrate away from Windows, but as more and more of these programs migrate to a browser based interface, Linux compatibility shoots through the roof.
By going with a phased approach where the OS is the last thing to migrate, they have already demonstrated more forethought than many other organisations. The real milestones will be when they get finance to move away from excel and when they replace senior members of IT. Until they meet those milestones, this will in all likelihood end up being a giant waste of money and time.
Re: Thanks to the cloud (Score:3)
Move from Excel to what?
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That's exactly the attitude the finance people will have. Believe it or not there are open source alternatives to Microsoft Excel. You'll get finance people to switch to that as quickly as you'll get Texans to give up their firearms though.
Re: Thanks to the cloud (Score:2)
The finance department will be over the moon about having to port all those spreadsheets to another piece of software for no obvious benefit to them I'm sure. Don't pretend you can just open them up and they'll work the same.
Re: Thanks to the cloud (Score:3)
So have the finance department. They won't still be on Excel 95. The difference is they'll be moving complex data structures to software that isn't completely compatible and required to do a lot of work for no appreciable advantage. The same could be said for a document production department that uses a lot of Word templates. If Libre Office was a drop-in replacement as is the common mistaken belief here, Microsoft Office would be dying already.
Re: Thanks to the cloud (Score:2)
Visual Basic is still very much alive but proves your point very well. Migrating to similar but incompatible software is hard and expensive and using Microcrapware as an argument won't get you very far when trying to switch.
If it was easy then loads of organisations would be switching. It's not inertia. It's actually difficult, time-consuming and expensive and the business benefits are hard to quantify when you end up with the same or less functionality than you had before.
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LibreOffice macros have come a long way, they are very good now and I am no longer running into any roadblocks personally.
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Are you a finance person though? I am not, but I work closely with a few outstanding financial analysts, and I am astounded at how they wring the shit out of data with Excel.
Yes, Libre Office calc is fine for what I do, but I am a toddler compared to some of the financial analysts I work with, and they will not be likely to change unless there is a significant improvement over what Excel does (not mere parity will be enough for them).
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Inventory, costs, shipping, billing, distribution, KPI, projections
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Move from Excel to what?
Everything that should have been used instead of Excel in the first place.
Seriously the only Excel tables which don't work on the several other office suits which are available are the ones that shouldn't have been setup in the first place (think payroll database that someone decided to implement in Excel). Migrating to cloud based services for management returns the office applications to their basic roots and makes adoption of other software easy.
Now Sharepoint and Exchange on the other hand...
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Move from Excel to what?
Everything that should have been used instead of Excel in the first place.
Thank you. Came here to post just this.
There is so much excel abuse in the world that it's not funny. Entire businesses run off a black box of macros that someone wrote a decade ago. Hire someone to script it up in a sensible language and drop it into some sort of CVS so that there's some amount of transparency, backups, and the ability to debug it.
One place I worked at had a major disaster in accounting because some guy's hard drive failed. Close to a month goes by as he re-writes his excel macros to be ab
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Since most people use it as a glorified calculator anyway, there should certainly be some google-doc tool good enough to replace it.
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Quite the opposite. The problem don't use excel as a calculator. They use it as a database, management tool, accounting tool, expediting tool, employee management, planning tool, scheduling tool, ... each of which loaded with enough VB script mostly copied and pasted straight from stack exchange and re-arranged until it gives the least number of errors while running that it is a wonder the computers haven't committed harakiri to spare themselves from having to execute it.
Needless to say portability of those
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Why "replace" and not "retrain" IT?
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Don't cross pollinate Windows and Unix derivative users. The last we need is the former bringing down the IQ of the latter. :-)
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People retire, move cities, change jobs for a promotion.
There will be a few IT people driving this from a technical standpoint. Seeing them successfully replaced will be a real boost to the viability of this project.
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People tend to resent when finance pushes for cost cutting measures and then fails to live up to those measures themselves. Internal politics for the win.
I dont get it (Score:2)
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>So long as there isn't commercial support for all this open software that they now don't have to pay for, these transitions aren't going to work.
It's not impossible to contract support, even for Linux.
> I assume they aren't going to shift their license costs to developer costs to maintain and improve said open software.
Probably not, which is foolish. Let's hope they're not all fools and somebody points out the need at a meeting at some point.
>As soon as you need to support that shit, it is just a
I wish I remember where I read this, it applies (Score:2)
- Organisations which need very limited specialist finctionality (E.g. Point of Sale)
- Very small organisations who can make do with a few standard apps and can spend time converting formats
- Very large organisations that can have whole departments to customise apps (leverage open source) change formats of incoming documents, give support, etc.
I would think that Barcelona would be medium sized and no
Save even more money! (Score:3)
Let's hope there are less idiots in charge (Score:2)
The way LiMux was botched is a textbook example how to screw up a software rollout with shitty management. That some stupid n00bs can rollback a deployment worth 10ns of millions of Euros is a total desaster.
I hope the city of Barcelona has the minimum requirements of basic brain functions to pull this off without to many problems and some ords screwing up the process. After the LiMux desaster we need a success in this field.
My 2 eurocents.
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> Large organizations will end up paying more by using open source because ultimately you STILL need to pay (a lot) for someone to provide service and support for that software.
I've been involved in a number of such migrations for more than 20 years. It's been very successful when the benefits are clear to the users of the software, especially when the closed source upgrade path is extremely poor. In many cases the Linux or UNIX support has been vastly less expensive, especially to configure and migrate
Coutinho (Score:2)
They spent so much on Coutinho that they had no money left for licensing fees...
Here we go (Score:2)
I know lots of Slahshdotters (?) love them some Linux, but I've heard this story before, and it rarely ends up well.
Servers and specialized machines, sure... they are mostly running Linux anyways, so it's not a problem.
Government employees' computers? It's not only because Microsoft comes later on with enticing propositions, it's because people can't get used to distros like Ubuntu even when it's this user friendly or close to looking like Windows.
For regular users, it's almost like learning another languag
Re:20 years later... (Score:5, Funny)
I don't need to be psychic to work out where you're from...
Re:20 years later... (Score:5, Funny)
I don't need to be psychic to work out where you're from...
Now, now - Redmond's schools are better than that.
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In all seriousness, though- hope this works out well for them. There are clearly challenges, but moving away from any monoculture is a good thing.
Re: 20 years later (Score:2)
I suspect that the bigger "out of the box" applications won't be converted at all, instead the workers will be told what they use in the future. Preferably not too much new stuff at a time, so they don't have to relearn everything in short order.
The real problem might be with small, proprietary stuff. As a hypothetical example, the management software for the munipical public transport, which was written by some small software vendor 10 years ago. Of course, it is closed source, the vendor is bankrupt by no
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Re: 20 years later... (Score:2)
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This isn't a tech help/Linux help forum. Google for the fucking answer. The problem you admitted to having sounds like a made up one. Millions of functioning Linux desktops say otherwise bunk.
You Are The Problem
Is because of assholes like YOU that linux does not advance. Now Fuckoff.
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- It is quite difficult to configure, especially if you have a slightly out of the ordinary configuration (And in some cases it may be virtually impossible, I've had more than one case where I've had to look at really obscure forums to solve a hardware problem and all I could find was users asking about the same thing);
- The user interfaces are very inconsistent, where usually every application behaves the way it wants instead of respecting the sys
Desktop Linux (Score:2)
In a nutshell, your problems with the Linux desktop are that you're not a programmer. We do apologize for the second-class end-user experience. I promise that it all makes more sense if you use it daily for at least ten years, on all your systems, including a small fleet of headless servers, and learn at least three programming languages (plus Bash). I mean, not that I can really wholeheartedly recommend such things, but there is a perspective from which Linux is the easiest OS to use. Or perhaps we mean th
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If you're a developer then what's your problem with compiling from source? In what OS are you free from having to deal with library conflicts?
You've lost any sympathy from my perspective here. If you can't figure out how the system works, use something else. This is not the horrible bug-ridden mess you're making it out to be.
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Let's give some practical examples, since you want so much, about some things that I decided to install from source:
Freetype: I wanted to install from the source in order to enable the use of subpixel hinting and other useful settings that are not enabled by default. Clean, clear documentation on what each option does, few dependencies and therefore easy to compile. Compiled and installed without problems.
Kernel: The first thing
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I did not say you were making it up, I'm saying it's your problem for not knowing how the system works, and how to deal with source code. If you're a developer, figure it out. It's not like dealing with source dependencies is easier on other platforms.
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But this brings back to the root of the problem: I am a developer, but why all Linux users also must be a developer to be able to use? A desktop should be usable by anyone you know?
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But if you are also a developer then you should know very, very well the trouble that is dealing in third party code, especially when the documentation is shoddy or nonexistent.
Yeah? Because it sounds like your problems were related to system libraries. Which suggests that we don't know how to manage those, or when to use a chroot instead. Neither of these things are trivial, but they are part of the job description.
But this brings back to the root of the problem: I am a developer, but why all Linux users also must be a developer to be able to use?
Because the primary interface is textual (i.e. composable, not discoverable) and programmatic, and the distinguishing feature is that it's an open source Unix. If one is not able to take advantage of that, why bother using it?
A desktop should be usable by anyone you know?
No, I do not know this. It sounds like the
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I think you may have comprehension problems (or I'm really really mutilating English), because at this point it must have become clear that I know what I am doing although you insist on believing otherwise... I know perfectly well about system libraries, headers, symbolic links and hardlinks, shell scripts, "everthing is a file", etc. and so on. The slight problem is when you want to install application "A" and it requires library
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If you want Windows, use Windows. Linux is not Windows. It will not ever be Windows. That you are repeatedly stating that it should be like Windows does not make that idea less stupid.
Re: 20 years later... (Score:2)
You just described my Windows experience, never had those issues with Linux, then again, I never got used to a GUI with Windows 95 only coming to market a few years before I was finishing school.
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Remulak may be a small town in France [nydailynews.com], but Barcelona is neither of those things.
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Patience, High Master. Our plan is working perfectly, Zontar The Mindless. The foolish earthlings do not suspect a thing. I counsel respectfully that you refrain from drawing attention to their geographical perception-impairments, for you may induce an unintentional flow of Fabaceae seeds from their implement of storage.
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Re: Opps Another City Going to Learn The Hard Way (Score:2)
But Microsoft don't have a monopoly. You have plenty of alternatives to choose from. Except you don't.
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....or perhaps some bribes happened behind the scene. I heard M$ had an HQ at Germany.
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You sound like you're celebrating the fact many businesses and government agencies are locked in to a single source of software for a multitude of reasons. As a nerd I'd expect you to celebrate non-technical people embracing a very technical philosophy and trying to encourage other vendors to provide alternative products and avoid monopolies and all the pitfalls they bring.
I remember when this place was News for Nerds. Now it seems to be Clickbait for Trolls.
Are there any alternatives to slashdot that the t
Re:destined to fail (Score:5, Insightful)
there, fixed that for you
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Europeans love to hate on American companies. Just see all of the court cases the European Union brings against American companies (Apple and Microsoft being the first two to spring to mind).
Have you looked at the list of court cases the European Union brings against companies? I'm guessing not, and I'm also guessing that you read about these court cases only in the tech press where they're reporting only on cases brought against big tech firms where American companies tend to dominate, and not against other markets where EU companies dominate.
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Governments aren't necessarily horribly inefficient, though. If you look at healthcare, they seem to be quite efficient. However, any large organisation has pockets of inefficiency, and governments are no exception. Some of the inefficiency is driven by frequent changes of direction in policy, although that can also happen in any large organisation. Keeping track of government efficiency is a good thing, and the GAO serves that purpose nominally, and just about every Western nation has an equivalent, as wel
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