It’s done before in Munich. It can work.
BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Ad I said yesterday when this was posted. They tried this about 15 years ago, reverted to Windows after a few years.
I wish them all the luck in the world with this, truly. But I’m not sure a government has the drive, management, and flexibility to pull this off successfully.
If we want it see Linux compete with Windows for the desktop, it will need to start at the opposite end of the spectrum: small environments where the need for specialized apps is minimal, IT is a smaller group, flexibility is much higher, end users are a smaller group (from a training perspective) and reduced cost realizations are more apparent and impactful.
We may be seeing the beginning of this with VMWare’s new, exorbitant licensing costs causing a push to other solutions such as Proxmox/TrueNAS for virtualization/virtualization backup in the SMB.
And if we really want to see a sea change, we need to get Linux as a desktop in education. But that would require settling on a single shell, and generally a single distribution (or at a minimum ensure there’s a consistent set of tools in the OS).
Seems like an “Education Build” would be a great idea. But, again, who’s going to back it, and which Linux distro gets the nod?
0x0@programming.dev 9 months ago
flubo@feddit.de 9 months ago
Yeah but they switched back to Windows in 2017 for no reason. :( some Bad rumors say it had to do with Microsoft building its headquater in munich 2016. But no one knows if the decision to build it in munich is indeed related to the switch back to. Windows.
Miaou@jlai.lu 9 months ago
Seriously? With the amount of political corruption in Germany I really don’t think there’s any reason to doubt that at all
bus_factor@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Debian Edu has existed for over a decade, originally as a Norwegian distro called Skolelinux (“school Linux”). I’m not sure how they differ from regular Debian at this point, but a big part of the original project was high quality translations.
rikudou@lemmings.world 9 months ago
Wasn’t there also something like Edubuntu?
bus_factor@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Yeah, and their latest release was 5 months ago, so they’re probably still a thing.
Buelldozer@lemmy.today 9 months ago
Linux the Operating System could have the Desktop now. You could throw a lightly massaged Mint install down on nearly anyone’s desk and they’d be fine.
However Linux is an Operating System and vanishingly few people actually give a shit about the OS, what they care about is the application set and that’s where FOSS, not Linux, completely falls apart.
Linux on the desktop for 30,000 Government PC’s? No problem. Removing Microsoft Office from those 30,000 Government PCs? Major problem!
Nearly everyone uses MSO and even Google hasn’t been able to successfully work around this after plowing untold billions and a decade of effort into G-Suite…only to have it widely viewed as an inferior product. When you get to “specialized apps” territory it gets even worse since outside of STEM they’re almost all entirely written for Windows. You literally can’t get away because the software isn’t there to do it.
Smaller group means that there’s less, or even NO, resources to find, maintain, and train people for “alternate” applications. It’s vastly less expensive to simply use the applications that users are already familiar with and that everyone else in their industry is using.
The “reduced cost realizations” only come from not buying licenses, which can be impactful, but that expense gets quickly overwhelmed by lost productivity, increased training cost, and higher support burden.
Yes SOME organizations are able to make it work but those orgs are usually staffed with highly technical people and they’ve got leadership willing to bleed money while everything gets sorted out. Those two conditions don’t describe very many businesses and they are certainly not found in Governments.
Linux the OS works just fine but that’s not the hurdle. The hurdle is the applications. To quote a famous sweaty guy on a stage one time this fight about is about “Developers, Developers, Developers!”.