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A petition has been created by an Austrian EU rep. to replace Windows with GNU/Linux in all Europe
(www.europarl.europa.eu)
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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Double edged sword. Forced adoption of a shitty distro, or a really locked down/limited system might not be a step forward at all.
From memory, Germany did this many years ago, and ended up rolling it back?
The city of Munich deployed their own custom Linux systems many years ago. But since it wasn't really maintained and updated, the user experience was pretty bad and the city's employees were unhappy. Then Micro$oft lobbyists also came in and made them switch - by threatening to move their German headquarters out of Munich, which would cost the city lots of tax revenue.
https://itsfoss.com/munich-linux-failure/
You think that Microsoft lobbyist would have had any traction if the user experience was any decent?
Of course not. They wouldn't have had any reason to switch.
That is the biggest issue with Linux at the moment. It takes more maintenance than Windows. And there are a lot less people with the knowledge to setup and maintain those environments.
At the end of the day, the point of those environments is to allow the user to work in them. But if the user is unable to work properly because of the environment, then that environment must be changed. It is as simple as that.
Of course they would? Millions of euros of tax revenue sounds like a pretty compelling reason to me. This is why Micro$oft's "lobby efforts" should be labeled as what they are: Nothing more and nothing less than corruption.
If you create your own distro, yes. But there are countless noob-friendly distros like Mint, Ubuntu and Fedora that they could use with practically 0 maintenance required. Also, compare the 2004 desktop Linux experience to now. Having used Gentoo Linux compiled from a stage 1 tarball back in 2002, I can tell you: the differences are tremendous. Many of the issues they had can be directly attributed to OpenOffice and it's bad compatibility with Microsoft Office file formats, which has long been replaced by LibreOffice. It still worked out pretty well for them, over a period of 13 years. And it saved the tax payer millions of euros of Microsoft's stupid licensing fee for their proprietary garbage.
https://www.techspot.com/news/102518-windows-microsoft-office-replaced-linux-libreoffice-german-state.html
Then they went back to Linux a few years pater
Yeah, that's the one. Gnome 2 in 2017 would have felt pretty dated. And the political reasons can't have helped either.
So, it didn't fail from a technical fault but a political one? I feel like you're arguing against it but I'm not following how that has anything to do with the viability of it (especially if it worked for 13 years)
Its not that I'm against it or don't think it can work, I just dont think its going to help drive adoption of desktop Linux. And I think there is a very real risk that it could negatively impact Linux mind share if the experience is particularly bad.
The Munich OS proves its possible. But I'm really curious about how the end users actually felt about it. Maybe I'm wrong and they love it, but I'm very skeptical.
Fwiw, I suspect the "Linux" that ends up being deployed will likely be a glorified thinclient/browser, and nothing like desktop Linux as most of us know and love.
That's fair
They then switched back to Linux
Government systems should be locked down and limited.
Yup, exactly, which is kinda my point. The OS given to users is gonna be heavily restricted, so no one is going to use it and then run home to install it on a home PC. Government OSs are just not good ambassadors.
No one was discussing users transitioning on their home computers.
Of course not, but if the first exposure someone has to Linux is a bad experience, thats not going to be good for mind share. Thats the double edge sword i am referring to.