Large parts of one german state switched to open source. First they laughed at them and now they are envious.

The switch to Linux is happening this year. Until the end of the year they want all workers on Linux instead of Windows.

It is possible, and fast if you want it.

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lelanthran 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Large parts of one german state switched to open source.

Haven't they been doing this every 5 - 8 years since 2004?

	▲	adgjlsfhk1 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		there's a lot of parts of Germany. the original versions were town at a time. now it's whole regions.

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john_strinlai 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

kudos to them!

out of curiosity, "large parts" of "one german state" is how many machines roughly?

i am suspecting that it is probably nowhere near enough to put windows in "significant danger". however, i am rooting for their success and hope that they thoroughly document (and publish) the process. i have never seen a transition like that go smoothly, let alone when it is in government.

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kuerbel 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Goodbye-Microsoft-Schleswig-Hol...

That was the situation at the end of December.

Note that projects like these often fail not for technical reasons, not even cost, but political pressure from other parties, pressure from people that worked for ages in the administration and, well, have some problems to adjust to new software.

There is also a push from the German state to switch to open source or at least European solutions. There is the Deutschland-Stack, for which the IT planning council made open source mandatory: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Deutschland-Stack-IT-Planning-C...

And so on. At my day job more and more customers are reconsidering cloud adoption, especially M365 and such.

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john_strinlai 2 hours ago | parent [-]

thanks for the link! it is unfortunate that they do not provide numbers, just percentages. i would love to know exactly (or roughly) how many machines "80%" is.

and the "80%" seems slightly misleading, because it is 80%, not including the tax administration. i have no idea what overall % of machines are inside or outside of the tax administration.

it also appears like this is mostly about software like office, rather than operating systems?

>"outside the tax administration, almost 80 percent of workplaces in the state administration have already been switched to the open-source office software LibreOffice."

switching away from office is significantly more realistic than migrating away from windows altogether, and something that every business can and should absolutely consider doing soon.

anyways, seriously, good for them. as i mentioned elsewhere, i hope that they are thoroughly documenting their experiences and are willing to share them after completion.

	▲	kuerbel 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Migrating to linux will be started this year. I think a big step is also replacing sharepoint with Nextcloud. Iirc they have 30k workstations.

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willy_k 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This alone obviously doesn’t put Windows in danger, but if it does go over well then it’ll mark a turning point; A large non-techy institution getting away from Microsoft’s castle and being better off for it would signal to the world that it’s not only doable, but could even be worth it. It’ll take a while, but this could be the start of the end for Windows.

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john_strinlai 4 hours ago | parent [-]

>This alone obviously doesn’t put Windows in danger,

so, the quote i specifically replied to said that today windows is in "significant danger", and i said it isnt. we seem to be in agreement.

as for what the future holds, i think it will be much slower than other people. but maybe i am wrong! which would be fine with me.

but, today, windows is not in "significant danger".

	▲	grujicd 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That "significant danger" was a bit of dramatization on my part. I don't expect anything to significantly change in the short term. I was more referring to long-term tidal-like change, which would be very hard to stop once momentum builds up.

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pydry 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This exact same thing (literally another german state i think) almost happened about 20 years ago and Microsoft freaked the fuck out. Thats where all the TCO nonsense came from - just one german state trying to de-microsoft.

I think Microsoft won, too.

I think theyre terrified of positive examples. Especially ones with FAR lower TCO and lower geopolitical risks.