The city of Munich tried to develop a Linux distribution "Limux" that was used for some time, but political considerations ultimately reversed the decision.
Or just employees got fed up with the "almost but not quite there" compatibility, and unpolished functionality, and wanted to return to MS Office.
I've got a CS degree, have used Linux since 1998, used and developed for several commercial unices, and have used Open Office since it was Sun's. I still prefer MS Office.
not in this case.
people coming from office 2003 have a hard time with 2010 or higher.
it had a lot of things to do with smartphones which are problematic in the windows environment aswell.
also germany builds more and more web interfaces for administrative work.
It's it? I try to use open source software as much as possible but Office365 is just significantly better than the alternatives. I wish it wasn't true but it is.
And it's not even that expensive. £8/month/person. Slack is £5/month/person and that's just for chat.
Considering an average employee probably costs at least £3000/month it's a bit silly to worry about these small expenses.
Does MS Office have real competitors? Google Docs is very casual compared to MS Office. LibreOffice needs a lot of work.
My money was on Corel Office for Linux (with solid products like Wordperfect and Quattro Pro), but Microsoft bought a large share of Corel and it was mysteriously discontinued.
Slack has competitors but none of them are as good. At least none of the free ones - I've tried them all. Zulip is closest but it has a weird threading model (it's more like Usenet).
It's quite surprising given how relatively simple it is.
I disagree wrt office 365 (except for the collaborative editing in the browser feature). I dont recognize the price either - more like 22£ (unless its exchange only).
That's true, there was cronyism. For example, they used the worse, slower KDE instead of better options like MATE because KDE has a considerable European (and even German) legacy. I imagine they took many decisions like that.
Take a computer that used to run Windows 2000 and install KDE on it, it's no wonder people got pissed and they had to revert their decision.
I still use KDE (4.x) on CentOS 7, with older hardware.
It's not quite as as snappy as XFCE, or probably MATE, but it's still easily good enough to get the job done.
On CentOS, being a stable platform, KDE itself is also really stable. (important to me, as I have better things to do that screwing around just keeping a desktop updated)
For strict accuracy, MATE is not a fork of GTK2, but of GNOME 2. MATE did originally use GTK2, though without forking it, and it has since switched to GTK3 (while still keeping the GNOME 2 "look").
MATE is a fork of GNOME 2, which is a full featured desktop environment as well. MATE runs orders of magnitude faster and is much more stable than KDE. Especially on the old workstations where they installed LiMux.
I'm not going to say that the project failed entirely because of technical reasons, but at first glance it really looks like they took bad decisions. It's hard to defend a move where you end up with worse software and a worse experience for users, no matter how much money you save.
It's obvious you're being provocative on purpose but I don't see this leading to any fruitful discussion. Maybe try a more constructive approach next time.
The LiMux project started in 2005, so the KDE version used back then would be KDE3. That was not really worse in performance than GNOME2 (or today MATE), although comparing it to Windows 2000 would not be easy.
Then put Windows 10 on it, or any other fully featured modern GUI OS. And we have proved what? Computers from 18 years ago don't run modern OS's very well, but can run ok with an OS specifically pitched as 'lightweight'.
On the other hand I have a PC right here on my lap that is 10 years old that is running Kubuntu problem free.
For so.e of the problems that is the case. Some of fheproblems were that no other municipality joined them in the effort, which leaves them a sole fighter in a world where they have to use software provided by other authorities. One example is ordering a passport was initially setup by running the software provided by the federal administration via terminal server, however the. Finger prints were added to passports so the setup didn't work anymore and even being "the largest municipality in Germany" (cities of Berlin and Hamburg are larger, but they delegated more municipality tasks to the districts and are also states) doesn't give them much leverage.
They way the decision came into play is crazy however. Just around the elections Microsoft moved their German headquarters from outside the city into the city and the next elected deputy mayor from the conservative party was disappointed that it took much time to get an official mobile phone from the IT department and setting up mail on that device was complicated ... not idea how that's related to desktops, but that triggered the debate ...
Yup. Going open source requires a shift in mindset when handling support issues. Coming from a paralyzed, complaining-to-vendor position, into taking responsibility and fixing the problems yourself.
> political considerations ultimately reversed the decision
Thats a very one-sided portrayal of the situation. There were problems regarding usability, the resulting low user acceptance and issues with external MS Office files due to compatibility bugs.
If anything, funding the project for so long was a symptom of putting ideological and political considerations before user needs.
I find it very weird how even most software developers prefer MBPs with MS Office on them, but some poor souls elsewhere are supposed to do their daily work on a sub-standard platform. I mean we're still joking about the "Year of the Linux Desktop".
The EU asked for the standardization of Microsoft Office file formats, and the "Office Open XML" format (OOXML for short) was created (ECMA-376).
The resulting standard was 6,546 pages long (in comparison, ODF is just 867 pages long), and Microsoft Office was not fully compliant with it, making the entire process a waste of time. 10 years later situation is the same.
It is reasonable to believe that interoperability and standardization were not in the best interest of Microsoft. They have the largest market share and they have not much to win by giving opportunities to competitors.