[4bpp]

Google Translate butchers the article badly, but https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr... suggests that this is more of a personal ambition of the vice-mayor and the city council is positioning itself firmly against any move back to Windows.

Ultimately, it is more surprising that things even managed to remain this peaceful so far. Windows holds a huge home advantage simply by being the operating system almost everyone in the bureaucracy invariably uses at home. Many of the employees probably already invested years of painstaking trial-and-error, frustrated tech support calls and offering of incentives to more computer-literate relatives and offspring to get where they are in terms of being able to navigate a Windows desktop. No amount of corporate training is going to be able to make up for the feeling of frustration that those people will feel from the realisation that much of that was moot and they will have to relearn the basics.

[click170]

As one of those computer-literate relatives / offspring, I can't help but feel like I'm contributing to the problem by helping them "fix" their windows computers.

So I've stopped doing it.

I've explained politely but firmly that I'll be happy to help them transition to a Linux or Mac desktop because I use those in my daily life and am familiar with them, but I'm not helping them with their Windows 8 PC. I do not use it, don't plan to, and have no interest in it.

Anecdotally, the relative who is the most cautious seems to be the one who causes most of the problems by trying to click on all of the "helpful" messages that pop up. This came to light after they got a new laptop that only one of them had been using exclusively.

[graeme]

>As one of those computer-literate relatives / offspring, I can't help but feel like I'm contributing to the problem by helping them "fix" their windows computers. So I've stopped doing it.

This happened to me after I switched to mac. Not on purpose, I just stopped knowing how to troubleshoot.

Recently, my parents had to upgrade their old XP computer. They bought a mac. They were worried about learning Windows 8 without support.

[Widdershin]

This had been one of the nice upsides of swapping to *nix. I can now claim ignorance of Windows problems.

[fiatjaf]

This is something everyone reading this should start doing now. I will.

[egor83]

Makes me wonder - why hasn't anyone made a Linux desktop environments that tries to mimic Windows look and behaviour as much as possible? IP/patent issues maybe?

There would be a huge market for something like that, as this situation shows.

[ejr]

It's an extremely difficult thing to do from a design and engineering perspective. The majority of office suites available are good, but different and "quirky" enough that the flow isn't seamless. The same goes for design applications and many other utilities that people use every day.

At the end of the day, any OS that requires some command-line at any point has failed to appeal to the mass market. Instead of Windows, Linux would be better off mimicking Mac as it tries to be as unobtrusive as possible while still leaving the command-line power intact.

Linux needs to escape the Uncanny Valley of general purpose computing to become more mainstream.

[DSMan195276]

It's kinda interesting, Zorin does exactly what you've mentioned but I've never seen it get really popular. I think the big issue is that the UI isn't what people stumble with when moving to Linux. The bigger issues is the differences in file-system and programs, and it would be extremely hard to create a compatibility layer for such differences because Wine just isn't perfect (Nor should it really be recommended when Linux equivalent exist), and lots of programs ask for files and there's no easy way to patch them all in such a way that it appears like the Windows drive system instead of a Unix file system.

[varkson]

There has been, like PCLinuxOS. The problem is that it's not just the interface keeping people off GNU/Linux, it's everything else, like software and hardware support.

[ronwl]

Linux Mint with Cinnamon?

I think its good enough since I've managed to convert at least 42 user from Windows to that. Its been almost 2years and they still stick with that.

[fiatjaf]

42? You're a hero. I've succeeded with 1, failed with 2, and still trying with 3 more.

[rrradical]

Check out Linspire (formerly Lindows): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linspire

[jnamaya]

There is, and its getting popular http://zorin-os.com/ there is another OS that is trying to build a windows compatible open source architecture, but it hasn't got out of the alpha stage for the last 10 years, so I think the project is dead. The name of the OS is reactOS. I think they still have the website up.

[byerley]

I think this is an unstated (stated?) goal of Kubuntu, and there are some guides floating around to make it look even more like Windows.

[pippy]

He'll be getting paid by MS to position himself in supporting windows. Even in medium organisations you'll be shocked by the freebies and goodies you'll get by supporting their infrastructure.