Munich City Government to Dump Linux Desktop

munich city officials turned lots of heads 10 years ago, when they voted to swap out Microsoft Windows with LiMux -- a custom desktop version of the Linux operating system, based on Ubuntu Linux. The current municipal government wants to dump LiMux and replace its 15,000 computers with Windows 10.

The city's general council this week voted to investigate how much time and money it will take to build a Windows 10 client for use by the city's employees. The city spent millions of euros over the last decade on the Windows replacement project.

Now council members want the city to spend millions more, basically to lay the groundwork for the process of migrating back to proprietary software.

The vote this week does more than approve a feasibility study -- it calls for preparing to return to Windows by 2021. After the preparatory phase is completed, the council once again will again vote on whether to proceed with replacing LiMux with Windows.

However, it appears that the second vote merely will formalize the earlier decision. The groundwork already will be done. City officials will have the actual time and cost figures in hand prior to the second vote Glancing Blow

One government entity dropping the Linux desktop is not likely to have much impact on overall Linux desktop adoptions, according to Howard Green, vice president of marketing at Azul Systems.

"It is unlikely that this will have much of an impact on other existing adoptions of desktop Linux by governments," he told LinuxInsider, "although there are certainly some issues that have been highlighted by users within the city government that might give pause to net-new migrations from other platforms."

Unclear Objectives

Some of the city officials behind the proposal have blamed LiMux for numerous ongoing IT problems. However, others maintain that the IT disarray resulted from a previous city council decision to fractionalize the staff into different departments.

source:technewsworld.com