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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)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The petition is open to all EU resident. The goal is to replace all Windows in all public institution in Europe with a sovereign GNU/Linux.

If the petition is successful it would be a huge step forward for GNU/Linux adoption.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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/

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

Of course not. They wouldn’t have had any reason to switch.

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.

It takes more maintenance than Windows.

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.