Doubtlessly, this successful migration to desktop Linux must have been very difficult, costly, and disruptive. The <i>upfront</i> costs of migration surely exceed what it would have cost the city to stay on Windows for one or two more waves of upgrades. The important question is: were these upfront costs & multi-year effort worth it?<p>The data presented in the article provides compelling evidence that the answer is yes -- i.e., the migration's <i>recurring</i> savings exceed its <i>upfront</i> costs:<p>* The city no longer has to pay for license upgrades, thereby eliminating a major recurring cost <i>forever</i> -- savings of nearly 3 million pounds every three to four years, according to the article. That's <i>huge</i>.<p>* The city no longer has to upgrade desktop software or hardware as frequently, reducing another recurring cost <i>forever</i> -- also <i>huge</i>.<p>* Most surprisingly, the city claims its IT department is fielding considerably fewer user complaints with Linux than with Windows, reducing another major cost <i>forever</i>. Labor-intensive IT support is always the costliest component of operating a corporate desktop, so that's also <i>huge</i>.<p>If the recurring cost savings claimed by the city of Munich are accurate, every budget-strapped city in the planet should be seriously considering this kind of migration to desktop Linux. It makes a lot of sense purely from a financial standpoint.<p>[UPDATE: I toned down the language and corrected key figures, which were off by an order of magnitude due to an incorrect reading of the article. I also materially changed the bullet point regarding support costs, as the article itself was slightly misleading on the matter. THANK YOU Xylakant and luser001 for pointing out my errors!]
<i>"... and reduced user complaints" </i><p>When I hear that metric I think of a homegrown app that was supposed to upload files from PeeCees to the company's mainframe. At the annual IT meeting ...<p>"And since implementing change foo and bar in the system user complaints to the special helpdesk have declined 90% .."<p>My boss stood up [1] "That's because the users got tired of calling and not having anything fixed. It's still broken."<p>The manager/presenter shot daggers at Eric [1]. Cross-hall verbal sniping started. Entertaining.<p>[1] He was retiring in a few months.
With these kinds of `hooray linux´ articles, I always wonder whether they included the cost of reduced productivity they included when moving everybody from MS Office to LibreOffice and stuff like that. The difference in quality, stability and features is pretty big. I've worked with LibreOffice only for about 8 months, and I can tell you, it's not just a matter of "getting used to". There's simply a whole bunch of bugs (layout screwing up in Writer, Ctrl+Z not perfectly going back to the previous state, etc) and limitations. The time wasted fighting these tools costs a lot as well.<p>Take 12000 civil servants losing one hour a week on fighting the tools, and you get to 11.7 million pretty fast.
On a parallel anecdote. Installing Ubuntu on my parents PC sure did reduce the amount of assistance they needed from me with crashes and malware. I'd recommend it to anyone who needs to spend some time helping non-tech friends with computer problems :)
They moved from Windows <i>NT</i> to Linux in <i>2006</i>. No wonder it reduced complaints. I'd be far more interested in a migration from Win 7 or Win XP to Linux.
Have they actually saved anything when you take into account nearly a decade (so far) spent on doing this migration?<p>The Munich migration is pretty much the canonical example of how to botch a Linux migration.
Disclaimer: I'm not a programmer and have been a bystander in medium sized IT projects.<p>Does anyone think that large organisations will tend to move to Web-browser based business applications over the next few years?<p>If so, will that make it easier to switch the <i>client</i> device without major change in the central plumbing?
Maybe interesting as well: Dave Richards is aggregated on planet.gnome.org with his work blog [1] about running the infrastructure of the city of Largo, Florida [2] (granted, far from the size of Munich). Time frame seems similar (since 2006) and his blog contains quite a bit of technical information about the challenges of running a city wide thin client network and the custom software they create for their users.<p>Its a fun read to learn about how many instances of Firefox you can run on a single machine at any given time as well..<p>1: <a href="http://davelargo.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">http://davelargo.blogspot.com/</a><p>2: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largo,_Florida" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largo,_Florida</a>
It would be interesting to measure the number of complaints that were based on experimentation due to users' familiarity with Windows. Since the LiMux environment is probably more restrictive, is it possible some folks just gave up on some features, e.g. "How do I attach my Excel doc to an email?" because there is no Excel, for example. It's great that they are saving the tax-payer , though.
For counter arguments there's some fascinating stuff at <a href="http://limuxwatch.blogspot.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">http://limuxwatch.blogspot.co.uk/</a> although it hasn't been updated for a while, so maybe they've finally succeeded?
"[...] €2.08 million (£1.73 million) for optimisation and test management that ended up on the balance of the LiMux project [...]"<p>Does anyone know details of this? Any ideas on what type of "optimisation" was done?
Replacing MS Office with Libre Office, especially based on comments so far seem to be not that great choice. People not calling support, it might be tu number of reasons. I bet if they did survey on what people think about impact on their work, they would get different results.
I was thinking and Google Docs would probably be better choice as alternative to MS, however, this is just another provider ie. you don't get open source.<p>I am all for open source, and cities like Munich getting into it is welcome news, and will influence improvement in apps, however I suspect there is a lot of negativity pushed under the rug here.
The subheading of the linked article, "Monthly IT complaints dropped from 70 to a maximum of 4" is contradicted in the article text. The text of the article says that the "maximum number of complaints" per month dropped from 70 to 46, not 4.<p>(Also, the maximum number of complaints is irrelevant, but I guess complaining here about people not understanding statistics is pointless.)
I love Linux myself, and I have no doubt that they've saved money, but the following makes me a little concerned about how they are going about Service Management:<p>"Ude said it was impossible to be exact about the amount of complaints the help desk gets about LiMux, noting that most problems are a combination of several causes. The software is not always the problem, since often there are problems reaching a server, or Internet connections might be malfunctioning."<p>My concern here is that they aren't logging incidents via some sort of appropriate iTSM framework (MOF, ITILv3, etc.) Even the most basic Incident Management setups would allow them to perform <i>basic</i> analysis of the incident data to work out where there issues are coming from.<p>I'm afraid I just don't buy the argument that it's impossible to know for certain where the city's problems are coming from :(