Munich ends its long-running love affair with Linux

Microsoft just moved an office into Munich and now, over the objections of the municipal IT staff, the city is switching to Windows. Interesting.

&quot;Love&quot; affair is a bit of a misnomer. Munich forked most of their userland software in &#x27;03 and were surprised to find out that handling so much software maintenance on their own is a) expensive and b) leads to poor results.<p>IMO, LiMux was always doomed to fail, and it&#x27;s a testament to the slowness of public institutions that it took this long to realize their mistake.<p>If the same project was undertaken now, with the lessons learned (no goddamn forks of entire desktop environments just because Janice in accounting wants her buttons in a different order!) it would give <i>much</i> better results.

I think I can understand some complaints about Linux because I use it as my main desktop OS since many years, but I want to fix two points:<p>- &quot;compatibility headaches&quot; is a problem caused by the usage of Microsoft office. Linux has no compatibility problem with itself or with standards.<p>- &quot;apps and hardware that absolutely needed Microsoft&#x27;s platform to run, and those were destined to stay&quot;. Since 2003, these products are 14 years old. It is hard to believe most of them could not have been renewed without this dependency.<p>I think that acceptance of Microsoft office proprietary format is the main cause of failure.

Stunned silence ensues while reality sinks in (:-D)<p>Can’t wait to read n-gate’s take on this.