What's the cost to rewrite all of the existing software to a Linux version?
this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2024
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Zero if it can run on wine
What gets me is that militaries use Windows, including North Korea
Watch the movie "zeitgeist moving forward" and learn why they don't and why life sucks.
I'm sure I'm going to get made fun of for this post.
For anyone who didn't see “zeitgeist moving forward” yet, just don't.
Reminds me of the US swapping to the metric system.
Short to mid term would be miserable and confusing for people. Long term would probably work out better. Will it happen: never.
Short term: no breathing
Long term: improved breathing
You can at least see why that’s a bad plan right?
Just hold your breath silly
The issue with Linux is getting middle management to support it. I'm my experience is based on them laying you off and hiring somebody else. Linux is great but management needs support contracts.
And thus RedHat was born
It’s shameful that I feel the need to preface this by saying that I’ve used Linux for 26 years now:
The consensus is that it’s a massive cost increase rather than savings.
Well, I would argue that depends very much on the basis of your calculations. Closed source software means public services are held hostage after a company winning a contract. In Norway some Finnish company won a contract for some digital system in the health services and later wanted them to ship all their computers to Finland so that they could update their software. In a paradigm were governments commited to Linux and open source software, there would most likely be a lot less overhead in adapting and developing solutions for Linux.
I actually agree with you, under communism we could run public services on open source software no problem.
When the externalities of training people to use that software, integrating with outside systems, using state power to influence standards&norms and contributing back to the development only exist on the balance sheet of the switch though, it’s not possible.
The problem from my pov is, who is getting what support for ms? I just don't see it.
I used to be okay at using their stuff,
most of the people i've every worked with (in the public sector) did a less-than-average job of using the software.
They got by, now it's worse with office365 and sharrepoint and web-apps and shit like that everything has become extremely infuriating.
Whenever we have issues it seems that more money gets earmarked for more new microsoft products, the new shit will solve our problems.
Oh, except the budget for "developers" on that new thing is spent so we're perpetually "waiting until next development cycle".
The only things we have that are reliable are tools we build ourselves in python, SQL and so on - and we just have to support thm ourselves. We're not "developers" or anything mystical like that, but it's the only way to actually get stuff done that helps us work better.
Who is out there having a good experience with MS and where does all this support go? I'm genuinely curious.
Ultimately none of this matters once MS based software has won some sort of auction for a contract (thanks Thatcher). Vendor lock-in is problematic in a lot of cases with a multiplier of damage based on the size of the entity wrapped in it's web.
I hear it didn't go well in the German government, something about the cost of training and skyrocketing tech support calls for basic tasks.
The Germans also fell prey to Microsoft telling them that they would give them all the free copies of Windows they might need and build a new facility providing a ton of jobs in their area if they would abandon the Linux thing.
The city in question also built their own distro based on an older version of an existing distro rather than going from off the shelf.
That sounds like a bad transition plan. For sure there's some lessons to learn from that experience.
One of them main reasons for that, I think, is how the average non-tech computer user perceives UI/UX, when they have been exposed to only a single type of interface for most of their lives (most probably Windows).
And even though they tend to pick up different UIs in mobile phones fairly quickly, that seems to not be the case for computers.
Back that up with earlier versions of middle-school computers studies in being mostly like:
- How to print a file in Microsoft Word?
- How to copy a file to USB drive? (with the implicit - using Explorer on Windows XP)
And you have most of the population thinking that's the only way to do it. That was the case with me until I learned programming.
Tbh, most people above a curtain age struggle with even that.
Well, of course one can't expect someone with 0 exposure to similar stuff in their learnable period to be able to pick up those things. Just one of the limitations of the human brain.
On the other hand, people who tend to be more imaginative would probably be able to do better in that regard.
They seem to be pushing for it still. Did you hear about that grant the German government gave to gnome?
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