Interesting (and poorly paraphrased) story about a successful Linux migration:
spoilerSeveral years ago someone made a post or cross-posted on r/sysadmin where OP (lead sysadmin) was in meeting with management and they complained about windows and the licensing costs. OP jokingly passed a comment about switching to Linux and management actually thought he was throwing out a real idea. Upon explaining the much lower cost due to FOSS and maybe only requiring a small contract for consulting/support, management actually agreed to his idea. He successfully transitioned the entire company to OpenSUSE which he determined was the best enterprise distro for desktop use. The other important part was how he handled the transition. iirc he got it going by first offering it to tech savvy departments who were ecstatic to get new stuff, so he lined it up with a hardware upgrade. Naturally the rest of the departments heard about it and also wanted the new stuff which locked them into using Linux. There were several holdouts clinging to Windows, but with the majority showing success, management forced them to change as well. For his use case, most of the employees were using web apps, so almost no additional desktop apps were required.
I love Linux but I’ve seen so many of these efforts fail. I did a move where we moved an entire election system onto centos. the move was a quarter billion dollars for them, but a couple years later they came back needing us to move to Redhat… then back to windows eventually.
the reason is governments are never willing to figure things out for themselves. if there’s any error at all that happens that might make some gov officials look bad, they need a support line to call immediately and threaten breaking contracts. maybe these guys are fuckin with Canonical but Linux support is so shit from my experience.
as much as I hate Microsoft, you can pay them enough and they’ll elevate your tickets to engineers who actually can do something and fix your shit. THAT is what governments actually want. somebody to sue or blame when their tech hits the fan.
I actually want Microsoft to do better. Then can, they just ignore user feedback about user choice, design, what to work on etc. Good if they start to get some competition. I wonder what will happen when ARM gets common in a normal PC-build. Good opportunity to make some big changes.
Fuck yeah. Biggest employer in Europe NHS England needs to wake up and do this too. In one single licensing agreement they handed Microsoft £163.1 million. Imagine what that could do if spent on linux development instead, or heaven forbid on actual healthcare. It actually boggles my mind that the NHS doesn’t have it’s own distro and do its own development.
From what I’ve heard, the problem with IT in the health industry is with equipment manufacturers. MRIs, x-ray machines and other equipment that have control software that’s written not just for windows, but a particular version of windows, and won’t work without it. So you end up with a patchwork of different OSes that need to be updated and secure. Unifying that into one OS, even if it was to a pre-rolled Linux distro would be a nightmare, if not impossible.
It breaks my brain every day of the week thinking about how much money could be put to better use in so many industries if they just switched to Linux, but big organisations are like big ships; they move slowly and are hard to steer. And they regard software licences as the cost of doing business 🤷♂️
Yeah it’s a shame about that. I wonder if a customer the size of the NHS could make it worth releasing Linux versions of the software though. I mean, if I can get an appimage or flatpak of some small open source cross-platform project surely someone like Canon could release one for their new ultrasound stuff. Especially if they’re being offered an order to roll it out across an entire nations health service?
It would be pretty funny if they just ran it using Wine though!
They don’t need a new distro, unless they hire a lot of highly skilled packagers. I’d take say Ubuntu or OpenSuSE … but it would be RedHat with Oracle for the NHS - they just can’t help losing money.
For my tiny company, I’m going Kubuntu … bear with … Ubuntu means:
Multiple “enterprise AV” are available (ESET and others)
Secure Boot
Full disc encryption is available
Those boxes ticked gets you on the way in the rather naff enterprise security word of tick boxes. Without those - give up now.
The K(DE) bit gets you a lot of configurability and its reasonably easy to get an environment out of the box that Windows users can get to grips with. Besides, I like KDE/Plasma.
I then tack on this rather fine project: cid-doc.github.io for AD, SYSVOL, “Drive letter” etc integration. Evolution with EWS does email.
My test machine is my desktop (it used to run Arch (actually), my laptop still does) - I started off with Kubuntu 22.04 and wired up all the above and then whilst in a Teams meeting kicked off the upgrade to 23.04 for a laugh. Sound stopped after a while because the kernel modules switched out. Anyway, all good after a reboot.
Seeing as I am competing with something that has GPO, I’ll allow myself to use Ansible.
PS - I should point out that an Arch box can run one of the ESET for Linux products OK (I have). You can get it to do secure boot and it can do FDE. So can Gentoo but I spent 15 years constantly fixing my Gentoo pets too.
bro you need to wake up. this is not how software works with government. NHS is not going to write their own Linux distro. that’s crazy even for a company to do. its gonna take them a recurring budget every year just for maintaining the system. it’ll balloon way past the Microsoft number easily. 163mm pound is a tiny TINY budget for an undertaking like building a healthcare OS that they plan to maintain forever. they’ll have money to hire contractors once, then they’ll pass it to their internal teams that are staffed with people trying to pass time until they collect pension.
also no way will any agency take the liability of building a custom OS for their health infra. health tech is honestly one of the hardest, most expensive things to dev just due to all the regulation and red tape behind it. you can’t just build health tech for the hell of it, even if you’re the NHS. it takes years and years and crazy money to have your systems certified to handle health data even if you’re building internally.
Funnily enough, this is what a chromebook was made to do. A computer that was only a browser. Unfortunately, the hardware was severely underpowered, and the custom software wasn’t as flexible as a simple Linux desktop is capable of. (Almost no software support outside of Google)
I saw a “gaming Chromebook” for $649 (USD) at the big box electronics and appliance store today.
At first I was astounded, but it did have a high refresh rate display and some type of GeForce iGPU. Apparently designed around cloud gaming. Which is na interesting use case.
Depending on need they can be a very effective device. Keep in mind they can also easily run a lot of android packages and Linux. Some come in tablet form factor with a keyboard folio case…I was looking at the Lenovo Duet for a while but ended up buying a OnePlus Pad recently.
When web apps took off a decade ago, I was secretly rooting for this.
OSes shouldnt matter anymore. Everything should funnel through a browser. WASM is already bringing traditional desktop apps to the web. Microsoft and Apple can die in a fire.
But with the migration, now the fight is to stop Google from owning browsers.
Google workspace has a fraction of the functionality. At a base level they’re relatively comparable. But once you go into more advanced functionality and security, 365 is a landslide better.
In terms of the basic office utilities like text editor, spreadsheets and so on, Google is a good contender. But Google Workspace isn’t even close to the functionality IT admins have with Microsoft Defender, Intune, Entra, Purview, and so on.
There’s a lot more going on at the administration side than just the user’s experience, that could make it less ideal to move to Linux.
I’m saying this as someone who hates both Microsoft and Google.
Companies that use Windows and Azure are locked into it by their use of things like AD, Intune, Exchange, OneCloud, SharePoint, Hello etc., on the infrastructure and ops administrative side, not necessarily by Office365. It’s almost impossible to make a clean break from all that for any company past a certain size.
History tells us that 85% of these people will move to Windows 11 despite what they say.
The interesting rub this time is the hardware. There’s tons of still powerful and useful CPU’s in use today that don’t support Windows 11’s TPM 2.0, so I wonder if that will push a few more people to Linux than when Windows 7 was EOL.
Hopefully this at least forces Microsoft to rethink riddling their bullshit with ads. I feel sorry for people who are still stuck with that trash for whatever reason.
I’m pretty sure the enterprise version of Windows does not and will never have ads. So not super relavent when talking about a transition to Linux in an office setting.
we are now trying out recommendations to help you discover great apps from the Microsoft Store under Recommended on the Start menu. This will appear only for Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel in the U.S. and will not apply to commercial devices (devices managed by organizations). This can be turned off by going to Settings > Personalization > Start and turning off the toggle for “Show recommendations for tips, app promotions, and more”.
Edge “new tab” default is hellishly full of ads and “news”, the Taskbar has stock price information alongside weather and sports, and search in the start menu still shows internet searches. Even on enterprise.
You can remove the stock ticker even on home edition, on enterprise you can make it go away by default for new installs as well. And with enterprise, you can disable edge entirely and unlike home edition it won’t re-enable on upgrade.
None of these things should exist in the first place. Edge will stay disabled until Microsoft feels its been long enough since the last time they got slapped for it, then they’ll push it again.
Correct. Bavaria once tried the same thing, but then MS went to the local politicians, sucked their dicks a bit and boom, back to MS products it is! Hopefully the north doesn’t fall for that kind of shit, and they likely won’t because Bavaria is a backwards piece of shit of a Bundesland while Schleswig Holstein is kinda cool.
And ofc, Microsoft is well aware and is not interested in letting that happen.
This is true, but there are only so many times that they can pull off what they did in Munich. If enough cities keep trying at this, there’s no way they’re going to be able to hold the floodgates back forever.
I’m usually a pessimist, but stories like this actually do get my hopes up
Nothing like paying your consulting friends to move everything to Linux to then pay them again to move back to Windows later one. Just like someone is Germany did at some point. :)
The LiMux project in Germany had some shady stuff going on in the background. Microsoft almost certainly bribed the new conservative government to switch everything back to Windows. There was a great documentary about it from DW that interviewed some whistleblowers, but I can no longer find it. However, Quidsup on Youtube did a good video encapsulating the course of events.
Those documentaries are great findings (and really really interesting). I would highly suggest posting them to the channel (or I would be happy to if you don’t mind)
Great find, I was aware of that situation but it doesn’t mean what I said wasn’t also happening “in the background”. Everyone was profiting from consulting companies to Microsoft.
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