Linux very difficult to get working properly

I personally have had nothing but headaches when attempting to develop for that platform.

The original question was about safety, SimonForsman's response was about how stable and secure it is and your response is how hard it is to set up and develop for?

How easy things are set up and get working depends on your device and what you insist on doing with it. Any normal desktop user might just as well throw in Ubuntu and fire away. I've also personally gotten Ubuntu working nice on all 3 laptops I've tried it on with things like FN-keys and Wi-FI working out of the box. And this was many years ago...

Just an aside, one of the causes of Munich's problems was that they decided to forego commercial support because they felt they could do a better, and less expensive, job in-house. Turns out, in hindsight, they were wrong. Many, many other organizations have quietly made the switch in much less time and with a greater degree of satisfaction, almost all of them with commercial support contracts (just like Microsoft offers to do the same thing). What we have here is not a critique of GNU/Linux systems so much as a critique of the Munich bureaucracy and an example of how marketing types can spin a story to sell product.

they decided to forego commercial support because they felt they could do a better, and less expensive, job in-house. Turns out, in hindsight, they were wrong. o sell product.

No. That's Microsoft propaganda.

The reasoning was not that felt they could do better and cheaper. But as it is, they are doing cheaper and better.

What we have here is not a critique of GNU/Linux systems so much as a critique of the Munich bureaucracy

True. It is mostly an example of what you get when you have 17 independent IT departmenst working on the same intranet, trying to find a consensus. Which had been the case before and during the migration phase. Plus, what you get if you dive into such a huge project saying "yeah, no problem, we'll figure as we go".

If you read the project's site (in German only, unluckily) you believe it's a joke. They had 17 IT departments support 22 distinct groups with some 14k machines of vastly different hardware, communicating via two incompatible file sharing networks and using half a dozen of MS Office versions. Half of the "special functionality" for running the registry office work was written as ActiveX controls, and most of the "office special stuff" would be Visual Basic macros that did some stuff nobody could understand or maintain.

What they realized was that the longer they stuck with this, the more they would get locked in and dependent on Microsoft-proprietary technology, and the more expensive it would get.

So they moved to OpenOffice expecting that it would "just work" and immediately got complaints that OpenOffice and Word wouldn't play together seamlessly, and Office would format things differently. Surprise.

After that, they eventually moved over everything, and now after nearly a decade, they have one consistent system. Was it a shit approach? Probably. But the result isn't really that bad.

Sorry to nitpick L.Spiro, but visiting a place for the sake of taking pictures?

I did not say I would ever do that.

Why those cities? London and Paris are not even cities of tall modernized buildings. You could have picked St.Petersburg or Budapest too.

You do realize you are asking why you like the kind of girls you like, right?

At least with cities I can recognize desirable features more easily and give a closer description of what attracts me, but there are always going to be outliers.

But I probably have a clue about London and Paris: Familiarity in a positive way. A lot of good movies took place there and they aren’t “non-modern” enough to ruin the appeal (lots of good movies took place in Africa but not enough to overcome its lack of modernization). Plus I have lived in France and it is more familiar for that.

And of course they both have famous sights to see. They may not be super-modern and tall buildings, but they are an accumulation of enough other things, specifically things that bring back good memories from childhood.

L. Spiro

I see, but I don't think you can really decide if a city it interesting or not unless you visit it, apart from obviously unattractive properties, like crime, bad weather, etc.

Sorry for derailing the thread, and of course I don't want to convince anyone, it's just those cities you listed still seem to be too random.

they decided to forego commercial support because they felt they could do a better, and less expensive, job in-house. Turns out, in hindsight, they were wrong. o sell product.

No. That's Microsoft propaganda.

The reasoning was not that felt they could do better and cheaper. But as it is, they are doing cheaper and better.

I think you misunderstood his point; as I understood it he wasn't talking about MS commercial support but Linux commercial support instead of trying to do all the Linux stuff in house and thus ending up not saving money vs having someone help and saving money (vs continuing to pay for MS based solutions).

I think you misunderstood his point; as I understood it he wasn't talking about MS commercial support but Linux commercial support instead of trying to do all the Linux stuff in house and thus ending up not saving money vs having someone help and saving money (vs continuing to pay for MS based solutions).

Yes, this. I don't know where people get the idea that only Microsoft Windows has commercial support: commercial Linux support is a multi-billion dollar market, and paid commercial Linux desktop support has buttered my bread for well over a decade.

Ah ok, so I misunderstood. Sorry.

I'm a bit shocked at how negative and ignorant attitude this community has towards linux, I would have expected so much more from people that are in good terms with computers.

The article does also give worse impression of linux than it really is and it's not all just it being outdated ugly GUIs. The popular distributions like Ubuntu are truly amazing alternative to trying to keep up with Windows and I wish more people would look into it.

Wow, the drama. Who's being negative against Linux? I can't see it.

Many of us just don't care what operating system some public authority is using. If they use Linux, fine. If they use Windows, fine. It's not a big deal.

Many of us just don't care what operating system some public authority is using. If they use Linux, fine. If they use Windows, fine. It's not a big deal.

Aren't there lots of threads about topics that you might not personally care about at all? Do you actually go into a thread and state it out loud? I think doing that is not "not caring".

But that behavior isn't what I was referring to. People ask questions about the very basics of unix like security and even the few brief answers don't convince me much. I don't want to patronize anyone, I just thought such technically talented community would know this topic in more depth and in fact I can't still believe I would have to be the one explaining about it if I wanted it answered. O.o

OpenOffice? Do I see openoffice in the slides?

OOo has a long-standing bug involving encryption. According to some, it is proven to corrupt user data.

Apparently, the reason for not fixing it is that filesystem encryption is much more secure. One is still left wondering why the functionality is still available in the GUI.