No, it was reversed for political reasons. The majority of users were happy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
[0] https://www.golem.de/news/von-microsoft-zu-linux-und-zurueck...
> It got rolled back after they elected [a] mayor who got Microsoft to move their German headquarters to Munich.
It always baffles me how we tech people lose sight of a product's quality and usability the moment it's a FOSS product. We feature new products here on HN everyday, which is "like X but better", and it gets lots of upvotes in the style of "OMG finally someone builds something better".
But then you have a FOSS initiative, and because of FOSS, we turn two blind eyes?
People in an administration don't care about FOSS or not FOSS. And they shouldn't. Their job is to solve other problems. IT and software is there to serve the administration. If, as a user, I can't get my actual job done, or only with much more hassle than before, then that's all that matters.
If we want FOSS to succeed in administrations, we have to put the same product hat on that we wear when we look at all the other software showcased here on HN. And Limux (that was the project's name) just brutally failed here.
Yes, but the failure was basically manufactured. You cannot keep every process as it was before and just install Linux/libre office, yet that is what they did.
Their current processes are optimized for windows to a degree that usage of the Microsoft office suite is part of the training they undergo.
Switching at this point would be a multi-year process that cannot be rushed. Each task needs to be evaluated separately and a new solution has to be tested and likely engineered from the ground up.
Isn't it just regular office software? What processes do you have for dealing with spreadsheets and text documents?
And fun fact: now 4 Years later, after the reigning political party has changed, they are switching back to Open Source and probably Linux.
Perhaps they weren't used to non-GUI automation.
Linux and OpenOffice. I think one of the major concerns at the time was that OpenOffice didn't work well with all the Excel and Word documents they needed to open, so people opted out and installed Windows instead. To the regular office worker, it didn't matter much if the computer ran Linux or Windows, as long as it worked.
To the IT admin, it might have been more work to administer thousands of Linux machines, due to the slightly less mature environment.