German city that ditched Windows for Linux wants to go back to Windows - WinBeta
Back in 2004, the German city of Munich ditched Microsoft Windows in favor of Linux in an attempt to save more than €10m and to be “independent” with open source software. The city of Munich determined that it would save more than €10m by not upgrading to Windows 7, newer versions of Office, as well as associated hardware upgrades. Instead, the city figured it would cost €23m to switch to Linux, as opposed to the €34m it would have costed to stick with Microsoft’s offerings. The city began the migration from Windows NT and Office 97/2000 to a Linux-based operating system called “Limux” (custom version of Ubuntu), a custom version of OpenOffice, and a variety of free software such as the Mozilla Firefox browser,... Despite the high-end devices that were purchased for city staff members, the common complaint has been the inability to use the devices for simple tasks such as word processing and making video calls. Although the complaint says there isn’t a program for text editing, each of their machines comes pre-installed with LibreOffice. One of the big complaints from using Limux and OpenOffice/LibreOffice is the incompatibilities with Microsoft Office. As we are all well aware of, sometimes creating documents, spreadsheets, and other files on OpenOffice will appear differently on Microsoft Office, and vice versa. Source: www.winbeta.org
