Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> “The decision to convert (14.000 PC clients) back to Microsoft from Limux [some time] until 2020 was a purely political one. Christian Ude: “There wasn’t a single unsolvable technical problem.”

I have worked on the Limux team during university. There were a couple of problems that led to resentments:

- fossilized, underpowered computers (1G RAM!) combined with fossilized software versions (Firefox/Thunderbird/Openoffice) thanks to testing/conformity requirements. This was what drove the majority of customer complaints.

- underpowered Internet uplinks of the dozens of government offices - you would think each had a gigabit fiber uplink, which is far from reality

- lack of manpower in the dev department, mostly caused by abysmal pay compared to the free market

- special IT software was mostly Windows-only or, if it was available for Linux, compiled for rpm-based distros while Limux was Ubuntu-based leading to all sorts of issues

- city staff being used to MS and not to Linux, requiring extensive training

- infighting among departments of the city, not everyone was a friend of centralization in IT

Technically all of this would be solvable but the budget was too low. People, especially key deciders, blamed it on "Linux" instead on their failure to provide adequate resources. The colleagues were the best people I have had the pleasure to learn from and work with, even to this day, but the best work is moot against idiots or bought-off morons in politics

> - lack of manpower in the dev department, mostly caused by abysmal pay compared to the free market

Abso-fucking-lutely. IMO this is the main factor why most government IT in Germany is in such a disastrous state. Not just abysmal pay, but also coupled with:

a) Limited-term contracts (usually 2 years)

b) Ludicrous academic requirements: You only get pay grade E13 (which is ~40k€/year) with a Diplom or a Master's Degree, so there's no way to hire motivated talent that the rest of the market is more likely to ignore

c) In the case of Limux, Munich has one of the highest costs of living in all of Germany. You earn the same amount of money for a position, no matter if you live in Munich or somewhere in the middle of nowhere with half the cost of living.

d) Since this year there's now also a requirement that a candidate must not have worked under a limited-term contract for the government before. You can imagine how that works out, when most government jobs of the last decade were mostly limited-term.

I was thinking about the same in France.

I recently had a look at the jobs in the administration and the salary was ridiculous compared to a similar one in the private sector.

This is particularly visible in the middle management are where a lit of actual decisions are made. No surprise that bringing in talent is not easy.

Same in science. I would love to come back to research but I cannot afford a smash (not cut) of my salary.

I do not think that the gouvernent is actually interested in having good pepole.

> Ludicrous academic requirements: You only get pay grade E13 (which is ~40k€/year) with a Diplom or a Master's Degree, so there's no way to hire motivated talent that the rest of the market is more likely to ignore

Surely 40k EUR seems very little from an American perspective, but in Germany you cannot really expect much more than maybe 50-60K straight out of uni (as a normal, average student). 40k is surely less (I think E13 is more than 40k though), but the difference isn't that huge.

For normal users the software must "Just Work (tm)" (former "Plug&Play"). These people need devs/power-users to turn to for help, though should usually be unnecessary. The experience need to surpass alternatives, ie. better privacy, no advertisements, rapid updates, more choice, freedom, no bugs, no useless notifications and distractions.

Not sure how this aligns with most businesses and govs, though they should support companies/orgs that make this their core.

"The colleagues were the best people I have had the pleasure to learn from and work with, even to this day, but the best work is moot against idiots or bought-off morons in politics"

This is a universal truth.

“failure to provide adequate resources”

So you’re confirming Microsoft’s point that Linux on the desktop provides no cost advantage? Combine that with OpenOffice’s Word 6 level UI, and it’s understandable why they went back.

He’s confirming using free software is not free. People trained to use Microsoft’s ribbon can’t use OpenOffice, just like many people trained to use older Office versions can’t use the ribbon.

I’m always surprised by the need for training to click on the “bold” or “save” button. Yet Facebook has 2.41 billion monthly users. One cause would be that people are afraid of the career implication of clicking « save » on a document that shouldn’t be saved (the « mismanagement trauma » is how I would call that).

I know Atlassian changed it colors[1] for “cringy blue” because it made people less afraid of clicking than “serious blue”. But generally the same persons who succeed to become fashionistas on Instagram and plug it with their Google Analytics somehow and make hundreds with it, are sometimes the same who would need a training to use the Microsoft ribbon, come Monday morning.

[1] Heavy use of B400 for flat elements like the bar, to sashimi salmon for lozenges: https://atlassian.design/server/foundations/colors/

That's not what they say though. We'd need to know 2 things:

- what was the difference between LiMux and the Microsoft direction

- how much more would be needed to fix LiMux problems

> - what was the difference between LiMux and the Microsoft direction

Unfortunately I left Limux years before that shit happened so I cannot answer that question directly - I'll try with general politics instead. It was a political decision IMO - politicians were fed up with Limux shortcomings (which was caused mainly by their inability to provide users with decent hardware), that got combined with the decision of MS to move its Europe headquarters and thus a lot of prestige and tax money to Munich. Basically a "quid pro quo" deal, the politicians knew what was expected (getting rid of the flagship Linux government project) for this. Old government head and Limux fan Christian Ude went out to retirement, his successor Reiter... well, my opinion about that dude is beyond what is acceptable under HN guidelines. I'm happy he's at least done what he could against our local neo-nazis, but everything else... thanks but no thanks.

> - how much more would be needed to fix LiMux problems

A shitload of money. Limux was 15k desktops (for ~30k employees) IIRC, which means replacing all of them at ~1k € (new PC, monitor, mouse and keyboard - believe me, everything needed upgrades) or 15 million € alone for the hardware, plus upgrading alll the government building networks (probably 500 buildings, of which alone 300 are schools) and uplinks which will rack into three-digit million sums... and for staff, instead of the ~8 people working on Limux proper maybe 30-50 developers alone, which means another 1.5M a year at least in staffing costs.

So now they spend that anyway, to be able to run MS kit, plus sending that much again to Microsoft.

Clearly not an economic argument. Politically, there is always lots more money available for a big change than to make the current system work.

> So now they spend that anyway, to be able to run MS kit, plus sending that much again to Microsoft

True, but also they save a boatload of money on training cost. 30k staff is nothing to laugh at...

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