Munich board votes to switch from Linux to Windows

A committee of the city council of Munich has voted for the switch from Linux to Windows 10, which is due to start in 2020. The city has been working on the process of getting rid of its own LiMux system for some time now.

According to The Register, a full vote will take place on November 23, but it is likely that the outcome will be the same because the same parties have a majority there. An official document states that the transition to Windows 10 can probably be completed in 2022, as the release of the new Windows client could start in 2020. Anne Hübner, SPD member of Munich’s Stadtrat, tells the site that Munich has struggled with deploying LiMux, its own Linux project.

For example, about half of a total of 800 programs would not run on Linux and many software would require workarounds. According to Hübner, a lot of effort was put into this, but this turned out to be without result. Until the final vote at the end of this month, there will be no estimate of the cost of the migration. The German site Heise says it has information that the migration will cost more than 100 million euros, which is higher than the estimates that have been made so far.

Matthias Kirschner, president of the European Free Software Foundation, tells The Register that there have never been any investigations into why people weren’t happy with LiMux. He would also be unaware of a comparative study of employee satisfaction in cities using Windows. He expects that the transition to Windows will paralyze the municipality for years, causing citizens to suffer.

SPD politician Hübner reports that it is not clear whether LibreOffice will also be abandoned. That should be determined at the end of the year, once the costs are clear. Instead of the open source software, the city would then use Microsoft Office. Previously, it looked like LibreOffice would disappear as well. In February of this year, a municipal document indicated that the Munich city council wanted to phase out the LiMux project.

Munich took a decade to migrate all civil servants’ PCs and laptops to LiMux; by December 2013, 15,000 systems had switched to open source software such as Ubuntu with KDE and LibreOffice. This made it one of the largest projects worldwide to provide desktop systems with Linux. Many problems soon came to light, including setting up a mail server for mobile synchronization. An Accenture study at the end of 2016 already recommended moving away from LiMux and opting for Microsoft.