1w ago

German state gov. ditching Windows for Linux, 30K workers migrating

Schleswig-Holstein, one of Germany’s 16 states, on Wednesday confirmed plans to move tens of thousands of systems from Microsoft Windows to Linux. The announcement follows previously established plans to migrate the state government off Microsoft Office in favor of open source LibreOffice.

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Great, now Germany gets slapped with additional 10% tariffs, because of penguins.

1 year (and a few days) old article. How did this turn out?
- found this update from 1 month ago:
  https://euro-stack.com/blog/2025/3/schleswig-holstein-open-source-digital-sovereignty
  what the actual amount of progress is seems to be buried under bureaucracy-speak but I got 3 useful sentences out of it so far:
  Configuration via group policies
  MS Office can remain installed in parallel, until October 2025
  Goals for october 2025: LibreOffice should be the sole standard office software on around 70% of the state administration's IT workstations
  so to me it seems they're currently slowly doing a MS office -> LibreOffice transfer, but they're still all using windows (as the use of "group policy" implies)

Didn't they do this once before, like early 2000's?
- That was the city of Munich. It was sold as a success in creating freedom and saving millions, but they still went back to Microsoft.
  
  According to the Wikipedia article they changed their mind and decided to stay on LiMux.

Schleswig-Holstein therefore follows the general strategy to move towards an open source driven administration. In fact, several federn institution already migrated to the openDesk administration bundle (https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk/). Great!

Is this the year of the Linux desktop?
- No.

Let's hope they are successfull and let others migrate as well. The more migrate, the less likelier a failure is

Munich did it before and then they crawled back to Bill Gates and begged to take them back: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
- In 2018, journalistic group Investigate Europe released a video documentary via German public television network ARD that claimed that the majority of city workers were satisfied with the operating system, with council members insinuating that the reversal was a personally motivated decision by lord mayor Dieter Reiter. Reiter denied that he had initiated the reversal in gratitude for Microsoft moving its German headquarters from Unterschleißheim back to Munich.
  Maybe MS will have to move again.
  
  MS Will do anything to get back. Huge discounts, lobbying, corruption. Whatever it takes to dominate the market.

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