Federal authorities of the Swiss Confederation recently launched a pilot program to replace Microsoft 365 tools with open-source alternatives. The Federal Chancellery's plan calls for investing 9...
Replacing Microsoft 365 with open-source alternatives might be the right approach to solving the sovereignty problem, but plans could eventually change. Replacing traditional software tools on aging IT systems is no easy “plug-and-play” task, as some users have remarked. The German city of Munich even tried to move from Windows to Linux in 2004, but eventually returned to the old operating system in 2017.
Let’s hope the outcome is better this time. And i also hope the result can be leveraged by other nations.
I’m sure they weren’t using a distro from 2004 in 2017. But what’s weird is that Linux was very mature in 2017. 2009 is my cutoff where I fully dropped windows while still being able to function in a 100% windows environment. If they made it past that point there would have been no reason to go back to windows once they migrated. Without a doubt there were hijinks involved.
What I meant is they went through the rough years of 2000s Linux when hardware support was really problematic and the office suite options were far really behind.
Noooo, it’s just a coincidence that Munich switched off LiMux right after Microsoft moved their EU HQ there, and now has one of the highest IT budgets for a single city (500M€)
I think it failed because the Mail software they used had a bug that couldn’t handle very large E-Mail subjects. Then they were like “See? This linux thing is bad. Go back to Microsoft on everything right now”
@mrgoosmoos@Paulemeister
I hit that block almost every week!
Especially when backing up email in MS that is saved under the Subject name, which can be very long.
yeah if you try to, say, open a pdf with a filepath that is too long, it just doesn’t do anything
many such cases.
this is a problem for our SharePoint/OneDrive setup because our own directory gets quite long once you dig down into dpmt folders in projects, then you try to access the contents of an uncompressed customer package that’s neatly organized by folders and has filenames that are 50+ characters long by themselves… it’s annoying
Yeah, talked to their CTO in 2012 when I wrote an article for heise.de (sadly, never released with his statements, only broad summaries) and he basically said the politicians were intentionally crippling support for Linux so that Microsoft IT support looked better. He specifically mentioned the WollMux form system as a failed software project.
Let’s hope the outcome is better this time. And i also hope the result can be leveraged by other nations.
The fact that they made 2004 Linux work untill 2017 was impressive.
Linux and OSS in 2026 is night and day compared to back then.
I’m sure they weren’t using a distro from 2004 in 2017. But what’s weird is that Linux was very mature in 2017. 2009 is my cutoff where I fully dropped windows while still being able to function in a 100% windows environment. If they made it past that point there would have been no reason to go back to windows once they migrated. Without a doubt there were hijinks involved.
What I meant is they went through the rough years of 2000s Linux when hardware support was really problematic and the office suite options were far really behind.
Server side was pretty good by then though.
IIRC in Munich the effort “failed” in good part thanks to Microsoft lobbying and bribes.
Noooo, it’s just a coincidence that Munich switched off LiMux right after Microsoft moved their EU HQ there, and now has one of the highest IT budgets for a single city (500M€)
I think it failed because the Mail software they used had a bug that couldn’t handle very large E-Mail subjects. Then they were like “See? This linux thing is bad. Go back to Microsoft on everything right now”
hilarious when considering that Windows still cannot handle filepaths longer than 256 characters
@mrgoosmoos @Paulemeister
I hit that block almost every week!
Especially when backing up email in MS that is saved under the Subject name, which can be very long.
I think I ran into that problem once but there’s a registry key you can set to allow longer filepaths
It can’t? What the fuck?
yeah if you try to, say, open a pdf with a filepath that is too long, it just doesn’t do anything
many such cases.
this is a problem for our SharePoint/OneDrive setup because our own directory gets quite long once you dig down into dpmt folders in projects, then you try to access the contents of an uncompressed customer package that’s neatly organized by folders and has filenames that are 50+ characters long by themselves… it’s annoying
Yeah, talked to their CTO in 2012 when I wrote an article for heise.de (sadly, never released with his statements, only broad summaries) and he basically said the politicians were intentionally crippling support for Linux so that Microsoft IT support looked better. He specifically mentioned the WollMux form system as a failed software project.