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[–] 76 points 3 weeks ago (12 children)

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.

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  • [–] 116 points 3 weeks ago (8 children)

    IIRC in Munich the effort "failed" in good part thanks to Microsoft lobbying and bribes.

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  • [–] 49 points 3 weeks ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

    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"

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  • [–] 7 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

    hilarious when considering that Windows still cannot handle filepaths longer than 256 characters

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  • [–] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)
  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago

    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

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  • [–] 6 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    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.

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