It seems like only yesterday (2003) that a large government entity, the city of Munich, announced it would be converting their cities personal computers over to their own edition of Linux called LiMux. The good news was that perhaps 80% of the desktops would be converted over by 2008.
Not sure if it should be a surprise or not but the rollout of Linux to a city full of civil servants who were perfectly happy using Windows didn’t go quite as planned. Instead of all 18000 workstations only 1800 were converted over by 2009, but the rollout was completed to 15000 of the desktops by 2013. The sky didn’t fall nor did I hear how Munich sunk into the earth so I guess it was a successful rollout.
It may or may not be a surprise that a politician might change their mind on any given topic and the conversion over to Linux was such a topic. We may never really know all of the drama going on behind the scenes nor will we know if Microsoft moving their German headquarters to Munich played a roll.
The summary is that Munich tried to create their own Linux distribution and despite what was general acceptance, see wikipedia, they switched back to Windows 10 by 2020.
Open source 2026
The German state of Schleswig-Holstein is planning on replacing proprietary software with open source software. Specifically they want to replace Microsoft office with LibreOffice and later to replace Windows with Linux.
This actually might be a reasonably good plan, start with the applications which is something the users are passionate about and eventually change the underlying operation system that they are not as invested in.
We will keep an eye on this particular German state to see if this plan succeeds.
