No. Reread what I wrote. I'm talking desktops users.

Do you really expect Betty from accounting to move her screen to another user's system?

Where I've seen network transparency I'm talking about environments where the employees have high school or less. Thinks like repair or warehouse. I'm talking to someone we decide on what to do, then I push the screen to the terminal next to the relevant piece of equipment. Then maybe I duplicate it in the back to look for a part that's non-standard...

Betty from accounting is college or more. I've never seen it used in an accounting department. But I have seen it used above that level for things like planning meetings.

Why do you feel such a need to push the horror of user-friendliness that is Linux upon regular users?

I don't. In my own company we have a Mac culture. OTOH I have seen those companies and that was the point in question.

It will save you a penny in the short run but will cost you a boatload of money in lost productivity.

Actually in my experience it is the opposite. The cost of in house development is considerably higher than just paying for commercial. The benefit is much higher productivity.

Me thinks you've never seen a non-windows environment being broadly used.

Problem is you can't just change one business. Most people average only a few years between employers. By knowing the Windows way you make yourself a whole lot more employable. And by sticking with the Windows way, the cost of hiring new staff is far simpler and cheaper. Incumbency has huge, huge benefits...

This is government and it is Germany not the USA. Much slower turnover. In general though:

a) High turnover
b) Demand for immediate high productivity from new employees and low-medium training costs
c) Non-standard applications

Pick any 2 for your business.

I've converted those Excel power users. BTW also Word Power users can be tricky. First off one can just leave them on Windows and just treat it as an isolated non-intergrated application. So for example the accounting department uses Excel in a VM or Wine (lags about 3 years and some addons fail but core program works) or they run Linux with their office integrations in a VM on their windows boxes. That's the easy way.

If you want to make them go fully open source generally it requires a complete shift in their workflow which ultimately is beneficial. Your typical Excel poweruser is someone who is benefiting greatly from the flexibility and short time to answer of Excel while having become a poweruser to compensate for the lack of dimensionality and scalability of Excel. Introducing them to BI and Business modeling tools which are better in these areas allows the to offload their more complicated Excel functions. This transition makes them into non-powerusers and then you can switch the spreadsheet on them. They actually become more effective as they are now using tools which can handle what they really want to do with Excel. But..., and this is not a small thing, they training costs of bringing on new people are large. Accountants don't walk in the door with those skills. Which is fine for government (and Germany for that matter) with long employee retention.

Most companies have IT accounting. If you can get those people on board and they have the skills, then via. training it can migrate down to the Excel Powerusers and from there to the Excel heavy users.

Again this comes down to understanding Windows is a culture not just software and to change the software you really need to change the culture. Obviously this keeps getting easier as LibreOffice Calc gets more feature rich. It certainly would be easier today than it was a decade ago.

I've seen non windows office environments. They have an answer to you ". "What's this weird Linux thing they're making me use? I never had to use that anywhere else! Other organizations aren't converting, why are we?" They do things that Windows just doesn't do. For example a lot of them actually use network transparency and share windows between workers. I can't message "Ron take a look at this" and send him an image of my screen. Then he says come over and I move the applications screen to his system. Or (especially prior to things like VMWare View) they loved to pass whole environments between physical computers so they don't have fixed desks. The same way that employees frequently login and logout of their phone in remote offices they can now do that with their computer so they don't even need a laptop. Something like building their applications on Docker and thus they get the advantage would be the modern equivalent where Linux far surpasses Windows where they can run just about any piece of software on any system without having to worry at all about the underlying Linux. Or a lot of the gurus who in the windows world would be your Excel or Word gurus pick up a little scripting and love to automate tasks and so you have shell scripts or Perl scripts flying around the office. There is for example much more blurring of lines between servers, and network shares and desktops because server solutions are also free.

    If they are still doing things the Windows way then Linux is just a bad Windows. That's the key. The office culture changes and people don't do things the Windows way anymore. When new workers come in the work culture is so different they immediately see it is nothing like their old job.

No. I imagine that over the last decade what Munich has found is that a competitive marketplace of multiple software developers has created a pretty nice rich ecosystem of software that's improving and updating while their linux stack has been largely dependent on their internal team to push forward.

Excellent point they might not be getting the benefit of sharing. They might be something like 30%+ of the entire budget for municipality specific OSS development. They would either need to sell it, sell support or fall behind. They have a chicken and the egg problem. They need to get a system close to usable before other municipalities would pick it up. Since they were trying to switch to Linux they had to hit lots of applications at once which means they couldn't spend a fortune on each one. Hence it took a long time and they were falling behind...

My general opinion that the easiest way for open source operating systems to move in was first a switch from:
mostly closed and some open software on proprietary OS (windows)
mostly open and some closed on proprietary OS

Which shouldn't have been that big a deal. File formats generally aren't that complex and of course they always could have set up conversion servers. Hopefully we will get ore details.

The one example of transitioning to desktop Linux. And it's failed.

That's not the one example. Lots of unix, mainframe and mini shops transitioned quickly and easily. Lots of business where the owner forced the change transitioned easily. Lots of institutions with a Windows culture looked at the cost and balked early on. Munich was an example of a large public group that put the time and effort in. But it is not the only example.

and the desktop for a regular office worker isn't it.

It is pretty good in places that never developed a Windows culture. There are certain advantages for a regular office worker that come for the Unix way of doing things. I'm surprised that after a decade they hadn't switched paradigms and people weren't enjoying the Unix advantages.

Is there anyone who really thought it would go any other way?

I did. I've been following this since it started. They seemed to have a fairly high degree of commitment and had made tons of progress. I'm shocked to see them throwing in the towel since after a decade I'd assume they no longer have a Windows culture. We know that institutions that never developed a Windows culture were able to switch to Linux easily.

So yeah put me down for surprised.

Yes. But once you examine an application you get detailed review information. You can also see summary review information when you examine the list.

Apps get reviewed by users and have a star rating for their functionality. That already happens.

Funny your suggestions already exist. Any phone can go against any server via. downloading an alternative profile and that server can have its own app distribution. https://developer.apple.com/pr...

It doesn't require rooting your phone. So yes Apple not only could do this, they do it now and have for years.

I think the app store should be organized for hundreds of thousands of applications better categorized. In particular searching by verticals, searching by interconnections to other applications, searching by level of sales... Mostly though I think the app store works pretty well the issue for most applications is they are yet another version of something for which better apps exist. The problem app developers are having is they aren't going after verticals which is where they should be in a more mature market.

If costs are anywhere near that high, this should just be a national system and not handled by localities at all. It is just insane to do this more than once.