A large state corporation in Brazil is currently trialing 800 Linux PCs. If successful, it will deploy and replace 22k Windows installs, comparable to the migration happening in Germany.

Since the huge push to SaaS I've seen plenty of companies that essentially run thin clients.

The local workstations are just thier access to login to X website that host thier apps and data.

Zero reason for them to switch to win11 or buy new hardware due to "incompatibility".

These end users can be trained to use mint or Ubuntu and be just as productive at work.

Back then I read an article about how M$ is crippling the ability of other office packets to read their docx and xslx formats who are supposed to be open formats, but in reality are written in a way never to be fully integrated by competing products. More information about their pseudo open standard: https://fsfe.org/activities/msooxml/msooxml.en.html

Munich in the past have used Linux PCs for quite some time until eventually switching back to windows. Back then they were citing the same incompatibilities to open and read and display M$ office files correctly. So Microsoft is definitely abusing their position as a market leader and trying to cripple competition as much as they can.

Offices have way more power to convert the world to Linux than even gaming does.

And ofc, Microsoft is well aware and is not interested in letting that happen.

I believe Lula and his government appreciates anything that reduces the influence of the US.

Damn alot of good things happening for Linux adoption recently huh

I keep seeing people say they will they move to Linux instead of Windows 11. I wonder what will happen to the market share.

Worse case we could see developers becoming harassed by people demanding features

What I predict will happen is that Microsoft will offer them Windows for free or bribe the relevant decision makers with free Surface Pro laptops (for "evaluation") or other Microsoft paraphernalia.

Hurry up before the next right-wing government fires everyone involved and orders a total rollback.

Fuck yeah. Biggest employer in Europe NHS England needs to wake up and do this too. In one single licensing agreement they handed Microsoft £163.1 million. Imagine what that could do if spent on linux development instead, or heaven forbid on actual healthcare. It actually boggles my mind that the NHS doesn't have it's own distro and do its own development.

I hope they succeed!

When I was at university (also in Brazil) all the computers from my institute used Mandriva.

Interesting (and poorly paraphrased) story about a successful Linux migration:

spoiler

Several years ago someone made a post or cross-posted on r/sysadmin where OP (lead sysadmin) was in meeting with management and they complained about windows and the licensing costs.

OP jokingly passed a comment about switching to Linux and management actually thought he was throwing out a real idea.

Upon explaining the much lower cost due to FOSS and maybe only requiring a small contract for consulting/support, management actually agreed to his idea.

He successfully transitioned the entire company to OpenSUSE which he determined was the best enterprise distro for desktop use.

The other important part was how he handled the transition. iirc he got it going by first offering it to tech savvy departments who were ecstatic to get new stuff, so he lined it up with a hardware upgrade.

Naturally the rest of the departments heard about it and also wanted the new stuff which locked them into using Linux.

There were several holdouts clinging to Windows, but with the majority showing success, management forced them to change as well.

For his use case, most of the employees were using web apps, so almost no additional desktop apps were required.

I love Linux but I've seen so many of these efforts fail. I did a move where we moved an entire election system onto centos. the move was a quarter billion dollars for them, but a couple years later they came back needing us to move to Redhat... then back to windows eventually.

the reason is governments are never willing to figure things out for themselves. if there's any error at all that happens that might make some gov officials look bad, they need a support line to call immediately and threaten breaking contracts. maybe these guys are fuckin with Canonical but Linux support is so shit from my experience.

as much as I hate Microsoft, you can pay them enough and they'll elevate your tickets to engineers who actually can do something and fix your shit. THAT is what governments actually want. somebody to sue or blame when their tech hits the fan.

Nothing like paying your consulting friends to move everything to Linux to then pay them again to move back to Windows later one. Just like someone is Germany did at some point. :)

I actually want Microsoft to do better. Then can, they just ignore user feedback about user choice, design, what to work on etc. Good if they start to get some competition. I wonder what will happen when ARM gets common in a normal PC-build. Good opportunity to make some big changes.

Maybe a not so subtle way of telling trump to stay out

nice

God I hope