Many have been the political parties, from a large number of countries, that have always questioned why governments do not make use of Linux instead of having to pay for expensive Windows and Office licenses. In Spain, some provinces have been using Linux for several years on a regular basis, like other European cities, but it seems that over time what at first seemed very nice has turned into a series of problems where productivity has dropped considerably . Munich is the last a city that uses Linux to manage all the information of its public administrations since 2006, but that has decided that it is time to return to Windows.
Or at least that is what the two parties that currently govern in coalition in the city have agreed. According to a city council spokesperson, after more than 10 years of migrating to LiMux (their own distro) are not satisfied with the operation and are far behind established standards. It also states that since it was implemented together with OpenOffice as an office suite, the efficiency and productivity of the workstations have decreased significantly, having problems to view and edit documents in other formats, to print documents ... not to mention the technical service that they had to create specifically for maintenance.
The initial idea of making use of Linux in the Munich administration arose in 2003, to try to lower costs by replacing Microsoft's licenses with free software, a proposal that quickly got the green light. Over the years, more than 15.000 computers from the Munich administrations have migrated to this solution, but it seems that the experiment has not gone as well as they wanted. Expected costs to re-migrate computers to Windows have not been announcedNor does the cost of maintenance, which will probably also be borne by Microsoft. A few months ago, the Brazilian government also began to consider the possibility of returning to Windows, after having adopted a specific Linux distro in all administrations.