From Newsgroup: alt.comp.os.windows-11
On Mon, 2/16/2026 12:06 AM, Mr. Man-wai Chang wrote:
On 2/13/2026 4:33 PM, Daniel70 wrote:
Back when I was in the Aust Army (80s/90s), the Army or Defence had a
deal with, I think, Lotus whereby everybody that wanted it could use the
Lotus Office Suite gratis!! In the Army Office and/or at home.
Since then, I've used Linux a lot so no MSOffice, so I've switched to
LibreOffice.
I barely remember a piece of news about German government trying to switch to Linux and then rolled back to Windows. :)
This is a bit better than the summary on Wikipedia right now.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/german-state-gov-ditching-windows-for-linux-30k-workers-migrating/
The transition to Linux means more interworking software is needed
to patch things together. And some of the transitions were done,
before LibreOffice had made as much progress as it claims today.
It's no different than companies which had legacy applications
they were still using, which created a "win32 dependency" on these choices.
As for the typical employee, they're not IT people, they don't
have years of experience bodging things, and while Linux
has a browser and Office look-alikes, that's not sufficient for
governments who have to share things with the public, and the output
has to mesh with a lot of different things.
Our city for example, is goofing around with taking pictures of
streets from moving cars, and from those pictures, extracting
maintenance data. This would be in addition to the GEO system,
where every pipe and wire is documented in a CAD-like system.
That's how, when the water truck went up the street several
days ago, they know *exactly* where my water cutoff valve is.
Even though it is covered in snow banks, an individual with a shovel
can find the valve with relatively little difficulty. They're all
the time drawing colored lines on stuff, as part of "call before
you dig" and proper labeling of dangerous things, like using
a backhoe near a natural gas line. They're going to fiddle the
drainage in my neighborhood when spring comes, so I'm to be covered
in six colors of muck :-)
So while cities may appear to be "boring collectors of taxes",
they have a fair amount of technology that requires
integration of parts. Maybe a city employee holding a cellphone
in hand, can be directed to the spot to dig while using
the cellphone for the coordinates. And that's all possible
because a number of pieces of third-party softwares work
together to make it possible.
And that means there is more than Windows involved. There could be
Android apps, and also a lot of web-based content.
Cities and their IT departments, can also be sources of influence
peddling, and the employees profiting from the purchase of equipment.
Toronto had a case like that, but I do not recollect the details.
A lot of money can be squandered for nothing, with no one understanding
why or how the money was spent. Even when cities have plans and
focused ideas on execution, the execution can be thwarted by the
city employees who are supposed to implement it.
Paul
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