Why are governments and administrations NOT moving to Linux?

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You might have wondered why public administrations don’t all use Linux, like the Police, the tax services, the health services, and all other government related agencies. It’s completely free of charge, really customizable, secure and stable. There shouldn’t be any kind of competition, right? Well, turns out there might be a bunch of barriers to entry, so let’s see why our governments don’t use our favorite OS.

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There is a heavy lobby in place for Microsoft and their solutions. These guys are entrenched in virtually every market, they have money, influence.

But that’s not the only reason why most countries do NOT run on open source software and Linux.

## Training

The second main obstacle is training. As simple as Linux desktops have become, they will still be unfamiliar to regular users that have been trained on Windows since they were in school. You can replicate a windows, or mac os layout, and that would ease the transition, but there are still major differences in how the file system is laid out, how settings are displayed, what settings you can access, and how the system behaves.

Then there’s the app issues. Most governments and administrations run on windows + office. Some have departments that use Adobe products. All of these are not available on Linux, so you also have to train your people to use new applications.

## Hidden costs

On top of these training costs, you also have some hidden ones. Linux might have gotten way better at hardware support, but it’s still not perfect. Some hardware doesn’t have good drivers, printers and printer / scanner combos can still be an issue for example, and these are extremely costly devices.

An administration might have to replace tons of hardware, computers and peripherals to make the switch.

There’s also the issue of custom software that administrations might use: these are usually old pieces of software that were designed to run on Windows XP on in IE with ActiveX controls. These don’t run on Linux natively. They might run with Wine, or they might have to be ported.

These hidden costs are a barrier to moving to Linux and open source apps, and can even make the migration completely fail if they’re not identified at the start.

## Lack of knowledge

There is also a huge lack of knowledge about Linux in general in public administrations. Few people know that Linux exist, or that it can even run on a desktop and isn’t limited to servers.

The people that make these kind of decisions, like moving to Windows 10 instead of Windows 8, or using Office instead of something else, they are generally not the most tech savvy persons in existence, that’s not their jobs, they’re managers, directors.

So Linux is probably way under the radar for them.

## Wrong choices

But, there have been experiments with Linux. Some administrations have moved to Linux based OSes, like the city of Munich, which moved to Linux, then back to Windows, then back to Linux again.
China uses their own distro on a lot of government computers, the French gendarmerie uses Linux since Vista came out, and schools in Iceland have moved to Ubuntu Linux in the past.

Some of these experiments have failed though, and I think there is a simple reason for that. Well, 2 reasons.

The first one is probably poor execution. If you just replace the OS with Linux, and MS Office with LibreOffice and Evolution, without training, without thinking how to move people over and train them, of course it’s going to fail, people are going to complain, and 5 years later, you’re going back to windows.

There is also the fact that most administrations decided to move to a custom linux distro. Munich moved to LiMux, based on Debian. The city of Vienna moved to Wienux, based on Debian. Russia and China use their own Linux distros.

I personally think the right solution is to use something that’s available out of the box, like ubuntu, openSUSE, or red hat. Something that has commercial support, and that will still cost way less than Windows, and something where you don’t have to manage updating the distro and then deploying it.

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