Schleswig-Holstein, one of Germany’s 16 states, on Wednesday confirmed plans to move tens of thousands of systems from Microsoft Windows to Linux. The announcement follows previously established plans to migrate the state government off Microsoft Office in favor of open source LibreOffice.
Great, now Germany gets slapped with additional 10% tariffs, because of penguins.
Is this the year of the Linux desktop?
No.
Let’s hope they are successfull and let others migrate as well. The more migrate, the less likelier a failure is
Didn’t they do this once before, like early 2000’s?
That was the city of Munich. It was sold as a success in creating freedom and saving millions, but they still went back to Microsoft.
Schleswig-Holstein therefore follows the general strategy to move towards an open source driven administration. In fact, several federn institution already migrated to the openDesk administration bundle (https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk/). Great!
Munich did it before and then they crawled back to Bill Gates and begged to take them back: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
In 2018, journalistic group Investigate Europe released a video documentary via German public television network ARD that claimed that the majority of city workers were satisfied with the operating system, with council members insinuating that the reversal was a personally motivated decision by lord mayor Dieter Reiter. Reiter denied that he had initiated the reversal in gratitude for Microsoft moving its German headquarters from Unterschleißheim back to Munich.
Maybe MS will have to move again.
1 year (and a few days) old article. How did this turn out?
found this update from 1 month ago:
https://euro-stack.com/blog/2025/3/schleswig-holstein-open-source-digital-sovereignty
what the actual amount of progress is seems to be buried under bureaucracy-speak but I got 3 useful sentences out of it so far:
Configuration via group policies
MS Office can remain installed in parallel, until October 2025
Goals for october 2025: LibreOffice should be the sole standard office software on around 70% of the state administration’s IT workstations
so to me it seems they’re currently slowly doing a MS office -> LibreOffice transfer, but they’re still all using windows (as the use of “group policy” implies)
