Open Source Projects Receive Funding to Reclaim the Public Internet

>What exactly do you mean by this? What do people need that Apple supplies as an integrated system that is hard to replace?

The complete package. Hardware, software and ecosystem by a single company. Only Microsoft and Google have anything coming close to this.

Organisations are unlikely to rely only on Apple Software though.

Most organisations do not use MS or Google hardware though.

MS can provide everything for a standard office desktop, but the real strength of their OS is the availability of lots of third party software.

While that’s sure nice to have as a customer, I fail to see how it is strategically relevant to the EU to have something similar here. I’d value a functioning, open, and compatible ecosystem of European software much more.

Don't forget enterprise management. Windows makes it easy to maintain a fleet of endpoints much easier than MacOS or Linux.

I agree. Get rid of reliance on any one supplier. Open makes it easier for everyone to contribute. The UK, or India, or the US, or anywhere.

I'm confused about this assertion. Managing fleets of thousands of Linux machines via declarative role-based configuration management is completely normal. Linux also has a way better story with updates that activate instantly (occasionally requiring 10s to reboot for a kernel update) with easy rollbacks if something goes wrong (e.g. nixos).

What exactly does Windows have that makes it easier to manage machines?

What I'm seeing is more and more web based systems. My kids school is completely browser based. Nothing is installed beyond the browser. Same for the teachers, it's all web based.

That said, I love apple. Nothing else works like their hardware. It's not the best by a long shot, but I'm still able to use a mac-pro 8 years on. And my iphone is 7 years old (for me) and I got it used.

> What exactly does Windows have that makes it easier to manage machines?

A large marketing budget and sysadmin / devops outreach in a way that no single and all Linux distributions collectively haven't matched. Integration of things into a cohesive single tool instead of a grab bag of tools that move from hyped to normal to unmaintained in a number of years.

But on the application server side, Linux is extremely popular. Config management via some tool like ansible or puppet is a table stakes skill in that space. Likewise with some kind of ldap based config for users. I would actually be surprised if someone said they did "devops" and they meant they managed anything with Windows. Typically that's "IT", but I don't understand why.

KDE is also an obviously more "professional"/"serious" desktop environment that just makes it easy to open the tools to do work without a bunch of crap to turn off and without pointless UI churn requiring people to relearn how to use it. As far as bugs go, Windows IME has to be rebooted around 80% of the time after sleeping because either the WSL driver crashes or the VPN enters a permanently locked up state. I've had the start menu just stop responding to clicks when everything else is working normally. The thing is wonky as hell, and usually needs to be rebooted via the "hold power for 10s" method (do normal people even know about that?). I never run into issues on Linux (Fedora or Nixos).

The UI is also trash. e.g. if you type "reboot" or "restart" in the start menu (a common need, per above), it doesn't find the command you obviously want to run (KDE does for both), and it hides the (unlabeled pictograph) button you'd need to click to find it, requiring you to close the menu and re-open it. Nothing is organized anymore, so you need to rely on search, but search doesn't even work.

you should start teaching him before he thinks ^above^ is normal, rather than most conveinient for the school, let him know he will have superpowers.

Then I think that you would probably need to create some sort of centralized European FOSS software support, because in the ideal case that everything was interoperable without too much work, you're left with 20 different software projects to get in contact with if something goes wrong. And if something goes wrong in the interop between those 20 projects written on wildly different stacks, there's nobody to call.

If some genius hasn't already put together a turnkey umbrella project that meets your needs, you're going to have to find your own genius. That's different than just calling MS or Apple, even if their support is slow or annoying. I think Oracle counts, too.

It's not like Europe couldn't build these systems out of FOSS (just like Oracle and others, btw), they just haven't done it until now and it would have been just as easy to do 15 years ago. I think they'd rather get courted and bribed by American behemoths.

None of that matters to companies who want to hire an offshore tech to click things in the MMC and maybe write a Powershell script to solve something really quick. Especially small companies who can't afford an entire IT department.

All of the Linux management tools are good, but they do not integrate as tightly with the OS and there are several competing ones. Microsoft has one tool and one thing to learn and that's it.

I say this as someone who has managed a fleet of Linux systems and whose current work is 100% Linux based. If a company can throw a smaller amount of money at something then they'll do it

Is my experience unique in that "having someone to call" has historically been of very low value?

I'm an embedded firmware dev, so admittedly I am dealing with an entirely different list of vendors and asking for different things than the typical sysadmin or devops type.

With that said, it has certainly not been my experience that "having someone to call" actually solves my problems all that often. It's occasionally a nice to have, but normally I am reluctant to even start the process because my experience has been that it is usually a net drain on my time and energy to do so.

At this point, I am far more concerned with having access to source code so that I have a fighting chance of creating a workaround for myself, and failing that I don't want to contact my vendor so much as I want to replace them.

KDE has a better UI and probably works better for end users, but Windows has centralised management tools that are already deployed and lots of people know.

> Is my experience unique in that "having someone to call" has historically been of very low value?

It might often have low practical value, but usually high CYA value.

Windows: I can pay a low skilled admin who knows how to run prebuilt tools

Linux: I require a higher skilled admin who knows how to architect and build things

Because Linux has been built by developers for developers, it eschews braindead administration as a feature, because that's not something its dev community ever required.

That's changed somewhat in the past 15 years, but still lags Windows substantially.

Yes, and the low skill, low pay admin is what many companies are looking for, at least for their desktop/notebook fleet.

Server-side, it's almost all Linux