“I’m sadly just a duke now, succession has caused me to lose the throne. Please do not call me that again or my brother will have me beheaded.”

Yeah, exactly. And the Lock-In-Effect is huge, too. You only need to have a piece of required software that doesn’t have a Linux version (we have this situation) and you’ll be stuck for a looong time.

As someone in German Government who has written a thesis on OSS in government:

Happens regularly, on a small scale, but almost always eventually leads to a rollback to Windows. People are discontent with the solutions on Linux since they have to get used to something else, and the aging governmental workers and exactly very keen on things changing.

The City of Munich had a similar program of switching to Linux before, only took Microsoft to open an office in the city to revert on those plans.

The federal government recently finished rolling out a centralised, unified client around all of their ministries and other institutions. Which OS? Guessed it, Windows 10.

Dont get me wrong, having something like the French Police would be amazing, but the highly federal nature and old workforce of government make it super unlikely for Linux to have a proper chance. Taking into consideration the lack of suitable employees to drive forward such a change, the lack of money at local government levels and the fact that most of the specific software required doesn’t have a version for Linux doesn’t fill me with hope.

Samsung phones have a lockdown mode you can get to when you keep the power button pressed (like when you want to shut down). The legal situation is the same here in Germany - fingerprint unlock can be forced, regular pin or other measures not.

Yeah, it’s something I observed, too. I’m new here, coming from a STEM field myself - Many places give off a tech-elitist vibe, though.

Customization options for Firefox get reactions like “nobody needs this”. I like it here so far, but the tech-bubble is obviously super prominent here, and in many places it simply seems very “If you’re not a tech-y don’t talk to me because I know better”. It’s worrying because it will lead to people leaving again when they get the cliché reactions of “use Linux, don’t use Windows” or “ewww, Reddit”. People should be less hostile, but I guess that’s just a problem of the Internet in general and doesn’t just apply here.

I hope to see it succeed, though!

Thank you! It’s a small, yet beautiful city in Eastern Germany, not far from the Polish border - “Spremberg”.

I use Amazing Marvin - super customizable to make your own workflow, so you can make it as simple or complicated as you’d like. Small team, but responds super quickly to questions and requests.