Why are governments and administrations NOT moving to Linux?

hey guys this is nick and welcome to my linux experiment and if you've ever used linux sorry about this my french is coming out so if you've ever used linux you might know that it's secure it's free of charge it's heavily customizable it's pretty stable depending on what district you pick which begs the question why are governments and public administrations like the police the military the health systems the dmvs whatever public administrations do not use linux as a desktop os why don't they because surely when you're using taxpayer money you'd want to use something that is as cheap as possible and something free of charge surely beats something paid for a proprietary system like windows for example so today we're going to take a look at why governments and public administrations have obstacles and barriers to entry to using our favorite operating system and speaking of operating systems do you use a lot of virtual machines because if that's the case today's sponsor might be for you 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inexpensive so you can take a look at the link in the description below to see how you can apply that to your own virtual machine workflow based on qmu okay now back to our governments and public administrations and the first reason why they're not moving to linux is very simple and it's lobbying so microsoft has a heavy lobbying arm these guys have the money the influence the power they know the right people and they've been doing this for ages now they've been lobbying cities municipalities administrations governments to get their solutions pushed onto basically every single big ensemble fleet of computers apple does the exact same thing in schools everyone seems steve jobs founded next these guys have a wide reach and we also all know that some government officials can be let's say swayed by some big tech companies and the promises they make oh honey the nice guys at microsoft are offering us a vacation and it's all paid by those sweet taxpayer dollars so microsoft is a huge company they have the market share they have the strength they have the money to push their solutions onto governments onto officials and onto decision makers and they've been doing it for years and it's been working very well for them but that's not the only reason that's only part of the reason there are other barriers to entry now the second main obstacle is training people working in administrations in governments in offices are not trained to use linux they don't know about linux they've been educated either on mac os or on windows ever since they were in school they have learned all the reflexes all the ins and outs of virtually this single system that they've been using for their whole life which is generally windows so moving them to something different is gonna be tricky you can replicate a windows or mac os layout on linux it's pretty simple to do but the similarities will only be skin deep as soon as you try to do something more complex that you know how to do as soon as you dig into the settings to change a few things as soon as you try to even install a program you're gonna hit a wall you don't know how linux works because you have never been trained to use linux why does this new version of windows want me to use flags to emerge i just wanted to install solitaire this means that moving a government or a public administration to linux requires you to train all your staff you have to put in some training sessions to teach them how to do the basic things that they already know how to do it can be very costly and very time consuming and seeing that a lot of people just know how to do things by instinct and just because they do it every day over and over again breaking these little muscle memories by switching to another system will have a huge impact on productivity and we all know that governments and public administrations are generally the most productive institutions in the world right so in the end it all boils down to money and time because training your staff is going to be costly and time consuming so basically moving to that free linux system isn't going to be free at all you're going to have to spend a lot of time retraining your personnel your i.t personnel it's going to take some time so on top of these training cards you also have some more hidden cost linux has gotten way better at hardware compatibility in the recent years but it's still not perfect and some hardware peripherals still do not work well with linux because they have no drivers for it because manufacturers didn't decide to create drivers for linux scanner and printer or the combos of printer scanners are generally a big offender on this printer and scanner support from linux is still terrible and unfortunately these things are used quite a lot in public administrations and in government and they're also very very expensive a copy machine costs a ton of money and you can just justify replacing like an entire fleet of computers an entire fleet of printer or scanners in an administration just because you decided to move to linux this is another cost that you have to factor in sure you're not gonna pay a license fee to microsoft but you're also going to have to replace a ton of hardware which might end up costing you the same money or maybe even more there's also a second hidden cost which is the custom software that these administrations use generally they use really old pieces of software that were designed to run on windows xp or with internet explorer with activex controls and those things do not run on linux they might run with wine but that's not a super stable or really recommendable solution for day-to-day tasks and so you're going to have to migrate these old pieces of software to linux or to a browser-based version so you're os agnostic it's just another cost to factor in some software has been specifically designed for windows and if you move to linux you lose access to that software that simple a third issue is just a general lack of knowledge like the people working in i.t in these public administrations the people managing the whole fleet of computers and software they might know about linux they might use it on some servers they might even use it on their personal computers but the people who are making the decisions for the licenses for the software they're gonna use for the whole fleet of computers for the administration for the government these guys don't know about linux that's not their job they're not tech savvy these guys are managers they're directors they don't know anything about linux and if they don't ask the question if the it people don't try and push linux then no one is ever going to try and move to linux the lack of knowledge is killing linux in terms of where it's deployed in companies at least on the desktop side in companies in governments and in administrations but there have been a lot of experimentations from governments and public administrations moving to linux there's been the city of munich which moved to a custom distro then moved back to windows then moved back to linux there's been the city of vienna the french john de gramery which is a secondary police force handled by the military they moved to linux as well thus china and russia who moved to their own custom linux distributions their south korea has been pondering a move for a while now there's a lot of experimentations going on and a lot of them also have failed for very very simple reasons in my opinion the first reason is probably poor execution if you just use linux as a drop-in replacement for windows and you replace microsoft office with libreoffice or even worse open office you don't train your people you just say okay you know what's a computer they're going to use that now they're going to have issues everywhere they're not going to know how to use it the productivity is going to tank people are going to complain and the it guys will have to maintain computers and spend their whole time explaining to the other guys which don't know much about computers how to use linux if they know how to use linux themselves which might not be the case because generally these iot guys have been trained on windows as well now the second issue in my opinion is that these experimentations have been made making the wrong choice in terms of distribution they mostly all used a custom distribution based on debian which introduces a lot of issue first debian is not made to be run on a desktop for most people it's too old if you try to install software it's going to be a very old version lacking features there are there are no more guides on the internet for the versions of software that debian ships by default you're going to have a bad time it's going to look bad it's going to lag features it's not a good choice second building a custom distro with your it team is gonna put a huge burden on them maintaining that distro doing the updates selecting the patch sets that they want to apply keep their customization on training people defining the layout distributing the images it's a lot of work people have done that already you have ubuntu opensuse red hat they offer commercial support they have tools to deploy to multiple computers at the same time to handle updates use the tools in place you wouldn't build a custom windows os why would you build a custom linux distro when you have commercial offerings that's going to cost a lot less than building your own debian based distro or using windows at that point why not ask users to install linux from scratch on their own devices that way they have a completely custom software environment right so all these problems in the end is linux even a good choice for public administrations is it even worth it to try and make governments cities public administrations move to linux i think so yes first it's gonna cost you less maybe not initially the first transition maybe in the first four years is probably going to be more costly you're gonna have to train your people train your it team you're gonna have to pay some commercial support to a major distribution vendor you're gonna have to replace some hardware that there's a lot of costs implicated in that but after a while the cost of renewing windows licenses office licenses or paying office 365 subscriptions it's gonna add up and after a while once your destroy is set up the only recurring cost that you have is just training the new rivals which is a lot less because their colleagues can do that you don't even have to instigate a custom training session and the hardware is already there you know what to buy and what works and you only have the commercial support to pay to the distro vendor so yes in that sense linux is definitely a good option for governments and administrations now the second advantage is that you're moving away from proprietary file formats if you're stuck on microsoft office you're stuck with proprietary file formats that maybe in 10 20 15 years won't be openable by any other program if microsoft decides to move to a a dog z format and the docx format disappears in 10 years all your older documents if you have not converted them they're dead they're gone you can't use them if you move to open source software you have a lot less chance of that happening you're gonna keep your file formats safe you're gonna be able to open them and also you can make sure that this information is accessible by anyone in the general public this is a lot more ethical in my opinion and that's it for this video guys i hope i haven't been too critical but yeah i really think linux is the right choice for governments and administrations but i still think that people making the decisions and the experimentations that have been made are just not made with the right goals in mind with the right expectations in mind and not with the right tools i hope you enjoyed the video anyways if you did don't mistake to like or dislike if you didn't you can also subscribe and turn on notifications to get more videos like this one and if you don't really like youtube you can also watch all my videos on odyssey i left a link in the description below if you want to help me start and make my own linux lobby and make the whole countries everywhere the whole world switch to linux then you can also join my amazing patreon subscribers and youtube members and you get access to a weekly patreon cast on every monday and the right to vote on the next topics i'll cover on the channel so thank you guys for watching and i'll see you in the next one bye [Music] you

Channel: The Linux Experiment

Views: 292,831

Keywords: linux, elementary os, open source, distribution, linux distro, linux help, linux 2021, linux in public offices, linux in governments, linux in administrations, linux in the wild, linux for public admins, linux for gvs, linux for governments, should governments move to linux, munich moves to linux, gendarmerie linux, france linux, aministrations linux, governments linux, DMV linux, health services linux, hospital linux, city hall linux

Id: 9Ki3VUS_znA

Length: 13min 13sec (793 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 29 2021