Switch to Linux for the Federal State of Schleswig-Holstein – Linux

The state of Schleswig-Holstein, one of the 16 federal states in Germany, confirmed this last Wednesday It plans to migrate tens of thousands of systems from Windows to Linux. This announcement ties into the local government's current plans to switch from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, which is also open source software.

In 2021, the local government announced that it planned to move 25,000 computers to LibreOffice by 2026. At that time, Schleswig-Holstein authorities announced that they had already been testing LibreOffice for two years.

The state government has already taken the first steps in the plan to transition to free and open software systems, a development that will affect about 30,000 local government employees who will be provided with further training programs. As for LibreOffice, it is still not clear that some positions in local government will still use proprietary software, so the move to open source will not continue.

In 2021, Jan-Philippe Albrecht, then Minister of the Government of Schleswig-Holstein, in statements to the magazine Heise described the local government's interest in this transformation, commenting on the high requirements of Windows 11 in terms of hardware hardware, which can be created on old computers, unlike Linux. .

According to an announcement last week, the state of Schleswig-Holstein will stop using Microsoft's Sharepoint and Exchange/Outlook in favor of free software offerings Nextcloud and Open-Xchange, as well as Mozilla Firebird in conjunction with Uninvention.

Explaining the decision, the announcement cited enhanced IT security, economics and cooperation between different systems as the benefits that the state government expects to come from open source software. Another issue of concern to local government is the increasing reliance on cloud services, noting that a situation is emerging where users have no influence on the flow of data and whether that data is routed to other countries. In addition, the Schleswig-Holstein government expects that the shift to open source software will free up money from the licensing market, which will be directed to “real programming services for our digital economy” while creating new jobs.

Schleswig-Holstein is not the first case where a local government has tried to transition to Linux and open source software in general. In addition to countries that have other reasons for wanting to avoid US-sourced software, such as North Korea and China, even South Korea has announced plans to switch to Linux by 2026, while the local government in Barcelona took the initiative as early as 2026. In 2018.

However, not all efforts were successful. Vienna tried to switch to a Debian-based distribution in 2005, but abandoned the switch in 2009. Earlier, in 2003, Munich announced its intention to convert about 14,000 computers from Windows to Linux. The migration program was completed in 2013, but the resulting high costs and user dissatisfaction forced Munich in 2017 to announce that it would have the next three years to switch back to Windows.

Albrecht stated, at the time, that the main problem was that employees were not actively involved enough in the whole process, as the state of Schleswig-Holstein was aiming for a long transition period while using the two systems in parallel, and introducing open source software into the services that were ready. The goal of this gradual transition was to promote next steps, as officials and concerned citizens saw in practice that the transition was bearing fruit.

It remains to be seen whether Albrecht's 2021 predictions will be confirmed by 2026.