This. Whoever they partner with has to take it seriously though. None of this, “Good luck with working out how to get the Ubuntu computer on our website, getting drivers, support, getting a refund on your Windows license”. The hardware vendor must be seriously back their Ubuntu computer through advertising, support, treating it as a first class citizen on their website, brochure, etc.

In my country (Republic of Macedonia), OpenOffice is already being used by the ministries and the ministry workers as a replacement for MS Office. It’s installed on WindowsXP and lately Windows7 computers.

MS Office was used before that, because the copyright laws started being enforced 5-6 years ago and most of the versions of MS Office were actually pirated. And only certain number of MS Office users were using the Office software properly in a sense that there wasn’t any document management systems/software used – the most far they went was organizing/sharing documents by using shared named folders on some networked HD. Kind of replacing the old typewriters (mechanical and electronic) with computers. That’s why this transition was/is not very painful. For instance the only problem my father ever encountered with the transition was that his monthly report MS Word document that consisted of an fairly simple table was not being rendered and recognized properly in OpenOffice, so he used the home computer (with MS Office 2003) instead of his office laptop to write the report. Yup, after using MS office for 15 years, he still doesn’t know how to create tables on his own.And he is not an isolated case.

Three years ago, I got a temporary job teaching a very (VERY) basic introductory course to WindowsXP and MS Office(Word+Excel+Powerpoint). Among other people, I also had 2 groups of (15-20) each that were actually administration workers. Each of them had seen and used MS Word before (and used it during their work day), but their knowledge was very very elementary (typewriter level).

The knowledge and interest in the course they showed?

MS Word

Only one of them has heard of Unicode and Unicode fonts before. My country uses the Cyrillic alphabet, and because at the time Windows 95 came out, Unicode didn’t exist,so someone made a dirty hack, reworked some of the Latin fonts and made them appear and print as Cyrillic but when you use the Search function for instance, you still see the word you type with Latin plus some symbols like {,},|,\ etc.) – but I doubt they any one of them ever used the Search function. 15 years later they still use those tweaked fonts while creating their documents, 40+ font versions exist, not all of them behaving identically (with some letters uppercase and smallercase are inverted, some letters might have different mapping etc.) And I doubt that any one of them will use Unicode when creating their new documents, unless they are forced to do so (some ministries actually started enforcing the Unicode use).

They were impressed with the formating capabilities of MS Word and that’s the part of the course they liked most.

PowerPoint

They refused to listen to this part of the course, because none of them actually find it useful in their work.

Excel

They found it interesting, but 20 minutes after the presentation they started recognizing some “database capabilities in organizing data” from the presentation. When I told them that the true database part is actually covered by MS Access (that wasn’t part of the course), they started discussing how they really need a course on using MS Access (not they I believe that they could have handled it).

I know that this sounds like an experience from a 3rd world country but the problem is that we are speaking about a country located on the European continent that aspired to become member of NATO and EU.

But don’t allow this to fool you. Our government still spends A LOT of money for IT (relative to the financial situation and the unemployment percent that is around 33% – mush bigger than in many 3rd world countries).

And Microsoft still managed to collect big money for the Windows and MS Office that is installed (and underused), after allowing for a period of time (5-10 years)for pirated version of its software to be used. Enough time for some people to start to believe that it’s indispensable and irreplaceable.

I already wrote here a big post about the introduction of free software and Ubuntu (Edubuntu) in our education system and the difficulties we’ve encountered, but it’s still waiting for being reviewed as Akismet recognized it as being a spam (it appears when I refresh this page).

My personal opinion is that Ubuntu has a good potential in Government use. But something has to be done about Unity (among other things).

The people I worked with are not susceptible to changes, they refuse to learn keyboard shortcuts (not even ctrl+c and ctrl+v), they wouldn’t find any use of the lens.

They even find the MS Office UI overwhelming (2003 was and probably is still used by the ones that use MS office). They forget that they can zoom in the document they opened. You know how when you start Word 2003, the right side of the screen lists the recently used files? Well if they have luck, they’ll find the document they need from there, they have much more difficulty locating it by using the Open dialog (double clicking on a document icon is the way they prefer), BUT, they will never remember to actually CLOSE that annoying right-hand side dialog even though they have difficulties working/reading the document they’ve just opened. Their eyes will tear, they’ll move their head closer to the monitor even after you remind them 10 times that they should do that. By the end of the class they’ll do it, next week you see them doing all over again.

This are the typical government workers in my country. Is this unique for my country or is it more general? I don’t know.

Best regards,
Celso

In my opinion it is possible.

German cities like Schwäbisch Hall and Munich are now “linux cities”. Munich has already migrated 10000 of its computers mainly to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with KDE 3.5.10.

http://www.muenchen.de/rathaus/Stadtverwaltung/Direktorium/LiMux.html
http://www.muenchen.de/rathaus/Stadtverwaltung/Direktorium/LiMux/Zahlen_Fakten/Projektstatus.html

Recently Munich completed the migration of all its MS Office macros to OpenOffice:

http://www.pro-linux.de/news/1/18088/muenchen-schliesst-makromigration-ab.html
http://www.it-muenchen-blog.de/2012/02/konsolidierungserfolg-durch-die-open-office-org-migration-bei-der-landeshauptstadt-munchen/

One day they might need a special Ubuntu 12.04 edition, so yes, there could be big chances for you and Canonical, respectively, with or without sold PCs.
Moreover, Munich is showing other cities that a migration from Windows to Linux is possible and they achieved this with Debian (in the beginning) and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (the new Limux client 4.0 is based on Ubuntu 10.04). It could be that other cities will follow Munich.

See also
http://www.golem.de/1108/85823.html
“Limux Client 4.0 is based on Ubuntu 10.04″

I recall visiting the Ubuntu webpage once, and on the splash page is showed Ubuntu running on a slick ultra-thin Acer laptop, so I go to the Ubuntu Certified hardware page, and find that Acer does not have any certified laptops. So, what the heck did I see on the page? The difference between Ubuntu functioning on hardware and being certified on hardware is very significant in the enterprise. Developing a partner ecosystem is not an easy task, but a necessary one.

I sometimes wish that Canonical would take a page out of the Google book. With every major Ubuntu release, partner up with a hardware vendor and release/sell a line of Ubuntu branded hardware. This would work similar to the Google Nexus brand being released on HTC and then Samsung. Ubuntu could provide the front-end for selling the hardware and support, and the vendor customizes the branding and gets a piece of the pie. This type of partnership could be extended to other vendors on a per release basis. If we want more vendor variety, maybe it can be done on a per-release and per-type (netbook, ultrabook, etc) hardware. Just an idea.

Regardless, I cannot wait for 12.04 and I hope to see some improvements/additions in the HCL in the near future. This would help me greatly in selecting the best hardware for the job.

I think the main reason that more people are not using Ubuntu or similar modern distributions like Fedora or Mageia (fork of Mandriva) is simply that the blatantly monopolistic pre-loading of Windows on all non-Apple PCs is preventing anyone from even knowing about any alternatives to Windows unless they are technical or ‘in the know’. This produces the current self-perpetuating Windows monopoly which is sustained by the 100% no-alternatives Windows mind-share. This (of course) extends to schools where the current ‘educational agreements’ prevent schoolchildren from experiencing the wonderful rich range of software and activities that can be experiences legally and for free whilst running Linux!

I develop software that can run on multiple platforms (mainly Linux, OS/X, proprietary Unix and Windows) although my preferred platform (by far) is Linux. At home we have several computers (including an Apple Mac and Windows PC) but my children (9 and 12) both prefer to use Ubuntu Linux (their choice and they were offered both Windows and OS/X). They can happily hop between Windows, OS/X and Linux without any problems and use both LibreOffice (whilst at home) and Microsoft Office (whilst in school). This makes a complete mockery of the narrow minded staff in schools and local educational establishments who way that using Linux would be too different and too hard.

Have they ever tried?

Living in the UK – I have tried myself to get Ubuntu Linux into schools but run into Microsoft brainwashing every time. One time I had burned a handful of Ubuntu CDs (looking nice and ‘polished’ with logos printed on nice printable CDs). Various parents had asked me what Ubuntu was so I took these along to a school event and gave them out to anyone who was interested.

One teacher got very angry with me (about 2-3 years ago).
“You can’t distribute pirated software here!”, he said. I tried to explain that is was open source and therefore perfectly legal.
“Rubbish – everybody knows you have to pay for software!”, he said.

The only way to attack the Microsoft monopoly is with education and advertising I think. Perhaps if Canonical/Ubuntu were to run a money raising campaign (perhaps as a separate web site linked to the main Ubuntu one) to buy advertising time in newspapers or even perhaps even a TV advert (perhaps some other companies might sponsor this as well?). I would certainly be willing to demonstrate Ubuntu in schools – and if volunteers could do this worldwide then maybe, just maybe, we could break the current stranglehold and free our children’s minds. If a major PC seller (such as PCWorld) would sell a couple of decent specified computers running Ubuntu alongside the Windows ones then we could actually begin to have some choice again at last.