A new European city has announced that it will abandon Windows systems for its computers and switch to Linux. It is the city of Turn in Italy, which with the change hopes to save six million euros in the next five years. The plan is to migrate 8,300 computers in public offices to Ubuntu Linux, thus leaving Windows XP, the Microsoft system has been abandoned for a few months, which can pose a very serious security problem for a government; It means that the vulnerabilities found from now on will not be patched, leaving them up for hackers to take advantage of to take control of the devices or obtain data.
Winds of change
Many companies and organizations have chosen to upgrade to more modern Windows systems, but that in many cases means also renewing the hardware since the requirements are higher. That is one of the reasons presented by representatives of the Partito Democratico that governs the city: take advantage of the machines they already have. Although renewal is inevitable in the computing world, they found that the city could save a lot of money if they took advantage of the flexibility of Linux to run it on computers with several years on top. Between that and the savings from not having to pay for Windows and Office licenses (300 per machine according to their calculations), the decision was made last August.
Turin joins other Italian and European cities that have chosen to switch to Linux to avoid the cost of Windows licenses and their programs. That is, they are decisions that bring their own problems with them, as the city of Munich, which a few weeks ago considered abandoning its Linux project and returning to Windows, can attest. However, since then, representatives of the city council have tried to reassure the community by ensuring that nothing has been decided in this regard and that only a report is being created. However, we cannot compare the case of Munich with that of Turin, since the latter is much more modest; not only in number of teams but also in the fact that Turin not develop their own Linux distro but use Ubuntu.
Source | ZDNet | Toms Hardware
