This is exactly why Germany will never achieve widespread adoption. All the citizens wish to go and form their own cities, reinventing the wheel and duplicating effort. They should abandon all their smaller cities and focus their resources on a single city.

Yes, we should end fragmentation and force all citizens to live in the one true city, which is Munich.

What's the problem with duplicating effort?

I read your parent as making fun of the often-used argument against the plethora of Linux distributions.

It's true that entering the Linux world is a bit like entering a shoe shop: why can't they just make two versions, home and professional? ;)

but they do.

the 'problem' is that there are a dozen shoe factories, sorry, linux distributors, each with their own idea of what is home and professional.

we also need summer and winter variants, and outdoor and indoor.

i'd like the summer outdoor casual all natural materials pair please.

I should have specified that they only come in one size at that other shop :)

It was a quite memorable thing in the "this will be the year of linux on the desktop" days, so it's interesting to see similar headlines again today

Both times were Munich though.

6 years ago there was an election and the conservative party and the mayor went to Windows (after Microsoft moved German headquarters from a suburb to the city) This year we had a new election now Green party leads the city council and they want to go back to Linux.

Now Hamburg, where the Green party also won big, wants to change as well. Hamburg is even more significant since Hamburg not only is Germany's second largest city (Berlin first, Munich third) but also a state, which means it has more tasks than a "pure" municipal administration like Munich, while Munich administration sees pride in being "largest municipal administration" in Germany.

to give an example of where that difference between hamburg and munich could come into play:

munic can not decide to put linux into its schools, because as a decision that would have to happen at the state level, that is bavaria.

but hamburg can. so if the hamburg transition is successful, that may translate into more Free Software in schools, which will be a model for the other german states.

It's more nuanced. Munich has municipal schools and at least on administration side it can do what they want there. However curriculum is made on state level, thus if the curriculum depends on Microsoft software (explicit about Excel etc.?) They would have to comply. Also some state funding budgets, i.e. for getting a few machines, might be bound to "default configurations" thus for going Linux the city might have to pay out of its own budget ...

This thread is about Hamburg.

and now Microsoft has to move its german HQ again ...