The past few months have taken Munich farther along its round trip from Windows to Linux and back to Windows. TechRepublic chief reporter Nick Heath has been following the trajectory of the city’s open source initiative for the past several years, and in this ebook, he describes the latest developments.

From the ebook:

The German city of Munich, famous for rejecting Microsoft in favour of using Linux on its PCs, has voted to return to Windows. After more than a decade of running Linux-based PCs, Munich city council has decided to switch about 29,000 PCs to Windows 10.

Back in 2003 the council decided to to switch to a Linux-based desktop, which came to be known as LiMux, and other open source software, despite heavy lobbying by Microsoft. But now Munich will begin rolling out a Windows 10 client from 2020, at a cost of about €50m, with a view to Windows replacing LiMux across the council by early 2023.

Politicians who supported the move at a meeting of the full council said that using Windows 10 will make it easier to source compatible applications and hardware drivers than it has been using a Linux-based OS and will also reduce costs associated with running Windows and LiMux PCs side by side.

Munich has always kept a minority of Windows machines to run line-of-business applications that are incompatible with Linux, and where virtualization isn’t an option. Today there is disagreement over what proportion of machines run Windows, with critics saying it is as high as 40% of PCs, while others argue it stands at about 20%. Nevertheless, despite Munich running both systems side by side for more than a decade, the council said that this dual-system setup is unsustainable, hence the need to return to Windows.