A school in Montreal, Canada, is moving to Linux and its board has reported that it has managed to save almost $15,000 (€11,800) by ditching the Windows 7 OS and adopting Lubuntu 14.04 LTS.

People might still be ambivalent about moving to a Linux system, but proof that it can be done very easily is offered all the time, whether it's about a city moving to open source or just a school in Canada.

More and more entities realize that they can save a lot of money on licenses, support, and all kinds of other costs by switching to a free solution for the OS or for any other component, like an office suite for example. The bigger the company or the city, the more money they can save.

Lubuntu 14.04 LTS helps school save money

A representative of a school board from Montreal contacted the Lubuntu community with a simple problem. The school had an easy choice to make, either to upgrade the hardware or to get Lubuntu and have the old computers work better for a few more years. They reportedly saved $15,000 (€11,800) in this process, but there were some small issues to fix.

"Good morning, I work for a school board in Montreal and we are finally shifting over to open source software for our older computer labs using Lubuntu 14.04 instead of windows 7. The performance between the two is incomparable and schools are saving up to 15 000$ by converting to Lubuntu instead of purchasing new hardware. Our teachers have been working with us on this and one big request is to put shortcut to web sites on the desktop. I thought this would be a simple request but I am unable to find any information on how to do this. Can anyone help? Thanks," says Marc Tremblay on the official mailing list.

This being a Linux community, the answers to his question started pouring in immediately and numerous solutions for his problems have been posted. The problem is that Windows users tend to look for Windows-like solutions and Linux is somewhat different. It requires another approach and users need to unlearn a few bad habits.

Just the tip of the iceberg

Getting a Linux operating system instead of Windows seems like the logical thing to do. It saves people, companies, and administrations money and teaches users that there are other solutions out there that don't require a license to work. The movement has just started to pick up Steam and we're going to be reading more news like this one in the near future.