Munich has recently taken a huge step towards the return to Windows, with local authorities now looking into ways to complete the transition off Linux by 2020 as part of a recent plan voted by the city council.

One of the main reasons invoked by Munich officials concerned Linux reliability and usability, with the mayor itself using a research performed by Microsoft-partner Accenture to highlight the main issues that the city experienced with the open-source operating system, including what it called “printing, viewing, and editing documents” by employees of various departments.

But although city officials claim the switch back to Windows is necessary in order to reduce costs and address all these compatibility issues, Karl-Heinz Schneider, the chief of IT at the City of Munich's IT services provider IT@M, says the transition to Microsoft’s operating system was nothing more than a political decision and has nothing to do with technical issues.

In a recent interview, Schneider explains that both Linux and LibreOffice were working fine on Munich systems and there were no compelling technical reasons to switch to Windows.

“Strange decision”

Furthermore, he says the majority of issues reported by employees have already been fixed, and for compatibility reasons, IT experts in charge of the Linux systems put in place a virtualized infrastructure to access Microsoft solutions should they need to work with certain documents.

“We do not see any compelling technical reasons for a change to Windows and Microsoft Office. We solved compatibility and interoperability problems by providing MS Office, mostly virtualized, at workplaces that need to work together with external offices on Office documents,” he says.

Schneider explains that all the problems that have been reported by Munich officials “have nothing to do with Linux,” adding that they were caused mostly because of unqualified staff who made bad decisions.

In the end, the IT expert believes that it was “very strange that these decisions are not made on the basis of facts, but emotions and political interests,” emphasizing that the Accenture study was presented in such a way that Linux would be put in a bad light. He says that even Accenture recommended sticking with LibreOffice, but the public opinion was easily influenced by comments that criticized the performance of Linux systems.