Brazilian Education Ministry Dumps Windows

[MidnightCowboy]

A very interesting move.

http://www2.mandriva.com/en/news/press/?p=145

[garth]

I hope other governments are paying attention.

[Jeff91]

Russia announced they where also making the move to Linux in 2011

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Russi...1-175051.shtml

~Jeff

[MidnightCowboy]

Thanks Jeff, I also understand the excellent Turkish KDE based Pardus is widely adopted by educational institutions and some government departments in that country. I had a brief look at the English version a few months back and really liked their approach to making the basic setup easier.

[wdhpr]

Originally Posted by garth

I hope other governments are paying attention.

I bet Microsoft is.

[garth]

Originally Posted by wdhpr

I bet Microsoft is.

I bet they are too

[MidnightCowboy]

LOL, I don't think it will make any difference to Microsoft here, well in financial terms anyway.

There are legit boxed versions of Windows 7 gathering dust in the "informatica" stores but pirated copies cost $5. The whole university where my wife works runs on pirated Vista.

I tried to buy an English language version of W7 instead of having to botch this with an Ultimate translation pack and couldn't get one, even in Rio. The risk of having one sent from overseas is too great considering the amount of thievery within the mail service so I gave up.

[1002richards]

Here are 50 other big linux users:
http://www.focus.com/fyi/information...ht-not-expect/

including:
U.S. Department of Defense
U.S. Navy Submarine Fleet
The City of Munich
Federal Aviation Administration
Government of Mexico City
Russian Schools
Switzerland Schools
and not forgetting ......... Google

[wdhpr]

Simply amazing.

[MidnightCowboy]

Originally Posted by bibzgi

It would be nice to hear feedback from TSA members who live in India and China on this topic.

Maybe Anupam can shed some light on the Indian situation for us?

I keep having the same feelings about Windows 7 after a while, usually brought on by the fact that the English translation pack doesn't prevent some stuff still being churned out in Portuguese. This mainly centers around security program log files which I then have to translate which is a real pain. Consequently, my dual boot now has a good 'ol English version of XP on it together with Mint. Apart from testing I rarely use Windows now and with a fresh install I can set up and customize Mint in less than an hour, including the time it takes to copy my main stuff back across from an external drive. With windows, just installing, configuring and updating the security apps is likely to take this amount of time, without anything else.