[balug-talk] Linux computers for the police! With Link

[Joseph Brenner]

Greg Herlein <gherlein at herlein.com> wrote:

> Is linux better? Obviously.  Would it make fiduciary sense to change
> the City PD to Linux?  Probably not.

Most likely. But then, the actual question is whether the 95 => XP
upgrade is cheaper than making the (superficially) bigger leap to,
say, KDE on SUSE.

My presumption would be that standing still is not an option (or not a
good one).  Some people are presuming that they have some sort of
custom applications running on Windows (e.g. database front end), but 
I don't think we know that (e.g., they might have ported it to a web 
front-end already). 

If most of what they're doing is browser/spreadsheet/word processor
work, then the technical problems are relatively small; the main 
difficulty is then some re-training.

At a guess, the re-training is the hard part, which isn't necessarily
bad news if your firm gets the contract to do it.