There is something to be said about a community that get behind a single OS. To me, it says something about the cost and effectiveness of that operating system. Apparently the The City of Munich has opted for Debian. While there are other great choices out there, many great things have come from this distribution.

The City of Munich has chosen to migrate its 14,000 desktops to a free Linux distribution, rather than a commercial version of the open source operating system.

The City’s administration said on Thursday that it will use the Debian distribution, which will be customised to meet the needs of the city administration. It has awarded a contract to two German consultancies, Gonicus and Softcon, to help with the migration.

Munich’s migration from Microsoft Windows NT to Linux on the desktop was given final approval in June last year, after a year-long pilot project run by SuSE Linux and IBM. The contract for the project was put out to tender in the summer and the City said it considered several alternatives before choosing Debian, which it said offered the best solution in terms of technical competence and price. [Read the rest]