A Few Last Words
Legal Aid Manitoba's switch to Linux isn't quite complete, although they're well past the halfway point. Balneaves tells me that the switch to Linux should be complete by February or March. There will still be a couple of exceptions, however. Two of their machines will continue to act as their application servers. Those machines don't run Windows either, but Solaris.
And what about giving up the comfort of running Windows for the unknown of the Linux world? With Windows, users were crashing two to three times per day. After switching to Linux, this ceased to be a problem. "We asked our users if they would ever go back to Windows," he told me. The answer was "Not on your life!"
It's ironic that the greatest beneficiaries of this project probably have no idea of Legal Aid Manitoba's successes with Linux. They are the taxpayers of Manitoba who, thanks to the society's move from Windows to Linux, have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars.