Case Study: City of Munich achieves €10M+ savings and migrates 14,000 desktops to Linux with Ubuntu

Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions

The City of Munich, with about 1.5 million residents and over 33,000 employees (16,000 PC users), faced a fragmented desktop environment across many organisational units as Windows NT reached end-of-life. The council needed a sustainable, interoperable, low‑overhead alternative that avoided vendor lock‑in while supporting diverse user needs, hardware refresh cycles and centralized management — a change that required re‑organising the entire IT infrastructure and maintaining strong political and stakeholder backing.

Munich launched the LiMux project, first deploying Debian in 2006 and moving to Kubuntu/Ubuntu in 2009, while creating processes, forums and communications to manage requirements, testing and roll‑out. By the end of 2012 about 12,000 (eventually 14,000) workstations had been migrated, saving the city more than €10 million overall (including €6.8 million in Microsoft licensing savings by 2012); the total project cost was €23 million versus an estimated €34 million to stay on a Windows upgrade path.

City of Munich

Peter Hofmann

Project Manager