Desktop Linux for TU Wien - An Empirical Study

In recent years, the top position on the market was clearly occupied. Currently, there are increasing efforts, especially in Europe, to turn away from the market leader and to explore alternatives. There are many reasons to do so: Some cite the licensing and subscription costs as their motive, others the increasing reliance on third party cloud services. Companies have to decide for themselves if they want to have sovereignty over their data, or if they want to give it to third parties. Pricing models with affordable entryprices increase the reliance on the product and the vendor. This thesis addresses the desktop operating system of the Technische Universität Wien and possible open source alternatives.The goal of this thesis is the definition of requirements for a possible alternative to the current proprietary desktop operating system. With the help of a questionnaire and expertinterviews, requirements have been engineered. Furthermore, the current weaknesses of open source desktop operating systems have been compared with proprietary solutions.Last but not least, hurdles in building open source desktop operating systems are outlined.Methodically this is an explorative case study with quantitative and qualitative survey methods. To define resilient requirements, similar case studies have been compared. The findings of this literature research were used to create a questionnaire with quantitative and qualitative questions. The expert interviews supplement the qualitative survey. From all of this, a design concept for a prototype was created. On the basis of this concept, a prototype has been crafted which implements the requirements and show cases how todeal with existing hurdles.The evaluation shows that the replacement of proprietary office suites is still a problem today. However, if the areas of application are covered by open standards or can becovered with web applications, the migration to a Linux operating system is drastically simplified. Due to the general focus of modern applications being primarily web-first, the web browser has become one of the most important applications on the modern desktop.