A ridiculous nonsense click bait title and an article full of ignorance, probably on the part of NHS rather than the writer.
This would be a great solution if it was being properly managed and maintained going forward. But sadly history and common sense say otherwise.
Will moving to Linux same some money.
OK so they will not have to pay for Windows licenses, but as we all know from previous articles, most of the current expenditure came from having to pay Microsoft for extended support for Windows XP.
So they will save the ongoing license costs, but they then incur new costs for implementing and maintaining the new Linux systems and training everyone how to use them. So I think that saving will be lost in the first instance.
Remember that the average NHS employee is not going to be very computer literate, and even struggles with Windows, but when Windows problems occur, there might be someone more computer illiterate around who can help. Once they have moved to Linux, that is out of the windows, there will not be a single person who will know what to do with Linux, and we know this because Linux is used on less than 2% of desktops (servers do not apply here, so calm down fanboys), so every issue will require a call to tech support, which will also incur a cost.
Govt not keeping their IT systems up to date is a systematic problem, not just in the UK either. Moving to Linux is not going to miraculously change that. So unless they address the whole issue with maintaining systems and keeping them up to date, then they are still going to have the same issue. Sure they will have some added security through obscurity thanks to that <2% userbase, so won't have much malware to worry about. But once it becomes common knowledge that NHS is running on Linux, hackers and malware writers will likely make more efforts to target Linux, especially knowing that NHS are likely running an older version with known vulnerabilities.
Granted this will probably take years, by which point the NHS bigwigs will have a false sense of security and will probably have adopted the old "We don't need to worry, Linux doesn;t get malware and is unhackable" attitude, so the whole OS maintenance and updates plans and procedures will be even worse than they were with Windows, maybe even non-existent, especially since nobody is telling them "you must update, it is not safe, your OS is end of life".
Now we sit back and await the rantings form the Linux trolls who didn't read this properly and jumped to the conclusion that it was an attack on Linux rather than the govt's incompetence.