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German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

blog.documentfoundation.org

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Re: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

#11

Post by raxxorrax »

ginko wrote: post #10
raxxorrax wrote: post #2

Awesome. I know how people in offices work and for their use cases LibreOffice has become the safer and more fitting choice. Yes, MS Office isn't bad and I wouldn't pull Excel from the dead hands of physicists, but the whole MS cloud deal is bad for government.

> I wouldn't pull Excel from the dead hands of physicists Accountants I understand but physicists? I'd have thought they mostly use Matlab or maybe Mathematica.

That too, but many aren't firm with such tools and Excel is very prominently used. They often employ special software (I mostly worked with them on optical systems) that use Excel as a common output format for visualization. Don't know the name of their simulators.

Re: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

#13

Post by ahartmetz »

ginko wrote: post #10
raxxorrax wrote: post #2

Awesome. I know how people in offices work and for their use cases LibreOffice has become the safer and more fitting choice. Yes, MS Office isn't bad and I wouldn't pull Excel from the dead hands of physicists, but the whole MS cloud deal is bad for government.

> I wouldn't pull Excel from the dead hands of physicists Accountants I understand but physicists? I'd have thought they mostly use Matlab or maybe Mathematica.

And / or Jupyter Notebook

Re: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

#14

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

scanny wrote: post #4

Seems to be a running trend in Germany to move toward open software. Tangentially related to this: The city of Munich has flip-flopped between their own version of linux and windows [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

>Seems to be a running trend in Germany to move toward open software.

Yeah, until the Ms sales guys wine and dine some German politicians and promise to build a new campus in $BIG_CITY that creates ## jobs, then they suddenly decide to renew their windows and office licenses instead. Rinse and repeat.

Re: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

#15

Post by emteycz »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #14
scanny wrote: post #4

Seems to be a running trend in Germany to move toward open software. Tangentially related to this: The city of Munich has flip-flopped between their own version of linux and windows [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

>Seems to be a running trend in Germany to move toward open software. Yeah, until the Ms sales guys wine and dine some German politicians and promise to build a new campus in $BIG_CITY that creates ## jobs, then they suddenly decide to renew their windows and office licenses instead. Rinse and repeat.

Sure, it has nothing to do with overall better UX that the actual users of these computers require, it's all corruption.

Re: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

#16

Post by dathinab »

raxxorrax wrote: post #7
ghunky wrote: post #3

Didn't they do something similar a decade ago and reverted to MS Office?

Munich reverted to Windows in 2017, then reverted back to Linux in 2020. it is expected that the 2017 rollback was a case of corruption and a waste of money. The first shift was allegedly explicitly against the wishes of many users.

> case of corruption

Probably, I mean the arguments where supper questionable.

Like oh mail on my phone is not working, that is because mail is now run by Linux we must switch back ... but it wasn't, Mail was one a the few systems which didn't switch to Linux.

Or very questionable calculations about the price of buying some "customer support" (Linux IT Consulting).

At least as far as I remember.

Re: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

#17

Post by pbasista »

throwaway123x2 wrote: post #12

MS Office was so much more functional and nicer to use than libreoffice when I last checked.

That is possible.

But apparently, people in Germany are looking for software based on attributes that reach beyond the elemental metrics like "nice to use" or "supports corporate integration".

They might care more about the ability to audit the software's behavior and to easily make changes where necessary. They might also like to contribute patches back to the original LibreOffice community because they know that they themselves will benefit from more people reviewing their work and making it better as a result.

Re: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

#19

Post by nicoburns »

This is great, but they seem to be missing the other part of it, which is that (at least some of) the money saved ought to go towards funding development of the open software. If that happened then Libre Office could hope to outcompete MS Office on merit sometime in the near future. As it is, it's unclear how much this really supports the free software.
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