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Believe it or not, many German teachers have started using digital technology for real only in 2020, when the pandemic first hit. They are now totally entrenched with the Microsoft way of doing things. They know all the MS quirks and how to navigate around them.
Free software alternatives to MS products have different quirks that will need different workarounds.
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That sounds so wonderful! Hopefully the US can also come together by divesting from European goods and services and also participate in this independence movement!
Trade might be a good thing in general, but this comment is a bit reductionist with respect to the role of US Big Tech in suppressing and controlling EU tech
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I've used Linux full-time at home for 10 years, and now at work (in an enterprise). For the most part, it works well and doesn't require a whole lot more support. The LTT video hit one specific packaging bug in PopOS that was present for only an hour, and was unfortunate. But to judge so much on that is unreasonable, shit happens in software engineering, it'd be like trying to use Facebook in the window where it was…
As someone who used to be an avid linux desktop user, but has subsequently moved away from it and is interested in the current ecosystem with a view to maybe coming back, what would you say is a good entry point? I used to run Ubuntu back in the day if that helps. I'm curious to get a sense of how much has changed.
It takes a little bit of set-up / learning at the start. But you can easily try it out with a tool like ALMA - https://github.com/r-darwish/alma
See my preset files here - https://github.com/jamesmcm/arch-i3-usb
But PopOS is probably the closest to the previous beginner Ubuntu experience now.
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Sure, it has nothing to do with overall better UX that the actual users of these computers require, it's all corruption.
Better UI ? Ten years ago, yes. Now the UI in Office 365 is a disaster. And yes, some german politicians are very sensitive when money starts to flow.
Edit: I don't get the downvote. Last week I spent 10 minutes of a meeting waiting for the presenter to apply some fix to his LibreOffice presentation because font kerning and sizes were corrupt in the full screen view.
I would love to ditch MS completely and use LibreOffice for all my work, but it has its weak spots.
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.
[1] https://de.blog.documentfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/si...
Now switch to Linux too. The more we invest together, the easier it becomes. German states can help Spanish states, and Finnish schools, Danish universities, and French businesses, etc. - collaboratively investing so that everyone benefits and Europe can build its own Tech industry and have some independence from the US. This is absolutely critical to move away from the dominance of "Big Tech" to FOSS solutions that…
I agree with your arguments but the Linux desktop sucks, I would never want to use it full time let alone support it (note that I used to be a full time Linux desktop user, I left after KDE 4 came about). Linus Tech Tips is running a series on desktop Linux and they are hitting the hammer on the nail where exactly all the pain points are.
This is the kind of story that would have been cheered on on Slashdot twenty years ago. But here we are in 2021 and a major organization having the temerity to not pay the Microsoft tax is newsworthy. This is not what a free market looks like.
It's the kind of story that was cheered on on Slashdot. Multiple times. I can't count the number of times I've seen "Some German [agency|municipality|state] [is planning to adopt|has adopted|cancels adoption|reverses adoption] of [StarOffice|OpenOffice|Libreoffice|Linux]". I think it's some kind of meme, the product of peculiar German administrative politics, or a result of vigorous Free Software activism in Germany…
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.
This is a 20-year-old problem. It won’t improve. And we’ve lost the cloud fight (practically no site is Affero GPL). OSS is dead. Even Linux - I bet half installs nowadays are on AWS/GCP/etc., and they run custom distros, and one day Debian won’t have enough funding to fix all CVEs, and the only ones which will be constantly viable to run when you have liabilities (=all the time) will be cloud provider-maintained one…
Given that OSS was a corporate sponsored perversion of Free/Libre software designed to trick naive developers into contributing unpaid labour without getting anything back, I would hope so.
Free software, on the other hand, is roaring ahead, and doing better than ever.
I tried to use LibreOffice recently and that lasted about 30 seconds. Terrible software.
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 th…
While I have no illusions about Microsoft's business model and motives, the truth is that "it just works" and makes collaboration very easy.
Create a team in Teams, add a document which everyone can edit (if needed at the same time), click a button, share it with someone outside the team, have a meeting with them, click a button, save the meeting video to OneDrive, click one more button and you're collaborating on a whiteboard. And all this works fully synchronized on my phone too.
As far as I can see (from their terrible website) LibreOffice does not offer this at all. Maybe Germany, known for being "digitally outdated" by 5-10 years, will suffer no consequences from that and their basic workflow is still "type document - print it - sign it - fax it". But it will be a sad day for my productivity when I am forced to switch to LibreOffice.
