German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by bildung » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 2:38 PM UTC

sgt wrote: post #69

nivenkos wrote: post #24

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…

Didn't Munich do this like 20 years ago and it was a complete failure? Linux and OpenOffice. I think one of the major concerns at the time was that OpenOffice didn't work well with all the Excel and Word documents they needed to open, so people opted out and installed Windows instead. To the regular office worker, it didn't matter much if the computer ran Linux or Windows, as long as it worked. To the IT admin, it mi…

> Didn't Munich do this like 20 years ago and it was a complete failure?

No, it was reversed for political reasons. The majority of users were happy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

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

#92

Post by mc32 » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 2:39 PM UTC

nivenkos wrote: post #24

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…

Too little too late. Most “office collab” is going cloud. Neither Google nor MS are threatened by free/open thick client alternatives. Users will still need their onedrive googledrive for collab.

Admittedly some work is non collab but more and more of that gets pushed to SaaS.

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

#93

Post by y4mi » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 2:40 PM UTC

sgt wrote: post #69

nivenkos wrote: post #24

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…

Didn't Munich do this like 20 years ago and it was a complete failure? Linux and OpenOffice. I think one of the major concerns at the time was that OpenOffice didn't work well with all the Excel and Word documents they needed to open, so people opted out and installed Windows instead. To the regular office worker, it didn't matter much if the computer ran Linux or Windows, as long as it worked. To the IT admin, it mi…

> Didn't Munich do this like 20 years ago and it was a complete failure?

Yes, but the failure was basically manufactured. You cannot keep every process as it was before and just install Linux/libre office, yet that is what they did.

Their current processes are optimized for windows to a degree that usage of the Microsoft office suite is part of the training they undergo.

Switching at this point would be a multi-year process that cannot be rushed. Each task needs to be evaluated separately and a new solution has to be tested and likely engineered from the ground up.

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

#94

Post by jeroenhd » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 2:40 PM UTC

marcodiego wrote: post #47

Hope this encourage them to invest in improving OOXML compatibility. I think right now this is the biggest reason people avoid LibreOffice. Also, some action must be taken about MS behavior. They are the same company they were in the 90's. It is easy to find commit messages in LO explaining things like 'this is what MSO does but not what the specification says'. They recently change the algorithm the justifies text i…

This being the government, they have the power to flip this around. Why invest in compatibility with Microsoft Office when you can use the good old native OpenOffice formats instead? When the state is working in LibreOffice, there's no need to save files in Microsoft's format anymore.

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

#95

Post by md8z » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 2:42 PM UTC

gopiandcode wrote: post #58

laurent92 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> OSS is dead. 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 used to volunteer for the FSF and I can't agree with that at all. The FSF is politically/socially irrelevant and GNU has largely failed and been relegated to an extreme niche. The "free software movement" as it stands is still a reactionary movement, a desire to go back to the good old days when hardware vendors also wrote all the software and shipped the source code along with their products. It's just not a realistic goal.

It also doesn't seem to really matter whether you call it open source or free software. Either way the projects that I see are all struggling for cash in the same way. It's not easy to fund a product when the entire point is you're giving away your labour for free to everyone on the internet.

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

#96

Post by bildung » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 2:43 PM UTC

1234letshaveatw wrote: post #52

nawgz wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The EU seems to have no problem legislating against and penalizing US Big Tech in return. IMO the European attitude towards entrepreneurship and startups does more harm to EU tech than "US Big Tech" ever would or could

What kind of harm, i.e. which stats to look at to compare the different approaches?

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

#97

Post by shireboy » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 2:44 PM UTC

I'm in a position to recommend similar for a large organization, but am on the fence. They have SharePoint on-prem and Office, and are being pulled to Office 365 by MS sales folk. I'm definitely pushing to linux containers for apps, etc, and part of me wants to recommend Libre. There's a lot not to like about Office and SharePoint, but I've yet to find decent open-source document management software that does all the things SharePoint does. I could recommend they stitch together some things, like some of the low-code projects I've seen here, some calendar apps, some dropbox clone, BI/reporting tools, etc. into a Kubernetes environment. But that's more complex than "go pay N/user/mo for this service". You have to get SSO working for all the things, and each has their own quirks, etc.

Any HNers out there have recommendations for open source tools to replace SharePoint/Office 365?

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

#98

Post by periheli0n » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 2:44 PM UTC

marcodiego wrote: post #70

leokennis wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devil's advocate here. Recently my employer (large corporate) went all in on (as it is now called) Microsoft 365: Teams, SharePoint online, OneDrive etc. 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 so…

Consider OnlyOffice or the version offered by Collabora with on-line features. I really don't know how good these options are but they exist.

we're using this for document management in a large European research project. It sort of works but has its quirks. The UI is not really smooth, and the whole system could be more stable. I once lost a day's work because of a bug in the writer component. That was quite discouraging.

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

#99

Post by rich_sasha » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 2:45 PM UTC

cardanome wrote: post #75

RedShift1 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would agree that the Linux Desktop sucks in absolute terms when we think what a sane Desktop experience could look like but compared to Windows, this does not hold true. Linux has quite improved from the early KDE 4 days. These days, you install Linux Mint with Cinnamon and you are good to go. Super easy to use and just works. It is based on Ubuntu, so you can use all the packages but with the bad stuff and experim…

This has been said ad infinitum. My experience is that Windows works, but very poorly. It is slow, hangs, steals my data and treats me like an abusive parent treats a toddler.

But for me, Linux doesn't work. Or maybe it works 90%. Something's always broken, and a different thing is broken with each update. It requires constant tinkering.

One flawless and amazing experience I had was working on Linux at a medium-sized tech firm, which had a dedicated sysadmin team who knew what they were doing. As a decent Linux user I could never maintain anything like that level of service on personal machines.

I think it's quite telling that so few vendors sell you hardware+Linux+promise of it all working well. There are quite a few who will sell you hardware and pinky promise you can install Linux on it yourself, but that's not the same.

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

#100

Post by nivenkos » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 2:46 PM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #92

nivenkos wrote: post #24

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…

Too little too late. Most “office collab” is going cloud. Neither Google nor MS are threatened by free/open thick client alternatives. Users will still need their onedrive googledrive for collab. Admittedly some work is non collab but more and more of that gets pushed to SaaS.

That's less of an issue though as it's a bit easier to migrate. If everything were already on Linux, then switching cloud providers is much simpler than switching the desktop systems themselves.

Also from my own enterprise experience, Office 365 cloud has still got a long way to go.