Do they plan to fund and/or contribute to the development of LibreOffice as well? I couldn't find anything in that article or the linked paper. Edit: Actually one of the slides seems to indicate they have the intention to contribute and/or fund in someway.
It is highly doubtful. German public authorities are notorious for not voluntarily sharing anything with the public.
German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice
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Re: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice
#102I think the main "drawback" of LibreOffice is that it is not widely used. If you receive a docx document and it formats funny, or vice versa (common on LibreOffice and not entirely their fault), it's on you for using weird software, or penny-pinching on a MS Office license.
If it becomes common, people just accept the minor incompatibility and move on. It will also get better as funds and attention flow to these projects.
As far as I'm concerned, LibreOffice lacks no features I would remotely consider using.
It's like when Windows was the sole mainstream OS, it wasn't an excuse "oh but I'm on Mac and can't run this". Now Macs are mainstream, and Linux is not, it's still in a "weird nerdy" corner. But not so if it just gets more widely used (it's happening, just slowly).
Re: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice
#103MS 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…
The big question is: Is the aim to have the best possible software integration? Or is it about freedom from MS and contributing to open source?
If it's software integration, MS is hard to beat. It comes at the price of total dependence.
If it's about freedom then going full open source is great. But the cost in efficiency is huge, since the OSS alternatives will never be as streamlined as MS's stuff. not having to spend money on licenses is great but a lot of extra footwork will be required to get the job done.
Re: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
> the truth is that "it just works" and makes collaboration very easy.
My org does that too for different reasons for years now. It just works is a lie. We also have a lot Apple devices for all our external employees. That doesn't 'just' work as well.
Sadly I have to deal with SharePoint integration which a lot of MS services are based on. Digitally outdated has a complete new dimensions here, even if you add half baked services like Flow on top of it. There are far more modern alternatives than what MS brings to the table, there are countless alternatives that are better to control and easier to adapt.
You could use teams on Linux and while the office integration is nice, it isn't essential at all. This "collaboration" in the MS cloud is a nightmare to archive or access and some of the APIs are in a beta phase. We killed our fax a long time ago...
Re: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice
#105I'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…
I haven't used SharePoint/O365 much, so I don't know how it compares, but I've been quite happy with Nextcloud and its OnlyOffice integration.
Re: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice
#106I'm all for using free / open source where it makes sense and is cost effective. And frankly, Office is probably overkill for most of the actual needs of users. Having said that, I tried making a three page brochure a year ago, using the most recent LibreOffice release at the time. Just a mix of some screenshots and paragraphs of text. It was just too slow to be useable. On the same computer, Google Docs running in the browser was able to handle the same brochure without any noticeable slowdowns of any kind. That's a strong indication that LibreOffice is just ... not up to the task.
Re: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice
#107This 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…
Also there a _lot_ of different cities and municipalities in Europe. And when it succeeds you don't usually hear about it.
Like when I worked at an MPI in Germany, all the machines used Ubuntu. In Catalonia, most of the universities also use Ubuntu. The Ayuntamiento uses LibreOffice (and maybe also Ubuntu in some parts) - and for the most part, it all just works. It was the same in Zaragoza too.
You only notice it when they accidentally send a .odt file to someone who is only using Windows for example.
Re: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice
#108Hope 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.
Makes sense. That would be even better.
Re: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'd recommend Arch Linux for developers. 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.
Also, if you don’t want the hardcore(!!!) installation experience of Arch Linux, try Manjaro Linux instead. It has one of the most sane defaults and the best GPU driver management system, and you can customize a lot of it since it’s just Arch under the hood.
Re: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice
#110What is the open source alternative to Office365? 'Regular' Office is becoming more and more rare.
Which is a shame, between the licensing costs, having to re-download or re-install the desktop apps, having to deal with OneDrive, etc.