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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

#191

Post by lvass »

I really want this to succeed, but I think it's the wrong approach in the grand scheme. OOXML is the de-facto "document" standard, and I think it's reasonable to say that it is deliberately too complex, giving too much advantage to the company who created, implemented and pushed for it's adoption.

There's also a lot of research applied in not how to make the proprietary user interfaces better, but how to make it hard to move away from. Couple with how bad WYSIWYG actually is for any serious task (it saves you 30~300 minutes of learning in exchange for a life of pain), and it's hell unleashed on the poor souls who are forced to sidegrade like this. We can do better.

Existing free plaintext tools like tex, org, ledger, groff, beamer et al are the best solution IMO. Anyone can learn them, and they surely should when it makes their work better. We're giving people too little credit when we act like they need WYSIWYG and too much pain when we realize we screwed up.

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

#192

Post by aembleton »

cardanome wrote: post #126
rich_sasha wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What exactly does not work? What Distro were you using? Serious question because my experience is that I install Linux Mint and everything just works. Updates never break anything. Why should they? The only arguable pain point is maybe graphics drivers but honestly installing proprietary ones is just a few clicks these days. Plus you don't need them for office work anyway. (Maybe also some power saving features on ce…

Fingerprint reader does not work in Manjaro.

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

#193

Post by Symbiote »

9dev wrote: post #143
cardanome wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly does not work? What Distro were you using? Serious question because my experience is that I install Linux Mint and everything just works. Updates never break anything. Why should they? The only arguable pain point is maybe graphics drivers but honestly installing proprietary ones is just a few clicks these days. Plus you don't need them for office work anyway. (Maybe also some power saving features on ce…

This is the standard reaction I’ve heard so often from experienced Linux users, but you tend to forget all the trouble you’re able to solve because you know what you’re doing. Consider proprietary graphics drivers - ordinary people won’t even know why that is an issue, where to look if the display flickers, or what even drivers are. And that’s just the start of it… I’ve never had a Linux box that didn’t require me to…

None of that matters in this case, since the users don't purchase or administer their computers.

The IT department selects appropriate configurations that support the software they need. My university has no problem supporting a Linux laptop and desktop, and Germany's administration would be doing something similar.

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

#196

Post by pessimizer »

9dev wrote: post #143
cardanome wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly does not work? What Distro were you using? Serious question because my experience is that I install Linux Mint and everything just works. Updates never break anything. Why should they? The only arguable pain point is maybe graphics drivers but honestly installing proprietary ones is just a few clicks these days. Plus you don't need them for office work anyway. (Maybe also some power saving features on ce…

This is the standard reaction I’ve heard so often from experienced Linux users, but you tend to forget all the trouble you’re able to solve because you know what you’re doing. Consider proprietary graphics drivers - ordinary people won’t even know why that is an issue, where to look if the display flickers, or what even drivers are. And that’s just the start of it… I’ve never had a Linux box that didn’t require me to…

> Consider proprietary graphics drivers - ordinary people won’t even know why that is an issue, where to look if the display flickers, or what even drivers are.

Why would an employee that wasn't part of IT procurement ever be thinking about that? If you're telling me that it's impossible to hire a single person for procurement who can figure out whether your machines will run on the OS your organization has chosen, I'm going to insist that's not true.

> I’ve never had a Linux box that didn’t require me to open a terminal to fix something after a while.

I'm going to make the guess that you never run a stable distribution for your own personal desktop, like Debian stable, for example. For some reason, most individuals pretend to need a bleeding edge desktop. Organizations don't. Debian Stable is as fragile as a mountain.

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

#197

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

md8z wrote: post #163
GekkePrutser wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Largely failed? Everyone is using the GNU userland on Linux. I don't see it struggling either really. The Linux desktops are in a better state than they have ever been.

To me that just further illustrates the point that GNU failed. I mean it's right there in the name, it's supposed to be "GNU's not Unix" but the only parts anyone actually uses are clones of Unix that get used on a different Unix-like operating system (Linux) which is not GNU. And the desktop environments also don't have anything to do with GNU. IIRC the only official desktop environment of GNU is GNUstep, which I do…

GNU's not SysV/BSD UNIX. It isn't literally meant to be for a different OS altogether. Even Hurd has a POSIX syscall API.

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

#198

Post by f6v »

go_elmo wrote: post #46
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…

This could be a major ease on state budgets, also communal ones and allow to allocate resources where they are more urgently needed. Might require high initial costs for setup & staff education which would amortize over a few years for sure.

If you could save money by switching to Linux from Windows, I’d expect to see much more Linux machines in corporations.

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

#199

Post by 2143 »

rich_sasha wrote: post #99
cardanome wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're all talking past each other!

It depends on the machines.

I'm biased towards Linux. I also really like Macs.

I've had Linux machines that just works. Buuuuut, before getting my hands on those machines I researched online and ensured that Linux works well on those. In my personal experience, Dell (Inspiron/Vostro/Latitude/XPS) and some ThinkPads usually work fine.

On such machines, everything works out of the box. I've had to do nothing special on those machines to make anything work. Things worked right from the first install.

Now, there are definitely plenty of machines out there where Linux DOES NOT work well out of the box.

So, I guess Windows gets a brownie point for that — you don't have to investigate upfront if Windows is going you work on a given consumer machine; it probably works on more consumer computers than Linux. (However, there's more to it than this if you think about how this situation came about; I don't want to open that can of worms here).

My hope is that, if enough people choose to run Linux, then manufacturers might be incentivised to support Linux better so that even more people would choose Linux, and so on.

I refuse to run Windows because:

• I honestly just really like Linux, BSD, and unixy environments.

• Windows had a clunky developer experience the last time I tried it (a decade ago); I hear it has improved, but frankly I don't care.

• Statements like "Linux is cancer" from you-know-who never sat well with me. I suspect they're still evil.

I also refrain from running Cinnamon because that reminds me of Windows from long long ago, and I'd rather not be reminded of Windows.

Having said all that, I think LibreOffice is inferior to MS Office. It was the one Microsoft product that I actually liked.

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

#200

Post by pessimizer »

1234letshaveatw wrote: post #34
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…

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!

That's an entirely empty threat. Our trade deficit is larger than the GDP of half the countries on earth combined. What are we going to do with what we purchase in Europe - switch to buying it from China?
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