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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

#221

Post by mikojan »

formerly_proven wrote: post #73
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…

Munich did that a few years ago, which got rolled back after they elected the dude mayor who got Microsoft to move their German headquarters to Munich. Completely unrelated events, of course. There were of course some technical problems as well, e.g. because a number of administrative tasks can only be performed using Excel 2003 with VBS macros enabled and stuff like that, as well as "technical problems", like "users…

Never forget, Gates actually went to Munich in a luxurious mobile office disguised as a delivery truck to cajole that mayor.[0]

[0]: https://www.golem.de/news/von-microsoft-zu-linux-und-zurueck...

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

#222

Post by kall »

__m wrote: post #209
kall wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels like a good chunk of OSS development is happening in germany. By some accounts, the entirety of linux is being ruined by one german. The biggest software companies like SAP are maybe not shining examples, but when you go lower, there‘s a lot of good stuff. What differences do you see to the other European countries? Who‘s big in those countries?

I'm not familiar with linux development, what did that one german do?

Lennart Poettering created systemd, which is a rewrite of many different things in linux that where seperate before. Some people don‘t like it.

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

#223

Post by BlueTemplar »

frockington1 wrote: post #187
freeflight wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One major competitor who's also a massive corporation and has an even more questionable approach to handling user data. So while it might not be a pure "MS tax" anymore, in a way there still is a corporate monopoly tax.

Why is it that nobody can compete? I've tried various versions of excel/word clones and none seem to operate as well despite it seeming relatively straightforward

These days it's more and more the lack of online collaborative tools that is a problem.

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

#224

Post by go_elmo »

namdnay wrote: post #212
go_elmo wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only saw linux machines in SE companies so far (at least remote ones). Maybe, just maybe, it is because non-tech people 1) cant handle it as cli is needed from time to time 2) because personal preferences & habits make it almost impossible to "force" using linux on staff..?

3) Excel macros and VBscript

*aka cancer / high burden to switch systems to [insert any turing-complete language]

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

#225

Post by AdamN »

shubb wrote: post #216

I think what people get wrong with FOSS is, they assume that it's free as in beer. If I was a big company or national government planning on moving to FOSS I wouldn't count on a cost saving at all. Instead I'd take all that licence money 'saved', ring fence it, donate half of it to the opensource projects being used (to pay full time developers to maintain them), and half to a contract developer house to create and c…

That's all risk and no gain. If you're successful you've saved no money and just moved platforms. If the community thinks FOSS is an end in and of itself you've accomplished something but only if the community thinks so.

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

#226

Post by AdamN »

GatorD42 wrote: post #217

Excel is 100x better than any alternative I’ve used (it’s been a while since I used an open source version though). Any savings would be offset by loss of productivity if it’s a spreadsheet heavy workflow. MS software is good, I don’t know how much it costs for enterprise but it’s probably dwarfed by employment costs.

Yeah, everybody focuses on Word but that's the least interesting one. It's all about Excel and there is no competitor that has hundreds of thousands of trained users and works so well that it is the standard itself.

Luckily I don't use Excel and therefore can rarely use Microsoft.

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

#227

Post by afavour »

deknos wrote: post #179
earthnail wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm from Munich. As much as I would've liked that project to succeed (I really did), I can tell you that Limux - that was the project's name - was a brutal usability disaster. As in, almost meme-level bad. It's like the Berlin airport in software. Sure, Microsoft has a huge office in Munich, and they definitely applied political pressure, too (it'd be naive to assume they didn't). The project's stated goal was to be…

> I'm from Munich. As much as I would've liked that project to succeed (I really did), I can tell you that Limux - that was the project's name - was a brutal usability disaster. As in, almost meme-level bad. It's like the Berlin airport in software. Bullshit > The simple truth is that Microsoft's products were/are just far superior than what the Limux initiative shipped. The Linux transition caused massive productivi…

> I was there. You are just biased.

That doesn’t mean you’re free of bias. If anything it means the opposite.

“Limux worked” and “we solved a whole ton of problems and had to implement printing dialogs, QT interfaces and more” feel like statements somewhat at odds with each other. Were all these bug fixes complete on day one or did they have to be done after the Limux switch had been made?

Obviously I’m an outside observer here but boasting that you had to do a whole ton of work including network management and that no one has done much to it since makes it sound to me like maybe Linux isn’t or wasn’t ready.

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

#228

Post by nivenkos »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #219
nivenkos wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shame it failed and there are no real cheap netbooks anymore (aside from Chromebooks). I used an Acer Aspire One when travelling through Germany as a student (to research jobs and conferences) - and it was amazing being able to program and write papers on such a small device. Reading about the hardware issues reminds me a lot of the ZX Spectrum reviews (especially the keyboard!) - keeping a low price means a l…

The modern equivalent is a tablet with its corresponding type cover.

AFAIK I can't really run Jupyter notebooks, R, LaTeX and Rust on a tablet though. Perhaps the JingPad.

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

#229

Post by BlueTemplar »

periheli0n wrote: post #103
pbasista wrote: post #17

Earlier 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…

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 sp…

And Germany is unable to find and pay programmers to make Libre Office better ?

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

#230

Post by Zigurd »

rich_sasha wrote: post #102

I 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 proj…

You are right that Microsoft Office, Google Apps, and Libre Office are all fine for 98% of all users' needs.

Microsoft office does more. If I were to produce a book with proper front matter and index, glued together from multiple chapter documents, I would choose Word. But Microsoft Office does not work collaboratively as well as Google Apps, which were born cloud-based. Microsoft Office is laggy and fails completely with large numbers of collaborators (i.e. 20+ simultaneous editors). But these use cases are for 2% of users.

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