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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

#231

Post by marcodiego »

jlkuester7 wrote: post #151
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…

Does anyone know of any large-scale implementations of https://www.onlyoffice.com/ ? I wonder if that suite would be a better solution than LO simply because it is OOXML native (unlike LO which AFIK is ODF native and has a conversion layer to be compatible with OOXML). I think that OO's feature set is still limited in comparison to LO, but they are making a lot of progress (and being web-native seems like a huge adva…

They have a list of costumers but I really don't know of any large-scale implementation.

I've been testing it on my notebook and its compatibility with OOXML is much better than LO. Of course, harder cases break on both. So, even combining both, something I've tried to do, is not enough to achieve good compatility with MSO.

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

#232

Post by jaclaz »

OneTimePetes wrote: post #21

Would be nice to have a german software culture. But all we got is politicians who wish for that and then turn a blind eye on fraudsters like WireCard. Something is missing from the german cultural dna, that our neighbours have.(Swiss,Luxemburg, Belgians, Chechen Republic, Poland, Litauen). Seems the most important thing to be big in software in europe, is to foremost be not german ;)

Well, specifically about "office like" software there is Softmaker (that is Germany based) that offers a (Commercial) suite that is (IMHO) a good, low cost, alternative.

They also offer (or offered?) a free version for personal use, I have on one PC at home a few years old version and it was not shabby at all, IMHO faster than Open/Libre Office.

https://www.softmaker.de/softmaker-office

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

#233

Post by chrisseaton »

freeflight wrote: post #183
chrisseaton wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not true that there is a MS tax on office software - you can now run Google Suite, so there is at least one major competitor.

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.

How many different implementations of basic office software do we need? There's no point having hundreds of companies independently building the same thing.

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

#234

Post by sudosysgen »

nivenkos wrote: post #228
Tijdreiziger wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can on any Android tablet that allows root. You can run an X server via Termux and get a full graphical Linux environment. That will be necessary for Rust.

R, JupyterNotebooks and LaTeX can be done without root.

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

#235

Post by swarnie »

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…

I think they tried that and it was an expensive disaster.

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

#236

Post by pasabagi »

dmitriid wrote: post #157
pasabagi wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from the obvious strategic/people power side of it, honestly, I think being a user of closed-source is just the wrong model for a big organization. Ultimately, closed-source software is like running a factory with a machine you aren't allowed to repair. Having your core means of production and security essentially at the mercy of somebody else's support team seems kind of insane to me. I get the point in the 90…

> Ultimately, closed-source software is like running a factory with a machine you aren't allowed to repair. That... that is exactly how factories operate. When something breaks, they call the manufacturer to bring someone in to fix it.

I actually thought this when I was writing the comment. The difference is, you call the manufacturer when you actually need their specific expertise, and when they're your best option. You're not obligated to. They haven't generally purposefully hidden the internals of the machine from you - and most machines are designed to be serviced by end-users.

If every software supplier was like hilti when it came to support, I don't think there would be a problem - except, they aren't. An engineer from microsoft isn't going to turn up at your office if your computer won't switch on.

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

#237

Post by mlry »

smartbettor wrote: post #168
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…

thanks for mentioning the Berlin airport fiasco - I had never heard the story - hilarious and very troubling for those in Berlin!

Oh, if you find the story of BER hilarious and troubling you should read up on the 2021 vote for federal and local parliaments. Or the civil administration there in general where you have to make an appointment to get your passport renewed months in advance.

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

#238

Post by gentleman11 »

earthnail wrote: post #159
formerly_proven wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

The problem is that a lot of organizations see foss as purely a free thing and not an investment. If they put half the money they spent on licensing into paying people to improve the foss packages they use, the ecosystem would transform and everyone would benefit. Massive cost savings overall, and it would push paid software to work harder to compete (who knows, it might even force Microsoft to offer decent privacy policies and remove ads from their manipulative desktop)

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

#239

Post by MeinBlutIstBlau »

f6v wrote: post #198
go_elmo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The only places I've ever heard of having linux on their computers are tech companies or software devs.

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

#240

Post by GekkePrutser »

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…

The desktop environments are not from GNU, no. But they are all GPL. In that sense the FSF still has a strong influence IMO.
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