251–260 of 368 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tried to use a CNC mill recently and that lasted about 30 seconds. Terrible piece of equipment.
I like your argument, but there are some truth to what he says, not that I agree with him.
A few years ago I started writing a few pages of tech specs in libre office, then it crashed and lost all my work. Being used to google docs I forgot that software from the 90s doesn't autosave my work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your example sounds more like typical Firefox to me. While I use it as my daily driver, video calls should always be done in Chrome in my experience. (Yeah, I know that is not exactly a point in favor of free software but it is what it is.) Honestly at least relative to the general mood of the software industry I wouldn't say that foss projects don't care about backwards compatibility. The kernel is famous for caring…
Why are you doing video calls in a browser in the first place ?
Browsers have supported video calls for years now. Heck there are plenty of Show HN posts about the latest in browser virtual chat rooms with full video and audio.
Microsoft Office is buggy, but off-brand office suites make it look positively reliable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This is mostly because the "Munich case" was a star example for a long time. Also, star division, the company that started star office, is from Germany.
I'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 t…
It's just fine for internal usage.
Of course 90% of the employees were technical people, which may have had something to do with it. Nobody wet their pants when you called it a directory instead of a folder.
Now if Photoshop or Excel with VBA had been needed it would have been a different story.
A few years ago I started writing a few pages of tech specs in libre office, then it crashed and lost all my work. Being used to google docs I forgot that software from the 90s doesn't autosave my work.
I Ctrl+S on G Docs all the time. Muscle memory.
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…
If anything that rings alert on my mind is the LO's Calc, which at times decides to become slow and consume the CPU for no apparent reason. Or equally annoying flacky interoprability betwen LO Writer and MS Office Word (works in general, but loses some alignment, magles styles etc.)
As much as I'm for LO and want them to succeed, I feel for the clerks dealing with these counter-productive issues.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What "enterprise software" is needed at a public administration? Almost all of it is custom ordered, so Linux compatibility can be a part of the requirements. Outlook is a dumpster fire, and there are perfectly fine alternatives. Very few people actually need the full might of Excel, and you can always RemoteApp it to them, and have the rest use Libre Office. Or heck, provide them with actual tooling better fit for t…
> Very few people actually need the full might of Excel How's the groupware situation on Linux? Mail, calendars, adding shared meeting rooms, etc.
KMail was actually financed for some time by the german gouvernment.