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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

#271

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

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…

I think the truth between what you say and the other person accusing you of being biased is somewhere in the middle. They basically went too mach ahead of the time. Mind you, the project started 18 years ago! The computing landscape was very different back then. I know what you mean as I was forced by my employer to use Linux on the desktop at that time and it was mediocre - but many things changed in the meantime. Probably the most important: the web revolution has happened. Nobody is using abominations like the ActiveX/Silverlight/whatever anymore. VBS is no longer omnipresent (partly because of security reasons). Hardware support in Linux is incomparable to what was in 2004. SO yes, I can imagine it was terrible back then, but I still think it's very important not to give up and I'm happy they basically restarted the project recently.

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

#272

Post by slownews45 »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #139
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…

Uhh "users can't install software themselves" is how things are supposed to be. If you're still giving everyone admin rights you're going to have a fun time every time one of them falls for phishing.

Welcome to bigtime shadow IT then in a white collar / high performing workforce. People will be using personal laptops, spinning up AWS instances etc to get work done especially if they collaborate with others.

I worked at a place, folks had to go to the neighboring copy/print place to FAX themselves documents, because IT in its wisdom had locked down their machines and prohibited scanning docs (ie, they faxed to a virtual fax, then took those PDFs and sent them on).

I am convinced that part of the AWS appeal for many folks is to escape this "best practice" IT control that just results in no progress / ability to get work done. This was 10x during pandemic.

When IT hasn't yet gotten Zoom into default image, and you need Zoom or whatever to talk with others practically, so annoying.

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

#273

Post by ksec »

Interesting as I have just been thinking about this as a thought exercise. Assuming one want to switch away from M$ Office, should Office software be an Open Source Native Experience like libra office or should it be a cloud based close source but free experience ( aka Google ).

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

#274

Post by md8z »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #240
md8z wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes the desktop environments are still using GPL but those are already established projects, not growth areas. For newer projects it seems there is a shift away from copyleft towards Apache-style licensing. The newer copyleft licenses (GPL3, AGPL) just haven't gotten that good of a reception. And in the areas I've seen that do use them it seems it's despite the FSF, not because of them, for example the FSF seems to have completely given up on license enforcement or helping with anything in that area.

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

#275

Post by chrisseaton »

y4mi wrote: post #93
sgt wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't Munich do this like 20 years ago and it was a complete failure? Linux and OpenOffice. I think one of the major concerns at the time was that OpenOffice didn't work well with all the Excel and Word documents they needed to open, so people opted out and installed Windows instead. To the regular office worker, it didn't matter much if the computer ran Linux or Windows, as long as it worked. To the IT admin, it mi…

> Didn't Munich do this like 20 years ago and it was a complete failure? Yes, but the failure was basically manufactured. You cannot keep every process as it was before and just install Linux/libre office, yet that is what they did. Their current processes are optimized for windows to a degree that usage of the Microsoft office suite is part of the training they undergo. Switching at this point would be a multi-year…

> Their current processes are optimized for windows to a degree that usage of the Microsoft office suite is part of the training they undergo.

Isn't it just regular office software? What processes do you have for dealing with spreadsheets and text documents?

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

#276

Post by blacksmith_tb »

winstonschmidt wrote: post #61
RedShift1 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your arguments but the Linux desktop sucks, I would never want to use it full time let alone support it (note that I used to be a full time Linux desktop user, I left after KDE 4 came about). Linus Tech Tips is running a series on desktop Linux and they are hitting the hammer on the nail where exactly all the pain points are.

I really don't get the hate that Linux Desktop gets. When comparing Mac OS to Gnome the difference feels marginal (at least for normal users) these days - everything feels snappy, consistent and looks nice. What exactly are the pain points?

Hmm, I use Ubuntu for casual non-work stuff on a couple of old laptops, and it's totally fine for that, but the few times I have tried to do work things start to get a little less fine. Even with a clipboard manager, copy and paste is less reliable than on macOS, keyboard shortcuts (and ability to tweak them per-program or OS-wide) are clunkier or just not possible. Of course, I feel the same way when I have to use Windows for anything other than games...

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

#277

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

ruph123 wrote: post #269
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 always wondered why they had to create their own fork. I had the feeling that this is unecessary maintenance work that they took on and a "not invented here" philosophy. Why not just use one of the avaible distros or why not even make a deal with SUSE (a bavarian company) to have a subscription model with support directly from experienced distro makers? Surely they could've made sure that all important features and…

> I always wondered why they had to create their own fork. I had the feeling that this is unecessary maintenance work that they took on and a "not invented here" philosophy.

For the same reason there are hundreds of forks and counting: it is difficult to get the environment you want without rebuilding everything from scratch, and once you do that you have to maintain it.

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

#278

Post by Nohortax »

I hope other countries will do it. I have some doubts about Belgium which is not really great to do right choices. Also I feel like Germany is often ahead its neighbors. Anyway, that's good to read !

Edit : LibrOffice is not really complicated but Linux requires some knowledge to be well used. Will people have a training course to survive on Linux ?

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

#279

Post by md8z »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #197
md8z wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Come on now, that is a pretty big stretch. And it's not even true, coreutils and glibc implement a lot of SysV and BSD compatibility. My point here is that GNU as an operating system is dead. People can make up some new goals for it but it seems obvious that the original goals have mostly been a failure. Even if you disregard Hurd and count the "FSF approved" Linux distributions, few people actually use those because most of them are just ordinary Linux distributions but with the only major change being that some proprietary packages and drivers are removed. Is that really adding value to the software ecosystem? I personally wouldn't recommend those to anyone beyond hardcore GNU nerds, for most people I'd still say just use Ubuntu.

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

#280

Post by ploxiln »

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…

Yeah, in my experience, with big orgs, it's like:

Windows has bugs that don't get fixed: haha, computers, what can you do, eh, haha

Linus has bugs which can get fixed: see, nobody can use this thing!

I kinda get it though, people prefer to have the "industry-standard bugs", it means it's not their fault, they can explain it easily to anyone they have to work with ...

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