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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

#291

Post by josefx »

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…

They went with an Debian/Ubuntu based fork due to popularity.

>if Red Hat gets it

If your goal is to run a proprietary OS you might as well stay with Windows. No reason to endorse outdated IBM enterprise crapware after they killed the only compatible distro that didn't require paying the IBM tax to test and develop software for it.

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

#292

Post by trulyme »

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…

Interesting how our experience with Linux is exactly the opposite. I love the fact that once I set it up, it simply works (Ubuntu). Flawless updates. No changes, no endless forced updates + restarts, no ads, no tracking, and most of all, capable terminals (no, git bash and wsl on Windows can't compete). I am saying that from a position of someone who is on Linux for 15 years now and works on Windows at $JOB when requested. Windows XP weren't even that bad, but Win10... awful.

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

#293

Post by mistrial9 »

nodejs_rulez_1 wrote: post #249
gentleman11 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

> If they put half the money they spent on licensing into paying people to improve the foss packages... Like in a legally-binding contract way or some hippie way hoping for the best?

great to see the "H-word" used as a slur, again (great for my own sense of antagonistic prejuidice being alive and well that is).

for a more constructive reinforcement of what a "hippy way" might be, in business and government:

anti-rascist, that is actively inviting and communicating with others socially; inclusive generally; valuing cooperation; building and valuing talent for its own sake; bringing in arts to shared spaces; generally vegetarian; health proactive; tolerance of personal drug use including tobacco; deeply environmentalist; generally opposed to military-style administration; generally opposed to authoritarian governments; use of non-monetary trade goods; valuing education and definitely advanced education.

are these things "fail" in City Administration as the parent comment implies ? not necessarily

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

#294

Post by dmitriid »

pasabagi wrote: post #284
GravitasFailure wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you call the manufacturer when you actually need their specific expertise, and when they're your best option. You're not obligated to. That depends entirely on the terms of your lease and service agreements. For high end equipment, like the CNC systems at my work, you may not even be given the option to purchase them, and they're so specialized you probably won't have someone that can competently work on them even…

I guess specialized equipment isn't really the analogue for most software. Most software is a bit like a hammer - a generic tool with worldwide application. I can see the closed-source approach working for really complicated subdomains (like a geometrical constraint solver) where you really can't fix it unless you're immersed in the relevant maths - but that's just not what most software is, or where most bugs lie. A…

> Another thing is, how many of the machines in any given factory are that specialized?

As always: it depends. An automotive factory may have highly computerized systems in the hundreds for a dozen or so employees.

Or you may have mostly simple machines entirely serviceable by the factory personnel.

And anything in between.

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

#295

Post by trulyme »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #287
pessimizer wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Because there are only two ways to get up to date software on Linux: 1) run a bleeding edge distro, 2) compile from source. Neither of these are good options.

What does "up to date" even mean in this context? It's not like there is a new version of Kmail every day. Why do you care if your version is a bit older?

That said, the exception is a browser, where I would prefer to use the upstream version for security reasons.

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

#296

Post by 908B64B197 »

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…

> collaboratively investing so that everyone benefits and Europe can build its own Tech industry and have some independence from the US.

So you'll end-up having devs on the payroll instead of license fees.

Also, you'll need to compete with the US for the best devs to work on your platform now that you are effectively building a competitor.

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

#297

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

trulyme wrote: post #295
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there are only two ways to get up to date software on Linux: 1) run a bleeding edge distro, 2) compile from source. Neither of these are good options.

What does "up to date" even mean in this context? It's not like there is a new version of Kmail every day. Why do you care if your version is a bit older? That said, the exception is a browser, where I would prefer to use the upstream version for security reasons.

> What does "up to date" even mean in this context? It's not like there is a new version of Kmail every day. Why do you care if your version is a bit older?

Honestly, anything that a developer has pushed. Sometimes I want an SVN build of DOSBox or need a bleeding edge feature of some tool I use all the time. On Windows, this is simply a matter of downloading a binary, but by and large Linux software doesn't work that way. Distros expect that you will use whatever version of a package they have seen fit to grace you with, or you compile from source like it is 1975.

It is not unreasonable or unrealistic to ask for a stable platform upon which one can run bleeding edge applications, yet this remains painful on Linux Desktop.

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

#298

Post by 908B64B197 »

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 suspect the reason for that is nobody ever tried a Linux deployment as big as that, so the tooling to manage it simply didn't exist.

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

#299

Post by nomel »

freeflight wrote: post #185
pitaj wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether it's a disaster or not it's subjective. I think you'll find many people prefer how it is now, including the useful new features like xlookup. Either way, it's what people are used to, and changing everyone's well established memory will be very difficult and expensive.

> Either way, it's what people are used to The only reason people are used to it is because MS has spend decades, and plenty of money, getting their foot into pretty much every IT education of relevance. Free student/teacher versions are just one example of that, which then leads to MS products being everywhere, and consequently MS products are what most people get taught on in most educational settings. This doesn't…

> The only reason people are used to it is because MS has spend decades, and plenty of money, getting their foot into pretty much every IT education of relevance.

This is the same argument that people have used for the last 20 years of "this year is the year for Linux on the Desktop!". I don't think it was true then or now. People that use Linux consciously, or unconsciously, build/buy systems that work with Linux. I've tried many times in the past but gave up and moved to OS X after getting tired of fiddling with wifi, sleep/wake, trackpad, graphics switching, and battery life problems. If I'm going to buy a system for an OS, I might as well optimize the integration by buying an integrated system/OS. I suppose you could claim those are the fault of MS popularity, but I claim it's the result of volunteers not having financial incentive to add support for the random hardware that was in my computer.

I was used to Windows, but I'm not using Linux only because I didn't buy a system for it.

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

#300

Post by tmalsburg2 »

throwaway123x2 wrote: post #12

MS Office was so much more functional and nicer to use than libreoffice when I last checked.

What did your check consist of? I’m asking because I know people who’ve been using both Word and LibreOffice for many years to write huge amounts of technical documentation and their experience is that LibreOffice is much more reliable with longer and more complex documents. When a certain document size or complexity is reached, Word apparently starts to behave erratically and even crashes occasionally. They’d prefer LibreOffice any day but some customers require Word.
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