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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

#341

Post by AtomicOrbital »

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 have been using linux for decades without any need to revert to Microsoft windows ... No excuses hold water on any org to continue to cowtow to "requiring Microsoft windows"

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

#342

Post by freeflight »

nomel wrote: post #299
freeflight wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I don't think it was true then or now.

It was true back then and remains true to this day even with smartdevices taking over and slowly pushing desktops out of the educaton sector.

Anybody who grew up since the 80s and had some kind of "IT related" education in school, most likely got said education on MS systems with MS software.

In Germany having "MS office knowledge" is considered the absolute basic for any office/admin job no matter how unqualified. People expect you to know your way around Word, Excel and Powerpoint because that's the software that's taught in schools and forced occupational trainings even at the lowest levels.

At the higher levels you often gonna need a long list MS training certifications to even be considered taken seriously.

It's particularly the entrenchment in the education sector that makes it near impossible to change anything about this. People are getting "primed" on MS in school like children are getting primed into religions by their parents; There is pretty much no choice involved for them.

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

#343

Post by GekkePrutser »

slownews45 wrote: post #272
GekkePrutser wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 v…

AWS for us is even more locked down. Nobody gets access to that. Unless they sign up with their own account and pay for it themselves perhaps?

But the idea is of course that the applications needed for work are all available in the company software catalog. When we locked this down we did extensive pilots.

As an EU company we have to certify each tool for privacy anyway and we can't allow unvalidated tools (and even worse: cloud services) for this reason. The fines are huge and we have a responsibility to our customers.

Personal machines are explicitly forbidden and not allowed on the network using 802.1x.

The admin rights prevent people from bypassing security controls. Such as disabling the proxy which checks for forbidden services for which we don't have a data processing agreement, like Dropbox.

I know it's not easy. But letting people do what they please is causing the kinds of data leaks we're seeing in the media almost every day.

I agree some things are a step too far and inevitably drive people into shadow IT but admin rights are pretty low hanging fruit these days.

And really, since we did this the company is still running :)

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

#344

Post by throwawaymanbot »

zoomablemind wrote: post #259
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 REALLY hope the LibreOffice transition goes well. 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 wi…

I have never experienced this. You are making it sound like it happens to like 99/100 users. So I’m saying your story is BS.

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

#345

Post by GekkePrutser »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #283
GekkePrutser wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience I would say that limiting users in this way, unless they have a very standardized workflow and will never be expected to deviate from it, is a terrible idea. Most of the risks you're actually afraid of don't need local admin to do significant damage. Locking people out of their local OS just protects the local OS (which is trivially reimaged), not their documents, and not the resources they have acce…

The risk for us is more one of uncertified tools. People using stuff like Dropbox which we don't have a data processing agreement with. Or stuff like TeamViewer.

Locking down admin rights is not just to lock down the OS but to ensure security restrictions aren't easily circumvented.

For the files we use AIP which protects against copying. You can't open those in a personal machine for example.

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

#346

Post by throwawaymanbot »

mfer wrote: post #172
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…

> "users can't install software themselves" This is one example of a real problem. Linux desktops are great for professional Linux people and hard core enthusiasts. Once you try to take them out to non-technical people trying to do everyday tasks it's much harder. I've driven numerous distros and keep running into UX problems masses will run into. How do we get distros that can be good daily drivers for the masses? H…

This is a fake story. The UI is not broken. Especially in the last 5-8 years. Which MS dept do you work for???

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

#347

Post by firexcy »

toss1 wrote: post #135
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…

>>LibreOffice lacks no features I would remotely consider using. Yup. I use it all the time just fine, and set the default format to .XLS and .DOC (not the X versions which are bogus MS bastardizations of XML anyway) and I've had no interchange problems. Over the last decade or so, I occasionally see some Excel feature that might be switch-over-worthy, but then the whole MS setup is so much of a hassle I don't bother…

> set the default format to .XLS and .DOC (not the X versions which are bogus MS bastardizations of XML anyway)

I don't like the proprietary nature of OOXML formats either, but why are the older formats like .xls and .doc better than them? At least I can unzip a .docx file to extract the media and get the text and formatting in a machine-readable structure, all without the help of an office suite at all.

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

#348

Post by lostgame »

Kjeldahl wrote: post #106

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…

Huh? Even on my PowerPC Macs it’s usually been pretty smooth?

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

#349

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

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 remember in mid-late 2000s, I was surprised to see Linux and Libre tools everywhere in Govt. offices in India e.g.In Public transport systems.

Which might explain why India supposedly had the largest Linux user base[1] then(Might still hold true[2]).

Then Bill Gates made a deal with the Govt, Everything became Windows. Nadella made a even bigger deal, Everything became Azure.

P.S. Certain states in India e.g. Kerala could still be using FOSS in Govt. officers, but I'm not certain.

[1] https://www.pingdom.com/blog/linux-popularity-across-the-glo...

[2] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/india

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

#350

Post by periheli0n »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #229
periheli0n wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

Salaries are part of the problem; there is a very rigid salary structure in Germany's civil service. The salary band in which programmers would fall is OK but not overly attractive. There is very little headroom to pay talented developers a salary that could compete with what they get elsewhere.
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