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German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

blog.documentfoundation.org

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Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#131

Post by ChicagoDave »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #128
RalfWausE wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this would be the case: Thank you for creating a job opportunity for more open minded people ;-)

I have nothing against Linux or libreoffice. I just think forcing thousands of workers to drastically alter their work environment is going to be traumatic and I’ll lay odds that in 12 months they switch back or to a hybrid model.

Or what’s just as likely, workers will use personal Windows computers to do their work and shuffle things onto their work computers as needed. People don’t like change.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#132

Post by lyu07282 »

jorvi wrote: post #31
monospaced wrote: post #3

The will likely be using Phoenix: https://www.dataport.de/about-phoenix/ The German government developed a fully free and open source solution that is quite similar (consisting of Nextcloud, jitsi, Collabora etc.) and can be deployed using Kubernetes: https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk

It’s kind of a bummer that there’s a bunch of these separate OSS initiatives in Spain, France, Germany and a few other countries.. Instead of everyone rolling their own subvariant of Nextcloud, Matrix, LibreOffice etc, imagine if there was an EU mandate set up and some serious money was budgeted to it. You’d get a triple multiplier of more budget, less duplication of effort, and a self-reinforcing cycle where more us…

> imagine if there was an EU mandate set up and some serious money was budgeted to it.

We saw what that looks like already. "Gaia-X" it was a huge clusterfuck and burned to the ground before it even began.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#133

Post by mattalex »

sgift wrote: post #99
Havoc wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah last time with Munich they moved back to MS after MS just so happened to move their HQ to that state. Microsoft is clearly keen to avoid this becoming a thing. If governments can shift successfully then so can businesses https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-germany-moves-into-a-new-h...

The link is just about a move from one part of Munich to another (MS German HQ has always been in Munich). From what I remember it was more that we had a coalition with the CSU for four years and unsurprisingly, the moment conservatives were part of the cities government all went back to "help the companies". (MS had tried to pressure against the move from the start, but wasn't really successful in the first years)

The problem was mostly that the only guy that was really backing the project (Christian Ude, SPD), was replaced with his successor (Dieter Reiter, SPD) who just didn't have the drive necessary to maintain the project.

The entire design of "LiMux" was doomed from the start: it was a highly customized version of Ubuntu that was only used in Munich (not even throughout the entire state). That made everything ridiculously expensive since the actual advantages of building on an open source solution was never realized. That is combined with the fact that "open source" and "cost savings" were used interchangeably when in reality the budget for Windows should have been pre-allocated into development, rather than cut.

The entire project was half-assed to begin with, which basically meant that Windows and Linux had to coexist since many crucial tools were never ported to Linux.

The "Microsoft killed it" story sounds realistic, but the truth is the much more boring incompetence in execution.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#134

Post by diggan »

CalRobert wrote: post #117

My wife just started a new job in the Netherlands and I was super excited to hear that her office uses Ubuntu and LibreOffice for all their PC's. She wasn't interviewing for a tech job but apparently her being reasonably familiar with both was helpful at her interview (all those years of Raspberry Pis around the house paid off!) Is this normal? It certainly would be an outlier back in the US.

Don't know specifically about Europe-wide or Netherlands specific, but it's not unheard of in various European countries.

As an example, the city government of Barcelona started to migrate things away from proprietary systems back in 2017. First applications and later the OS itself. Not sure what the progress of that is though. Old article about it: https://elpais.com/ccaa/2017/12/01/catalunya/1512145439_1325...

Similar moves been done in various agencies and entities in France and Germany as well.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#135

Post by rad_gruchalski »

guappa wrote: post #77
Rinzler89 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how do you do that? You think EU companies will stop buying Office 365 subscriptions to reduce their dependency on the US? Companies buy Office 365 subscriptions so they can focus on their main business and don't want to think about their office solution and want something that JustWorks which is already compatible with what everyone else uses. They have a business to run and money to makes, so spending extra tim…

You just do it like USA does: if you want to do business with the public sector, you must not rely on a foreign cloud.

What are the alternatives. Like, really. I get it: Hetzner and OVH exist. But what are the alternatives to AWS, GCP, Azure?

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#137

Post by schleck8 »

Since it's linked at the bottom, I find it really funny how different the German states' websites are in quality.

There is good ones like

https://www.schleswig-holstein.de

https://www.baden-wuerttemberg.de

https://hessen.de

And then there is sites like this

https://www.sachsen-anhalt.de

https://www.sachsen.de

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#139

Post by Stranger43 »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #56
Stranger43 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drive here is to reduce dependencies to locations the state itself have jurisdiction over i.e. things that can be controlled. It's essentially to avoid having the states data taken hostage when the slowly brewing conflict between America's lack of respect for it's foreign partners data protection regulation and the EU's very popular trend towards less and less tolerance for corporate data abuse comes to an head a…

And how do you do that? You think EU companies will stop buying Office 365 subscriptions to reduce their dependency on the US? Companies buy Office 365 subscriptions so they can focus on their main business and don't want to think about their office solution and want something that JustWorks which is already compatible with what everyone else uses. They have a business to run and money to makes, so spending extra tim…

If the alternative is not getting the security certifications required to operate legally in the sectors they depend on for revenue what alternative does an organization really have to seeking/implementation solutions in sync with the mandated regulations.

And this is not an private company whose demise is insignificant to the society at large(as all companies must be in an functional capitalist economy) but the government itself instituting policies to protect itself from dependence on a single foreign company.

And being told by an court to get off the o365 cloud is not an theoretical prospect for an European governmental organization as the EU commission found out about a month ago(https://www.edps.europa.eu/press-publications/press-news/pre...).

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#140

Post by doubled112 »

Hamuko wrote: post #110
Stranger43 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably lower then people think once the applications are identical across the two platform. and if Linux turns too complex there is always macos. The big push is going to be getting rid of old excel and word macro's and replace sharepoint/onedrive with something else as data migrations are newer as simple in reality as they look in theory.

> and if Linux turns too complex there is always macos I have witnessed in person people switching from Windows to macOS have issues adapting to a different operating system and its concepts, like the fact that pressing the X button in the top-left corner doesn't close the application. Therefore I am rather skeptical that you can just throw some Linux distro at a bunch of novice computer users without large amounts o…

Your example feels like shots fired because the programs running without windows concept still confuses me. It just doesn't compute.

I'm a sysadmin and have been using Macs on and off since System 7, Windows since 95, and probably 10000 Linux distros/DE combos. Just as a point of reference.

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