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German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

blog.documentfoundation.org

141–150 of 402 posts

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#141
post #126

Open source is great, but LibreOffice is a nightmare to use when you want to any actual work. I feel for the German bureaucrats.

What issues for example?

Did they fix the unusable slow rendering on retina Macs yet? Couldn't even normally scroll through a blank document last time I tried...

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#142

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.

This is definitely new for me as a dutch person, would you care to say which company? Seems like a cool company

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux was successful before corporate backing from just a handful of volunteers. If it was a failing product, corporations wouldn't have chosen it to develop on. It has been greatly enhanced by corporate contributions, but it would have gotten there without them too, albeit much slower. I do agree though that MS products will likely play hard and fast with the compatibility game in order to exhaust local government w…

Linux started receiving corporate backing within a few years of it being released. Red Hat played a huge role in providing support and someone to turn to when something went wrong. > but it would have gotten there without them too, albeit much slower No, it wouldn't have. There is no way that a bunch of volunteers in their spare time could achieve the same results, what took many full-time employees and contributions…

I counter these assertions by simply saying the opposite with exactly the same authority supported by exactly as many citations.

Even the bsds, which allow companies to steal without giving back, have kept essentially apace in any important ways with a microscopic fraction on Linux's individual or corporate investment, and without Linux's copyleft to ensure all developments go back upstream.

Both of these comments were nothing more than religious faith opinion.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#144
post #114
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Most schools too. Microsoft has incredible political power here.

Even after CISA's review of the summer 2023 Microsoft Exchange online intrusion? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39929246

There's stories like this for every big vendor. This rarely has any impact.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#146
post #114
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Most schools too. Microsoft has incredible political power here.

Even after CISA's review of the summer 2023 Microsoft Exchange online intrusion? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39929246

The phrase is, "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft." It's descended from the same phrase, applied to IBM, when they were the power.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#147
post #37

Genuine question, is there any other professional field in the world where people work for free like how Software Engineers work in open source?

Volunteer firefighters.

In Britain they are paid as well. They get a yearly retainer of ~£6k for being on 5 min standby and are also paid per call out.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#148
post #110

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…

Linux Mint is practically identical to Windows 7/10 in terms of basic interaction. Most people learn only a few workflows and software and do not tinker with the OS. When my SO moved to MacOS, the only thing she asked about was how to launch apps and do things like copy-paste. Everything else is still how I configured it when the computer came. Just like you don’t tinker with container images, people will be fine with Linux GUI if everything they need is there.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#149

Genuine question, is there any other professional field in the world where people work for free like how Software Engineers work in open source?

Collaborative writing (1), movie making (2), terrorist hunting (3), and volunteer forum moderation (4), are all things. Fanfiction (5) is also written for free.

All of these have been, in the past, variyng degrees of professional.

1. https://www.makeuseof.com/collaborative-fiction-sites-improv...

2. Iron Sky (2012), Moon (2009), Norwegian Ninja (2010) all involved free collaboration, to varying degrees.

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OR6epSP_Xlw

4. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3491102.3517628

5. http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M...

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#150
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

openstack
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