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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

#171

Post by mariusor »

vasco wrote: post #163
jorvi wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

State mandated projects give you things like the Lidl AWS "alternative" who's pricing page is a downloadable PDF.

Do you have a specific critique of the StackIt cloud that makes you put "alternative" in quotes? Do share if that's the case.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#172

Post by openrisk »

A question mark before open source productivity tools find mass adoption is their ability to integrate ML/AI tools.

The current hype notwithstanding, it is likely that the next generation productivity suite (from spreadsheets to document editors etc) will support important algorithmically augmented workflows and non-technical users will expect them to be available. Libreoffice and friends must have a forward looking narrative to remain relevant.

Proprietary cloud based solutions are already rolling in this direction but will always face the extra hurdles that sensitive data are accessible by third parties and essential functionality for business continuity relies on external actors.

But, so far at least, neither libreoffice (nor the linux desktop for that matter) seem to be particularly keen on moving to that next phase. Even while cutting edge open source machine learning and even competend LLM models are getting available in record time, the integration story is still non-existent.

The pendulum of client/server balance and thin versus thick clients is always swinging. With mobile and cloud it seems to have reached an extremum. Who knows where it lands next, maybe the "AI PC" that some hardware vendors already pitch will become a thing.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#173

Post by ChicagoDave »

prmoustache wrote: post #162
ChicagoDave wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most non-technical people have a pattern of work. They know how to do their job because it’s been repeated over years. This change will alter many of those patterns. Even the simplest things like text editor or using a command line will be disruptive. The support staff is going to be overwhelmed.

Why are you talking about using a command line or a text editor? How does it relate to the subject?

Switching from Windows to Linux Desktop?

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#174

Post by dubcanada »

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.

If you don't mind me asking, what type of job is it?

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#176

Post by ToucanLoucan »

zo1 wrote: post #166
daeros wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sane policy. Every time Office 365 is down I watch the maddening dash of IT workers who can't get anything done, it's amusing.

I live in a badly-maintained, "3rd world" country, and since we got office 365 maybe a half decade ago (probably more) it's been down once, for one afternoon. And that was due to what looks like an undersea cable sabotage. What kind of internet/IT department do you have where you have any sort of regular office outage?

Recently we had a Teams outage at work that wasn't AWFULLY disruptive, but the only reason that is is that we don't depend on 365 cloud services to get anything done. We use Slack for chat features and more casual calling services (non-meeting) though of course Teams managed to be down on a meeting-heavy day, and we ended up organizing Slack huddles to get around it.

The only real cloud service we use is OneDrive and the CEO is pushing us to get away from it because it has all kinds of strange problems with file permissions and we constantly have to call IT to unlock files.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#177

Post by croes »

trelane wrote: post #146
croes wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But the impact is deeper nowadays.

What was the worst that could happen when you bought IBM back then?

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#179

Post by prmoustache »

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.

I think most of the french gendarmerie has been using openoffice then libreoffice + thunderbird for 2 decades already. Initially on windows that have progressively replaced with linux over the years.

I've read 4 years ago that out of 85k desktop computers, only 8% where running windows 10, the rest was running ubuntu LTS.

I would say that being a branch of the french army, migration was easier.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#180

Post by pydry »

etiennebausson wrote: post #127
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…

If the entities you depends on for funding migrate from Words to LibreOffice, then yes, you will consider moving as well. The network effect may be mostly considered in regard to social media, but it is just as powerful when it come to tools and file format. Administrations moving en-mass to open-sourced software would ensure a significant chunk of companies would follow.

This is precisely why Microsoft freaked out when Germany last tried this. It led to them inventing this nebulous "TCO" concept wherein they massively overestimated the costs surrounding moving to FOSS in order to try and convince clueless managerial stakeholders to stick with them.
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