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German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

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Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#251
post #42

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

To be fair, there are not many professions that a single individual can make so much impact as Software Engineering. People say 10x Software Engineer, rarely 10x Electrical Engineer.

That's not how people use 10x (which I think is a silly article of marketing at best or a pretend metric people like to claim as some sort of totem of achievement), usually it means someone 10x more productive(???) than a supposed 1x software engineer.

In that case if we applied the same make believe as we do with software, then sure a 10x electrical could exist, just think of what you think an avg electrical engineer does and 10x it, boom.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#252

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.

Do you know, if that company offers remote jobs for developers? And what company is that?

All in-office I'm afraid.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#253
post #29

The germans have been tinkering with policies mandating non-cloud dependent products for a while wondering if this is a start of it actually getting implemented on a large scale or if the delay attempts will remain successful elsewhere across the region. If this is a start of an actual migration away from cloud dependence, it's a matter of time before windows(which is as cloud dependent as office those days for enter…

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.

> 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.

While there might be issues with Office 365's reliability (I don't know, I use Google Docs), the online collaborative capabilities is a fantastic tradeoff. Mailing individual files amongst a group of collaborators impede productivity (even though it has other benefits).

You could make the argument that cloud solutions are not a prerequisite for collaborative tools like Office 365 or Google Docs, but desktop peer-to-peer systems like those that Groove Networks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groove_Networks) tried to create did not take off.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#254
post #165
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What issues for example?

I'm not sure if this still current, but a few years ago I switched from LibreOffice to MS Office because Calc was unbearably slow. I wasn't doing anything crazy, but also not trivial: 6 or 7 sheets, with a bunch of formulas with never more than about 500 cells filled (10 columns, 50 lines), and on most sheets a lot less. Excel blazes through it. I feel it was a very good decision, even though I'm a miser.

Profiling and fixing Calc perf issues happens all the time, so do file reports: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/BugReport

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know, if that company offers remote jobs for developers? And what company is that?

All in-office I'm afraid.

>>> her office uses Ubuntu and LibreOffice

>> remote jobs for developers?

> All in-office I'm afraid.

The irony of using LibreOffice.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#256
post #82
post #44

China started the process of switching from x86 to own architecture (loong-something if I recall correctly). Where Microsoft is essentially not present. I think they use Microsoft products a lot like any other governments. So we might see a big switch to libreoffice soon

China gov is already on a mainly Linux stack https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kylin_(operating_system) Unsure what office tools they use though

Chinese started WPS Office (called Kingsoft before) in 1989. Since end of 90s it is state favored and in 2011 received major grand. My wild guess is that they have much more incentive to use this rather than some broken open source Java thingie which is generally much slower than WPS.

This package is 36 years old and very often overlooked by analysts dunno why. At time of writing there isn’t a single mention of this in the comments… very weird?!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WPS_Office

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#257

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.

It's an outlier in Germany as well. The municipal government in Munich tried to migrate to OSS around ~2004, but had to roll back after a couple of years. Most municipalities and government agencies would _like_ to utilize more OSS, but don't really have any concrete idea of how to proceed.

This was probably completely, utterly unrelated to the migration of the german Microsoft HQ to Munich at that time and there was no corruption involved at all.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#258

The germans have been tinkering with policies mandating non-cloud dependent products for a while wondering if this is a start of it actually getting implemented on a large scale or if the delay attempts will remain successful elsewhere across the region. If this is a start of an actual migration away from cloud dependence, it's a matter of time before windows(which is as cloud dependent as office those days for enter…

I figured the stated move to open source was a bluff to get a lower license cost.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#260

The germans have been tinkering with policies mandating non-cloud dependent products for a while wondering if this is a start of it actually getting implemented on a large scale or if the delay attempts will remain successful elsewhere across the region. If this is a start of an actual migration away from cloud dependence, it's a matter of time before windows(which is as cloud dependent as office those days for enter…

Do the americans exclusively use MS Office in government computers?

America is a very big place with federal, state, city standards. I'm not sure it is possible to say "exclusively" about anything.

That said, I've been in the IT world for 3 decades and I haven't worked for/with a government agency that used anything other than MS Office since the WordPerfect and Lotus 123 days.

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