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?
No fractional scrolling. No tolerable (color) templates for graphs.
German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice
261–270 of 402 posts
Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't seen a particular productivity boost anywhere from regular office + sharepoint and office365. I also haven't noted a productivity difference between sharepoint (which office 365 really is) and other content management platforms. Ironically the only place where office 365 offered a boost is in the linux world really. You don't even need a local suite office to open msoffice documents.
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.
and yet thats only ever brought up when defending windows despite the fact that MS is cauing this kind o issues every 3-5 years.
So how is it that people can go from XP->vista->10->11 and not break the bank on retraining or from windows to MacOS but somehow anything else is impossible.
This is not an logically coherent argument against linux it's basically admins being scared of having their decades of investment into wintel ecosystem devalued.
The problem is that because your applications is windows specific your not comparing windows to linux your comparing whatever legacy mess of custom applications that people use to get their job done to whatever your replacing you win32/winforms legacy stuff with(which is something you have to do anyway as that platform is dying).
Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice
#263I haven't really used a WYSIWYG word processor in almost a decade (I like Pandoc), so these are old memories, but I remember feeling like the interface to OpenOffice (before it was split into LibreOffice) was more intuitive than MS Word 2007 and beyond. I feel like they doubled down on 90's-era MS Word-style interface, which I personally have just found to be extremely intuitive and easy to work with.
That said, the equation editor for LibreOffice and OpenOffice utterly sucks. This bizarre, quasi-TeX, quais-WYSIWYG interface is extremely unintuitive and hard to work with. The equations themselves generally render fine, but back when I used OpenOffice on Windows I purchased a copy of MathType and would OLE equations in. This didn't work on Linux, which is why I stopped using LibreOffice.
Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice
#264The 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.
I use O365 all day across two orgs and have done for about 5 years. Never had a problem. Not once!
Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice
#265I haven't really used a WYSIWYG word processor in almost a decade (I like Pandoc), so these are old memories, but I remember feeling like the interface to OpenOffice (before it was split into LibreOffice) was more intuitive than MS Word 2007 and beyond. I feel like they doubled down on 90's-era MS Word-style interface, which I personally have just found to be extremely intuitive and easy to work with. That said, the…
The good news is that most state workers probably don't need advanced features like an equation editor, so hopefully this transition won't be super painful. Seems like it would be rough on academics though.
Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Rubber Stamps belong in a museum. Along with Fax machines. And the people still insisting on using those for "security reasons". Common practice in Germany is to receive an email with a pdf, print it, sign it (or stamp) it, and then put it in the post. This both stupid and slow. German bureaucracy is still paper driven. Having lived in other countries with more or less full digital access to all the stuff Ge…
Past week I travelled to London by train. I tried to book this trip a couple of months in advance from Deutsche Bahn website, but only got obscure error messages when finalizing the booking(*). So I tried the french SNCF app and the booking was done in a couple of minutes, all tickets conveniently in the app - expect for the German leg of the travel. SNCF sent me a Deutsche Bahn paper ticket via snail mail. (*) Tried…
Try trainline.com next time, there’s many official DB resellers if you run into issues with their site.
Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>> her office uses Ubuntu and LibreOffice >> remote jobs for developers? > All in-office I'm afraid. The irony of using LibreOffice.
Why? What's ironic about this?
I am guessing GP means:
Libre -> Free -> Freedom to choose -> Freedom to choose your office.
Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice
#268Mixed feelings on this, but can we please appreciate the irony that this is happening just days after XZ Utils.
To be fair, xz didn't hit, xz flopped. The issue was detected before it could do much/any damage.
As far as I'm concerned it's a point in favor of OSS, rather than against it. How many such attacks in closed-source programs goes undetected?
Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair in certain cases the cost might be very high and considerably higher than whatever the license/subscription fees paid to MS are. e.g. Libre Office doesn’t really have a drop-in replacement for Excel (for non trivial use cases. To be fair it still might be sufficient for the majority of users, but that would mean that some proportion of your workforce has to stay on Excel/Office which kind of beats the whol…
Vendor lockin is no excuse leaking PI to MS though. You could buy some Office 2003 CD and use Excel locally.
Uh using an out of date and unsupported Excel version is a really bad idea. Lots of security vulnerabilities around VB scripting/macros which gives you the very real risk of being compromised by a malicious spreadsheet.
Better to just switch where you can and invest resources into improving FOSS offerings to handle the use cases it currently can’t.
Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice
#270Since 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
A bit dated graphically, but I wouldn't say low quality... a graphic designer worked on the first three - the last two are the creation of a "webmaster".