German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice • Hacker News Board

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#281

Post by SoftTalker » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 2:52 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #218

Stranger43 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who split his time 50/50 between AWS and vmware based instances, i cant really think of anything we run in AWS that is not eventually supposed to go back on prem when we have stabilized the specification and lifecycle expectations. And who could not have gone in on prem if we had been willing to spend capex upfront(which would likely had led to lower lifecycle costs). The last time this debate came along m…

> i cant really think of anything we run in AWS that is not eventually supposed to go back on prem Hod do you handle multi-DC, multi-AZ resilience? What are you using instead of IAM policies that cover every resource? (Asking unironically, would just like to know. I worked at cloud-centric companies for last 15 years or so.)

Many users don't need multi-DC, multi-AZ resilience. Having a good (and tested) DR plan might be enough.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#282

Post by underlipton » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 2:52 PM UTC

mglz wrote: post #126

moolcool wrote: post #125

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?

I once had a bug that wiped a handful of documents. Spent hours writing them, opened them a few months later and they were blank. In some cases, it replaces all of the characters with #s. It's something to do with the autosave feature, I believe.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#283

Post by instagib » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 2:54 PM UTC

Libre office excel replacement doesn’t handle vba well and many programs break.

Idk how many macros they are utilizing with vba but would find out quickly switching to libre.

Then there is Microsoft project which has no libre office clone. Those are just two examples and I’m sure there are more nuanced ones.

I get it, Microsoft is slowly getting away from local copies but this is the same news every contract cycle of going to Linux or whatever bullshit they say they will do but IT knows it will turn into a tire fire.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#284

Post by tiahura » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 2:55 PM UTC

jhickok wrote: post #231

xyst wrote: post #230

The licensing costs associated with MS products is stupid high. In analyzing the budget for a county, across all departments the line item for MS was ~$322K for just a 3 month span (o365??). It was the top line item for the quarter, beating out health insurance line related line items.

Seems unlikely that an M365 license that tops our around 50 dollars per month would be more expensive than health insurance.

Tops out at with Teams and AI. I believe office 365 + exchange is $20.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#285

Post by fbn79 » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 2:58 PM UTC

diggan wrote: post #134

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... Simi…

Another article about migration to linux after 2019 https://computerhoy.com/noticias/software/barcelona-cambiara... and a Gemini sumup https://g.co/gemini/share/74fe50828fa1

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#286

Post by jraph » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 2:59 PM UTC

cladopa wrote: post #4

They already did that before until Microsoft offered them new conditions and they went back to MS. So take all those "digital sovereignity" with a grain of salt. It usually means: "We want you to lower your fees".

> So take all those "digital sovereignty" with a grain of salt

Actually, there's actual money flowing from Germany to open source companies as we speak to build digital sovereign solutions (like openDesk [1]), so it's more than "We want you to lower your fees".

Real concerns have more and more motivated this kind of things in recent years.

[1] https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk/info/-/blob/main/REA...

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#287

Post by digging » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 3:02 PM UTC

ctrw wrote: post #91

rchaud wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like in the days long last we used to email .doc files to each other? I doubt it How long ago are we talking? I was sharing files with coworkers on a shared network drive 20 years ago. I could send files via IM as well back then.

Listening to people talk about the 00s like we barely invented fire is something else. There's been very little new in computing since the arpanet was invented. The cloud is someone's mainframe and we moved away from those for the same reason why government wants to leave the cloud.

> There's been very little new in computing since the arpanet was invented.

Now there's a hot take!

I suppose for this assertion to work, you'd have to consider Arpanet orders-of-magnitude more sophisticated an advancement than modern gaming, blockchain, VR, LLMs with fully integrated real-time image processing... all just minor increments?

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#288

Post by tombert » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 3:06 PM UTC

kevingadd wrote: post #265

tombert wrote: post #263

I 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.

It's the main reason my dad (who isn't an academic but does work on R&D in the aerospace industry) won't touch LibreOffice. He's constantly bothering people to see if he can use one of their Office licenses because he hates the LibreOffice equation editor.

My handwriting is completely illegible, even to myself most of the time, so ever since I was a teenager I would type out all my homework, including math homework, so I've developed pretty strong opinions on math formatting. I've gotten good enough with TeX that I don't really have anything I can't easily do, but my dad has, for reasons kind of unknown to me, has had a strong aversion to learning LaTeX, despite the fact that I have offered dozens of times to teach him, so he just sticks with MS Office.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#289

Post by pydry » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 3:07 PM UTC

ffgjgf1 wrote: post #220

pydry wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

To be equally fair, in certain cases the non-licensing costs of Microsoft software are higher than the FOSS equivalent.

In fact, I'd argue that in some cases these are higher. A good example of this is that piece of shit that is Microsoft Teams - both the horrid security flaws and the ways it keeps breaking. I've used FOSS equivalents and they have a smaller attack surface and are more reliable.

They also play all sorts of user-hostile tricks that make vendor lock in possible, and this often has an underappreciated impact on delivery.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#290

Post by bee_rider » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 3:13 PM UTC

panzi wrote: post #119

shrubble wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean emailing .doc files around to co-workers, like what happened yesterday?

Nowadays they mail .docx around, haven't seen a .doc in a long time. I'm a software dev on Linux and haven't even LibreOffice installed. I tell the sender to please send it to me as .pdf. I write docs in markdown on GitHub (the company I work for uses GitHub, make of it what you will).

I like PDFs when I trust them, but I’m always a bit wary receiving them from random people. Don’t they support embedded scripting?

I’d like a format that is like PDF, but markup only.