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German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

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Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#181
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Europe is poorer than ever Europe is richer than ever.

Wealth only matters in comparison to others, and Europe is poorer than ever compared to other regions.

> Wealth only matters in comparison to others

Ask someone who can't afford food, shelter, shoes, healthcare, education ...

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Office is much superior to any open source and even paid alternatives Bullshit. The only reason to use Microsoft Office is compatibility with Microsoft Office files. What improvements have been made in the last 10 years in Outlook and Word? Nothing. There are some new bugs that didn't exist before, but no advancements. That's what lack of competition gives you.

Objectively there have been an absolutely enormous number of "improvements" to MS office (including Outlook and Word) over the last decade. The biggest is probably cloud/simultaneous editing capabilities. See https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-life-hacks/sto... . Interestingly, there is a decreased emphasis on the file format- the opposite of your point. In addition to cloudy used on mobile devices, sharep…

The bar for Outlook was so abysmally low- and even today it is pretty much the IE6 of mail clients. But good news! With the New Outlook, it won't even be a mail client at all.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#183

I can remember the same or very similar news from Germany appearing every now and then for over a decade. This time I almost believe them as there seems to be no alternative to LibreOffice given the changes Microsoft introduced during the recent years - forcing everyone to log-in with their Microsoft account at best, also moving from a classic desktop app to a web app. Conservative users like me and probably German s…

The Office Apps still have desktop versions and they still work very well.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#184

I've tried LibreOffice, periodically over the years. The same thing always sends me back to MS Office. MS has really sweated the details of their UI in ways that can only be done by maintaining a huge army of coders. When I use LibreOffice, the lack of responsiveness is immediately noticeable, and actually makes the software physically laborious to use. I've also noticed something like a 10x or even 100x difference i…

> When I use LibreOffice, the lack of responsiveness is immediately noticeable, and actually makes the software physically laborious to use.

I say the same thing about Windows. Why is its UI so sluggish?

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#185

I can remember the same or very similar news from Germany appearing every now and then for over a decade. This time I almost believe them as there seems to be no alternative to LibreOffice given the changes Microsoft introduced during the recent years - forcing everyone to log-in with their Microsoft account at best, also moving from a classic desktop app to a web app. Conservative users like me and probably German s…

> I can remember the same or very similar news from Germany appearing every now and then for over a decade.

Yup I can remember (mainly via Slashdot) this being a thing going backwards and forwards for two decade or more. Back to the days of it being called StarOffice if I remember correctly.

Sometimes it seemed the city or state was just doing some elaborate license negotiation.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#186
post #56

Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office. I was helping an elderly relative who works as a translator and hasn’t touched a modern version of word in about 5 years. They had a new computer and I got an ms office sub for them. The poor person re-did about 4 hours of their work 3x because they couldn’t find the file MS Word had guara…

So many microcosms with tech. I'm always reminded here on HN how terrible Office is and why we don't just use Google Docs. I hold this same opinion personally. However I go to other communities (I think the last one I remember was some startup subreddit) and GSuite is being mocked and everyone is recommending Office and Teams as the obvious choice for starting your business. I assume it's just that we prefer the devi…

>and GSuite is being mocked and everyone is recommending Office and Teams as the obvious choice for starting your business.

These must be paid shills. While it's actually quite understandable why real people and businesses would want to use and recommend MS Office, no one in their right mind actually thinks Teams is the best video chat tool in the world. Any serious business uses Zoom, Slack, etc.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#188
post #5

> ...cites cost, security, and digital sovereignty... With the recent XZ Utils backdoor fiasco, I would really think twice with this decision. Might be worth sticking to MS for a little bit longer, who knows if the backdoor code has been reused somewhere else? Besides, wasnt it a MS employee who uncovered this backdoor?

Because the absolute amateur hour of Microsoft using null IV in cryptography (ZeroLogon) and telling you that "it's all fine trust me bro" certainly works better. Yeah. And this isn't the sole example of sheer incompetence from this company, we got like 4 decades of stupidity to go back to.

Also: https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-04/CSRB_Review...

> Microsoft’s decision not to correct, in a timely manner, its inaccurate public statements about this incident, including a corporate statement that Microsoft believed it had determined the likely root cause of the intrusion when in fact, *it still has not*

Anyone still using O365 is absolutely irresponsible.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#189

Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office. I was helping an elderly relative who works as a translator and hasn’t touched a modern version of word in about 5 years. They had a new computer and I got an ms office sub for them. The poor person re-did about 4 hours of their work 3x because they couldn’t find the file MS Word had guara…

Yeah these are reasons I had to set up a a VM for my dad while he finally went off Wordperfect 6 to LibreOffice for word docs.

It's been interesting to watch because he's happy to embrace better tech but hates dark patterns.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#190
post #39

Can LibreOffice on Linux deliver management solutions? Think of 1,000 workstations, a small to mid-sized network: you need software that automates installation, configuration, security, etc. It's not like at home: Even if everyone is in the same building, you can't manually install, configure, change configuration, upgrade, etc. 1,000 times (think about it; not only the time and quality issues, but you'd spend a tota…

Linux has multiple options for configuration management: Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Salt, Nix, etc. You can even write a quick loop on the shell of your choice and orchestrate your machines that way if only want to rely on stock software...

Yes. I should have framed the issue more carefully: Are they as efficient as Windows' Active Directory and Group Policy? It's a bit of a hard-to-define question, and not many people have the experience to answer it.

I've seen plenty of deployment and configuration management tools that definitely fit the definition - those are easy to make - but were inefficient for one reason or another; that's the hard part.

One major advantage of AD/GP is the market power of being the tools for the dominant corporate OS: Every application vendor who hopes to put a toe in the corporate market makes their product work with AD/GP, including GPOs (Group Policy Objects) that provide the settings to manage their product, makes sure they work sufficiently well (at least they have incentive to try!), and supports them. If they don't, then corporate IT usually won't give them the time of day - it's a job requirement; their 'resume' goes in the circular file. Given Linux server share, I could imagine some good tools there.

A secret of IT management - the difference between what even highly skilled hackers do at home, and IT administration - is that the time resource is highly constrained; it's the most valuable asset and you spend it very carefully. You don't have nearly the time to do everything you need to do; you certainly aren't spending it trying to make some application work with your Linux config management for purposes of - what? your FOSS hard/wide-on? what is the big ROI here for this major project that you're going to bring to the VP? - and do it over and over again for each application. It's not even a consideration.

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