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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

#201

Post by bruce511 »

dmbche wrote: post #168
bruce511 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Believe me, Office and Office clones are very distinguishable. It's like saying a Macdonalds burger is indistinguishable from a Gordon Ramsey burger. They may both be food, but they are very much not the same thing. There's a reason people use Office. Pretending that reason does not exist does not make the argument for switching better.

I've been using libreoffice for maybe 10 years now? I don't remember what I'm missing, could you name one or two killer features of ms office?

You're happy with what you are using, so that's great, and I'm not knocking that.

But the difference is not 'killer features". The difference is in the million small details and polish. The integrations, formats, UI, workflow, things it just "gets right" that I don't even know its doing.

I try Libre Office every once in a while. But each time I try it just feels old and clunky. It's all in the tiny details that add up to the overall experience.

Clearly you're not missing anything since you're happy with what you have. But going from Office to LibreOffice is painful. Not bullet-wound painful, more like thousand-paper-cuts painful.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#202

Post by sakjur »

dmbche wrote: post #168
bruce511 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Believe me, Office and Office clones are very distinguishable. It's like saying a Macdonalds burger is indistinguishable from a Gordon Ramsey burger. They may both be food, but they are very much not the same thing. There's a reason people use Office. Pretending that reason does not exist does not make the argument for switching better.

I've been using libreoffice for maybe 10 years now? I don't remember what I'm missing, could you name one or two killer features of ms office?

Imho it doesn’t come down to one or two killer features, it comes down to momentum.

Stuff like font rendering, grammar- and spellchecking, the exact set of Excel formulas, graphs, templates, and VB scripting matter. The office suite’s localization changes keyboard shortcuts, Excel formulae names, and swaps between decimal points and commas. It is absolutely horrendous, but people rely on it for their daily work.

In essence, if we accept that Excel is both an IDE and a dialect of a programming language, we can compare it to asking what makes C# in Visual Studio worse when people are used to Java in IntelliJ. The answer might be “nothing, but I’m used to my setup and it’s ridiculous that I’m even having this discussion about my main work tool” for programmers, Office users, and video editors alike.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#204

Post by WuxiFingerHold »

> Why? Schleswig-Holstein cites cost, security, and digital sovereignty - though not necessarily in that order.

It's been attempted before and costs has always been higher. But it's not a matter of costs. Reason and responsibility should make it mandatory for certain institutions and the government to own their data. Companies would be well advised to keep owning their data as well or try to get it back. We've all seen what happened with the "privat" Github repositories. No access from Github employees, but as they admitted by AI bots. I don't remember and it doesn't matter if it was on purpose or accidentally.

If using cloud then at least with true E2E encryption. The cloud should only hold strong E2E encrypted blobs and meta data. There're providers out there that I think can be trusted.

My (very large) employer has surrendered to Microsoft. Everything is Office 365 and in Azure. Our IT told us proudly that it's all E2E encrypted and Microsoft can't in any circumstances read our data. But how come I can search for content of Powerpoint and Word docs on Bing for work? A colleague of mine found secret project information this way before the classification levels were on place.

Am I missing something about E2E encryption or is our IT that stupid and naive?

EDIT: And recently our IT announced proudly that we soon can use Copilot.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#205

Post by Ziggy_Zaggy »

xw38011 wrote: post #103
worldsayshi wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What features in Office are essential for those users that you don't get from Google? If you're talking about Excel I can imagine there are such features but not so much in other apps.

> What features in Office are essential for those users that you don't get from Google? Backward compatibility with existing documents that are already in Word. Also, for those knowledge workers who aren’t in tech, the high likelihood that the recipient can open the document with correct formatting.

...why not just print to PDF then since all browswer support PDF?

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#206

Post by NikolaNovak »

shiroiushi wrote: post #186
Difwif wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not a paid shill, but Until recently Teams had capabilities Slack was laughingly behind :-/

Biggest one for me was that I could

A) start multiple chats with same audience and rename them - so I can have chat with thom dick and Harry on system architecture over a few days and separate conversation with them on performance testing issues. This is trivial in teams. I have to create awkward channels in slack to approximate the functionality.

B) seamlessly start a conversation with two people, then as you troubleshoot and expand, add more people, then jump in a call, then finish a call and keep chatting. Until recently slack would force you to start a new blank conversation when you added people - absolutely useless. Now they've hacked a solution that works up to arbitrary number of ten people and is so clearly a script in the background which still creates a new chat with added person but helpfully copies all conversation over. Then you need to add 11th person and too bad you've hit the magic number.

In operations setting and evolving incidents, teams was just better. And don't get me started on slack "huddles"!

My inlression has always been the opposite - startups used slack because it was cool. Serious businesses used teams because it worked and integrated well.

Now. I've realized lately that when people talk about slack vs teams, they're usually not actuslly talking about slack vs teams. They're actually talking about their companies security and usage policies, as incidentally instantiated through the collaboration tool of choice. I've become aware that my experience with teams is bit everybody's, due to various policies and limitations imposed, and similarly for slack.

But mostly... Not nearly as many people that disagree with average internet forum dweller are paid shills as may be believed :=)

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#207

Post by musicale »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #206
shiroiushi wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Not a paid shill, but Until recently Teams had capabilities Slack was laughingly behind :-/ Biggest one for me was that I could A) start multiple chats with same audience and rename them - so I can have chat with thom dick and Harry on system architecture over a few days and separate conversation with them on performance testing issues. This is trivial in teams. I have to create awkward channels in slack to approxima…

Teams, as much as I may dislike it, seems to have more built-in features than Slack, including a files feature that supports editing MS Office documents in place, and integration with Outlook calendar and email and other Microsoft apps. I also think that Slack didn't have video conferencing until relatively recently?

As with the IBM model, I imagine it's simpler for companies to have a single source and a single support channel. It is possible to use Exchange sign on for non-MS systems and apps however.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#208

Post by davchana »

CharlesW wrote: post #63
holografix wrote: post #21

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…

> 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. For knowledge workers who live in these tools, the difference is stark. Even for companies who've standardized on Google Workspace or Apple iWork, advanced users will need Microsoft Office.

Yes, my pet peeve is printing as pdf. You can control line thickness, size, placement of row borders to pixel perfect in Excel & it will get printed to pdf or paper exactly as it is. But not from Google Sheets or Excel Web, even same excel sheel imported in these & then printed will have slight difference in what you see on screen and what gets printed. I understand its because of browsers limitations to place stuff on pixel scale.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#209

Post by musicale »

briHass wrote: post #117
holografix wrote: post #21

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…

People always forget about Outlook. Name me a competing desktop app that does integrated calendar, email, todo, and meetings as well as Outlook. Thunderbird is (unfortunately) a joke, and web clients aren't as nice when managing complex folder arrangements and lots of mail.

On macOS/iOS I like Apple's suite of apps (and its desktop-mobile integration), and arguably Google's advantage is that it's web-first so it works well on cheap ChromeBooks that you don't think twice about replacing when they are lost or broken.

And Teams is a clunky Electron app.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#210

Post by mandevil »

nextos wrote: post #122
mandevil wrote: post #109

I'm sorry, what year is it? Am I posting on Slashdot still? Is this year finally going to be the year where Linux desktops become something for normies? When Munich did this it never got to a majority of their desktops, is my recollection, it maxed out in the 40%s. Now we're going to do it all over again with a different, much poorer, German state?

Schleswig-Holstein is not poor. It is next to Denmark, and it is really nice and well developed. I think transitioning to a different platform is mostly an organizational and political, rather than technical problem, and the main roadblock is educating users and altering processes to migrate away from MS Office. That said, modern Linux distributions like NixOS or Guix could be great to manage large fleets of computer…

According to wiki here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_cities_by_GDP) Munich in 2021 had a per capita GDP of 86k euro. According to wiki here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_states_by_GRP_p...) Schleswig-Holstein had a per capita GRP of ~42k euro in 2022 (note that the years are different). So these figures suggest that Munich is roughly twice as rich as S-H, which they list as below average for the BRD, as the 8th richest of Germany's 16 Lander. I took German in high school (back when I was on slashdot), I actually had tests on where all of the Lander were, I know a few things!
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