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German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

zdnet.com

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Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#251

Post by fbdab103 »

CSMastermind wrote: post #250
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…

I generally don't see people recommending teams, typically business users seem to prefer zoom while the ones who use teams are forced to because it's bundled with other Microsoft products. Excel on the other hand is still miles better than Sheets for non-trivial use cases and I've seen business users revolt multiple times if you try to force them to use GSuite. To a lesser extent that's also true with Word and to an…

>I haven't yet seen someone threaten to quit if they don't get a Teams license (but I have seen that for Zoom).

Uhhh what? I suppose I am a novice video chat user who just uses it to talk to people and share a screen, but I am clearly missing some killer feature. From my perspective, all of the platforms suck for one reason or another. Bad CPU usage, latency, but hey, they have background swapping and fun emojis!

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#252

Post by freefrog334433 »

Perenti wrote: post #94

Can anyone tell me what this means: "Other countries, notably China, have proverbs that say they are much more stubborn when shifting gears from Windows to Linux." Proverbs? A stitch in time saves nine. Many hands make light work. Please, anyone, show me a proverb that says "they are much more stubborn when shifting gears from Windows to Linux."

I was trying to remember a Confucius proverb that applied to Linux. Or something from the Art of War?

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#253

Post by qwerty456127 »

cjk2 wrote: post #245
qwerty456127 wrote: post #164

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…

You don’t have to log in with O365 and office and windows can stand entirely alone and there is no requirement to be cloud connected. It all still works offline as a classic AD setup. You have to be an enterprise customer though. I literally have one of these on my desk. This is not a problem for state level organisations unless they are throughly incompetent at infrastructure provision. As for libreoffice I throughl…

> I managed to switch entirely over to LaTeX document authoring

I tried and found it the weirdest language (BrainFuck aside) I ever seen. Sure you can copy-paste-modify it to do something similar to what everyone does but doing anything atypical seems prohibitively hard.

I really miss a modern (first-class Unicode to begin with, also more intuitive while more rich and less verbose than HTML+CSS) human-oriented typesetting language. Perhaps it's time to invent what MarkDown is to HTML but to SVG.

> As for cloud we just send PDFs around

Can MS Office make hybrid PDFs the way LibreOffice does (embed the source document into the PDF)?

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#254

Post by stickmunch »

tombert wrote: post #133
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…

I'm not a psychologist, but I think it's the same reason I still can't get into IntelliJ. Let me explain: I cut my teeth on Vim. I've been using Vim since I was 17 (I'm 33 now). Nearly everything I do for fun has been with Vim. Most of what I've done for work has also been with Vim (or NeoVim). I write documents in Vim with Pandoc. I compose emails in Vim (using Mutt). I use Vim whenever I do an interactive rebase in…

I just started down Vim rabbit hole. It's a cult I am more than willing to spend time diving into head first.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#255

Post by freefrog334433 »

Perenti wrote: post #94

Can anyone tell me what this means: "Other countries, notably China, have proverbs that say they are much more stubborn when shifting gears from Windows to Linux." Proverbs? A stitch in time saves nine. Many hands make light work. Please, anyone, show me a proverb that says "they are much more stubborn when shifting gears from Windows to Linux."

“The clever combatant looks to the effect of combined energy, and does not require too much from individuals.” Art of War

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#256

Post by andylynch »

jrmcauliffe wrote: post #198
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.

Lol any serious business. Shoutout to all the people at mega-corps using Teams!

Teams and Symphony are my industry’s weapons of choice. But I guess we’re just playing around.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#257

Post by fbdab103 »

petepete wrote: post #220
midnight2 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel blows Sheets out of the water. Try opening a million row CSV in Sheets.

This is a feature few people need.

Yet it is the status quo expectation. If you offer up an alternative, do not be surprised if people expect it to be comparable in all features.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#258

Post by andylynch »

Reviving1514 wrote: post #176
alluro2 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here - there are 1000 options, across 15 tabs, and I have to look through all the icons and labels till I find the one, with active tab and even displayed options changing depending on content selection.... It's a constant battle if you don't spend hours a day in MS apps and develop muscle memory. I do realize that there are probably no ideal UIs for accessing such a breadth of options, and it was a valid attemp…

I already use the search function in Office to find everything I need. Is that what you had in mind or was it something different?

The search bar is excellent and being keyboard driven fast too.

The ribbon is also entirely keyboard-drivable and fast that way. I’ve seen the data on why it was introduced; it was a scaling issue- the old toolbars simply could no longer fit all the functionality in apps like Excel, so they made them context-aware.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#259

Post by ctrw »

MenhirMike wrote: post #246
qwerty456127 wrote: post #164

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…

LiMux (Linux for Munich) was started in 2004: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux Of course, Microsoft did some of their... persuation of politicians and initially killed the project in 2017, but it seems that since 2020 it's back. I do think that LibreOffice could need some more full-time User Interface people to polish some rough edges (please none of the hackjob wanna-be UX people that ruin all modern apps by obno…

You just copy office 97 and can't go wrong with it. The problem with having UX people on a team is that they need to jusity their existence which they do by change for changes sake. I've yet to meet anyone who appreciates ms office UX changes that happen every 5 years and move everything around.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#260

Post by andylynch »

musicale wrote: post #209
briHass wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s not anymore, the current version is WebView2 and much faster.
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