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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

#261

Post by pxc »

musicale wrote: post #207
NikolaNovak wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 supp…

> Teams, as much as I may dislike it, seems to have more built-in features than Slack

Isn't that the problem with Teams? Instead focusing on highly usable text chat, the focus is growing the pile of integrations with other mediocre Microsoft products.

(Not that Slack is great; it's been bloated and slow for a long time and has likely been on steep downward trajectory since the buyout by Salesforce.)

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#262

Post by cjk2 »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #253
cjk2 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 typese…

Well it all makes a lot of sense but you have to understand it first. That takes time. I’m typesetting stuff which has complex mathematics in it so there are no better solutions. This is the best human solution we have.

There are some workflows that you can’t do with anything else as well. For example I am doing a lot of semi hand drawn diagrams on my iPad in Goodnotes. These are exported as vector PDFs and trimmed and included in the LaTeX documents as figures. They are fully vector end to end which is a complete pain in the ass on any other package.

As for hybrid PDFs I don’t know. I am mostly interested in not shopping the source document.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#263

Post by Zardoz84 »

briHass wrote: post #147
tichiian wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a reason virtually everyone uses AD. The reason everyone uses AD is that you can have a functional Linux client in AD. But you cannot have a Windows client in any Linux-based LDAP+Kerberos setup. The problem isn't that there isn't a good solution for Linux in big organisations, the problem is that Windows is only compatible with AD, nothing else, so the more compatible system (Linux) gets shoved into AD.

AD is also better and more feature complete. It was born out of necessity, but it's had decades of refinement in thousands of deployments that the OSS solutions haven't had.

So, why does Microsoft want to kill AD and move everything to their cloud ?

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#264

Post by dirkt »

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.

You don't want Google to have data that is used to govern a federal German state.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#265

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

datavirtue wrote: post #226
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The popularity of all these paper emulators seems odd to me. Like, how long after the advent of software will it take before our workflows find their authentic shape? Or was that shape really just a list of flat rectangles all along?

I love the question as I'm constantly faced with the absurdity of user-hostile software. It was supposed to be built to help humans. Instead it creates PTSD.

Hmm, maybe the problem is more of a drift towards hostility instead of an inability to move forward.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#266

Post by sakjur »

saintfire wrote: post #212
sakjur wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

Sort of unrelated, but, VB scripting not working on web versions felt to me like it really killed a giant moat of legacy code to draw from. If you're forced to script in something else then why not just go to something else. Additionally, having tons of forms written by long gone employees just not port over is a tough sell at smaller offices.

I think that’s very related. It’s hard to get people to migrate to Office for Mac or the web version because they’re subtly different enough.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#267

Post by MenhirMike »

ctrw wrote: post #259
MenhirMike wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You just copy office 97 and can't go wrong with it.

Clippy had its debut in Office 97, so let's please NOT copy that one. Other than that, yeah, I agree. Anything up to and including Office 2003 really, those were all great. (Also includes one of my favorite, underrated Office Apps, InfoPath)

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#268

Post by woopwoop24 »

fbdab103 wrote: post #257
petepete wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

for the money your governments spend licensing MS products, they could develop libreOffice from scratch in better, faster and nicer looking.

Or just pay a few devs or a few hundred to make it better and still pay less in fees every year.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#269

Post by bradley13 »

analog31 wrote: post #57

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…

Odd comment. The UI has nothing to do with recalculation speed. Anyway, the MS ribbons continually move stuff around - it's a pain for the casual user. Maybe people who use it all day long get used to it?

Regarding spreadsheets, yes, that is one area where LibreOffice genuinely has not overtaken MS-Office.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#270

Post by usr1106 »

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 as the owner of a computer you want to put precious data on someone else's computer. Especially someone that has no customer service, a history of killing products with no good options for their users and frequently breaking laws.
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