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German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

blog.documentfoundation.org

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Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#341

Post by josefx »

tiahura wrote: post #280
josefx wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but working with non-traditional tools is going to cost the taxpayers more money when important documents are not formatted correctly or the software behaves differently than the proprietary alternatives. That is already a given with Microsofts own tools, office365 is a crippled mess. > The cost of Microsoft Office is comparable to the cost of keeping their workplace stocked with coffee throughout the year. Which is…

office365 is a crippled mess. Strong “I have no idea what I’m talking about” vibe here.

It is not like there are pages describing just what excels web version cannot display or dozens of features that the web versions break because they cannot handle them correctly (like connectors).

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#342

Post by pxc »

pydry wrote: post #180
etiennebausson wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the entities you depends on for funding migrate from Words to LibreOffice, then yes, you will consider moving as well. The network effect may be mostly considered in regard to social media, but it is just as powerful when it come to tools and file format. Administrations moving en-mass to open-sourced software would ensure a significant chunk of companies would follow.

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.

> It led to them inventing this nebulous "TCO" concept

Source? Is that phrase really a Microsoft invention?

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#343

Post by graemep »

deaddodo wrote: post #227
pixelpoet wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the americans exclusively use MS Office in government computers?

What do you mean by "exclusively" and "government"? Outside of the DoD/US Military (where hardened Linux has quite a few uses), I'm pretty sure the US Federal govt is fairly Microsoft-centric as they offer them the guarantees and concessions needed to sign contracts. It's not that the Fed thinks Windows or Office is better than the open source alternatives, as much as it is that if/when they do fail they have a direc…

> It's not that the Fed thinks Windows or Office is better than the open source alternatives, as much as it is that if/when they do fail they have a direct point of contact with strict SLA guarantees to get things fixed

Does MS provide SLAs? Are there no suppliers who will provide similar SLAs for FOSS software?

> and they have full control of all of their software to do so without hindrance.

That puzzles me. How can you have more control over proprietary software than over open source? If you mean MS have full control, how does that benefit their customers?

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#344

Post by rightbyte »

alemanek wrote: post #269
rightbyte wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vendor lockin is no excuse leaking PI to MS though. You could buy some Office 2003 CD and use Excel locally.

Uh using an out of date and unsupported Excel version is a really bad idea. Lots of security vulnerabilities around VB scripting/macros which gives you the very real risk of being compromised by a malicious spreadsheet. Better to just switch where you can and invest resources into improving FOSS offerings to handle the use cases it currently can’t.

Executing malicious code on your computer is a problem, ye.

If you want to give the users a nice programming environment you can't also prevent them from doing arbitrary computations.

You can run Excel in a VM if you want.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#345

Post by bzzzt »

planede wrote: post #168
bzzzt wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they fix the unusable slow rendering on retina Macs yet? Couldn't even normally scroll through a blank document last time I tried...

I suppose they won't use macs anyway.

Then why do they pretend they 'support' macOS and even make a build available?

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#346

Post by AlbertoGP »

weinzierl wrote: post #202
jillesvangurp wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Rubber Stamps belong in a museum. Along with Fax machines. And the people still insisting on using those for "security reasons". Common practice in Germany is to receive an email with a pdf, print it, sign it (or stamp) it, and then put it in the post. This both stupid and slow. German bureaucracy is still paper driven. Having lived in other countries with more or less full digital access to all the stuff Ge…

Past week I travelled to London by train. I tried to book this trip a couple of months in advance from Deutsche Bahn website, but only got obscure error messages when finalizing the booking(*). So I tried the french SNCF app and the booking was done in a couple of minutes, all tickets conveniently in the app - expect for the German leg of the travel. SNCF sent me a Deutsche Bahn paper ticket via snail mail. (*) Tried…

I did that trip several times years ago. I too tried first to book it via DB but ended up buying it from SNCF.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#347

Post by jhickok »

xyst wrote: post #317
jhickok wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Probably includes windows OS licenses in addition to azure add one. Not just email and productivity.

Both E3 and E5 includes Windows Enterprise.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#348

Post by daeros »

andsoitis wrote: post #253
daeros wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sane policy. Every time Office 365 is down I watch the maddening dash of IT workers who can't get anything done, it's amusing.

> sane policy. Every time Office 365 is down I watch the maddening dash of IT workers who can't get anything done, it's amusing. While there might be issues with Office 365's reliability (I don't know, I use Google Docs), the online collaborative capabilities is a fantastic tradeoff. Mailing individual files amongst a group of collaborators impede productivity (even though it has other benefits). You could make the a…

Google's collaberative is probably miles ahead. it's been awhile, I've not used it since I was paying for Japanese lessons.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#349

Post by deaddodo »

graemep wrote: post #343
deaddodo wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "exclusively" and "government"? Outside of the DoD/US Military (where hardened Linux has quite a few uses), I'm pretty sure the US Federal govt is fairly Microsoft-centric as they offer them the guarantees and concessions needed to sign contracts. It's not that the Fed thinks Windows or Office is better than the open source alternatives, as much as it is that if/when they do fail they have a direc…

> It's not that the Fed thinks Windows or Office is better than the open source alternatives, as much as it is that if/when they do fail they have a direct point of contact with strict SLA guarantees to get things fixed Does MS provide SLAs? Are there no suppliers who will provide similar SLAs for FOSS software? > and they have full control of all of their software to do so without hindrance. That puzzles me. How can…

> Does MS provide SLAs? Are there no suppliers who will provide similar SLAs for FOSS software?

Gotta love how internet commentators feel like picking a statement apart in isolation somehow validates their point.

Yes, they offer SLAs and have full control of their software and its release cycle. So can offer guarantees and stand by them.

> That puzzles me. How can you have more control over proprietary software than over open source?

"They" is Microsoft.

> If you mean MS have full control, how does that benefit their customers?

It means they don't have to wait for Linux (or a plethora of other open source softwares) for upstreaming or need to fork / manage an independent branch. It means that they aren't at the whims of a community who decides to abandon projects willy-nilly or replace them with brand new implementations at the drop of a hat. Or commercial entities built on top of those projects that can only offer surface level guarantees.

No one here is saying Windows (or proprietary software) is intrinsically better. What they're saying is that what Microsoft offers to certain large-scale/enterprise entities is clearly better.

If you disagree, have at it. I don't care. The fact that people continue to sign with Azure, Microsoft, Office, etc makes it self-evident.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#350

Post by panzi »

bee_rider wrote: post #290
panzi wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, my viewer doesn't support embedded scripting. :D
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