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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

#281

Post by 7bit »

ctrw wrote: post #276
omnimus wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This can be said just about any profession working in software. The real issue is that nobody wants to accept that software can be finished especially management - because then you don’t have anything to sell. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were designers who fought tooth and nail agai…

Software always has bugs that need to be fixed. It is never finished because it has an infinite number of ways it can go wrong. The same is not true for any of the non-software parts of software design. If you're a software shop you should have everyone who doesn't write code on a contract and not be afraid to terminate them when the product is mature.

A software can only ever be mature for a period of time. Technology advances, work practices change, and your software should adapt to it. Imagine text editing stopped at Notepad, or image editing at Photoshop 1.

Also, your second paragraph leaks of Americanism and undoubtedly, people are happier and healthier with stable jobs.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#282

Post by different_base »

tredre3 wrote: post #110

Frankly I am shocked that they went with LibreOffice over OnlyOffice. OnlyOffice supports online collaboration already, works online and offline, and has a much more familiar interface. Compatibility is also better with MS Office documents. OnlyOffice is developed online-first but they provide an electron app that works fully offline on all OSes: https://www.onlyoffice.com/download-desktop.aspx?from=deskto... Yep, an…

Using OnlyOffice promotes Microsoft Document format even further. Microsoft will again change their spec and OnlyOffice won't know how to render it correctly.

For long term, it's better to choose LibreOffice which uses open standards and does not purposefully change specs to break others.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#283

Post by jolmg »

wolverine876 wrote: post #190
jolmg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

> but were inefficient for one reason or another; that's the hard part.

The efficiency of such tools is mostly just a matter of familiarity. It's like asking what programming language is most efficient to do e.g. web development. There may be arguments for X or Y language depending on the specifics of what you're going to do and what you value, but ultimately the most important factor that determines whether it feels efficient to work with or not is how familiar you are with it.

> you certainly aren't spending it trying to make some application work with your Linux config management

I struggle to think of them needing to be aware of one another. Configuration management is pretty much completely a matter of moving configuration files and running commands. It's pretty universal. There's no "make some application work with your Linux config management". Configuration management systems may provide application-specific helpers that make things neater, but if you can copy files, maybe template them, and run commands, you're pretty much set.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#284

Post by wink »

lwde wrote: post #2

We'll have to see how long it takes, as it did with LiMux ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux ) when Microsoft Germany headquarters magically moved to Munich and everything got back to running on Windows again.

I like this conspiracy theory as much as the next person but in fact they moved only around 10-15km south, to be in Munich proper. Yes, I know, that would be irrelevant regarding possible tax breaks or bribes or whatever. But physically it was not far, same people working there without relocating, etc.pp

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#285

Post by stby »

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…

https://github.com/typst/typst looks promising, both the language and the tooling. I wonder where it will find its place in a world that is dominated by either Word or LaTex.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#286

Post by tichiian »

Zardoz84 wrote: post #263
briHass wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

Because AD is a security nightmare. It is a collection of ~30 distinct protocols, e.g. bastardized versions of LDAP, Kerberos, DNS, DHCP, X.509 and a few RPC protocols that are all weirdly intertwined, with 30 year old designs. Every few months there is another CVE like 'oh, we forgot to checksum and sign that one field over there, please install this incompatible patch or you will have unauthed RCE'. Since all those patches make things break, there is a lot of vulnerable AD installations out there because most people need to be on "compatibility settings" that are insecure. And even the "secure" settings drop a CVE every few months.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#287

Post by ctrw »

7bit wrote: post #281
ctrw wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software always has bugs that need to be fixed. It is never finished because it has an infinite number of ways it can go wrong. The same is not true for any of the non-software parts of software design. If you're a software shop you should have everyone who doesn't write code on a contract and not be afraid to terminate them when the product is mature.

A software can only ever be mature for a period of time. Technology advances, work practices change, and your software should adapt to it. Imagine text editing stopped at Notepad, or image editing at Photoshop 1. Also, your second paragraph leaks of Americanism and undoubtedly, people are happier and healthier with stable jobs.

And consumers are better off when we don't keep the candle stick maker employed in the led factory.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#290

Post by benhurmarcel »

worldsayshi wrote: post #75
CharlesW wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

Google Docs can't automatically number headings, figures, and tables. It also can't automatically update cross-references ("see Figure 3 in Section 3.4").

Some colleagues have issues because it can't handle very large documents too (above a few hundred pages).

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