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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

#291

Post by oliwarner »

cjk2 wrote: post #247
doctor_eval wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember using the original StarOffice to write up some consulting work that I’d done, it just have been the early 00s at the time, and I thought it was excellent - a worthy competitor to MS office of the time. And then over time it felt more and more bloated and slow, to the point where I started to think I maybe misremembered how good it was when I’d first used it. Is it just me? Or did it fall deeply into a hole…

It was always pretty laggy. It didn’t and still doesn’t scale to any reasonable size document. The last thing I wrote in libreoffice was a technical specification around 200 pages long in 2019. It crashed regularly, wrecked the document and caused me a lot of work. I literally cut and pasted the entire thing into word, applied styles and cleaned it up over two days and had no problems with that. This made me dirty so…

> This made me dirty so I learned LaTeX

Yup. Intermediary markup languages are king when you need to decouple editing from presentation.

I personally find the extended versions of markdown (and CSS) a lot easier to format but that's what 25 years of HTML does to someone.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#292

Post by pmontra »

wolverine876 wrote: post #229
pmontra wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In relative values it's worse than 100 years ago, better than 1000 years ago. Absolute values are also important. It's still much better than 100 years ago. And then so many people migrate to Europe from the Americas, Africa and Asia. It shouldn't be so bad after all.

> In relative values it's worse than 100 years ago Relative to what? 1926 was after WWI devestated Europe and I think Germany would have been in very bad shape from the Versailles Treaty.

Just one example: China has been the wealthiest country in the world except for the 19th and 20th centuries (and maybe the very few centuries before those,) when countries from Europe and the USA colonized it, then Japan. It's still recovering but economically is in the same league as Europe.

Post world war Europe and Germany were still better off than China. The proof is that Germany took very few years to recover, arm and start another war.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#293

Post by arielcostas »

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.

Precisely because some of that "bloat" is useful for others. Off the top of my head, I really dislike that Google Docs doesn't support stuff like creating your own styles to apply in the document. My use case, for example, is having a style for inline code, with a monospaced font and a different colour, which I can do in Word creating a new style and applying it, but can't in GDocs.

> The poor person re-did about 4 hours of their work 3x because they couldn’t find the file MS Word had guaranteed them it had saved, so they had to start from scratch.

It should appear as a recent file once you open word, no matter if it was saved to OneDrive or locally. And it certainly isn't so hard to choose where to save it, if OneDrive, a SharePoint site or locally. At least nowadays.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#294

Post by extraduder_ire »

different_base wrote: post #282
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.

Does it not have support for odt? I haven't used it much, but I do generally prefer it to libreoffice if I need to create or edit a document nowadays.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#295

Post by throwaway74354 »

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…

OnlyOffice, being Russian and embedded into the same autarky processes there, wasn't an option to begin with.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#296

Post by welterde »

wink wrote: post #284
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

The relevant part is that they moved from another city to Munich, which means that certain company taxes would be paid in Munich instead of Unterschleißheim (the city where the HQ was located previously). This means a increase of tax revenue for the city of Munich of tens of MEUR/yr from this tax alone, without even considering secondary effects.

The small physical distance just means that this would be quite cheap for Microsoft to implement, compared to trying to pull the same stunt with another city.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#297

Post by throwaway74354 »

extraduder_ire wrote: post #294
different_base wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does it not have support for odt? I haven't used it much, but I do generally prefer it to libreoffice if I need to create or edit a document nowadays.

It doesn't have a file creation dialog (nor global setting for this behavior), hence "promotes". New files are docx/xlsx/pptx. You have to manually use a "Save as" dialog to choose a corresponding LibreOffice format.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#298

Post by ravelfan »

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.

I hate Microsoft products in general but Excel is just good. It is not one feature but the whole package as a system.

It is basically the opposite of most MS products. There is not one feature that stands out as to why I hate Word, it is the summation of all the little things I hate about it that is the issue.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#299

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

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.

This is so rich and self-serving it’s hilarious . People that “write code” are just as susceptible to making busywork for themselves.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#300

Post by briHass »

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 ?

They want you to move everything to the cloud, for obvious reasons. However, if you have on-prem/non-cloud servers, AD is still in the mix. They actually recommend running an AD DC as a VM in the cloud as a backup and to integrate cloud resources in scenarios that are more complex than Entra and Intune can handle.
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