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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

#301

Post by UnserMannInK »

shiroiushi wrote: post #242
musicale wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem with Teams isn't features, it's that the thing barely works and is dog-slow, especially on certain platforms.

Agreed. I once cross-compiled for Intel on an Apple Silicon machine while being on a Teams call. Guess what was heavier on the CPU…

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#302

Post by PawgerZ »

Semaphor wrote: post #213
jasonjayr wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh boy. Outlook users are in for a surprise with "New Outlook" is forced on them in the near future. Microsoft has been pushing and warning about this change for some time ....

I use outlook for work mails and tried new outlook for a short while. It’s like an alpha version, it’s not even close to feature parity, a pure showcase for a new design. If it ever becomes the only version, I’m switching to thunderbird.

I used the default Mail Microsoft Store app for the past 2 years at work. The past 6 months, it's been telling me to move to Outlook desktop app. A couple weeks ago, it wouldn't allow me to use the Microsoft Store app anymore, so I installed the desktop version, tried to login, and got an error message that my account would only work on the webapp.

Set up Thunderbird on my work desktop that day, and haven't looked back. Wish I would have way sooner, to be honest.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#303

Post by tristan957 »

dataflow wrote: post #17
bkor wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Office is much superior to any open source and even paid alternatives, and we must remember that most people using the software don't have a degree in CS. Germany is investing in improving free software, see https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/ . Though not sure if this is linked to that state switching. I think LibreOffice is riddled with loads of small "paper cuts". Basically loads of small issues that make it annoy…

> I hope that they understand it shouldn't be about cost, it should be about being sovereign Makes sense in principle, but practically speaking Germany would seem to have higher priority threats to address than software from the United States?

The Document Foundation is a German organization.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#304

Post by tombert »

stickmunch wrote: post #254
tombert wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it's worth it, but just a warning, I'd be skeptical of the claims that some people make, where they act like "learning Vim made me 10x faster at coding!"

I do feel like Vim allows me to "translate my intent to the screen" really easily, and I avoid context switching as much, but I doubt it makes me appreciably faster at writing code. It's pretty rare that typing speed or "how fast I can edit" is the blocking factor for writing software.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#305

Post by mo_42 »

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.

I fully agreee. It's similar to older versions of Visual Studio.

On the other hand, I'm annoyed by the omnipresent File, Edit, View, ... stuff in the menu bar. Even if those functions make no sense for a given application. And then I have to open several brittle layers there to reach a certain function.

I think UI research can do better. And by that I don't mean stashing everything into a hamburger menu.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#306

Post by FriedEggFred »

adra wrote: post #113
rafaelmn wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gimp is a classic example of OPs point. Mozilla really ? Lack of vision and focus driving Firefox into irrelevance. And also started on the back of a commercial product. Blender started as a commercial software and is being spearheaded by Ton ever since (my very uninformed impression), which again reinforces OPs point.

Yeah, gimp is pretty crap and it is what it is sure. Clearly they work in a world that has more smaller boutiques where replacing Adobe with supporting OSS alternatives isn't a clear winner. Industries that have a ton of engineers are more likely to build their own alternatives, and some of them realize that they can cost share by being OSS.

Gimp is fine for my purposes, whipping up a favicon or making a bit of random developer art as filler until an actual artist can do the job.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#307

Post by FriedEggFred »

worldsayshi wrote: post #86
FriedEggFred wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gimp, blender, firefox and obs are all very successful OSS alternatives that come to mind.

Yeah I think that's exactly the point. Libre office would need a Blender like visionary management to flourish.

Their point was that it's impossible for OSS to have visionary management, the projects I listed prove that's a false claim.

Right gimp mightn't be as good as photoshop, but it's always satisfied my needs, granted my needs are pretty limited when it comes to photo editing/art.

I'm not claiming OSS projects are inherently better or even equal to their commercial closed source alternatives. I just think the claim that an OSS project haven't have vision is rubbish.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#308

Post by etempleton »

omnimus wrote: post #275
ctrw wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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…

There is a financial incentive for software to not be finished and users would probably complain that the software has not improved enough.

With that said, when you look at Word today compared to 20 years ago the functionality really isn't much different. The main changes are the UX.

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#309

Post by nextos »

mandevil wrote: post #210
nextos wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Schleswig-Holstein is not poor. It is next to Denmark, and it is really nice and well developed. I think transitioning to a different platform is mostly an organizational and political, rather than technical problem, and the main roadblock is educating users and altering processes to migrate away from MS Office. That said, modern Linux distributions like NixOS or Guix could be great to manage large fleets of computer…

According to wiki here ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_cities_by_GDP ) Munich in 2021 had a per capita GDP of 86k euro. According to wiki here ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_states_by_GRP_p... ) Schleswig-Holstein had a per capita GRP of ~42k euro in 2022 (note that the years are different). So these figures suggest that Munich is roughly twice as rich as S-H, which they list as below a…

That's a bit of an unfair comparison as Munich is a city, whereas Schleswig-Holstein is a state.

It's not very different from Bavaria or neighbouring areas such as Jylland or Lower Saxony: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_states_by_house...

Re: German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

#310

Post by sega_sai »

Shorel wrote: post #234
sega_sai wrote: post #35

I have been using Libreoffice/OpenOffice continuously pretty much for last 20 years (mostly Impress/presentation part for teaching/presentations). And the number of bugs, crashes, issues with video etc occasionally gets very annoying. I was hoping over the years things would improve, but I don't quite see that unfortunately. If I could get something to replace LibreOffice that is not online and works on Linux I would…

Serious question: Why don't you use LaTeX to prepare the presentations? A few things I could think of: the templates for presentations are less varied, less diverse, could look repetitive. With Office, you can make the most crazy designs. That's it. LaTeX generates PDF presentations that work everywhere and look very nice, they even have navigation buttons on the corner. I wonder if we could teach ChatGPT to create L…

I use LaTeX to write papers, so I am comfortable enough with it, but I tried beamer several times, and it just doesn't fit my personal flow of how I write presentations/lectures. I want to manually move things around, add figures. I don't won't to do all the LaTeX voodoo for that. Also, although I know know how to add movies to beamer, it's a PITA, I'd like to just be able to insert them.
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