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Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

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Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#231

Post by arianvanp »

edolstra wrote: post #212
arianvanp wrote: post #194

I studied at Utrecht University and all the programming classes in the Bachelor were C#, Visual Studio, XNA, DirectX. Windows. Database class i had to learn in Proprietary Microsoft tools too. All Microsoft stuff. Sure nobody would complain if you did stuff on Linux but all the support by TAs and teachers was on Microsoft platforms only.. The Master was much better but the Bachelor basically was grooming people to be…

It wasn't always that way. When I began studying CS at Utrecht University, there was no Windows at all. It was Solaris, IRIX and a bit of HP-UX.

And it should've been NixOS after!

It did slowly sneak in over time I guess. In my last year of my master's eventually the faculty was forced to stop hosting its own intranet and mailing lists and migrate everything to the "cloud" (Microsoft 365 and Blackboard).

I have a copy at home of all the old wiki content and the old cs.uu.nl website. The university themselves didn't even think they should archive it so I archived it myself.

I hope there's other people with copies too. My archive isn't complete

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#232

Post by arianvanp »

vanschelven wrote: post #203
arianvanp wrote: post #194

I studied at Utrecht University and all the programming classes in the Bachelor were C#, Visual Studio, XNA, DirectX. Windows. Database class i had to learn in Proprietary Microsoft tools too. All Microsoft stuff. Sure nobody would complain if you did stuff on Linux but all the support by TAs and teachers was on Microsoft platforms only.. The Master was much better but the Bachelor basically was grooming people to be…

Surely not _all_ the courses... Utrecht was and is big on Haskell as you know... Given that you TA'd a course on it :)

Well I guess at the time large part of GHC development technically was Microsoft Research ;) . But yeh the Functional Programming and Compilers course were nice exceptions to the Microsoft trend. That's also why I ended up following that path in my master's programme :')

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#233

Post by rzerowan »

d3Xt3r wrote: post #62
rzerowan wrote: post #50

For one reasono another im not seeing any of the currently OSS solutions like LibreOffice/OpenOffice.orgwould not gain much traction and will remain niche even as the MS/Goog options remain entrenched. The path taken by Blender(propreiety initially to open source) to reach industry lead would to me seem the most viable to make a dent. In that i think best cost effective options like WPSOffice or Corel Suite , would b…

If UI is your concern, check out Collabora and OnlyOffice, both have a modern ribbon-like interface and looks similar to MO.

Not just the UI ,as you can see with Blender it goes toe-to-toe with the paying big suites like Maya and Autodesk, a legacy of its dvelopment being proprietary.Comparad to GIMP et al difference is stark.

Most of those UI/usability changes are market specific, like in my post Corel has speciaized to cater to lawyers so their workflow reflets that. LibrOffice and the others are highlygeneric , even MO as bloated as it is has specific workflows that hook their respective nicehe business verticals.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#234

Post by jcgl »

mr_mitm wrote: post #222
solid_fuel wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to set up network file sharing with NFS the other day and it was like pulling teeth. You need Kerberos if you want to map user names instead of user ids and still have some security. Ultimately I gave up and used samba instead, but it does seem like there's a big gap in linux offerings for "home/small business network file sharing" with shared auth

sshfs doesn't work for you?

It's a great option to have, but ultimately it's at-best pretty slow.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#235

Post by einpoklum »

> Can they do without Microsoft, however? Can they work without Office, Outlook, Teams and OneDrive?

FOSS to the rescue:

* LibreOffice, instead of MS Office.

* Thunderbird, instead of Outlook (even though I don't like the direction Thunderbird has been going).

* NextCloud, instead of one drive (and there are other alternatives, more FOSS-friendly or less so)

* Matrix/IRC client plus Jitsi, instead of Teams.

and they will do just fine - on Windows or on Linux.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#237

Post by tester756 »

arianvanp wrote: post #194

I studied at Utrecht University and all the programming classes in the Bachelor were C#, Visual Studio, XNA, DirectX. Windows. Database class i had to learn in Proprietary Microsoft tools too. All Microsoft stuff. Sure nobody would complain if you did stuff on Linux but all the support by TAs and teachers was on Microsoft platforms only.. The Master was much better but the Bachelor basically was grooming people to be…

Visual Studio is world class IDE, C# is one of the better designed languages and ecosystems, Windows is everywhere - from home, to enterprise.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#238

Post by theLiminator »

arianvanp wrote: post #194

I studied at Utrecht University and all the programming classes in the Bachelor were C#, Visual Studio, XNA, DirectX. Windows. Database class i had to learn in Proprietary Microsoft tools too. All Microsoft stuff. Sure nobody would complain if you did stuff on Linux but all the support by TAs and teachers was on Microsoft platforms only.. The Master was much better but the Bachelor basically was grooming people to be…

The things that's puzzling is that I overall find it much harder getting my toolchains and stuff working on windows.

In my experience, getting the periphery stuff is harder than the contents of the course a good chunk of the time for beginners.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#239

Post by rambambram »

graemep wrote: post #101
ta20240528 wrote: post #81

If China can survive — and even start to thrive without ASML and TMSC, then have no doubt that should push come to shove Europe will be able to run a mail server and some office tools. They’re just hedging that American politics will stop licking the car battery.

Europe is not a political entity or an organisation. Who exactly will do it? The EU, some EU country, Russia, the UK, Switzerland, some cooperative agreement...?

Already heard about the plans of the European Union to spend 200 billion on AI Factories?

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#240

Post by d3Xt3r »

rzerowan wrote: post #233
d3Xt3r wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If UI is your concern, check out Collabora and OnlyOffice, both have a modern ribbon-like interface and looks similar to MO.

Not just the UI ,as you can see with Blender it goes toe-to-toe with the paying big suites like Maya and Autodesk, a legacy of its dvelopment being proprietary.Comparad to GIMP et al difference is stark. Most of those UI/usability changes are market specific, like in my post Corel has speciaized to cater to lawyers so their workflow reflets that. LibrOffice and the others are highlygeneric , even MO as bloated as it…

You're talking about business workflows, and that makes sense. But this article is about universities, they have far less Microsoft-specific document editing workflows, compared to established enterprises. At least, that was my experience when I was a part-time teacher at a university - LibreOffice did the job just fine for me. And although other professors used MS Office, none of them did anything fancy (they didn't have any custom VBAs/macros, no disgusting database-like Excel spreadsheets etc) - I can see these people easily switching to the oss options we have today.

Of course, every university and every person is different, but it's not an impossibility unlike businesses.

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