[dead]
Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?
261–270 of 383 posts
Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?
#262> 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…
What email server are they going to use? what about anti-spam / anti-malware in there. and compliance... oh my compliance
Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is described in the first two sentences of the article: > "The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court suddenly couldn't access his email. According to Microsoft, that's because of US sanctions against the court's employees." Nothing you've listed relates to that. If American services and platforms have become unreliable and untrustworthy because the American government is erratic, then it's…
Yes it is, see my last sentence. Without Windows developers, game studios using Windows, Visual Studio and DirectX, SteamOS would have no games. Proton represents Valve's failure to make a business out of Steam OS native games. Funny will be when Microsoft decides Proton is a relevant target to aim for, and shot down by all means necessary.
> Proton represents Valve's failure
No, it represents a market opportunity. WINE (a European led project) effectively makes Win32 and DirectX into Linux APIs. It works well for games. You can bring those games to Linux with less effort. And Valve can offer SteamOS (based on Arch Linux, also a European led project) for less cost.
You don't need Visual Studio. JetBrains has nice, cross-platform IDEs and they're a European company to boot:
Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?
#264I 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…
I've gone without Microsoft products for many years now. It's SOOOOO much better.
I ditch Windows in 1996 and went Linux. Really SOOOOO much better. :D
Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ask IBM/RedHat. They did a lot of foundational work with SSSD (aka "too many 'S' D"). Kerberos is not a great protocol, though.
Ultimately Kerberos is used to authenticated basically everything in a Windows on-prem environment and in a way that is largely transparent to the user. Silent SSO is a very nice feature. Even if you're doing OIDC or SAML, those protocols do not define what is actually performing authentication at the IdP which, again, ultimately ends up being Kerberos if you're people are on-prem. So whatever your feelings are about…
> Ultimately Kerberos is used to authenticated basically everything in a Windows on-prem environment and in a way that is largely transparent to the user. Silent SSO is a very nice feature.
When it works. And when it doesn't work (which is most of the time if you're outside of corporate LAN) you simply can't debug what's happening.
> MIT Kerberos on Linux is not really compatible with Windows Kerberos
It actually is! Long, long time ago I managed to join Windows into a pure Kerberos domain. Everything worked, including things like GSSAPI authentication in Putty or MySQL. It involved some `ksetup.exe` incantations, I think this guide might be still relevant: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19316-01/820-3746/gisqf/index.ht...
Of course, there was no group synchronization (because no AD).
That was about 20 years ago. Back then, I was working on helping companies migrate to Linux, and I toyed with an idea of having a background service to periodically sync groups from the Linux SMB server with the local users.
Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?
#266So, I'm going to chip in with a different perspective from that of some other commentators on here. The overwhelming majority of computers in the entire world, used by our entire species, have windows as their OS. While I applaud the use of alternatives to windows and it's apps, universities teach it because it is what their graduates will use in the real world. Governments use it because while it has it's flaws, it…
> and manpower to repair it and use it are available everywhere
So why each time i announce myself as working with computers, there is always someone that approaches me saying "great, i have a problem with my computer, can you ..."? I just make them stop and ask "Are you talking about Windows?", and when the answer is affirmative i just say "Sorry, I only work on Linux." and they go "What is that?", lol, i would like you to see their faces when i say "It's a professional system!" and leave. :)
Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?
#267I 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…
And same goes for less technical disciplines too. Adobe, Autodesk, Archicad, etc. It's pretty bad software: expensive, very buggy, poor extensibility, poorly maintained, closed-source, rapid tech debt accumulation requires upgrading your pc every few years. If only a minor percentage of organizations licensing it would instead spend that budget financing an open source project, that would have a very positive effect…
But if students learn some open-source software that doesn’t get used in private industry, will they be able to land a job that’s asking Autodesk et al. knowledge as a requirement?
Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can run a logistics consulting business without windows, but you will struggle without Excel and PowerPoint, and 365 with SharePoint is basically needed for collaboration in any consulting business. Im also a logistics consultant… try to parse a multi-million line orderlines extract in Google Sheets compared to excel. I’m also on Mac but to be honest it’s a challenge - there are still enough industry specific too…
Collaboration with Sharepoint is I think the biggest issue with M365. It’s impossible to figure out where a file is stored… on your hard drive? One drive? Teams? Sharepoint? And the biggest problem I have is managing revisions with multiple editors. If I were talking to Microsoft about strategy, this would be the thing I’d suggest. I know it’s common to use Sharepoint for collaboration, but it’s such a Frankenstein’d…
My 22 year old fresh out-of-school communications manager admin was able to figure all that out on her first day of work.
Don’t know what to tell you.
Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...?
We're talking about running a few mail server, network shares, and an office suite (LibreOffice if you want). Any university's in-house IT department should be able to pull that off, and it's exactly what many did for a very long time.
This. Not long ago, every organization had their own email server. It's only in the last 10-15 years or so that gullible IT managers drank the cloud kool-aid.
Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?
#270So, I'm going to chip in with a different perspective from that of some other commentators on here. The overwhelming majority of computers in the entire world, used by our entire species, have windows as their OS. While I applaud the use of alternatives to windows and it's apps, universities teach it because it is what their graduates will use in the real world. Governments use it because while it has it's flaws, it…
> and manpower to repair it and use it are available everywhere So why each time i announce myself as working with computers, there is always someone that approaches me saying "great, i have a problem with my computer, can you ..."? I just make them stop and ask "Are you talking about Windows?", and when the answer is affirmative i just say "Sorry, I only work on Linux." and they go "What is that?", lol, i would like…
I think you do know the answer, and are just being coy.
In case you don't: The products that people report problems with are the products that people actually use frequently. When "Linux as daily driver" market share is the same order of magnitude as Windows, then such observations will tell us something about the two systems' relative usability.