German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

#1

Post by jrepinc » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 12:44 PM UTC

German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice
blog.documentfoundation.org

Re: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

#2

Post by raxxorrax » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 12:46 PM UTC

Awesome. I know how people in offices work and for their use cases LibreOffice has become the safer and more fitting choice.

Yes, MS Office isn't bad and I wouldn't pull Excel from the dead hands of physicists, but the whole MS cloud deal is bad for government.

Re: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

#3

Post by ghunky » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 1:05 PM UTC

Didn't they do something similar a decade ago and reverted to MS Office?

Re: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

#4

Post by scanny » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 1:08 PM UTC

Seems to be a running trend in Germany to move toward open software. Tangentially related to this: The city of Munich has flip-flopped between their own version of linux and windows [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

Re: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

#5

Post by schroeding » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 1:12 PM UTC

ghunky wrote: post #3

Didn't they do something similar a decade ago and reverted to MS Office?

Maybe you're thinking about Munich, which changed from MS Office to OpenOffice to LibreOffice and then back to MS Office. They may change again soon to something open source, too :-)

Re: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

#6

Post by soco » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 1:13 PM UTC

Some more contextual infos about challenges of moving German officials to opensource: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...

Re: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

#7

Post by raxxorrax » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 1:15 PM UTC

ghunky wrote: post #3

Didn't they do something similar a decade ago and reverted to MS Office?

Munich reverted to Windows in 2017, then reverted back to Linux in 2020. it is expected that the 2017 rollback was a case of corruption and a waste of money. The first shift was allegedly explicitly against the wishes of many users.

Re: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

#8

Post by soco » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 1:16 PM UTC

schroeding wrote: post #5

ghunky wrote: post #3

Didn't they do something similar a decade ago and reverted to MS Office?

Maybe you're thinking about Munich, which changed from MS Office to OpenOffice to LibreOffice and then back to MS Office. They may change again soon to something open source, too :-)

Yeah the new coalition signed all those agreements back in 2020 (Munich, Hamburg, Dortmund...) but I don't know how far are they with actually implementing those plans.

Re: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

#9

Post by cat199 » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 1:18 PM UTC

"digital sovereignty" is a nice phrase

Re: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

#10

Post by ginko » Thu, Nov 18, 2021, 1:20 PM UTC

raxxorrax wrote: post #2

Awesome. I know how people in offices work and for their use cases LibreOffice has become the safer and more fitting choice. Yes, MS Office isn't bad and I wouldn't pull Excel from the dead hands of physicists, but the whole MS cloud deal is bad for government.

> I wouldn't pull Excel from the dead hands of physicists

Accountants I understand but physicists? I'd have thought they mostly use Matlab or maybe Mathematica.