Let's not forget about GitHub.
The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
101–110 of 156 posts
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#102David Heinemeir Hansson (ruby-on-rails) writes extensively about the risk to Danish sovereignty if they don't have digital sovereignty. In particular, Microsoft have already shown they will acquiesce to Trump's wishes. Turn off Microsoft in Denmark in the morning, you get Greenland by the afternoon. https://world.hey.com/dhh/denmark-gets-more-serious-about-di... P.s. this thread will be gone within 1-2 hrs when the m…
> P.s. this thread will be gone within 1-2 hrs when the mods on PT time wake back up. Anything about European Digital Sovereignty is killed quietly and quickly here.
No it won’t.
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#103I wish there was a fund we could pool money into to make LibreOffice less ugly to look at. I'll happily donate to the cause.
That’s the nice thing about Open Source. Nothing’s stopping you from organizing this yourself.
Not everyone has an extra 20 hours a week to contribute to open source, and I'm assuming a project as big as LibreOffice has a lot of non-technical hurdles in place for anyone new. It's perfectly reasonable to donate to people already working on it tho.
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't have the capacity. The opinion you present is actually part of the narrative you are seemingly against. That you can compete with big tech if you just want to. And you "can" compete with big tech, but it isn't actually possible. Because the right pre-requisites, environment and priorities doesn't exist. Not in Europe, not in much of the US and not in much of the world. The European companies the would (or…
I think it's a question of habit / inertia. "This is how we've always done things". In the company I work for, 99% of people spend their days in some combination of teams, outlook, word, excel and chrome. Word is basically for random text which is expected to last longer than an email or for carting around screenshots, Excel is for people who need five lines in a table. All these things work fine in a browser. The ot…
I also think something fundamental is missing in the education of your average office worker.
The reason why people are scared to change software is that they can't actually use any software. They basically don't know how it works and are just cargo culting. They memorize some functions, and they think that is all they need to do their job, which they consider to be some higher level thing like being a bureaucrat.
But it's like literacy. You're not literate when you can only read one book. You're literate when you can read any book.
There are principles in how software works, below the level of the programmer, that everyone can learn. What is running on my machine, what is running on the server, why do I see the things on the screen that I see, what do common GUI elements do, and so on.
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#105This is great for sovereignty.
It’s wonderful that they made the choice (likely exactly for sovereignty reasons).
But: IMO (as an infrequent user) LibreOffice is still far behind MS Office in usability. I hope the more big orgs depend on it, the more interest there will be to improve it. This will then hopefully make it easier for others to make the switch.
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#106As far as I can tell, this is only about MS Office, not about operating systems. But I cant read the whole article due to paywall.
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#107I wish there was a fund we could pool money into to make LibreOffice less ugly to look at. I'll happily donate to the cause.
Might not be what you are looking for, but I missed this option for a LONG time, so, in case you don't know, you can enable tabbed ribbon interface in LibreOffice, and I think it looks better.
https://itsfoss.com/libreoffice-ribbon-interface/
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same in Germany
The answer is, sadly, still more political than technical. Munich moved to Linux in 2004 and was mostly complete by 2013. Then Microsoft turned up the charm, and moved its headquarters in Germany to Munich, and Munich decided in 2017 to switch back to Windows by 2020: https://fsfe.org/news/2017/news-20170301-01.html But then different politicians were elected, and in 2020 it decided to switch back to Linux again: htt…
Munich story is one failure among many successes.
Ever heard of GendBuntu? [1]
Probably not, because it was a successful migration.
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#109There is currently a very strong reason to migrate to Open Source: the big tech corps are pushing people into their clouds and this leads to new constraints on your planning because now you are subject to the software company's product lifecycle. So, if before you could run your old version of Oracle or whatever for as long as you wanted (if you could live without the support), now you have no choice. When the suppor…
I'm not convinced this is that strong of a reason for most companies. Pretty much everyone and their dog jumped on the cloud bandwagon without being forced by tech corps. So now, since most clients are already in the cloud, the tech corps might as well stop supporting "legacy" environments.
I imagine this will be a serious issue for companies with small IT teams and large legacy systems.
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's a question of habit / inertia. "This is how we've always done things". In the company I work for, 99% of people spend their days in some combination of teams, outlook, word, excel and chrome. Word is basically for random text which is expected to last longer than an email or for carting around screenshots, Excel is for people who need five lines in a table. All these things work fine in a browser. The ot…
I also think something fundamental is missing in the education of your average office worker. The reason why people are scared to change software is that they can't actually use any software. They basically don't know how it works and are just cargo culting. They memorize some functions, and they think that is all they need to do their job, which they consider to be some higher level thing like being a bureaucrat. Bu…
I entirely agree with you, but I'm at a loss as to how we might improve things.
People just don't seem to care, just like they didn't seem to care to understand how machinery used to work. They know that they should press this button and expect that outcome.