I recently tried a bunch of Office packages and was surprised by just how bad they've gotten over the years. It just feels like a downgrade from what we had in prior decades. Especially LibreOffice just had the most abysmal performance imaginable. The older versions were much better in my experience.
The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
21–30 of 156 posts
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#22Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#23I'm pleased at the overall tide here. I think governments especially ought to use and contribute back to FOSS. When I see announcements like this it does make me worry that MS (or whatever vendor) will try to make an example of them; by submarining stories about how the switchover is hard, non-techie civil servants want to keep what they're "used to", LibreOffice is technically inferior (no comment on that one, I thi…
I know many infrastructure techies that prefer Windows and swear that it's easier to maintain a Windows network. With regards to end users, I think the only office software that still has an undeniable grip is Excel, but as people use Google Sheets more and more, the idea of using something different is becoming less absurd.
I've also known some that prefer a Linux network. However one thing that is pretty objective: it will be harder managing a network with both kinds of machines than either one individually, which will inevitably happen for some period during the changeover. Also it's clearly hard to change from one to another when you have a team who only needed skills in one previously - that is one of the things that seems likely to sink an effort like this.
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#24It's a few times over the years I've read about govs switching to linux like this. Anyone know how they got on?
I assume it went as well as an acquaintance of mine found out. Wanted to go Linux and open source so dumped O365 and got Fastmail, libreoffice in to start with. His two office staff found rather quickly that they were up shit creek as they didn't know how to do anything and stuff didn't work quite how they expected it to. So they ended up switching back to O365 in under a couple of months. This was for a company that cuts out bits of foam and sells them.
A lot of computer users are drones. They have no conceptual idea or care about what they are doing. Moving stuff, even simple things, is crippling for productivity.
Now scale that up to hundreds or thousands of people. In local government people don't like to talk about the failures at all because there is fallout so we probably won't find the truth about what really happened but I suspect it wasn't all about politics and cash backhanders and MSFT investment.
If you really want to move off MSFT you will probably have to start again and run two completely isolated silos.
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#25I 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.
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#26It's a few times over the years I've read about govs switching to linux like this. Anyone know how they got on?
They give up and switch to Windows (again).
The highest profile was in Munich where they did migrate >10,000 desktops to Linux and OpenOffice, but eventually they migrated back to Windows and Office:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
Lower Saxony:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-scores-a-win-over-linu...
Vienna:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wienux
Note that even when these projects succeed, the software users are running is invariably just Firefox, and often users have both a Windows and Linux PC side by side. There are no actual Linux apps being developed or maintained, in the sense of apps that use Linux APIs.
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#27My problem, I tried to switch from PowerPoint to Impress several times, but it's just not working for me (it also crashed).
Hope for the best, with more users perhaps I can switch too in the future.
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#28I used to love LibreOffice when it was OpenOffice.org. When it got unshackled from Oracle, it somehow became kinda uglier, and unfortunately it wasn't able to keep up with the times technology-wise, as all efforts to make it online are a failure of usability and speed. What we, the humanity, need, is a free-as-in-freedom open source set of web applications that work like Google Docs / Spreadsheets / Slides, but can b…
I do not care whether LibreOffice looks ugly or not.
What I care is that the documents that I generate with LibreOffice look beautiful and that depends on me choosing beautiful high-quality typefaces (not the default ugly typefaces of LibreOffice) and on choosing adequate formatting of the documents.
All that LibreOffice has to do is provide adequate support for all OpenType features and for all formatting options that one might want. LibreOffice does this and at least LibreOffice Writer does it better than MS Word.
In LibreOffice one can still discover quickly in which menu or dialog box the desired option can be found. I have been using MS Office for decades, but in recent versions I can spend many minutes searching for some option that has been moved into some random menu/toolbar that has no obvious logical relationship with it.
While MS Excel remains much better than LibreOffice Calc (but the latter is adequate for most simple tasks), I would consider as a cruel and unusual punishment to be forced to use MS Word instead of LibreOffice Writer.
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#29Talking to my Danish friends, and I have a fair few in tech, the country is owned by Microsoft. A lot of code jobs are c# on Azure, and all the office people use Excel. This is a welcome change. I've thought for a long time, why would your average office worker even need to pay MS for their desktop OS when so many things could just be done on the web? And why develop a bunch of stuff on a proprietary platform when yo…
Dankse Bank is a synonym for C# dev jobs here
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#30Talking to my Danish friends, and I have a fair few in tech, the country is owned by Microsoft. A lot of code jobs are c# on Azure, and all the office people use Excel. This is a welcome change. I've thought for a long time, why would your average office worker even need to pay MS for their desktop OS when so many things could just be done on the web? And why develop a bunch of stuff on a proprietary platform when yo…
I'm Danish, and yes: I can confirm. Everything is Microsoft. I have talked about this a lot in many years, and I was very (positively) surprised to read about this, as it will be a large job to move everything out of Microsoft.
Most companies (both public and private) I have worked for in the last twenty years or so are almost entirely on Microsoft solutions: Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Sharepoint, Teams. You name it. Occasionally you meet something like JIRA or AWS and more technical systems, but the backbone of anything related to management, communications and documentation is based on MS solutions.