That's a great news but does not surprise me. In the University where I studied in Germany, almost all Library computers had Ubuntu (and also LibreOffice). The Windows machines were limited to use only 2 hours a day and they were almost always occupied, so I had to start learning linux. Years later and I work half of time at my current job as Linux admin.
German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice
331–340 of 402 posts
Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair in certain cases the cost might be very high and considerably higher than whatever the license/subscription fees paid to MS are. e.g. Libre Office doesn’t really have a drop-in replacement for Excel (for non trivial use cases. To be fair it still might be sufficient for the majority of users, but that would mean that some proportion of your workforce has to stay on Excel/Office which kind of beats the whol…
Vendor lockin is no excuse leaking PI to MS though. You could buy some Office 2003 CD and use Excel locally.
Medical researchers in many places leak non-anonymized sensitive patient data to MS, even when they know better and that's one of the reasons Office LTSC exists
Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice
#333Did not work well in Munich, my hometown, in 2004. Hope the lessons have been learned. https://itsfoss.com/munich-linux-failure/
I predict it will yet fail again. Desktop Linux maintains it's bad reputation very well, and 20 years is just enough time for everyone to forget the details. Unless they have an insane user to IT ratio (perhaps 6:1), the adoption pain points will soon be rediscovered and overwhelm the project.
Why do you think they stopped using Linux in Munich? I'm sorry, but it feels like you didn't read the article you're responding to at all.
Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn’t. These guys are probably still upset about the ribbon. Microsoft is not my favorite company. But the only reason O365 has been down for days is when customer integrations (identity, security stuff, VPN rules, etc) break. That was even true in the early days before 365 branding. Source: I’ve been accountable for 250k+ user O365 environments as a customer director or VP for over a decade.
Really? Or did that not make its way up the chain of command? None of your 250k+ accounts had issues because they didn't connect to the internet? What about license renewals - did anyone get shut out of their account immediately because they missed a license renewal date and happy to be off the internet?
Looks like 40 in a decade.
Offline use cases don’t use O365.
Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until you can bribe officials to the tune of billions the quality of your software won't matter. The only reason why ms keeps winning is that it keeps bribing.
MS also keeps winning because they have billions of dollars to pour into the UX of their Office suite. The FOSS community doesn't spend a lot of money on hiring professional UI designers, and it's "do-ocracy" doesn't handle UI design well because UI design isn't seen as "doing" so much as nitpicking the choices of the programmers who are "doing all the work". MS bribery is a factor, but if we use it as an excuse to i…
I've never met anyone who said 'yes, the new change in UI for office is amazing, I'm so happy all my memorisation of UI elements is now obsolete'.
Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
sane policy. Every time Office 365 is down I watch the maddening dash of IT workers who can't get anything done, it's amusing.
> sane policy. Every time Office 365 is down I watch the maddening dash of IT workers who can't get anything done, it's amusing. While there might be issues with Office 365's reliability (I don't know, I use Google Docs), the online collaborative capabilities is a fantastic tradeoff. Mailing individual files amongst a group of collaborators impede productivity (even though it has other benefits). You could make the a…
Groove worked amazing until MS bought them out and basically killed them. I've only used it when it was included in Office, but it worked amazingly well. As long as you had at least 1 computer on, it synced pretty reliably. It even worked for Outlook when they were independent but ironical Outlook sync was disabled when they integrated Groove into Office. The next batch of syncing systems were a terrible mess. I think it turned into Sharepoint sync, then decided to go full internet cloud and decided to replace it Foldershare (they bought them about same time they bought Groove), updated it to Livemesh, and killed all that off finalizing with Skydrive which had to be changed to Onedrive. I loved Groove and tried all the iterations but found Dropbox to be hands down the best and have over 30GB free. Unfortunately they only offer 3 free devices now so I might have to go back to Onedrive which had a lot of sync issues last i tried it.
Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess the same as people have always done. You have more server rooms on ideally different networks and grids. That can be a rented room/ rack in a bigger DC, your own if you have a big factory with subsidiaries etc. The IAM etc. will probably done by a combination of technical on organizational measures. You will have certain people doing certain things at least before the solution is ready for IaC. People will cr…
Thanks, this makes sense! I mostly thought about the software infrastructure side. With thousands and even mere hundreds of servers over several locations you already want some uniformity. Would you run k8s? Nomad + Consul? MinIO or Ceph? MySQL + Galera? Would OwnCloud scale to many hundreds of users? How would you unify or integrate access control to all that? Nothing unsurmountable here, just interesting how it's d…
Well, hundreds or thousands of servers can probably be still managed by Ansible with Fabric, Puppet, Chef etc.
I don't think focusing too much on the technologies used is useful when planning the overall approach. Most companies could probably consolidate all the critical hardware to 2-3 racks of equipment if they tried nowadays with HA and everything. Hardware is just really powerful and having less of it makes everything else further up usually simpler.
What I would run depends on the particular customer I would have. I probably wouldn't try to unify or integrate access control much. You are not trying to build another public cloud, you want to develop and deploy applications with reasonable robustness in comparison to the cost and benefit of the solution.
Real on-premise installations usually are a mix of open and proprietary technologies. Many companies probably have a few Windows Server file servers on top of VMware vSAN or some kind of EMC2/ NetApp/ HPE 3PAR or whatever storage with HA capability. There is no S3 compatible storage and all the data is stored on the network drive and referenced in some MSSQL database or stored directly in it. If MSSQL or Oracle is used, they probably run on local storage and have are part of a cluster that are marked such that they are never on the same physical node. You can do similar things with Proxmox, GNU/ Linux and PostgreSQL too with a little more effort. You can run MinIO or Garage for S3 if you want to be cool or buy a supported Ceph installation from e.g. SUSE. Everything will be more rudimentary and half automatic but still a few people will be able to manage that even on a rather large scale without many issues. Of course, if you have bigger needs, there are companies you can by computers from by the rack. Some will offer you a complete cloud management stack with it. It can be Oxide Computers (their own stack), or Cloud&Heat in Germany for instance (that is built on OpenStack). There are so many options.
Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've no doubt that there was incompetence involved. Which is to be somewhat expected since Linux requires a set of skills to install and administer at scale, and few people have that particular skillset. Equally I'm sure it was never going to be a cost saving exercise since firstly the cost of Windows is negligible, and second the conversion costs, in-house skill requirements, re-training of users, and porting existi…
They always stated that it won't be cheaper. That was not the intention. The main point was that Munich saw an opportunity to leave a monopoly for an option with competition. When the LiMux decision was made Munich had to change their whole IT landscape anyway (They ran on NT4 and even extended support was running out / getting extremely costly), so they thought: If we have to change anyway, why not change for someth…
Having more options, in and of itself, has no value. Leaving a monopoly to go to an alternative option in itself has no value. Plus of course, since they decided to basically build their own option, they did neither.
Firstly, the number of options argument. Choosing between lots of options, over choosing the best option, isn't some intrinsic good. I don't support say football over Formula 1 because there are more teams. I choose one over the other based on which sport I prefer to watch.
Going the Linux route "because there are more distributions to choose from" is a dumb argument if Windows is the best OS for your organisation. [1].
Equally, you may decide that you'd prefer to foster competition. You might decide that it's worth subsidising competition just to have competition. You acknowledge you're making an inferior choice, but the are unaccounted upsides to others having that choice.
But govt adoption of Linux (especially creating your own distribution) does little to nurture competition. Munich didn't spend its budget improving Linux. They spent the budget implementing it.
There are reasons Windows and Office dominate the desktop, especially in large scale environments. You may not like MS, but that doesn't negate those reasons. If you make a choice to forge a different road because you don't like MS then you'd better be very clear on what those reasons are, and what challenges and costs you are likely to face. Because if you aren't, then earn those challenges and costs come up it's hard to wave them away.
I'm not saying all this to rag on Linux or OSS, or to say its impossible to run Linux etc. As per the GP, there are companies that have made a choice, that hire people with the right skills, that make it work.
But thinking that rolling out Linux at enterprise level is easy, or cheaper, or has better desktop options, or runs more bespoke software, or is easier to get good desktop software for , or is easier (cheaper) to buy hardware for, is wrong. And that wrongness will lead to project failure. And those failures don't help Linux, arguably they hurt it.
Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, there are not many professions that a single individual can make so much impact as Software Engineering. People say 10x Software Engineer, rarely 10x Electrical Engineer.
I would argue most volunteer firefighters and other social volunteers have more net-positive impact than the vast majority software engineers.
Maybe, but I'm just talking about the potential here.
Most type of volunteer works require more people, with some level of organizations before it becomes effective.
While open-source software projects are often started by one very good SWE, as a hobby, in his own time: a very low barrier of entry. Plus, a project can live with a solo maintainer for a very long time. Though, I digress that can be detrimental in the long run, like the recent xz-utils fiasco.