Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

blog.documentfoundation.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–368 of 368 posts

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

#361

Post by eitland »

greyhair wrote: post #357
eitland wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux can do something, which windows cannot || : eh, wo cares Exactly. We who have used Linux for a while have had fun a couple of times before asking if Windows is ready for our desktops and the answer was most often a resounding no. Lately I've made do with just Windows and WSL and to be honest, it still isn't ready for my desktop. Recently my laptop had overheated in the bag a number of times. Knowing I would p…

Ads on the logon screen? Or the start menu? I don't get those on my personal 'home' installs, 'pro' installs, or the enterprise laptop from my employer. Did your machine get hacked?

> Did your machine get hacked?

Nope. Except maybe growth hacked by some department at Microsoft who doesn't have to answer to the "brand" department.

(If you think about it: which hacker would add bing ads and ads for Microsoft games to the login screen? And the Start menu ads for Candy Crush is so well known you can find it using your preferred search engine.)

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

#362

Post by throwaway123x2 »

Fazel94 wrote: post #352
throwaway123x2 wrote: post #12

MS Office was so much more functional and nicer to use than libreoffice when I last checked.

The thing that costs 7$/user/month(home version)+119$ for Windows 10 Home is better than the thing that is free, Gee, I wonder why is that? Everyone should use the thing that costs a lot of money for it to just make sense. Over 15 years you would be paying 1260$(paid 7 per month) for the office. 119$ for windows.

If I can afford to pay for the better experience and I want it badly enough, I will. That's how markets work.

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

#363

Post by candiodari »

sudosysgen wrote: post #234
nivenkos wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK I can't really run Jupyter notebooks, R, LaTeX and Rust on a tablet though. Perhaps the JingPad.

You can on any Android tablet that allows root. You can run an X server via Termux and get a full graphical Linux environment. That will be necessary for Rust. R, JupyterNotebooks and LaTeX can be done without root.

You can on any tablet that supports webassembly:

https://jupyterlite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/_static/lab/ind...

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

#364

Post by nomel »

freeflight wrote: post #342
nomel wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only reason people are used to it is because MS has spend decades, and plenty of money, getting their foot into pretty much every IT education of relevance. This is the same argument that people have used for the last 20 years of "this year is the year for Linux on the Desktop!". I don't think it was true then or now. People that use Linux consciously, or unconsciously, build/buy systems that work with Linux. I…

> I don't think it was true then or now. It was true back then and remains true to this day even with smartdevices taking over and slowly pushing desktops out of the educaton sector. Anybody who grew up since the 80s and had some kind of "IT related" education in school, most likely got said education on MS systems with MS software. In Germany having "MS office knowledge" is considered the absolute basic for any offi…

I agree completely about being primed, but I'm saying it's not completely true.

I have many tech friends that gave up on Linux and moved to OS X. I would claim these moves are unrelated to Microsoft.

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

#365

Post by France_is_bacon »

nivenkos wrote: post #24

Now switch to Linux too. The more we invest together, the easier it becomes. German states can help Spanish states, and Finnish schools, Danish universities, and French businesses, etc. - collaboratively investing so that everyone benefits and Europe can build its own Tech industry and have some independence from the US. This is absolutely critical to move away from the dominance of "Big Tech" to FOSS solutions that…

100% tried to move to linux, but couldn't because there is software that only works on Windows, and just can't get around it - have to use it. I tried to dual boot, but it is just such a pain to do that, it's impossible.

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

#366

Post by top_kekeroni_m8 »

nivenkos wrote: post #24

Now switch to Linux too. The more we invest together, the easier it becomes. German states can help Spanish states, and Finnish schools, Danish universities, and French businesses, etc. - collaboratively investing so that everyone benefits and Europe can build its own Tech industry and have some independence from the US. This is absolutely critical to move away from the dominance of "Big Tech" to FOSS solutions that…

It says they are going to do that as well - in the first paragraph.

Did you even read the article?

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

#367

Post by [deleted] »

gentleman11 wrote: post #238
earthnail wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm from Munich. As much as I would've liked that project to succeed (I really did), I can tell you that Limux - that was the project's name - was a brutal usability disaster. As in, almost meme-level bad. It's like the Berlin airport in software. Sure, Microsoft has a huge office in Munich, and they definitely applied political pressure, too (it'd be naive to assume they didn't). The project's stated goal was to be…

The problem is that a lot of organizations see foss as purely a free thing and not an investment. If they put half the money they spent on licensing into paying people to improve the foss packages they use, the ecosystem would transform and everyone would benefit. Massive cost savings overall, and it would push paid software to work harder to compete (who knows, it might even force Microsoft to offer decent privacy p…

[deleted]

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

#368

Post by phendrenad2 »

rich_sasha wrote: post #102

I think the main "drawback" of LibreOffice is that it is not widely used. If you receive a docx document and it formats funny, or vice versa (common on LibreOffice and not entirely their fault), it's on you for using weird software, or penny-pinching on a MS Office license. If it becomes common, people just accept the minor incompatibility and move on. It will also get better as funds and attention flow to these proj…

> LibreOffice lacks no features I would remotely consider using

That right there is EXACTLY the problem with LibreOffice. You see no problem with it. Other programmers see no problem with it. Programmers convert their grandmother to using it and their grandmother doesn't even notice. Success! Right? Wrong.

It's missing a lot. Just not the things a programmer would notice.

Here's a simple example:

I have a document with multiple languages in it. Sometimes multiple languages in the same sentence (it's a guidebook for translating between two languages). When I open it in Word, it detects where one language starts and another ends. It provides spell-checking for both languages automatically.

LibreOffice? I had to dig through the config panels to enable this feature, and even then, it was on a global basis. Not per-document. If I type a word in language B into some random document now, but it's really a word in language A with a typo, now LibreOffice will silently accept it. Maddening.

Post reply on HN