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

The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

politiken.dk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 156 posts

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#61

Post by Iulioh »

worthless-trash wrote: post #38
neepi wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the standard voice of someone who's never had to deal with a badly maintained or managed open source product or an asshole maintainer or had to run a fork for 6 years because no one will merge a trivial fix in. Or had a LibreOffice bug open for a decade. Yeah I can really get in there and spend 2 years ripping the horrible UI out, then have to run a fork because it's not of interest to the maintainers and wil…

But you can't fix that one either.

Man, I hate how excel behave a lot of times but I thank God everyday that it exists.

On the backend while writing macros you discover a lot of...interesting choices

Like how sometimes my macros failed because it does not interface with the regional formatting of the system (had to take 0.34 and convert it to 0,34 by converting it to string). The reverse is not necessary.

How value and value2 exists as property of a cell (I will bet whatever you want that it was a temporary name) and how the "value" behavior is dogshit.

How stuff is hyper advanced but stuff that SHOULD work does not....

It's an interesting look at it.

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#62

Post by dgrin91 »

mmooss wrote: post #58
neepi wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the standard voice of someone who's never had to deal with a badly maintained or managed open source product or an asshole maintainer or had to run a fork for 6 years because no one will merge a trivial fix in. Or had a LibreOffice bug open for a decade. Yeah I can really get in there and spend 2 years ripping the horrible UI out, then have to run a fork because it's not of interest to the maintainers and wil…

I don't understand these stories: Do people talk to the maintainer before they work on the change? If not, why not? It seems necessary and obvious to get people on board before you invest in something.

If you can get a discussion going with the maintainer, which is not a guarantee (cant speak to libre maintainers, but I know other projects like this), then you have to convince them that your change is both valuable and reasonable for them to maintain. The latter part there is key - they are _maintain_ers. You write the code once and then run off. If you write some new UI in some fancy framework then they have to live with it forever and learn a new framework to support it. Its a big cost for them, so on smaller projects maintainers can get defensive/grumpy

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#65

Post by mmooss »

The issues in this situation are always,

1. How much is compatibility with outside users and past documents necessary? No office application can successfully, reliably convert anything but relatively simple documents (have LLMs done better somehow?). Each conversion reduces fidelity and often integrity; send a few revisions back and forth and it can become a problem. Simply adding a small headache every time an outsider emails your users' a document - or vice verssa - becomes a big issue. Regarding past documents, some users create complex applications in Excel, for example. How much of a problem is that for these users? How will those problems be solved?

2. What is the system management story? Essential to IT beyond even 30 users is a way to deploy, administer (including configuring settings), and upgrade/patch applications en masse. Microsoft provides those tools and Office, of course, integrates well with them. There are third party tools, but they need to do much better than exist; they need to function efficiently and reliably - imagine the deployment bug implemented en masse. Are there such tools for Linux and LibreOffice?

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#67

Post by adrian_b »

ryanackley wrote: post #41
adrian_b wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I'm no Microsoft fanboy but LibreOffice is hideous and the compatibility has not kept up even after the MS Office formats moved to xml. Also, most of my interactions with Office Documents nowadays are through the online tools. I don't even have to install a binary on my computer anymore. These enterprises should invest a fraction of what they used to spend on Microsoft Office into a development effort to modernize Li…

While LibreOffice has a ton of things that should be improved, I hope that it will never suffer a "modernization" that will make it more similar to the recent versions of MS Office.

In my opinion, MS Office has been improved steadily during the decade ending in 2003/2004, then it has stagnated, then it has been degraded continuously until today.

The UI of LibreOffice is ugly, but it is easy to do with it what you need. The UI of MS Office has become extremely convoluted for any of the more sophisticated tasks.

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#68

Post by neepi »

mmooss wrote: post #58
neepi wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the standard voice of someone who's never had to deal with a badly maintained or managed open source product or an asshole maintainer or had to run a fork for 6 years because no one will merge a trivial fix in. Or had a LibreOffice bug open for a decade. Yeah I can really get in there and spend 2 years ripping the horrible UI out, then have to run a fork because it's not of interest to the maintainers and wil…

I don't understand these stories: Do people talk to the maintainer before they work on the change? If not, why not? It seems necessary and obvious to get people on board before you invest in something.

Yes. Lucky if you even get noticed.

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#69

Post by victorbjorklund »

lordnacho wrote: post #13

Talking 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…

Same in Sweden. Everything is azure, office365 and c# (okay not everything but a way higher % than elsewhere)

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#70

Post by pietervdvn »

dgrin91 wrote: post #62
mmooss wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand these stories: Do people talk to the maintainer before they work on the change? If not, why not? It seems necessary and obvious to get people on board before you invest in something.

If you can get a discussion going with the maintainer, which is not a guarantee (cant speak to libre maintainers, but I know other projects like this), then you have to convince them that your change is both valuable and reasonable for them to maintain. The latter part there is key - they are _maintain_ers. You write the code once and then run off. If you write some new UI in some fancy framework then they have to li…

As such a maintainer: you hit the nail on the head.

Add to that an infinite stream of bug reports and feature requests, and it gets tiring. I don't even have the time to answer all bug reports...

Post reply on HN