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Munich confirms switch to Windows 10
- geff82 9y agoThey switch back to Windows in a time of total vendor lock-in in the office software space. In the time when they started their Linux project, one really could switch from Office 2003 to Staroffice/Openoffice. But now, in the days of cloud and absolute technical domination of Office 365, this is a bit sad to see.
- midnitewarrior 9y agoOffice 365 is affordable, well-supported, easy to use, and updated frequently. It does what businesses and governments want. Their formats are well-supported. The software is also very stable and very mature. Other than ideology, there are few reasons not to use Office 365.
- justinjlynn 9y agoThe real question of interest here is: how much do they pay people to make favourable posts online?
- dkural 9y agoDo you have a response to the argument being put forth as opposed to making unsubstantiated ad hominem attacks?
- justinjlynn 9y agoI wasn't aware any cogent argument was being put forward. "Does what businesses and governments want" is so broad as to read like advertising copy. I mean this is about as blatant as it gets. Clearly the only reason to use open source software is because one is an idealogue... please.
- praneshp 9y ago> Clearly the only reason to use open source software is because one is an idealogue... please. If you taken a few more seconds to read, that is not what your parent comment said when they wrote "Other than ideology, there are few reasons not to use Office 365."
- dang 9y agoIt breaks the site guidelines to insinuate astroturfing or shillage unless you have specific evidence, so would you please not do that? Such things no doubt exist, but internet users are overwhelmingly more likely to just invoke them ex nihilo when someone happens to post a view they don't like. This is toxic to discussion, so we don't allow it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- justinjlynn 9y agoFair enough, my apologies.
- adrianN 9y agoOne reason not to use it is because it makes German government dependent on a foreign company. Another reason not to use it is because it's a cloud product and shouldn't be used to store private data about German citizens. Another reason not to use it is because the FOSS alternatives are free.
- godzillabrennus 9y agoThere is still real cost to using FOSS software. Training employees. Maintaining the environment by addressing bugs. Securing the environment. Plus compatibility with proprietary formats isn’t 100%. I’d still choose FOSS for many kinds of environments but it’s not free.
- justinjlynn 9y agoAll of those enumerated costs apply equally to proprietary software as well.
- godzillabrennus 9y agoThere is a reason Microsoft practically gives away their software to schools. They have an amazing ecosystem.
- justinjlynn 9y agoWell, they certainly have a number of products, but I fail to see how their giving away licences has anything to do with reducing those ongoing operational costs? Not only that then, "first one's free" certainly applies: I would hate to see the renewal costs they charge!
- thaumasiotes 9y ago> I fail to see how their giving away licences has anything to do with reducing those ongoing operational costs? Not only that then, "first one's free" certainly applies: I would hate to see the renewal costs they charge! Your parent comment is referring to the following model: 1. Microsoft provides free or nearly-free licenses to schools. They don't charge the schools for software now, and they won't charge the schools for software later, because that would defeat the purpose of giving the software away. Renewal fees are not an issue anyone sane would worry about. 2. Incoming government workers already know how to use Microsoft software, because that's what they used at school. They complain if they're supposed to use something else.
- madez 9y agoCan it be used completely offline and off-the-grid while still supporting work-flows between peers? Can the documents created easily be shared with peers not using it? Is one tied to other products due to this product, like OS, certain hardware and other things? Who has authorative power over the software and it's updates?
- m_mueller 9y agoHere's my main problem with MS productivity software: Quality degradation when including standard formats like png, pdf (not sure about svg these days). With Apple desktop software you can pretty much copy & paste from A to B and never worry about the result looking bad. With MS I have to follow very specific workflows to get an acceptable result. I don't understand why this is still such a hassle after 25+ years of development. I'd love to have some of Office's advanced features (collaboration, referencing, most excel features, powerpoint's line and endpoint snapping), but with Pages/Keynote/Number's GUI and layouting engine.
- godzillabrennus 9y agoNo need to innovate when you dominate.
- eadmund 9y ago> Other than ideology, there are few reasons not to use Office 365. Isn't that a sufficient reason? Other than ideology, there are few reasons not to kill someone and take his money, if there's no chance of being caught. Proprietary software is immoral; that is IMHO a sufficient reason to forego it.
- praneshp 9y ago> Proprietary software is immoral; that is IMHO a sufficient reason to forego it. Nonsense.
- lisper 9y agoThere is one very good non-ideological reason not to use it: one should never ever use a sole-source vendor for a mission critical product on a subscription basis because if that vendor decides to raise their price, you have no option but to pay.
- brogrammernot 9y agoThis same logic can be applied to FOSS software. It could stop being supported at any moment. There’s also zero financial incentive to fix any critical bugs that arise. As for non-subscription based software, you are simply delaying a pricing increase as the newer versions are needed eventually as new versions contain key features.
- lisper 9y agoNo. With FOSS you always have the option of hiring someone to fix bugs and make enhancements, or form a coalition of customers to hire people and spread the cost, or doing the work yourself. Moreover, the market for providers willing to do that work will be competitive, which will tend to drive costs down. WRT key features: I'm still using Microsoft Office 2008. In ten years I have never once needed a feature it didn't have.
- adrianN 9y agoImagine a world where all German city governments use FOSS software. Every tax Euro spent on adding critical features automatically benefits hundreds of municipalities. Some of those features might even benefit the general public that can also use the same free office software. Compare this to money spent on licensing fee going straight to Microsoft.
- pjmlp 9y agoGiven politicians way of life, I doubt it very much. It would go to some supa-duppa FOSS consulting company, or to yet another Berlin airport.
- BrandoElFollito 9y agoI agree. Now, the data is fully managed by a US company and may be peeked at. Or not. This is a reasonable concern when you put you sensitive information over there.
- nu5500 9y agoIt'll most likely be using the German regulated version of Azure/Office 365: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Learn-about-Office-365-Germany-8a5a4bbc-667a-4cac-8769-d8ac9015db4c?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Learn-about-Office-... Similar to what China does.
- diminish 9y ago>> days of cloud and absolute technical domination of Office 365, Very weird - for my clients of dozens of companies, Google Docs dominates. Never saw even one client using Office 365 just heard someone negotiating with Microsoft.
- confounded 9y agoFor those who want a longer read, the LWN article earlier this month was fantastic https://lwn.net/Articles/737818/ https://lwn.net/Articles/737818/
- dizzystar 9y agoI'm all for FLOSS solutions and love Linux and many of the things that are freely available to us. I wouldn't trade Linux for Windows for any sort of development work. However, I'll be the first to admit that MS Office simply blows Libre Office out of the water. I'm very good with Excel and Calc, but I'm many times slower with Calc. The hotkeys, variety of equations, and simple features simply aren't available in Calc. I know that if I'm say 3x slower, the cost associated with that across a year and across a team is going to outweigh the MS subscription. There is nothing wrong with ceding the crown to the better product.
- madez 9y agoCan you make yourself more specific? What hotkeys, equations and simple features are missing?
- sz4kerto 9y agoPerformance is relative easy to test: open a CSV with 100k rows in Excel, Calc and Google Spreadsheets.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoI suspect most of Libre Office's slow performance is a result of using JAVA.
- MegaDeKay 9y agoNope. From https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Java https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Java - "Note though that very little of this Java code is actually part of the shipped product." A lot of the Java stuff is ancillary, and chunks of Java code have been rewritten to C++ over time. Part of the reason that LibreOffice is slow is that it was essentially debugged into existence. Michael Meeks from Collabra would often post to Planet Gnome about his optimization work. There is certainly hope looking forward. It is a lot faster than it used to be, and they will hopefully be enabling Multi-threading in Calc for LibreOffice 6.0. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LibreOffice-Calc-Threading https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LibreOff...
- userbinator 9y agoI wonder about the telemetry... or have they decided that the available methods of disabling it are sufficient? I remember hearing that a lot of Germans were wary of Win10 specifically because of that.
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoIf you have Windows 10 Enterprise edition, all telemetry can be disabled. Most people don't talk about that much because at $500 a seat... well, most people don't buy Enterprise edition. (Of course, organizations of certain sizes, government institutions, etc. may have better pricing options available to them as well.) Also, bear in mind, if you're an organization with a proper modern firewall solution, you can detect and block unwanted network traffic at the edges of your network as well.
- lucb1e 9y ago> If you have Windows 10 Enterprise edition, all telemetry can be disabled. I remember reading that this common belief is wrong, but unfortunately I don't remember where/who claimed that. Did it recently change, perhaps?
- userbinator 9y agoThat might be this: https://xato.net/windows-spying-and-a-twitter-rant-19203babb2e7 https://xato.net/windows-spying-and-a-twitter-rant-19203babb... It's so confusing to disable that a (admittedly self-proclaimed, but still) "security expert" got it wrong several times, and even after that it still continued sending data to Microsoft. It reminds me of the same scummy tricks used by spyware/adware in the past e.g. "do not disable for the best user experience", double-negative wording, etc. I believe it's still (deliberately) really easy to pirate/crack Windows, so I could get the Enterprise edition if I wanted --- but I wouldn't want it even if it was legally free, just like all sorts of other malware and unwanted software.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
- rob74 9y agoJust a small information that's missing from the discussion: I'm sure this decision doesn't have anything to do with Microsoft (a major taxpayer) moving its German offices from the suburbs (Unterschleißheim) to Munich proper in 2016 (https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-germany-moves-into-a-new-headquarters/ https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-germany-moves-into-a-new-h...)...
- static_noise 9y agoKey users hated Linux and their know-it-all IT administration prescribing them software that nobody else uses. During the time the IT department failed to provide a solution that was better than the MS offering. The user interface is different and the compatibility lacked badly. Let's be honest. How do you beat MS Office using Linux solutions? Will your Excel documents with macros still work flawlessly? How would you replace Exchange? Maybe Thunderbird with what calendar solution? There are tons of material and training for everyday MS Office use and most people are already familiar with the details they need. For OpenOffice... not as much... OpenOffice isn't even really developed anymore as people switch to LibreOffice.
- Certhas 9y agoFrom people in Munich I talked to, there were a number of interwoven problems. In particular there was a major IT reorganisation at the same time as the switch. Users also tend to blame everything on Linux, whether related or not. An yeah at the end of the day, interop with MS documents is not seamless.
- bo1024 9y agoThat makes sense. When you try something new, every hurdle or setback gets blamed on the new system. When you stick with something old, they're accepted as part of the daily grind.
- frik 9y agoMunich should have switched to ChromeOS/ChromiumOS or Android or RedHat/CentOS or Ubuntu on thin clients, as the software is anyway usually web based in the cloud/intranet. But neither Google nor RedHat or Ubuntu are known to lobby. @sz4kerto: > ChromeOS proprietary Why you pick this one of a list of many? ChromiumOS is open source, as is Android, as is RedHat or Ubuntu. But Windows is proprietary. > Google spends a lot on lobbying, by the way, afaik more than what Microsoft is spending. Really? Source please. The question is how much do they all spend lobbying for an OS? How much do they spend lobbying in Munich? (hint German HQ got relocated to Munich) You read like a employee.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y agoEven the giants can die. And as they do, their willingness to help you export your data from their proprietary formats and products will decrease at a rate faster than the neccessity of doing so. Properitary software is a short sighted choice, and probably one made by people with greased pockets. It's difficult to get funding to work on open source software. Governments are a natural source, but time and time again bribery fucks everything up.
- beefhash 9y agoWould it be wrong to say that Microsoft is "too big to fail", similar to some banks? I'd expect governments to actually try and save Microsoft precisely because of this situation.
- AnthonyMouse 9y ago> Would it be wrong to say that Microsoft is "too big to fail", similar to some banks? I'd expect governments to actually try and save Microsoft precisely because of this situation. It doesn't really work like that. If Microsoft fails, it will be slow. You don't go from 90% installed base to 0% installed base overnight. There is no point at which they still have enough customers to be too big to fail but don't have enough to continue operating. But as businesses transition to something else, they have to pay the transition cost. Which is a lot higher when changing market conditions force you to transition unexpectedly than when you have the foresight to plan and get ahead of the curve.
- bunderbunder 9y agoOffice's formats are now open, and have been for a long time, now - they're basically just zip archives full of XML files. Whether they're easier or harder to work with is maybe a topic for debate. My experience from working with them is that OXML tends to be easier to work with than ODF in simple cases, in part because of better open source library support on more languages, and more StackOverflow-type advice. (Yes, open source support for the Microsoft formats really is quite a bit better than for the OpenOffice ones these days.) But it also tends to be the one that produces really gnarly compound documents that are just impossible to make sense of. I'm not sure that's because the format allows for more complexity, though, so much as because MS Office makes it easier for the kinds of people who use templates that look like spiral bound notebooks with Comic Sans type to create trouble.
- fartcannon 9y agoThis is why we can't have nice things.
- BrandoElFollito 9y agoBackground : I am IT for 25 years, run Linux on all servers (pro and home), develop open source. I tried to use Linux desktop at least 5 times over the last years (again a few days ago on the home shared laptop). It is ok-ish when I use the browser and IDEs (vcs, pycharm) but anything else is horrendous. I looked for an equivalent of ShareX, I felt like I was 25 again. Linux desktop is on for the 86% if the train which only uses a browser ("Internet") but I doubt anything more specialized is reasonable. Not that Linux desktop is bad (though it is not good either), it's because there are no ports of that specialized software. If someone is fully (apps, I mean) html5 then why not.
- xyproto 9y agoGaming is also covered, with 2500+ commercial games available on Steam only. The KDE applications Kdevelop, Kdenlive and Krita has improved a lot the latest 1-2 years, providing a pretty great IDE, video editing and also painting application. 3D animation, modeling and texturing isn't too shabby either, with Maya, Houdini, Blender and 3D-Coat. For ShareX, there are many alternatives for grabbing screenshots. A direct clone is ShareNix (video: http://www.hnng.moe/f/3CI http://www.hnng.moe/f/3CI) If ShareX is what's stopping you, I think that you're mainly stuck with a Windows desktop habit.
- mamon 9y agoRegarding gaming: it doesn't matter how many games are there, what matters is WHICH GAMES. Playing games is a social activity after all, especially for teenagers. If all of your Windows-using friends are playing Assassin's Creed: Origins, and you can't because there isn't a Linux version of it then those 2500+ games on Steam do not really matter to you.
- eitland 9y agoCS:GO is there and IMO it has often been more performant there than on Windows :-) While CS:GO might not be your thing it should be proof that the sitiation is improving.
- ringe 9y agoImagine if Munich had put the same amount into improving the upstream software instead. Politicians never fail to disappoint, feels like. That said, I often can't replace Windows due to legacy applications. Regarding MS Office, some people buy iPhone. These people also seem to need their Microsoft Office.
- jodrellblank 9y agoMicrosoft Office apps are available for iPhone - https://itunes.apple.com/gb/developer/microsoft-corporation/id298856275 https://itunes.apple.com/gb/developer/microsoft-corporation/...
- zvrba 9y agoAlso: what is the Linux equivalent of Active Directory / Windows domain? How do you centrally manage workstations? (push software updates, configure firewall rules and other access policies, etc.)
- lucb1e 9y ago> what is the Linux equivalent of Active Directory / Windows domain? LDAP > How do you centrally manage workstations? SSH This is how my school does it: there is a system user with an ssh key which they use for pushing updates and such (e.g. recently fail2ban was installed on all computers), and we can all log into any system using LDAP.
- dogma1138 9y agoActive directory isn’t equivalent to a basic LDAP directory not even close. To have similar functionality you need a commercial directory solution. Same goes for remote management SSH is how you connect to machines remotely not how you manage them. Automation of Linux desktop again requires either a commercial product or a huge development undertaking. The problem with Linux on the desktop is that if you get out of the Microsoft ecosystem you need products to centrally manage users, workstations, configuration and patch management and all of these usually require you to go for other enterprise solutions even if they are OpenSource in their core but still commercial in practice.
- pjmlp 9y agoSo basically they are stuck in the 80's.
- danieldk 9y agoHow do you centrally manage workstations? (push software updates, configure firewall rules and other access policies, etc.) There are different solutions, such as Red Hat's Satellite: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/management/satellite https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/management/satellite Or Canonical's Landscape: https://landscape.canonical.com/ https://landscape.canonical.com/ But a tech-savvy team could do the same with Ansible, Puppet, Chef, etc.
- webreac 9y agoHello. I am a linux lover. I have choosen ubuntu gnome because IMHO, it is the closer to desktop linux and I do not want to spend my life tuning my system. Recently there was some automatic updates and now the chrome scrollbar jumps crazy. I am pretty sure this will be fixed in a couple of days (weeks), but all these little glitches are becoming tiring. Since release 16.04, I have stopped advising people to migrate to linux. I see discutions about removing the features that count for me (network transparency, remote display, GPL license, ...). As a tax payer, I really want my administration to stop giving money to compagnies that work against my freedom. I feel very sad about it but Munich is probably reverting to Microsoft for sensible reasons and not for politic.
- bo1024 9y agoI feel that you are portraying Ubuntu as representing all of Linux, and maybe it does to you, but this is far from the truth.
- webreac 9y agoAt work, I have just migrated to RHEL 7. With RHEL 7.3, there was a problem with gedit (impossible to resize). This ought to be solved in 7.4. In 7.4 most of the applications crash because GTK does not check correctly the values returned by the RandR extension (which is broken in my version of exceed). The current workarounds are either to use xming or deactivate extension RandR (unrealistic in our case because many people use laptop). The package bash-completion is installed by default. It causes so many issues that we decided to mandate its removal in all installations.
- leereeves 9y agoWho's talking about removing the GPL license? How would that even be possible? Are they going to rewrite all the GPL code?
- webreac 9y agomany packages are replaced, for example gnu netcat has been replaced by ncat in RHEL 7
- mjw1007 9y agoDoes anyone know if the amount they'll be paying in Microsoft licensing is (or will be) public? It would be interesting to see if they're getting an unusually good deal. Though I suppose there might be ways to hide that if they wanted to.
- sctb 9y agoRecent related articles: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15765990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15765990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15780556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15780556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15661372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15661372