24 ms·

German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

442 points by jrepinc 5y ago

throwaway123x2 5y ago
MS Office was so much more functional and nicer to use than libreoffice when I last checked.
- pbasista 5y ago
  That is possible. But apparently, people in Germany are looking for software based on attributes that reach beyond the elemental metrics like "nice to use" or "supports corporate integration". They might care more about the ability to audit the software's behavior and to easily make changes where necessary. They might also like to contribute patches back to the original LibreOffice community because they know that they themselves will benefit from more people reviewing their work and making it better as a result.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    Does a German state have the ability to audit software or contribute patches? And what would the patches be for? What use-cases do they have that are so unique that they need custom software?
  - leokennis 5y ago
    Devil's advocate here. Recently my employer (large corporate) went all in on (as it is now called) Microsoft 365: Teams, SharePoint online, OneDrive etc. While I have no illusions about Microsoft's business model and motives, the truth is that "it just works" and makes collaboration very easy. Create a team in Teams, add a document which everyone can edit (if needed at the same time), click a button, share it with someone outside the team, have a meeting with them, click a button, save the meeting video to OneDrive, click one more button and you're collaborating on a whiteboard. And all this works fully synchronized on my phone too. As far as I can see (from their terrible website) LibreOffice does not offer this at all. Maybe Germany, known for being "digitally outdated" by 5-10 years, will suffer no consequences from that and their basic workflow is still "type document - print it - sign it - fax it". But it will be a sad day for my productivity when I am forced to switch to LibreOffice.
    - marcodiego 5y ago
      Consider OnlyOffice or the version offered by Collabora with on-line features. I really don't know how good these options are but they exist.
      - periheli0n 5y ago
        we're using this for document management in a large European research project. It sort of works but has its quirks. The UI is not really smooth, and the whole system could be more stable. I once lost a day's work because of a bug in the writer component. That was quite discouraging.
    - raxxorrax 5y ago
      > the truth is that "it just works" and makes collaboration very easy. My org does that too for different reasons for years now. It just works is a lie. We also have a lot Apple devices for all our external employees. That doesn't 'just' work as well. Sadly I have to deal with SharePoint integration which a lot of MS services are based on. Digitally outdated has a complete new dimensions here, even if you add half baked services like Flow on top of it. There are far more modern alternatives than what MS brings to the table, there are countless alternatives that are better to control and easier to adapt. You could use teams on Linux and while the office integration is nice, it isn't essential at all. This "collaboration" in the MS cloud is a nightmare to archive or access and some of the APIs are in a beta phase. We killed our fax a long time ago...
  - periheli0n 5y ago
    The big question is: Is the aim to have the best possible software integration? Or is it about freedom from MS and contributing to open source? If it's software integration, MS is hard to beat. It comes at the price of total dependence. If it's about freedom then going full open source is great. But the cost in efficiency is huge, since the OSS alternatives will never be as streamlined as MS's stuff. not having to spend money on licenses is great but a lot of extra footwork will be required to get the job done.
    - BlueTemplar 5y ago
      And Germany is unable to find and pay programmers to make Libre Office better ?
      - periheli0n 5y ago
        Salaries are part of the problem; there is a very rigid salary structure in Germany's civil service. The salary band in which programmers would fall is OK but not overly attractive. There is very little headroom to pay talented developers a salary that could compete with what they get elsewhere.
- bserge 5y ago
  You should definitely check again. Office 2010 is over a decade old now, it's been going downhill ever since.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  I didn't check the latest LO version but I agree. LO shines on import export but the UI lags, the functionalities are limited. Even macros are weird compared to VBA which is sad. FOSS community needs to gather up on this.
  - mopsi 5y ago
    And what's worse, lot of functionaly that appears to exist turns out to be broken when you actually try to use it. Basic things like pivot tables, conditional formatting or automatic data import at regular intervals (from a file) are ridiculously broken in LO, and have been so for many years. Feels as if no-one's actually using it beyond a simple document viewer.
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      10$ the most used button is export as pdf
- albertopv 5y ago
  This. At home I use Ubuntu I tried Libreoffice few months ago, for anything non trivial it just sucks compared to Office, years behind. I don't know what kind of documents this German state creates, maybe for them Libreoffice feature are good enough. And I'm just talking about document creation feature, whole Office 365 collaboration ecosystem is huge and on Windows PCs it works just fine, at least most of the time. I really would like them to succed, we really need a real MS Office competitor, but it's very hard, MS can be a powerful opponent[0][1] [0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-is-shifting-back-from-microsoft-to-open-source-again/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i... [1] https://www.neowin.net/news/munich-germany-realizes-that-deploying-linux-was-a-disaster-going-back-to-windows/ https://www.neowin.net/news/munich-germany-realizes-that-dep...
- tmalsburg2 5y ago
  What did your check consist of? I’m asking because I know people who’ve been using both Word and LibreOffice for many years to write huge amounts of technical documentation and their experience is that LibreOffice is much more reliable with longer and more complex documents. When a certain document size or complexity is reached, Word apparently starts to behave erratically and even crashes occasionally. They’d prefer LibreOffice any day but some customers require Word.
- Fazel94 5y ago
  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.
  - throwaway123x2 5y ago
    If I can afford to pay for the better experience and I want it badly enough, I will. That's how markets work.
periheli0n 5y ago
This is a great move! I hope they will still have money left to train all teachers and office staff properly. Believe it or not, many German teachers have started using digital technology for real only in 2020, when the pandemic first hit. They are now totally entrenched with the Microsoft way of doing things. They know all the MS quirks and how to navigate around them. Free software alternatives to MS products have different quirks that will need different workarounds.
dgellow 5y ago
It's the same story every ~2 years since at least 10 years now... It's mostly a way to negotiate Microsoft prices down.
jccalhoun 5y ago
This is interesting since LibreOffice started life as StarOffice which was created in Germany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice#History
frakt0x90 5y ago
I've seen these stories pop up from time to time about large entities switch to linux or open source software in general and it seems there's a large number who end up going back to windows/proprietary. Hopefully this is not one of those.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
PaulHoule 5y ago
German local governments have been playing this game for a long time. Usually they try off brand software and then the employee union complains and they switch back to Microsoft. Microsoft Office is buggy, but off-brand office suites make it look positively reliable.
Nohortax 5y ago
I hope other countries will do it. I have some doubts about Belgium which is not really great to do right choices. Also I feel like Germany is often ahead its neighbors. Anyway, that's good to read ! Edit : LibrOffice is not really complicated but Linux requires some knowledge to be well used. Will people have a training course to survive on Linux ?
cat199 5y ago
"digital sovereignty" is a nice phrase
- nivenkos 5y ago
  Especially in contrast to the current digital colonialism. US Big Tech companies pay almost no corporation taxes in the EU (and if they do, only in Ireland / Luxembourg), and compete and buy out European companies, shipping the high-paying jobs (and the economic benefits and taxes those bring) back to the US (much like the oil industry in Nigeria, etc.). The EU must take a stand against this, like has been done against Huawei. Ultimately the American Big Tech companies are no better than Huawei - the US is not an ally of the EU, and has been interfering in European democracy ever since the May 1947 crises.
  - Flatuscents 5y ago
    Let’s not overgeneralize. The US is not in lockstep with all EU goals and ideas, but not an ally? As someone who grew up with nuclear drills every week I can assure you I think of the EU as an ally, AND I want you to have a robust Big Tech environment. We share a common cultural interest in freedom and fairness, more or less, despite all the craziness in the world right now. Maybe the US isn’t always the BEST friend, but we have to be in the top five right? I would hate to be replaced by Belarus and Russia. ;)
    - nivenkos 5y ago
      It's well known that the CIA has spied on European industry to benefit their own (e.g. Boeing over Airbus) - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32542140 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32542140 And on European leaders - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-security-agency-spied-merkel-other-top-european-officials-through-danish-2021-05-30/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-security-agency-spie... How does that differ from Huawei and China?
      - Flatuscents 5y ago
raxxorrax 5y ago
Awesome. I know how people in offices work and for their use cases LibreOffice has become the safer and more fitting choice. Yes, MS Office isn't bad and I wouldn't pull Excel from the dead hands of physicists, but the whole MS cloud deal is bad for government.
- ginko 5y ago
  > I wouldn't pull Excel from the dead hands of physicists Accountants I understand but physicists? I'd have thought they mostly use Matlab or maybe Mathematica.
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    That too, but many aren't firm with such tools and Excel is very prominently used. They often employ special software (I mostly worked with them on optical systems) that use Excel as a common output format for visualization. Don't know the name of their simulators.
  - ahartmetz 5y ago
    And / or Jupyter Notebook
  - valenaut 5y ago
    My physics undergrad had about equal parts Mathematica (for theoretical subjects), MATLAB (for engineering crossover), Python (for CS), and Excel (for labs).
ghunky 5y ago
Didn't they do something similar a decade ago and reverted to MS Office?
- schroeding 5y ago
  Maybe you're thinking about Munich, which changed from MS Office to OpenOffice to LibreOffice and then back to MS Office. They may change again soon to something open source, too :-)
  - soco 5y ago
    Yeah the new coalition signed all those agreements back in 2020 (Munich, Hamburg, Dortmund...) but I don't know how far are they with actually implementing those plans.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  Munich reverted to Windows in 2017, then reverted back to Linux in 2020. it is expected that the 2017 rollback was a case of corruption and a waste of money. The first shift was allegedly explicitly against the wishes of many users.
  - dathinab 5y ago
    > case of corruption Probably, I mean the arguments where supper questionable. Like oh mail on my phone is not working, that is because mail is now run by Linux we must switch back ... but it wasn't, Mail was one a the few systems which didn't switch to Linux. Or very questionable calculations about the price of buying some "customer support" (Linux IT Consulting). At least as far as I remember.
scanny 5y ago
Seems to be a running trend in Germany to move toward open software. Tangentially related to this: The city of Munich has flip-flopped between their own version of linux and windows [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  >Seems to be a running trend in Germany to move toward open software. Yeah, until the Ms sales guys wine and dine some German politicians and promise to build a new campus in $BIG_CITY that creates ## jobs, then they suddenly decide to renew their windows and office licenses instead. Rinse and repeat.
  - emteycz 5y ago
    Sure, it has nothing to do with overall better UX that the actual users of these computers require, it's all corruption.
    - MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
      I came here to say the same thing. Linux is fine for us devs and sys admins. The general populace wouldn't tolerate all the quirks to each DE one bit.
    - hulitu 5y ago
      Better UI ? Ten years ago, yes. Now the UI in Office 365 is a disaster. And yes, some german politicians are very sensitive when money starts to flow.
      - periheli0n 5y ago
        At least Office 365 does proper kerning. Edit: I don't get the downvote. Last week I spent 10 minutes of a meeting waiting for the presenter to apply some fix to his LibreOffice presentation because font kerning and sizes were corrupt in the full screen view. I would love to ditch MS completely and use LibreOffice for all my work, but it has its weak spots.
soco 5y ago
Some more contextual infos about challenges of moving German officials to opensource: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-is-shifting-back-from-microsoft-to-open-source-again/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...
jamil7 5y ago
Do they plan to fund and/or contribute to the development of LibreOffice as well? I couldn't find anything in that article or the linked paper. Edit: Actually one of the slides seems to indicate they have the intention to contribute and/or fund in someway.
- titannet 5y ago
  It is highly doubtful. German public authorities are notorious for not voluntarily sharing anything with the public.
  - schleck8 5y ago
    https://prototypefund.de/project/microg/ https://prototypefund.de/project/microg/ https://prototypefund.de/about/ https://prototypefund.de/about/
nicoburns 5y ago
This is great, but they seem to be missing the other part of it, which is that (at least some of) the money saved ought to go towards funding development of the open software. If that happened then Libre Office could hope to outcompete MS Office on merit sometime in the near future. As it is, it's unclear how much this really supports the free software.
- laurent92 5y ago
  This is a 20-year-old problem. It won’t improve. And we’ve lost the cloud fight (practically no site is Affero GPL). OSS is dead. Even Linux - I bet half installs nowadays are on AWS/GCP/etc., and they run custom distros, and one day Debian won’t have enough funding to fix all CVEs, and the only ones which will be constantly viable to run when you have liabilities (=all the time) will be cloud provider-maintained ones.
  - gopiandcode 5y ago
    > OSS is dead. Given that OSS was a corporate sponsored perversion of Free/Libre software designed to trick naive developers into contributing unpaid labour without getting anything back, I would hope so. Free software, on the other hand, is roaring ahead, and doing better than ever.
    - md8z 5y ago
      I used to volunteer for the FSF and I can't agree with that at all. The FSF is politically/socially irrelevant and GNU has largely failed and been relegated to an extreme niche. The "free software movement" as it stands is still a reactionary movement, a desire to go back to the good old days when hardware vendors also wrote all the software and shipped the source code along with their products. It's just not a realistic goal. It also doesn't seem to really matter whether you call it open source or free software. Either way the projects that I see are all struggling for cash in the same way. It's not easy to fund a product when the entire point is you're giving away your labour for free to everyone on the internet.
loudmax 5y ago
This is the kind of story that would have been cheered on on Slashdot twenty years ago. But here we are in 2021 and a major organization having the temerity to not pay the Microsoft tax is newsworthy. This is not what a free market looks like.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  Didn't Berlin attempt to convert to Linux but had to revert back because all their end users were too stupid/scared to learn a new OS? I know a German city did that at one point.
- wahern 5y ago
  It's the kind of story that was cheered on on Slashdot. Multiple times. I can't count the number of times I've seen "Some German [agency|municipality|state] [is planning to adopt|has adopted|cancels adoption|reverses adoption] of [StarOffice|OpenOffice|Libreoffice|Linux]". I think it's some kind of meme, the product of peculiar German administrative politics, or a result of vigorous Free Software activism in Germany because I don't see such headlines nearly as often for any other locality.
  - nivenkos 5y ago
    Also there a _lot_ of different cities and municipalities in Europe. And when it succeeds you don't usually hear about it. Like when I worked at an MPI in Germany, all the machines used Ubuntu. In Catalonia, most of the universities also use Ubuntu. The Ayuntamiento uses LibreOffice (and maybe also Ubuntu in some parts) - and for the most part, it all just works. It was the same in Zaragoza too. You only notice it when they accidentally send a .odt file to someone who is only using Windows for example.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    This is mostly because the "Munich case" was a star example for a long time. Also, star division, the company that started star office, is from Germany.
OneTimePetes 5y ago
Would be nice to have a german software culture. But all we got is politicians who wish for that and then turn a blind eye on fraudsters like WireCard. Something is missing from the german cultural dna, that our neighbours have.(Swiss,Luxemburg, Belgians, Chechen Republic, Poland, Litauen). Seems the most important thing to be big in software in europe, is to foremost be not german ;)
- kall 5y ago
  Feels like a good chunk of OSS development is happening in germany. By some accounts, the entirety of linux is being ruined by one german. The biggest software companies like SAP are maybe not shining examples, but when you go lower, there‘s a lot of good stuff. What differences do you see to the other European countries? Who‘s big in those countries?
  - __m 5y ago
    I'm not familiar with linux development, what did that one german do?
    - kall 5y ago
      Lennart Poettering created systemd, which is a rewrite of many different things in linux that where seperate before. Some people don‘t like it.
- bserge 5y ago
  Nonsense. Germans are bad at creating new things but excellent at improving anything to its highest potential. Kinda doubting the Chechen software industry, though.
- periheli0n 5y ago
  Things will hopefully change now that the political tide has turned. Digitally, the old government was essentially stuck to the status quo of 2005, when they took over. In my view the weak digital culture in Germany is a direct consequence of political non-engagement with the matter during the last 15 years. Many areas are affected, first governance itself (fax machines!!), in education (universities and schools "discovered" digital tools mostly in March 2020, when they were forced to), business and trade (card payment still not being ubiquitous, let alone contactless; Some trivial contracts still require ink signatures and paper being mailed around etc). Other European countries are a lot more progressive, e.g. the UK.
nivenkos 5y ago
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 independent, small co-operatives can maintain together.
- go_elmo 5y ago
  This could be a major ease on state budgets, also communal ones and allow to allocate resources where they are more urgently needed. Might require high initial costs for setup & staff education which would amortize over a few years for sure.
  - f6v 5y ago
    If you could save money by switching to Linux from Windows, I’d expect to see much more Linux machines in corporations.
    - MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
      The only places I've ever heard of having linux on their computers are tech companies or software devs.
    - go_elmo 5y ago
      I only saw linux machines in SE companies so far (at least remote ones). Maybe, just maybe, it is because non-tech people 1) cant handle it as cli is needed from time to time 2) because personal preferences & habits make it almost impossible to "force" using linux on staff..?
      - f6v 5y ago
        > because personal preferences & habits make it almost impossible to "force" using linux on staff..? I’m willing to speculate office workers won’t care. More and more people will have smartphone as the only personal computer. So it won’t be about them not wanting to use Linux at work because they run Windows at home.
jhgs 5y ago
Has been done multiple times before. Re-training users and increased support expenses usually nullify any license cost savings over time.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  That's the Microsoft side of the story yes. The old "Linux Myths" In reality many admins see much easier management, see other posts in this thread too. The problem arises when you don't go all-in on Linux and try to have the two ecosystems work together. This is when it becomes a mess.
a_square_peg 5y ago
I really would like to pay to use a viable alternative for MS Office on Linux that’s not clunky like Libre Office. I’m trying Softmaker program now and it’s fairly decent.
- aembleton 5y ago
  Have you tried WPS? https://www.wps.com/ https://www.wps.com/
  - a_square_peg 5y ago
    Thanks for the suggestion - I did not know about WPS but will give it a try.
whalesalad 5y ago
I tried to use LibreOffice recently and that lasted about 30 seconds. Terrible software.
- justtocomment 5y ago
  I tried to use a CNC mill recently and that lasted about 30 seconds. Terrible piece of equipment.
  - yetanother-1 5y ago
    I like your argument, but there are some truth to what he says, not that I agree with him.
    - nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
      That's a very clever argument actually. Clerks in government just want like better utility knives, instead they will be offered CNC machines!
marcodiego 5y ago
Hope this encourage them to invest in improving OOXML compatibility. I think right now this is the biggest reason people avoid LibreOffice. Also, some action must be taken about MS behavior. They are the same company they were in the 90's. It is easy to find commit messages in LO explaining things like 'this is what MSO does but not what the specification says'. They recently change the algorithm the justifies text in MSO and it is not explained in the specification. So, even a simple text file without any especial formatting may not be viewed correctly with anything but MSO. This is ridiculous. The use of such a format should be forbidden for governments. ISO shouldn't have ratified it.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  This being the government, they have the power to flip this around. Why invest in compatibility with Microsoft Office when you can use the good old native OpenOffice formats instead? When the state is working in LibreOffice, there's no need to save files in Microsoft's format anymore.
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    Makes sense. That would be even better.
- jlkuester7 5y ago
  Does anyone know of any large-scale implementations of https://www.onlyoffice.com/ https://www.onlyoffice.com/ ? I wonder if that suite would be a better solution than LO simply because it is OOXML native (unlike LO which AFIK is ODF native and has a conversion layer to be compatible with OOXML). I think that OO's feature set is still limited in comparison to LO, but they are making a lot of progress (and being web-native seems like a huge advantage as well).
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    They have a list of costumers but I really don't know of any large-scale implementation. I've been testing it on my notebook and its compatibility with OOXML is much better than LO. Of course, harder cases break on both. So, even combining both, something I've tried to do, is not enough to achieve good compatility with MSO.
Shadonototra 5y ago
Great move! that'll encourage more people to contribute and improve the software I agree with others, next logical move is to switch to linux fully
rob74 5y ago
Ok, so it's "A German State" (Schleswig-Holstein), not "The German State" (which would be the federal government) - of course this is big news too, but the title is a little bit misleading...
- PoignardAzur 5y ago
  Oh, wow, that's super underwhelming. The title is incredibly misleading.
nomdep 5y ago
Ten years ago I used to be excite by news like this. Now I don’t care that much because, unless is a commitment to openness on a cultural level, is just a n inconsequential gesture, maybe even just a cost-saving measure
- schleck8 5y ago
  > [...] and the Windows operating system is to be replaced by GNU/Linux
shireboy 5y ago
I'm in a position to recommend similar for a large organization, but am on the fence. They have SharePoint on-prem and Office, and are being pulled to Office 365 by MS sales folk. I'm definitely pushing to linux containers for apps, etc, and part of me wants to recommend Libre. There's a lot not to like about Office and SharePoint, but I've yet to find decent open-source document management software that does all the things SharePoint does. I could recommend they stitch together some things, like some of the low-code projects I've seen here, some calendar apps, some dropbox clone, BI/reporting tools, etc. into a Kubernetes environment. But that's more complex than "go pay N/user/mo for this service". You have to get SSO working for all the things, and each has their own quirks, etc. Any HNers out there have recommendations for open source tools to replace SharePoint/Office 365?
- jlkuester7 5y ago
  Also wanted to add my +1 for NextCloud + OnlyOffice! They integrate well and honestly IMHO have reached a maturity where a "normal" user should have no problems (if your people can handle the insanity of SharePoint, NC is nbd).
- MayeulC 5y ago
  I haven't used SharePoint/O365 much, so I don't know how it compares, but I've been quite happy with Nextcloud and its OnlyOffice integration.
- PoignardAzur 5y ago
  I've heard good things about OnlyOffice as a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office, with online collaboration out of the box. It's open-source and free for individual use, paying for companies, I think?
rich_sasha 5y ago
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 projects. As far as I'm concerned, LibreOffice lacks no features I would remotely consider using. It's like when Windows was the sole mainstream OS, it wasn't an excuse "oh but I'm on Mac and can't run this". Now Macs are mainstream, and Linux is not, it's still in a "weird nerdy" corner. But not so if it just gets more widely used (it's happening, just slowly).
- kevincox 5y ago
  > If it becomes common, people just accept the minor incompatibility and move on If LibreOffice becomes more popular people will receive an odt document, MS Office will format it funny and it will be their fault for using weird software.
  - edanm 5y ago
    I think the situation parent writes about is more likely (and more informative). Namely that there are places with two major-enough platforms such that everyone has to accommodate both (e.g. browsers).
- toss1 5y ago
  >>LibreOffice lacks no features I would remotely consider using. Yup. I use it all the time just fine, and set the default format to .XLS and .DOC (not the X versions which are bogus MS bastardizations of XML anyway) and I've had no interchange problems. Over the last decade or so, I occasionally see some Excel feature that might be switch-over-worthy, but then the whole MS setup is so much of a hassle I don't bother — NO I'm not interested in a monthly subscription, NO I'm not interested in online-only or Online-First, HELL NO I'm not interested in a Microsoft Account — I just want a package I can install locally and run when needed. Then, the next version, LibreOffice has that feature. So, great move by Schleswig-Holstein and also very strategic - right to repair, right to not be held over a barrel by a monopoly, etc.. Let's hope it catches on. (And now that I'm writing about this, I realize I haven't sent LibreOffice a donation in too long, so I'm off to do that now...)
Kjeldahl 5y ago
I'm all for using free / open source where it makes sense and is cost effective. And frankly, Office is probably overkill for most of the actual needs of users. Having said that, I tried making a three page brochure a year ago, using the most recent LibreOffice release at the time. Just a mix of some screenshots and paragraphs of text. It was just too slow to be useable. On the same computer, Google Docs running in the browser was able to handle the same brochure without any noticeable slowdowns of any kind. That's a strong indication that LibreOffice is just ... not up to the task.
- moolcool 5y ago
  This whole thread seems to love the principle of LibreOffice, but ignores the fact that actually using it is a slog and a half.
- tryptophan 5y ago
  As much as I want to support libreOffice, my experience has been the same as yours. The whole office suite just feels so janky/stutter-y/not-smooth. Its like there are fps drops or slight pauses before many actions. It is quite irritating. Also on a hidpi/4k display, many things still do not scale properly.
  - 3np 5y ago
    I wonder if there some specific bug you’re both hitting? I have a modest workstation and have not experienced this (fwiw 99% Writer/Calc, with the occasional slideshow)
    - sneak 5y ago
      Same experience yesterday running latest stable from the website on a brand new M1M MBP with Monterey. Laggy, with a garish UI straight out of 1998.
- lostgame 5y ago
  Huh? Even on my PowerPC Macs it’s usually been pretty smooth?
bluedino 5y ago
What is the open source alternative to Office365? 'Regular' Office is becoming more and more rare. Which is a shame, between the licensing costs, having to re-download or re-install the desktop apps, having to deal with OneDrive, etc.
- fuzzy2 5y ago
  Hm, depends what part of Office 365 you need, the offering is truly gigantic. If you need something like Word Online, there's some stuff floating around (search "open source google docs" to find them). As for the rest, Exchange Online, Sharepoint, especially how it's all integrated, I'm afraid there's simply no alternative. Nextcloud offers some integration in that regard.
- mfru 5y ago
  I'd say a combination of Nextcloud together with Collabora Office.
  - MayeulC 5y ago
    Collabora is quite nice, but also complicated to setup (at least last time I tried, could be true only at individual level too). OnlyOffice has less features, but that also makes it simpler to use and deploy.
open-source-ux 5y ago
The last photo in the article shows a slide that states: The 4 commandments of trusted internet services: 1. A service you use must be available from many providers 2. It must be possible to move your data from one to the other 3. The service must also be available as software 4. The software must be available as open source I like this criteria - and it's not new. Think of a popular online app that has met these conditions for over a decade: WordPress. If the criteria above were more popular it might make SaaS lock-in less attractive too. Consider the following scenario: Hosting companies agree on a standard installation API for server web apps. This lets developers create server web apps that can be installed on any hosting provider that supports that installation API. A simple one-click process. Businesses and indivduals can shop around to find a suitable hosting plan that will run the app. Like WordPress, there will be cheap-and-cheerful hosting plans at one end of the scale and at the other end are managed services with SLAs (Service Level Agreements) and premium support. The open, standard installation API enables data to be transferred from one hosting provider to another allowing easy data transfer from one hosting provider to another. (Or at least an easy way to download your data). Think of the above as the 'WordPress' model and imgaine if it was widely available to all cloud apps. It would unlock countless opportunities for developers. It would also mean management of servers is offloaded to hosting companies - while developers can simply concentrate on building their apps. Alas, it will probably never happen.
pt_PT_guy 5y ago
next: use matrix.org
bflesch 5y ago
They just use it as negotiation tactic with regards to MS. Last time Munich attempted this with LiMuX, even Bill Gates flew in to personally give them a discount.
flerovium 5y ago
Clears throat. LibreOffice: https://xkcd.com/743/ https://xkcd.com/743/ Published in 2010.
gorgoiler 5y ago
One doesn’t even need to ship the change. Having a viable alternative (ahem, BATNA) is all that’s required to improve the terms of the original deal. Or to put it another way: as long as you let Microsoft think they are without competition, you will get an awful price.
aimor 5y ago
How do the workers feel about these changes? I hate being told what tool to use. I've worked in computer labs where the admin had very strong opinions on what software was good and only installed those tools, no alternatives. It stinks. Imagine for yourself being told you can't use Jetbrains IDEs anymore, but hey there's VS Code and that does the same thing you'll get used to it! Some people won't care, some will adapt, and some will be miserable. If this type of transition isn't responsive to feedback people will find terrible workarounds like using the one unmaintained Windows machine kept around the office or doing work on a personal computer.
MarkusWandel 5y ago
This is an opportunity to rant about what makes MS Office so hard to be compatible with. It's a mess of ancient and modern features, that mostly, but not always, work as you'd expect them to, but the overall complexity is mind boggling. This is used by normal humans. Who don't want to spend a lifetime getting good at all this complexity, so they muddle around until stuff gets done. And then you end up with a table in a document where one row is wider than the others (sticks out at the side) and nobody knows how to fix it, and eventually in frustration the whole table gets deleted and redone. And you end up with lines in graphics that are almost, but not quite, horizontal. And hacks where only the depth arrangement of opaque objects hides the compromises that had to be made to get graphics to look just so. Don't even get me started on localized hacks to page headers and paragraph formats, or extra blank lines or "start on new page" attributes all over, because the "keep with" stuff just doesn't work the way you think it should, that have to be fiddled every time the text reflows significantly. And that's how you end up with documents that just don't work right in LibreOffice. It's simply impossible for an open source project to keep up with all that by glorified reverse engineering. As a counterpoint though, you can have exactly the same mess with LibreOffice in the first place. A bunch of documents with muddled weirdness in them that will only display correctly in the tool they were done with. No problem as it all stays in its native tool i.e. doesn't need to export cleanly to MS Office. One problem with LibreOffice (or whatever it's called this week) is that not all tools are equally good. The spreadsheet and word processor look solid. I'm not so sure about its Powerpoint equivalent though.
- RealStickman_ 5y ago
  I find Impress (LO's Powerpoint equivalent) to be good enough, but definitely don't try presenting the final file with Powerpoint.
- Fazel94 5y ago
  The "hard to be compatible" is a feature by design. If it was easy MS would have lost its biggest advantage by now.
kgwxd 5y ago
Again? Must be time to renegotiate their MS Office contract.
lvass 5y ago
I really want this to succeed, but I think it's the wrong approach in the grand scheme. OOXML is the de-facto "document" standard, and I think it's reasonable to say that it is deliberately too complex, giving too much advantage to the company who created, implemented and pushed for it's adoption. There's also a lot of research applied in not how to make the proprietary user interfaces better, but how to make it hard to move away from. Couple with how bad WYSIWYG actually is for any serious task (it saves you 30~300 minutes of learning in exchange for a life of pain), and it's hell unleashed on the poor souls who are forced to sidegrade like this. We can do better. Existing free plaintext tools like tex, org, ledger, groff, beamer et al are the best solution IMO. Anyone can learn them, and they surely should when it makes their work better. We're giving people too little credit when we act like they need WYSIWYG and too much pain when we realize we screwed up.
jccalhoun 5y ago
I wonder if they are using the "community" edition or the "enterprise" version that LibreOffice wants organizations to use https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2021/02/03/libreoffice-7-1-community/ https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2021/02/03/libreoff...
orangepurple 5y ago
This is the annual shakedown to lower Microsoft license costs with threats
shubb 5y ago
I think what people get wrong with FOSS is, they assume that it's free as in beer. If I was a big company or national government planning on moving to FOSS I wouldn't count on a cost saving at all. Instead I'd take all that licence money 'saved', ring fence it, donate half of it to the opensource projects being used (to pay full time developers to maintain them), and half to a contract developer house to create and contribute the features that turn out to be missing. Secure software that works well and does boring useful things costs money. All FOSS does is let you choose who you pay to do that work. Unfortunately, due to how organisations work, it is much harder to create and defend this 'optional' expenditure into the future than it is to just keep paying software subscriptions that turn the lights out if you stop.
- echelon 5y ago
  > All FOSS does is let you choose who you pay to do that work. Until Amazon makes it available as AWS and corners the market. Then you're paying the largest vendor again. The only reason this hasn't happened to desktop linux is because the market share is so small. (Oh wait -- Red Hat, OpenSuse, etc.)
  - boomlinde 5y ago
    Those are all just buyers themselves in the context of FOSS. They invest in open source software, which everyone can benefit from. To them, it's a cost of the products and services they sell.
- AdamN 5y ago
  That's all risk and no gain. If you're successful you've saved no money and just moved platforms. If the community thinks FOSS is an end in and of itself you've accomplished something but only if the community thinks so.
GatorD42 5y ago
Excel is 100x better than any alternative I’ve used (it’s been a while since I used an open source version though). Any savings would be offset by loss of productivity if it’s a spreadsheet heavy workflow. MS software is good, I don’t know how much it costs for enterprise but it’s probably dwarfed by employment costs.
- AdamN 5y ago
  Yeah, everybody focuses on Word but that's the least interesting one. It's all about Excel and there is no competitor that has hundreds of thousands of trained users and works so well that it is the standard itself. Luckily I don't use Excel and therefore can rarely use Microsoft.
lordleft 5y ago
I feel like I've read this exact headline like 5 times over the last 7 years
dsego 5y ago
A few years ago I started writing a few pages of tech specs in libre office, then it crashed and lost all my work. Being used to google docs I forgot that software from the 90s doesn't autosave my work.
- edgarvaldes 5y ago
  I Ctrl+S on G Docs all the time. Muscle memory.
  - nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
    Not the worst habit. One vague possibility of a bonus/promotion and they will mess saving feature up one way or the other.
JJMcJ 5y ago
I've worked at a couple of companies that used Linux and Libre for their standard setup. It's just fine for internal usage. Of course 90% of the employees were technical people, which may have had something to do with it. Nobody wet their pants when you called it a directory instead of a folder. Now if Photoshop or Excel with VBA had been needed it would have been a different story.
ksec 5y ago
Interesting as I have just been thinking about this as a thought exercise. Assuming one want to switch away from M$ Office, should Office software be an Open Source Native Experience like libra office or should it be a cloud based close source but free experience ( aka Google ).
lloydatkinson 5y ago
Again?
Bathroomtaken 5y ago
Libre office sucks! Google sheets is so much better
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
greyhair 5y ago
I have used LibreOffice, and it makes me cringe. Has it vastly improved the UI in the last three years? That was the last time I installed it, tried using it for three weeks, then uninstalled it. It was like a bad acid trip version of the 1990s.
- RealStickman_ 5y ago
  Have you tried one of the other included UI variants, or did you stick to the default one?

442 points by jrepinc 5y ago

throwaway123x2 5y ago

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

pbasista 5y ago
That is possible. But apparently, people in Germany are looking for software based on attributes that reach beyond the elemental metrics like "nice to use" or "supports corporate integration". They might care more about the ability to audit the software's behavior and to easily make changes where necessary. They might also like to contribute patches back to the original LibreOffice community because they know that they themselves will benefit from more people reviewing their work and making it better as a result.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  Does a German state have the ability to audit software or contribute patches? And what would the patches be for? What use-cases do they have that are so unique that they need custom software?
- leokennis 5y ago
  Devil's advocate here. Recently my employer (large corporate) went all in on (as it is now called) Microsoft 365: Teams, SharePoint online, OneDrive etc. While I have no illusions about Microsoft's business model and motives, the truth is that "it just works" and makes collaboration very easy. Create a team in Teams, add a document which everyone can edit (if needed at the same time), click a button, share it with someone outside the team, have a meeting with them, click a button, save the meeting video to OneDrive, click one more button and you're collaborating on a whiteboard. And all this works fully synchronized on my phone too. As far as I can see (from their terrible website) LibreOffice does not offer this at all. Maybe Germany, known for being "digitally outdated" by 5-10 years, will suffer no consequences from that and their basic workflow is still "type document - print it - sign it - fax it". But it will be a sad day for my productivity when I am forced to switch to LibreOffice.
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    Consider OnlyOffice or the version offered by Collabora with on-line features. I really don't know how good these options are but they exist.
    - periheli0n 5y ago
      we're using this for document management in a large European research project. It sort of works but has its quirks. The UI is not really smooth, and the whole system could be more stable. I once lost a day's work because of a bug in the writer component. That was quite discouraging.
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    > the truth is that "it just works" and makes collaboration very easy. My org does that too for different reasons for years now. It just works is a lie. We also have a lot Apple devices for all our external employees. That doesn't 'just' work as well. Sadly I have to deal with SharePoint integration which a lot of MS services are based on. Digitally outdated has a complete new dimensions here, even if you add half baked services like Flow on top of it. There are far more modern alternatives than what MS brings to the table, there are countless alternatives that are better to control and easier to adapt. You could use teams on Linux and while the office integration is nice, it isn't essential at all. This "collaboration" in the MS cloud is a nightmare to archive or access and some of the APIs are in a beta phase. We killed our fax a long time ago...
- periheli0n 5y ago
  The big question is: Is the aim to have the best possible software integration? Or is it about freedom from MS and contributing to open source? If it's software integration, MS is hard to beat. It comes at the price of total dependence. If it's about freedom then going full open source is great. But the cost in efficiency is huge, since the OSS alternatives will never be as streamlined as MS's stuff. not having to spend money on licenses is great but a lot of extra footwork will be required to get the job done.
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    And Germany is unable to find and pay programmers to make Libre Office better ?
    - periheli0n 5y ago
      Salaries are part of the problem; there is a very rigid salary structure in Germany's civil service. The salary band in which programmers would fall is OK but not overly attractive. There is very little headroom to pay talented developers a salary that could compete with what they get elsewhere.
bserge 5y ago
You should definitely check again. Office 2010 is over a decade old now, it's been going downhill ever since.
agumonkey 5y ago
I didn't check the latest LO version but I agree. LO shines on import export but the UI lags, the functionalities are limited. Even macros are weird compared to VBA which is sad. FOSS community needs to gather up on this.
- mopsi 5y ago
  And what's worse, lot of functionaly that appears to exist turns out to be broken when you actually try to use it. Basic things like pivot tables, conditional formatting or automatic data import at regular intervals (from a file) are ridiculously broken in LO, and have been so for many years. Feels as if no-one's actually using it beyond a simple document viewer.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    10$ the most used button is export as pdf
albertopv 5y ago
This. At home I use Ubuntu I tried Libreoffice few months ago, for anything non trivial it just sucks compared to Office, years behind. I don't know what kind of documents this German state creates, maybe for them Libreoffice feature are good enough. And I'm just talking about document creation feature, whole Office 365 collaboration ecosystem is huge and on Windows PCs it works just fine, at least most of the time. I really would like them to succed, we really need a real MS Office competitor, but it's very hard, MS can be a powerful opponent[0][1] [0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-is-shifting-back-from-microsoft-to-open-source-again/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i... [1] https://www.neowin.net/news/munich-germany-realizes-that-deploying-linux-was-a-disaster-going-back-to-windows/ https://www.neowin.net/news/munich-germany-realizes-that-dep...
tmalsburg2 5y ago
What did your check consist of? I’m asking because I know people who’ve been using both Word and LibreOffice for many years to write huge amounts of technical documentation and their experience is that LibreOffice is much more reliable with longer and more complex documents. When a certain document size or complexity is reached, Word apparently starts to behave erratically and even crashes occasionally. They’d prefer LibreOffice any day but some customers require Word.
Fazel94 5y ago
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.
- throwaway123x2 5y ago
  If I can afford to pay for the better experience and I want it badly enough, I will. That's how markets work.

periheli0n 5y ago

This is a great move! I hope they will still have money left to train all teachers and office staff properly. Believe it or not, many German teachers have started using digital technology for real only in 2020, when the pandemic first hit. They are now totally entrenched with the Microsoft way of doing things. They know all the MS quirks and how to navigate around them. Free software alternatives to MS products have different quirks that will need different workarounds.

dgellow 5y ago

It's the same story every ~2 years since at least 10 years now... It's mostly a way to negotiate Microsoft prices down.

jccalhoun 5y ago

This is interesting since LibreOffice started life as StarOffice which was created in Germany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice#History

frakt0x90 5y ago

I've seen these stories pop up from time to time about large entities switch to linux or open source software in general and it seems there's a large number who end up going back to windows/proprietary. Hopefully this is not one of those.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

PaulHoule 5y ago

German local governments have been playing this game for a long time. Usually they try off brand software and then the employee union complains and they switch back to Microsoft. Microsoft Office is buggy, but off-brand office suites make it look positively reliable.

Nohortax 5y ago

I hope other countries will do it. I have some doubts about Belgium which is not really great to do right choices. Also I feel like Germany is often ahead its neighbors. Anyway, that's good to read ! Edit : LibrOffice is not really complicated but Linux requires some knowledge to be well used. Will people have a training course to survive on Linux ?

cat199 5y ago

"digital sovereignty" is a nice phrase

nivenkos 5y ago
Especially in contrast to the current digital colonialism. US Big Tech companies pay almost no corporation taxes in the EU (and if they do, only in Ireland / Luxembourg), and compete and buy out European companies, shipping the high-paying jobs (and the economic benefits and taxes those bring) back to the US (much like the oil industry in Nigeria, etc.). The EU must take a stand against this, like has been done against Huawei. Ultimately the American Big Tech companies are no better than Huawei - the US is not an ally of the EU, and has been interfering in European democracy ever since the May 1947 crises.
- Flatuscents 5y ago
  Let’s not overgeneralize. The US is not in lockstep with all EU goals and ideas, but not an ally? As someone who grew up with nuclear drills every week I can assure you I think of the EU as an ally, AND I want you to have a robust Big Tech environment. We share a common cultural interest in freedom and fairness, more or less, despite all the craziness in the world right now. Maybe the US isn’t always the BEST friend, but we have to be in the top five right? I would hate to be replaced by Belarus and Russia. ;)
  - nivenkos 5y ago
    It's well known that the CIA has spied on European industry to benefit their own (e.g. Boeing over Airbus) - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32542140 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32542140 And on European leaders - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-security-agency-spied-merkel-other-top-european-officials-through-danish-2021-05-30/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-security-agency-spie... How does that differ from Huawei and China?
    - Flatuscents 5y ago

raxxorrax 5y ago

Awesome. I know how people in offices work and for their use cases LibreOffice has become the safer and more fitting choice. Yes, MS Office isn't bad and I wouldn't pull Excel from the dead hands of physicists, but the whole MS cloud deal is bad for government.

ginko 5y ago
> I wouldn't pull Excel from the dead hands of physicists Accountants I understand but physicists? I'd have thought they mostly use Matlab or maybe Mathematica.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  That too, but many aren't firm with such tools and Excel is very prominently used. They often employ special software (I mostly worked with them on optical systems) that use Excel as a common output format for visualization. Don't know the name of their simulators.
- ahartmetz 5y ago
  And / or Jupyter Notebook
- valenaut 5y ago
  My physics undergrad had about equal parts Mathematica (for theoretical subjects), MATLAB (for engineering crossover), Python (for CS), and Excel (for labs).

ghunky 5y ago

Didn't they do something similar a decade ago and reverted to MS Office?

schroeding 5y ago
Maybe you're thinking about Munich, which changed from MS Office to OpenOffice to LibreOffice and then back to MS Office. They may change again soon to something open source, too :-)
- soco 5y ago
  Yeah the new coalition signed all those agreements back in 2020 (Munich, Hamburg, Dortmund...) but I don't know how far are they with actually implementing those plans.
raxxorrax 5y ago
Munich reverted to Windows in 2017, then reverted back to Linux in 2020. it is expected that the 2017 rollback was a case of corruption and a waste of money. The first shift was allegedly explicitly against the wishes of many users.
- dathinab 5y ago
  > case of corruption Probably, I mean the arguments where supper questionable. Like oh mail on my phone is not working, that is because mail is now run by Linux we must switch back ... but it wasn't, Mail was one a the few systems which didn't switch to Linux. Or very questionable calculations about the price of buying some "customer support" (Linux IT Consulting). At least as far as I remember.

scanny 5y ago

Seems to be a running trend in Germany to move toward open software. Tangentially related to this: The city of Munich has flip-flopped between their own version of linux and windows [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

ChuckNorris89 5y ago
>Seems to be a running trend in Germany to move toward open software. Yeah, until the Ms sales guys wine and dine some German politicians and promise to build a new campus in $BIG_CITY that creates ## jobs, then they suddenly decide to renew their windows and office licenses instead. Rinse and repeat.
- emteycz 5y ago
  Sure, it has nothing to do with overall better UX that the actual users of these computers require, it's all corruption.
  - MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
    I came here to say the same thing. Linux is fine for us devs and sys admins. The general populace wouldn't tolerate all the quirks to each DE one bit.
  - hulitu 5y ago
    Better UI ? Ten years ago, yes. Now the UI in Office 365 is a disaster. And yes, some german politicians are very sensitive when money starts to flow.
    - periheli0n 5y ago
      At least Office 365 does proper kerning. Edit: I don't get the downvote. Last week I spent 10 minutes of a meeting waiting for the presenter to apply some fix to his LibreOffice presentation because font kerning and sizes were corrupt in the full screen view. I would love to ditch MS completely and use LibreOffice for all my work, but it has its weak spots.

soco 5y ago

Some more contextual infos about challenges of moving German officials to opensource: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-is-shifting-back-from-microsoft-to-open-source-again/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...

jamil7 5y ago

Do they plan to fund and/or contribute to the development of LibreOffice as well? I couldn't find anything in that article or the linked paper. Edit: Actually one of the slides seems to indicate they have the intention to contribute and/or fund in someway.

titannet 5y ago
It is highly doubtful. German public authorities are notorious for not voluntarily sharing anything with the public.
- schleck8 5y ago
  https://prototypefund.de/project/microg/ https://prototypefund.de/project/microg/ https://prototypefund.de/about/ https://prototypefund.de/about/

nicoburns 5y ago

This is great, but they seem to be missing the other part of it, which is that (at least some of) the money saved ought to go towards funding development of the open software. If that happened then Libre Office could hope to outcompete MS Office on merit sometime in the near future. As it is, it's unclear how much this really supports the free software.

laurent92 5y ago
This is a 20-year-old problem. It won’t improve. And we’ve lost the cloud fight (practically no site is Affero GPL). OSS is dead. Even Linux - I bet half installs nowadays are on AWS/GCP/etc., and they run custom distros, and one day Debian won’t have enough funding to fix all CVEs, and the only ones which will be constantly viable to run when you have liabilities (=all the time) will be cloud provider-maintained ones.
- gopiandcode 5y ago
  > OSS is dead. Given that OSS was a corporate sponsored perversion of Free/Libre software designed to trick naive developers into contributing unpaid labour without getting anything back, I would hope so. Free software, on the other hand, is roaring ahead, and doing better than ever.
  - md8z 5y ago
    I used to volunteer for the FSF and I can't agree with that at all. The FSF is politically/socially irrelevant and GNU has largely failed and been relegated to an extreme niche. The "free software movement" as it stands is still a reactionary movement, a desire to go back to the good old days when hardware vendors also wrote all the software and shipped the source code along with their products. It's just not a realistic goal. It also doesn't seem to really matter whether you call it open source or free software. Either way the projects that I see are all struggling for cash in the same way. It's not easy to fund a product when the entire point is you're giving away your labour for free to everyone on the internet.

loudmax 5y ago

This is the kind of story that would have been cheered on on Slashdot twenty years ago. But here we are in 2021 and a major organization having the temerity to not pay the Microsoft tax is newsworthy. This is not what a free market looks like.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
Didn't Berlin attempt to convert to Linux but had to revert back because all their end users were too stupid/scared to learn a new OS? I know a German city did that at one point.
wahern 5y ago
It's the kind of story that was cheered on on Slashdot. Multiple times. I can't count the number of times I've seen "Some German [agency|municipality|state] [is planning to adopt|has adopted|cancels adoption|reverses adoption] of [StarOffice|OpenOffice|Libreoffice|Linux]". I think it's some kind of meme, the product of peculiar German administrative politics, or a result of vigorous Free Software activism in Germany because I don't see such headlines nearly as often for any other locality.
- nivenkos 5y ago
  Also there a _lot_ of different cities and municipalities in Europe. And when it succeeds you don't usually hear about it. Like when I worked at an MPI in Germany, all the machines used Ubuntu. In Catalonia, most of the universities also use Ubuntu. The Ayuntamiento uses LibreOffice (and maybe also Ubuntu in some parts) - and for the most part, it all just works. It was the same in Zaragoza too. You only notice it when they accidentally send a .odt file to someone who is only using Windows for example.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- marcodiego 5y ago
  This is mostly because the "Munich case" was a star example for a long time. Also, star division, the company that started star office, is from Germany.

OneTimePetes 5y ago

Would be nice to have a german software culture. But all we got is politicians who wish for that and then turn a blind eye on fraudsters like WireCard. Something is missing from the german cultural dna, that our neighbours have.(Swiss,Luxemburg, Belgians, Chechen Republic, Poland, Litauen). Seems the most important thing to be big in software in europe, is to foremost be not german ;)

kall 5y ago
Feels like a good chunk of OSS development is happening in germany. By some accounts, the entirety of linux is being ruined by one german. The biggest software companies like SAP are maybe not shining examples, but when you go lower, there‘s a lot of good stuff. What differences do you see to the other European countries? Who‘s big in those countries?
- __m 5y ago
  I'm not familiar with linux development, what did that one german do?
  - kall 5y ago
    Lennart Poettering created systemd, which is a rewrite of many different things in linux that where seperate before. Some people don‘t like it.
bserge 5y ago
Nonsense. Germans are bad at creating new things but excellent at improving anything to its highest potential. Kinda doubting the Chechen software industry, though.
periheli0n 5y ago
Things will hopefully change now that the political tide has turned. Digitally, the old government was essentially stuck to the status quo of 2005, when they took over. In my view the weak digital culture in Germany is a direct consequence of political non-engagement with the matter during the last 15 years. Many areas are affected, first governance itself (fax machines!!), in education (universities and schools "discovered" digital tools mostly in March 2020, when they were forced to), business and trade (card payment still not being ubiquitous, let alone contactless; Some trivial contracts still require ink signatures and paper being mailed around etc). Other European countries are a lot more progressive, e.g. the UK.

nivenkos 5y ago

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 independent, small co-operatives can maintain together.

go_elmo 5y ago
This could be a major ease on state budgets, also communal ones and allow to allocate resources where they are more urgently needed. Might require high initial costs for setup & staff education which would amortize over a few years for sure.
- f6v 5y ago
  If you could save money by switching to Linux from Windows, I’d expect to see much more Linux machines in corporations.
  - MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
    The only places I've ever heard of having linux on their computers are tech companies or software devs.
  - go_elmo 5y ago
    I only saw linux machines in SE companies so far (at least remote ones). Maybe, just maybe, it is because non-tech people 1) cant handle it as cli is needed from time to time 2) because personal preferences & habits make it almost impossible to "force" using linux on staff..?
    - f6v 5y ago
      > because personal preferences & habits make it almost impossible to "force" using linux on staff..? I’m willing to speculate office workers won’t care. More and more people will have smartphone as the only personal computer. So it won’t be about them not wanting to use Linux at work because they run Windows at home.

jhgs 5y ago

Has been done multiple times before. Re-training users and increased support expenses usually nullify any license cost savings over time.

GekkePrutser 5y ago
That's the Microsoft side of the story yes. The old "Linux Myths" In reality many admins see much easier management, see other posts in this thread too. The problem arises when you don't go all-in on Linux and try to have the two ecosystems work together. This is when it becomes a mess.

a_square_peg 5y ago

I really would like to pay to use a viable alternative for MS Office on Linux that’s not clunky like Libre Office. I’m trying Softmaker program now and it’s fairly decent.

aembleton 5y ago
Have you tried WPS? https://www.wps.com/ https://www.wps.com/
- a_square_peg 5y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion - I did not know about WPS but will give it a try.

whalesalad 5y ago

I tried to use LibreOffice recently and that lasted about 30 seconds. Terrible software.

justtocomment 5y ago
I tried to use a CNC mill recently and that lasted about 30 seconds. Terrible piece of equipment.
- yetanother-1 5y ago
  I like your argument, but there are some truth to what he says, not that I agree with him.
  - nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
    That's a very clever argument actually. Clerks in government just want like better utility knives, instead they will be offered CNC machines!

marcodiego 5y ago

Hope this encourage them to invest in improving OOXML compatibility. I think right now this is the biggest reason people avoid LibreOffice. Also, some action must be taken about MS behavior. They are the same company they were in the 90's. It is easy to find commit messages in LO explaining things like 'this is what MSO does but not what the specification says'. They recently change the algorithm the justifies text in MSO and it is not explained in the specification. So, even a simple text file without any especial formatting may not be viewed correctly with anything but MSO. This is ridiculous. The use of such a format should be forbidden for governments. ISO shouldn't have ratified it.

jeroenhd 5y ago
This being the government, they have the power to flip this around. Why invest in compatibility with Microsoft Office when you can use the good old native OpenOffice formats instead? When the state is working in LibreOffice, there's no need to save files in Microsoft's format anymore.
- marcodiego 5y ago
  Makes sense. That would be even better.
jlkuester7 5y ago
Does anyone know of any large-scale implementations of https://www.onlyoffice.com/ https://www.onlyoffice.com/ ? I wonder if that suite would be a better solution than LO simply because it is OOXML native (unlike LO which AFIK is ODF native and has a conversion layer to be compatible with OOXML). I think that OO's feature set is still limited in comparison to LO, but they are making a lot of progress (and being web-native seems like a huge advantage as well).
- marcodiego 5y ago
  They have a list of costumers but I really don't know of any large-scale implementation. I've been testing it on my notebook and its compatibility with OOXML is much better than LO. Of course, harder cases break on both. So, even combining both, something I've tried to do, is not enough to achieve good compatility with MSO.

Shadonototra 5y ago

Great move! that'll encourage more people to contribute and improve the software I agree with others, next logical move is to switch to linux fully

rob74 5y ago

Ok, so it's "A German State" (Schleswig-Holstein), not "The German State" (which would be the federal government) - of course this is big news too, but the title is a little bit misleading...

PoignardAzur 5y ago
Oh, wow, that's super underwhelming. The title is incredibly misleading.

nomdep 5y ago

Ten years ago I used to be excite by news like this. Now I don’t care that much because, unless is a commitment to openness on a cultural level, is just a n inconsequential gesture, maybe even just a cost-saving measure

schleck8 5y ago
> [...] and the Windows operating system is to be replaced by GNU/Linux

shireboy 5y ago

I'm in a position to recommend similar for a large organization, but am on the fence. They have SharePoint on-prem and Office, and are being pulled to Office 365 by MS sales folk. I'm definitely pushing to linux containers for apps, etc, and part of me wants to recommend Libre. There's a lot not to like about Office and SharePoint, but I've yet to find decent open-source document management software that does all the things SharePoint does. I could recommend they stitch together some things, like some of the low-code projects I've seen here, some calendar apps, some dropbox clone, BI/reporting tools, etc. into a Kubernetes environment. But that's more complex than "go pay N/user/mo for this service". You have to get SSO working for all the things, and each has their own quirks, etc. Any HNers out there have recommendations for open source tools to replace SharePoint/Office 365?

jlkuester7 5y ago
Also wanted to add my +1 for NextCloud + OnlyOffice! They integrate well and honestly IMHO have reached a maturity where a "normal" user should have no problems (if your people can handle the insanity of SharePoint, NC is nbd).
MayeulC 5y ago
I haven't used SharePoint/O365 much, so I don't know how it compares, but I've been quite happy with Nextcloud and its OnlyOffice integration.
PoignardAzur 5y ago
I've heard good things about OnlyOffice as a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office, with online collaboration out of the box. It's open-source and free for individual use, paying for companies, I think?

rich_sasha 5y ago

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 projects. As far as I'm concerned, LibreOffice lacks no features I would remotely consider using. It's like when Windows was the sole mainstream OS, it wasn't an excuse "oh but I'm on Mac and can't run this". Now Macs are mainstream, and Linux is not, it's still in a "weird nerdy" corner. But not so if it just gets more widely used (it's happening, just slowly).

kevincox 5y ago
> If it becomes common, people just accept the minor incompatibility and move on If LibreOffice becomes more popular people will receive an odt document, MS Office will format it funny and it will be their fault for using weird software.
- edanm 5y ago
  I think the situation parent writes about is more likely (and more informative). Namely that there are places with two major-enough platforms such that everyone has to accommodate both (e.g. browsers).
toss1 5y ago
>>LibreOffice lacks no features I would remotely consider using. Yup. I use it all the time just fine, and set the default format to .XLS and .DOC (not the X versions which are bogus MS bastardizations of XML anyway) and I've had no interchange problems. Over the last decade or so, I occasionally see some Excel feature that might be switch-over-worthy, but then the whole MS setup is so much of a hassle I don't bother — NO I'm not interested in a monthly subscription, NO I'm not interested in online-only or Online-First, HELL NO I'm not interested in a Microsoft Account — I just want a package I can install locally and run when needed. Then, the next version, LibreOffice has that feature. So, great move by Schleswig-Holstein and also very strategic - right to repair, right to not be held over a barrel by a monopoly, etc.. Let's hope it catches on. (And now that I'm writing about this, I realize I haven't sent LibreOffice a donation in too long, so I'm off to do that now...)

Kjeldahl 5y ago

I'm all for using free / open source where it makes sense and is cost effective. And frankly, Office is probably overkill for most of the actual needs of users. Having said that, I tried making a three page brochure a year ago, using the most recent LibreOffice release at the time. Just a mix of some screenshots and paragraphs of text. It was just too slow to be useable. On the same computer, Google Docs running in the browser was able to handle the same brochure without any noticeable slowdowns of any kind. That's a strong indication that LibreOffice is just ... not up to the task.

moolcool 5y ago
This whole thread seems to love the principle of LibreOffice, but ignores the fact that actually using it is a slog and a half.
tryptophan 5y ago
As much as I want to support libreOffice, my experience has been the same as yours. The whole office suite just feels so janky/stutter-y/not-smooth. Its like there are fps drops or slight pauses before many actions. It is quite irritating. Also on a hidpi/4k display, many things still do not scale properly.
- 3np 5y ago
  I wonder if there some specific bug you’re both hitting? I have a modest workstation and have not experienced this (fwiw 99% Writer/Calc, with the occasional slideshow)
  - sneak 5y ago
    Same experience yesterday running latest stable from the website on a brand new M1M MBP with Monterey. Laggy, with a garish UI straight out of 1998.
lostgame 5y ago
Huh? Even on my PowerPC Macs it’s usually been pretty smooth?

bluedino 5y ago

What is the open source alternative to Office365? 'Regular' Office is becoming more and more rare. Which is a shame, between the licensing costs, having to re-download or re-install the desktop apps, having to deal with OneDrive, etc.

fuzzy2 5y ago
Hm, depends what part of Office 365 you need, the offering is truly gigantic. If you need something like Word Online, there's some stuff floating around (search "open source google docs" to find them). As for the rest, Exchange Online, Sharepoint, especially how it's all integrated, I'm afraid there's simply no alternative. Nextcloud offers some integration in that regard.
mfru 5y ago
I'd say a combination of Nextcloud together with Collabora Office.
- MayeulC 5y ago
  Collabora is quite nice, but also complicated to setup (at least last time I tried, could be true only at individual level too). OnlyOffice has less features, but that also makes it simpler to use and deploy.

open-source-ux 5y ago

The last photo in the article shows a slide that states: The 4 commandments of trusted internet services: 1. A service you use must be available from many providers 2. It must be possible to move your data from one to the other 3. The service must also be available as software 4. The software must be available as open source I like this criteria - and it's not new. Think of a popular online app that has met these conditions for over a decade: WordPress. If the criteria above were more popular it might make SaaS lock-in less attractive too. Consider the following scenario: Hosting companies agree on a standard installation API for server web apps. This lets developers create server web apps that can be installed on any hosting provider that supports that installation API. A simple one-click process. Businesses and indivduals can shop around to find a suitable hosting plan that will run the app. Like WordPress, there will be cheap-and-cheerful hosting plans at one end of the scale and at the other end are managed services with SLAs (Service Level Agreements) and premium support. The open, standard installation API enables data to be transferred from one hosting provider to another allowing easy data transfer from one hosting provider to another. (Or at least an easy way to download your data). Think of the above as the 'WordPress' model and imgaine if it was widely available to all cloud apps. It would unlock countless opportunities for developers. It would also mean management of servers is offloaded to hosting companies - while developers can simply concentrate on building their apps. Alas, it will probably never happen.

pt_PT_guy 5y ago

next: use matrix.org

bflesch 5y ago

They just use it as negotiation tactic with regards to MS. Last time Munich attempted this with LiMuX, even Bill Gates flew in to personally give them a discount.

flerovium 5y ago

Clears throat. LibreOffice: https://xkcd.com/743/ https://xkcd.com/743/ Published in 2010.

gorgoiler 5y ago

One doesn’t even need to ship the change. Having a viable alternative (ahem, BATNA) is all that’s required to improve the terms of the original deal. Or to put it another way: as long as you let Microsoft think they are without competition, you will get an awful price.

aimor 5y ago

How do the workers feel about these changes? I hate being told what tool to use. I've worked in computer labs where the admin had very strong opinions on what software was good and only installed those tools, no alternatives. It stinks. Imagine for yourself being told you can't use Jetbrains IDEs anymore, but hey there's VS Code and that does the same thing you'll get used to it! Some people won't care, some will adapt, and some will be miserable. If this type of transition isn't responsive to feedback people will find terrible workarounds like using the one unmaintained Windows machine kept around the office or doing work on a personal computer.

MarkusWandel 5y ago

This is an opportunity to rant about what makes MS Office so hard to be compatible with. It's a mess of ancient and modern features, that mostly, but not always, work as you'd expect them to, but the overall complexity is mind boggling. This is used by normal humans. Who don't want to spend a lifetime getting good at all this complexity, so they muddle around until stuff gets done. And then you end up with a table in a document where one row is wider than the others (sticks out at the side) and nobody knows how to fix it, and eventually in frustration the whole table gets deleted and redone. And you end up with lines in graphics that are almost, but not quite, horizontal. And hacks where only the depth arrangement of opaque objects hides the compromises that had to be made to get graphics to look just so. Don't even get me started on localized hacks to page headers and paragraph formats, or extra blank lines or "start on new page" attributes all over, because the "keep with" stuff just doesn't work the way you think it should, that have to be fiddled every time the text reflows significantly. And that's how you end up with documents that just don't work right in LibreOffice. It's simply impossible for an open source project to keep up with all that by glorified reverse engineering. As a counterpoint though, you can have exactly the same mess with LibreOffice in the first place. A bunch of documents with muddled weirdness in them that will only display correctly in the tool they were done with. No problem as it all stays in its native tool i.e. doesn't need to export cleanly to MS Office. One problem with LibreOffice (or whatever it's called this week) is that not all tools are equally good. The spreadsheet and word processor look solid. I'm not so sure about its Powerpoint equivalent though.

RealStickman_ 5y ago
I find Impress (LO's Powerpoint equivalent) to be good enough, but definitely don't try presenting the final file with Powerpoint.
Fazel94 5y ago
The "hard to be compatible" is a feature by design. If it was easy MS would have lost its biggest advantage by now.

kgwxd 5y ago

Again? Must be time to renegotiate their MS Office contract.

lvass 5y ago

I really want this to succeed, but I think it's the wrong approach in the grand scheme. OOXML is the de-facto "document" standard, and I think it's reasonable to say that it is deliberately too complex, giving too much advantage to the company who created, implemented and pushed for it's adoption. There's also a lot of research applied in not how to make the proprietary user interfaces better, but how to make it hard to move away from. Couple with how bad WYSIWYG actually is for any serious task (it saves you 30~300 minutes of learning in exchange for a life of pain), and it's hell unleashed on the poor souls who are forced to sidegrade like this. We can do better. Existing free plaintext tools like tex, org, ledger, groff, beamer et al are the best solution IMO. Anyone can learn them, and they surely should when it makes their work better. We're giving people too little credit when we act like they need WYSIWYG and too much pain when we realize we screwed up.

jccalhoun 5y ago

I wonder if they are using the "community" edition or the "enterprise" version that LibreOffice wants organizations to use https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2021/02/03/libreoffice-7-1-community/ https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2021/02/03/libreoff...

orangepurple 5y ago

This is the annual shakedown to lower Microsoft license costs with threats

shubb 5y ago

I think what people get wrong with FOSS is, they assume that it's free as in beer. If I was a big company or national government planning on moving to FOSS I wouldn't count on a cost saving at all. Instead I'd take all that licence money 'saved', ring fence it, donate half of it to the opensource projects being used (to pay full time developers to maintain them), and half to a contract developer house to create and contribute the features that turn out to be missing. Secure software that works well and does boring useful things costs money. All FOSS does is let you choose who you pay to do that work. Unfortunately, due to how organisations work, it is much harder to create and defend this 'optional' expenditure into the future than it is to just keep paying software subscriptions that turn the lights out if you stop.

echelon 5y ago
> All FOSS does is let you choose who you pay to do that work. Until Amazon makes it available as AWS and corners the market. Then you're paying the largest vendor again. The only reason this hasn't happened to desktop linux is because the market share is so small. (Oh wait -- Red Hat, OpenSuse, etc.)
- boomlinde 5y ago
  Those are all just buyers themselves in the context of FOSS. They invest in open source software, which everyone can benefit from. To them, it's a cost of the products and services they sell.
AdamN 5y ago
That's all risk and no gain. If you're successful you've saved no money and just moved platforms. If the community thinks FOSS is an end in and of itself you've accomplished something but only if the community thinks so.

GatorD42 5y ago

Excel is 100x better than any alternative I’ve used (it’s been a while since I used an open source version though). Any savings would be offset by loss of productivity if it’s a spreadsheet heavy workflow. MS software is good, I don’t know how much it costs for enterprise but it’s probably dwarfed by employment costs.

AdamN 5y ago
Yeah, everybody focuses on Word but that's the least interesting one. It's all about Excel and there is no competitor that has hundreds of thousands of trained users and works so well that it is the standard itself. Luckily I don't use Excel and therefore can rarely use Microsoft.

lordleft 5y ago

I feel like I've read this exact headline like 5 times over the last 7 years

dsego 5y ago

A few years ago I started writing a few pages of tech specs in libre office, then it crashed and lost all my work. Being used to google docs I forgot that software from the 90s doesn't autosave my work.

edgarvaldes 5y ago
I Ctrl+S on G Docs all the time. Muscle memory.
- nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
  Not the worst habit. One vague possibility of a bonus/promotion and they will mess saving feature up one way or the other.

JJMcJ 5y ago

I've worked at a couple of companies that used Linux and Libre for their standard setup. It's just fine for internal usage. Of course 90% of the employees were technical people, which may have had something to do with it. Nobody wet their pants when you called it a directory instead of a folder. Now if Photoshop or Excel with VBA had been needed it would have been a different story.

ksec 5y ago

Interesting as I have just been thinking about this as a thought exercise. Assuming one want to switch away from M$ Office, should Office software be an Open Source Native Experience like libra office or should it be a cloud based close source but free experience ( aka Google ).

lloydatkinson 5y ago

Again?

Bathroomtaken 5y ago

Libre office sucks! Google sheets is so much better

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

greyhair 5y ago

I have used LibreOffice, and it makes me cringe. Has it vastly improved the UI in the last three years? That was the last time I installed it, tried using it for three weeks, then uninstalled it. It was like a bad acid trip version of the 1990s.

RealStickman_ 5y ago
Have you tried one of the other included UI variants, or did you stick to the default one?