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German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice
- nottorp 3y agoAgain?
- reify 3y agoCool Hopefully they will move 30,000 wonkdows PC's to linux once Microsoft imposes the £61 annual extended security updates fee. let me open my terminal and start up python: 30000*61 1830000 £1,830,000 for the first year extended security updates and will double in consequitive years. A tad greedy! for a few old rotten wonkdows 10 machines. They first collected our data for free, then had the audacity to charge us for it too. Roll on linux Dare I use the word Enshittification?
- Hamuko 3y agoWhat's the cost of training a bunch of public servants to use Linux?
- Stranger43 3y agoProbably lower then people think once the applications are identical across the two platform. and if Linux turns too complex there is always macos. The big push is going to be getting rid of old excel and word macro's and replace sharepoint/onedrive with something else as data migrations are newer as simple in reality as they look in theory.
- Hamuko 3y ago>and if Linux turns too complex there is always macos I have witnessed in person people switching from Windows to macOS have issues adapting to a different operating system and its concepts, like the fact that pressing the X button in the top-left corner doesn't close the application. Therefore I am rather skeptical that you can just throw some Linux distro at a bunch of novice computer users without large amounts of friction.
- doubled112 3y agoYour example feels like shots fired because the programs running without windows concept still confuses me. It just doesn't compute. I'm a sysadmin and have been using Macs on and off since System 7, Windows since 95, and probably 10000 Linux distros/DE combos. Just as a point of reference.
- quesera 3y ago> programs running without windows concept still confuses me > I'm a sysadmin and have been using ... probably 10000 Linux distros/DE combos Most of the things I run on Unix systems do not have windows. This doesn't confuse me at all! :) I know what you mean of course. A GUI application without windows is superficially confusing, but you can certainly imagine something daemon-like that runs all the time and only occasionally requires interaction in the form of configuration or control. What you're really talking about is document-based applications, which can continue running when no documents (windows) are open. This may be less intuitive if you think about things in a document-centric way, vs an application-centric way. There are advantages and conveniences to both.
- CRConrad 3y agoTry using Microsoft Office some time. Sure, Word and Excel go away when you close the last document or workbook -- but Outlook and Teams don't. For outlook, there's a separate menu (Uh, "ribbon"?) item "Quit" under "File"; for Teams, not even that; you have to right-click the icon in the task bar. Close all their windows, and AFAICR they'll still pop up notifications.
- skydhash 3y agoLinux Mint is practically identical to Windows 7/10 in terms of basic interaction. Most people learn only a few workflows and software and do not tinker with the OS. When my SO moved to MacOS, the only thing she asked about was how to launch apps and do things like copy-paste. Everything else is still how I configured it when the computer came. Just like you don’t tinker with container images, people will be fine with Linux GUI if everything they need is there.
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- gtvwill 3y agoTrain once and never pay fees for the lifetime of the worker. Or still have to train on windows and pay fees ontop of standard user training for the lifetime of the user. Remember just because it's windows doesn't mean it doesn't require training. All business computer use takes training.
- zihotki 3y agoOr use classic approach - pay the lower price now and let the next goverment deal with the future problems.
- pakitan 3y agoThe cost to show one person "this is the browser icon and these are the excel/word icons; click them when you need to", multiplied by number of people who need to be trained.
- zihotki 3y agoIf they manage to do the training and onboarding within 4 hours then that may worth it (considering minimal hourly rate 12.41 euro per hour). That doesn't look realistic.
- steve1977 3y agoZero. Most of these people are probably not proficient in MS Office either. But since they are mostly not doing any real work, it doesn’t matter.
- 4878241143 3y agowhy not just use bc?
- jhgb 3y agoYou have to be at least 41 years old to remember that bc exists in the first place.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cbm-vic-20 3y agobc is the new thing. dc forever! (Though "modern" dc and bc are typically packaged together now.)
- gavinhoward 3y agoI'm less than 41, and I wrote a bc!
- ykonstant 3y agoHere is a setup I use to make `bc` more handy if you don't know how many computations you want to do in advance: alias bb='bc -l <<X' Now enter calculations and assignments one per line and enter X to exit.
- pjmlp 3y agoYou know to whom belongs many of the FOSS critical infrastructure projects nowadays, including some key CPython contributors, right?
- joostdecock 3y agoThe English summary focuses on the move from MS Office to LibreOffice (it's a post on the Document Foundation blog, so it makes sense that this is their focus), but the original German press release (1) lists 6 pillars: - Switching from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice - Switching the operating system from Microsoft Windows to Linux - Collaboration within the state administration and with external parties: Use of the open source products Nextcloud, Open Xchange/Thunderbird in conjunction with the Univention AD connector to replace Microsoft Sharepoint and Microsoft Exchange/Outlook - Conception of an open source based directory service to replace Microsoft Active Directory - Inventory of specialist procedures regarding compatibility and interoperability with LibreOffice and Linux - Development of an open source based telephony solution to replace Telekom-Flexport So it's a good bit more ambitious than replacing MS Office. (1) https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/ministerien-behoerden/I/Presse/PI/2024/CdS/240403_cds_it-arbeitsplatz.html https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/ministe... (edited for formatting/typos)
- yourusername 3y agoOk now do the cost for moving all other applications from Entra/Active Directory SSO running on Windows to LDAP or some non MS Oauth implementation on Linux. I'm sure replacing all the legacy applications and retraining the government employees on their FOSS alternatives can be done but it's going to take years and burn many many millions in fees for IT suppliers and investigating alternatives. You really need to do it because of ideological considerations because i doubt you'll save a dime the first decade.
- rad_gruchalski 3y agoYou need python to do 3*61 and append four zeros to the result?
- CRConrad 3y ago> once Microsoft imposes the £61 annual [...] 30000*61 1830000 £1,830,000 for the first What makes you think Microsoft would invoice their customers in Germany in British pounds? Weird unit to use when commenting on an article about Germany on an international site.
- monospaced 3y agoThe will likely be using Phoenix: https://www.dataport.de/about-phoenix/ https://www.dataport.de/about-phoenix/ The German government developed a fully free and open source solution that is quite similar (consisting of Nextcloud, jitsi, Collabora etc.) and can be deployed using Kubernetes: https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk
- jorvi 3y agoIt’s kind of a bummer that there’s a bunch of these separate OSS initiatives in Spain, France, Germany and a few other countries.. Instead of everyone rolling their own subvariant of Nextcloud, Matrix, LibreOffice etc, imagine if there was an EU mandate set up and some serious money was budgeted to it. You’d get a triple multiplier of more budget, less duplication of effort, and a self-reinforcing cycle where more use means the product becomes better through contribs which makes use even more attractive.
- unkoman 3y agoI think I want less bureaucracy in my development so happy to see multiple versions and letting them battling them out
- Rinzler89 3y agoWhile your small projects with next to zero market share fight it out between themselves, Microsoft keeps swallowing more market share making more billions. Who do you think is the real winner of your sandpit fight?
- nolist_policy 3y agoYou are right, we need to make a bloated project and need to pour in millions into it like we did with Gaia-X. Then it will be a big trash-fire with smoke visible from afar and not just some small sandpit.
- ctrw 3y ago
- cladopa 3y agoThey already did that before until Microsoft offered them new conditions and they went back to MS. So take all those "digital sovereignity" with a grain of salt. It usually means: "We want you to lower your fees".
- rchaud 3y agoSo you're saying digital sovereignty provides leverage. That itself is valuable.
- Isolus 3y agoNo, they didn't. That happened for example in Munich. But that is on the other side of Germany. And there is already a joke that MS can't move their german headquarters every time a state or big city want's to move away from MS products. (They did this when Munich changed back to MS producs - but of course this was pure coincidence.)
- elygre 3y agoMicrosoft started building their new Munich headquarters in 2013/2014. Their old headquarters were already immediately outside Munich. For example, the Munich airport is further away from Munch city than the old headquarters were. The decision to revert to a Microsoft Platform was taken in November 2017.
- Isolus 3y agoYes, the final decision to revert to Microsoft was taken in 2017. But in 2014, the mayor of Munich began an investigation into how to return to Microsoft products. And he was also the one who negotiated the location of the headquarters with Microsoft in 2013.
- non-chalad 3y agoYes, Bavaria is practically an entirely different state, with its' own language, religion, politics, and culture.
- Stranger43 3y agoThe germans have been tinkering with policies mandating non-cloud dependent products for a while wondering if this is a start of it actually getting implemented on a large scale or if the delay attempts will remain successful elsewhere across the region. If this is a start of an actual migration away from cloud dependence, it's a matter of time before windows(which is as cloud dependent as office those days for enterprise management features) itself is targeted, and the entire federation of germany changing from ms office formats to odf in practice could set some interesting balls in motions. But as we have seen this before where a product is started and then sabotaged or delayed by lobbying and inertia from people who dont want to change how theyve always done things, it could be another one-off that dont set a trend.
- daeros 3y agosane policy. Every time Office 365 is down I watch the maddening dash of IT workers who can't get anything done, it's amusing.
- Rinzler89 3y agoWhat's the alternative? Would they be able to do more without cloud office solutions? Like in the days long last we used to email .doc files to each other? I doubt it. Would hosting an on-prem alternative yeld better cost and a higher uptime? I doubt it.
- Stranger43 3y agoThe drive here is to reduce dependencies to locations the state itself have jurisdiction over i.e. things that can be controlled. It's essentially to avoid having the states data taken hostage when the slowly brewing conflict between America's lack of respect for it's foreign partners data protection regulation and the EU's very popular trend towards less and less tolerance for corporate data abuse comes to an head and we see actual blocks being mandated on high-security networks against US data harvesting companies(of which MS is but one).
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- selfselfgot 3y agoHonestly I think the decades long tech bubble is winding down, once people move away from Teams, what is the need to pay OS maintainers? It will take a few years but we are heading towards an economy more balanced amongst sectors.
- f_allwein 3y agoDid not work well in Munich, my hometown, in 2004. Hope the lessons have been learned. https://itsfoss.com/munich-linux-failure/ https://itsfoss.com/munich-linux-failure/
- zoobab 3y agoMicrosoft spent so much money to make it fail.
- boxed 3y agoHow do they do that? I mean, practically? If the open source solution works, where do Microsoft spend money to make it fail?
- hans_castorp 3y agoI am not saying this was the reason, but it is suspicious that the Munich Linux project was dropped, after Microsoft moved their headquarters back into Munich. And the reasons given were made up. The recommendation written by Accenture claimed that "users weren't satisfied" while a poll from a newspaper showed that most users were indeed satisfied
- mhitza 3y agoBribery can also work. I'm not saying that this is what they have done in Germany, but in Romania it was a big scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_licensing_corruption_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_licensing_corrupti...
- marksbrown 3y agoEmbrace, extend, extinguish.
- boxed 3y agoAgain: be specific.
- 3y ago
- ktzar 3y agoInterestingly, it might not be a cost saving decision, but the money needed for the initial setup and ongoing support ending in local companies' and worker's pockets.
- pjmlp 3y agoThe irony of this change, is this isn't Munich any longer, many of those services might run on Azure, depend of FOSS projects that are directly or indirectly paid by Microsoft, thus they won't care as much as in the past, see sore state of Windows versus Azure.
- icemelt8 3y agoGenuine question, is there any other professional field in the world where people work for free like how Software Engineers work in open source?
- Hamuko 3y agoVolunteer firefighters.
- joshxyz 3y agopro bono aka volunteer work that hones their skills
- sureMan 3y agoOff course, vets volunteering at animal shelters, same for MD's, medics and nurses at shelters, lawyers doing pro bono work, etc
- andrewstuart 3y agoThis ship sailed 20 years ago. Who is still fighting this ancient crusade? Pay the small fee, use the Microsoft software, live life. There’s much better battles to fight than the office software one.
- wasmitnetzen 3y agoThe entire IT landscape has changed tremendously in the last 20 years with that cloud-first approach. This is a different fight.
- Moldoteck 3y agothe fee will no longer be that small considering microsoft's intention to charge a lot for extended windows support, it's not like the price is constant
- yourusername 3y agoOnly if you stay on a outdated version. If you're a company/government you have a M365 subscription that includes the latest windows and you're replacing your computers every 5-7 years so Win11 not supporting some computers from 2017 might cost you 1 year of support for a small part of your total fleet.
- self_awareness 3y agoMuch better battles according to who?
- dguest 3y agoRemember to thank the OSS developers for the bargaining chip.
- EduardoBautista 3y ago> Why should local governments use taxpayers’ money to buy proprietary, closed software from a single vendor? I don't want to be a pessimist, but working with non-traditional tools is going to cost the taxpayers more money when important documents are not formatted correctly or the software behaves differently than the proprietary alternatives. Linux is successful on the server because it has huge corporate backing. Linux has not been successful on the desktop because it has low corporate backing. The cost of Microsoft Office is comparable to the cost of keeping their workplace stocked with coffee throughout the year.
- josefx 3y ago>but working with non-traditional tools is going to cost the taxpayers more money when important documents are not formatted correctly or the software behaves differently than the proprietary alternatives. That is already a given with Microsofts own tools, office365 is a crippled mess. > The cost of Microsoft Office is comparable to the cost of keeping their workplace stocked with coffee throughout the year. Which is also something many companies don't pay for.
- tiahura 3y agooffice365 is a crippled mess. Strong “I have no idea what I’m talking about” vibe here.
- josefx 3y agoIt is not like there are pages describing just what excels web version cannot display or dozens of features that the web versions break because they cannot handle them correctly (like connectors).
- jamwil 3y agoCorrect the web version is not a 1:1 swap but the desktop version has been a stable product used by millions for decades. Most users use the desktop version and indeed it has few compatibility issues with itself.
- nokeya 3y agoChina started the process of switching from x86 to own architecture (loong-something if I recall correctly). Where Microsoft is essentially not present. I think they use Microsoft products a lot like any other governments. So we might see a big switch to libreoffice soon
- pquki4 3y agoLoongArch, I believe
- Havoc 3y agoChina gov is already on a mainly Linux stack https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kylin_(operating_system) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kylin_(operating_system) Unsure what office tools they use though
- larodi 3y agoChinese started WPS Office (called Kingsoft before) in 1989. Since end of 90s it is state favored and in 2011 received major grand. My wild guess is that they have much more incentive to use this rather than some broken open source Java thingie which is generally much slower than WPS. This package is 36 years old and very often overlooked by analysts dunno why. At time of writing there isn’t a single mention of this in the comments… very weird?! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WPS_Office https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WPS_Office
- TheCleric 3y agoEven North Korea has their own linux distro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS
- poulpy123 3y agoI feel like I'm reading this headline every 5 or 10 years
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- _ink_ 3y agoGreat. Now employ a team of 10 or so full time engineers and assign them to contribute to it.
- rchaud 3y ago> We have no influence on the operating processes of such [proprietary] solutions and the handling of data, including a possible outflow of data to third countries. All countries should have a strategy to fork open source software and implement it for this reason. They should also share their contributions with the wider Linux community as well, although with the recent xz scandal, pull requests from nation states may be looked at with suspicion.
- Dalewyn 3y ago[flagged]
- TulliusCicero 3y agoIn those cases, there's not really a practical non-proprietary option. Whereas with a lot of software, there is a practical non-proprietary option.
- Dalewyn 3y agoIn that case their question can be answered thus: Because that proprietary, closed software from a single vendor is the industry standard and you will get laughed out of the room for deviating. It's a stupid question and virtue signal statement no matter which way it goes. Either it falls down on itself from hypocrisy, or it falls down on itself from defying reality.
- TulliusCicero 3y agoIt's probably not as popular as Office365, but Google Workspace is also a common office suite used by agencies/businesses. It's not a complete monopoly (which MS probably wouldn't want anyway, since it would introduce heightened scrutiny).
- isodev 3y agoNice! I think in general, public services should not have to depend on for-profit organisations for their operations. Especially when such are tax-funded.
- climateactivist 3y ago[flagged]
- ChicagoDave 3y agoI’d quit my job if I was forced to a Linux desktop and non office365 tools. The loss of productivity in this change is going to be massively disruptive. It’s not going to go as smoothly as they think it will. I highly doubt their pilot program sniffed out all the complexities.
- prmoustache 3y agoI haven't seen a particular productivity boost anywhere from regular office + sharepoint and office365. I also haven't noted a productivity difference between sharepoint (which office 365 really is) and other content management platforms. Ironically the only place where office 365 offered a boost is in the linux world really. You don't even need a local suite office to open msoffice documents.
- ChicagoDave 3y agoMost non-technical people have a pattern of work. They know how to do their job because it’s been repeated over years. This change will alter many of those patterns. Even the simplest things like text editor or using a command line will be disruptive. The support staff is going to be overwhelmed.
- prmoustache 3y agoWhy are you talking about using a command line or a text editor? How does it relate to the subject?
- ChicagoDave 3y agoSwitching from Windows to Linux Desktop?
- prmoustache 3y agoNo need to tell me you haven't touched a linux distribution in the last 2 decades.
- weinzierl 3y agoAs much as I congratulate them for moving away from Microsoft Office as much I feel this is a step in the wrong direction. We need to move our administration away from the paper centric workflows of a world that is long gone for most people.
- jillesvangurp 3y agoExactly. Rubber Stamps belong in a museum. Along with Fax machines. And the people still insisting on using those for "security reasons". Common practice in Germany is to receive an email with a pdf, print it, sign it (or stamp) it, and then put it in the post. This both stupid and slow. German bureaucracy is still paper driven. Having lived in other countries with more or less full digital access to all the stuff Germans still do with paper forms or in person, I know the difference. It's slow, tedious, expensive, error prone, etc. Any paper forms should move online. The whole ritual of printing them, filling them in with a pen, and then having people manually copy information back into some ancient database is just completely backwards. People should sign stuff digitally. This is not only possible but common practice in most of the countries bordering Germany.
- weinzierl 3y agoPast week I travelled to London by train. I tried to book this trip a couple of months in advance from Deutsche Bahn website, but only got obscure error messages when finalizing the booking(*). So I tried the french SNCF app and the booking was done in a couple of minutes, all tickets conveniently in the app - expect for the German leg of the travel. SNCF sent me a Deutsche Bahn paper ticket via snail mail. (*) Tried for about a week, on different computers, my mobile, from another account. Sent a complaint, received an email answer that said they could not help me, but I could send my email to another address - except the other address was the very address I sent my complaint in the first place. Went to Deutsche Bahn office eventually, train I wanted was supposedly booked out, which I know wasn't true because booked it later via SNCF. They reluctantly tried to find me an alternative, but apparently they had to go through all the combinations manually. It took forever and wasn't successful either.
- pshirshov 3y agoWhat, again?
- Ygg2 3y agoWhy is this constantly happening and nothing comes out of it? I've been reading same headline for past 20 years, I thought even if it was a single town, most of Germany would be running Libre/Open Office by now. Also OnlyOffice is a much better candidate, it's very usable and OSS as well.
- CalRobert 3y agoMy wife just started a new job in the Netherlands and I was super excited to hear that her office uses Ubuntu and LibreOffice for all their PC's. She wasn't interviewing for a tech job but apparently her being reasonably familiar with both was helpful at her interview (all those years of Raspberry Pis around the house paid off!) Is this normal? It certainly would be an outlier back in the US.
- diggan 3y agoDon't know specifically about Europe-wide or Netherlands specific, but it's not unheard of in various European countries. As an example, the city government of Barcelona started to migrate things away from proprietary systems back in 2017. First applications and later the OS itself. Not sure what the progress of that is though. Old article about it: https://elpais.com/ccaa/2017/12/01/catalunya/1512145439_132556.html https://elpais.com/ccaa/2017/12/01/catalunya/1512145439_1325... Similar moves been done in various agencies and entities in France and Germany as well.
- fbn79 3y agoAnother article about migration to linux after 2019 https://computerhoy.com/noticias/software/barcelona-cambiara-windows-linux-antes-2019-74335 https://computerhoy.com/noticias/software/barcelona-cambiara... and a Gemini sumup https://g.co/gemini/share/74fe50828fa1 https://g.co/gemini/share/74fe50828fa1
- ramon156 3y agoThis is definitely new for me as a dutch person, would you care to say which company? Seems like a cool company
- CalRobert 3y agoSure, https://svi.nl https://svi.nl. They do pretty interesting work!
- swarnie 3y agoIf a similar announcement came from my government i'd just assume one of their mates had set up an open source consultancy business and it'd all be abandoned once enough money had been siphoned off.
- Archelaos 3y agoSome clarification and background. The headline might be somewhat misleading if you do not read the article. It is not the federal state of Germany that is starting to switch to LibreOffice, but one of the member states of the federation: Schleswig-Holstein. Shifting to LibreOffice is only one component of the the state's strategy towards a digitally sovereign IT workplace. You can read more about the other elements of this strategy here: https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/themen/digitalisierung/linux-plus1/Projekt/projekt_node.html https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/themen/... (in German). What is very interesting is the political background: Schleswig-Holstein is governed by a coalition of the Converservative party (CDU) and the Greens. In past decades it had been the Greens who where among the most driving forces for the adaption of open-source software and open standards in the public sphere, while the Conservativs primarily sided with big business. Now the latter seems to change gradually. Interesting times ...
- moolcool 3y agoOpen source is great, but LibreOffice is a nightmare to use when you want to any actual work. I feel for the German bureaucrats.
- mglz 3y agoWhat issues for example?
- bzzzt 3y agoDid they fix the unusable slow rendering on retina Macs yet? Couldn't even normally scroll through a blank document last time I tried...
- lucumo 3y agoI'm not sure if this still current, but a few years ago I switched from LibreOffice to MS Office because Calc was unbearably slow. I wasn't doing anything crazy, but also not trivial: 6 or 7 sheets, with a bunch of formulas with never more than about 500 cells filled (10 columns, 50 lines), and on most sheets a lot less. Excel blazes through it. I feel it was a very good decision, even though I'm a miser.
- _aavaa_ 3y agoYup. The word and powerpoint replacements are workable, but Calc is excruciatingly slow. I pity the accounting departments.
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- ensocode 3y agoSure there was this sad Munich thing with Microsoft but still I think this is very positive news!
- schleck8 3y agoSince it's linked at the bottom, I find it really funny how different the German states' websites are in quality. There is good ones like https://www.schleswig-holstein.de https://www.schleswig-holstein.de https://www.baden-wuerttemberg.de https://www.baden-wuerttemberg.de https://hessen.de https://hessen.de And then there is sites like this https://www.sachsen-anhalt.de https://www.sachsen-anhalt.de https://www.sachsen.de https://www.sachsen.de
- kome 3y agoA bit dated graphically, but I wouldn't say low quality... a graphic designer worked on the first three - the last two are the creation of a "webmaster".
- tietjens 3y agoMixed feelings on this, but can we please appreciate the irony that this is happening just days after XZ Utils.
- etiennebausson 3y agoTo be fair, xz didn't hit, xz flopped. The issue was detected before it could do much/any damage. As far as I'm concerned it's a point in favor of OSS, rather than against it. How many such attacks in closed-source programs goes undetected?
- tietjens 3y agoMy point was regarding German appetite for risk. Not trying to make a point against OSS.
- oaiey 3y ago30k multiplied by an M365 license... If they would use these funds to pay some developers for Libre office... That would be awesome.
- openrisk 3y agoA question mark before open source productivity tools find mass adoption is their ability to integrate ML/AI tools. The current hype notwithstanding, it is likely that the next generation productivity suite (from spreadsheets to document editors etc) will support important algorithmically augmented workflows and non-technical users will expect them to be available. Libreoffice and friends must have a forward looking narrative to remain relevant. Proprietary cloud based solutions are already rolling in this direction but will always face the extra hurdles that sensitive data are accessible by third parties and essential functionality for business continuity relies on external actors. But, so far at least, neither libreoffice (nor the linux desktop for that matter) seem to be particularly keen on moving to that next phase. Even while cutting edge open source machine learning and even competend LLM models are getting available in record time, the integration story is still non-existent. The pendulum of client/server balance and thin versus thick clients is always swinging. With mobile and cloud it seems to have reached an extremum. Who knows where it lands next, maybe the "AI PC" that some hardware vendors already pitch will become a thing.
- CRConrad 3y ago> A question mark before open source productivity tools find mass adoption is their ability to integrate ML/AI tools. No, the question is how long it will take before the world admits that this "AI" emperor is naked. > The current hype notwithstanding, Whaddayamean "notwithstanding"? The hype can't be notwithstanding, since hype is all it is.
- openrisk 2y agoThis is insular attitude that will not serve well the open source desktop (and libreoffice in particular). Reasons to be annoyed by the "AI" emperor certainly abound, but one might get too distracted by distasteful mass hysteria phenomena and miss important developments and trends that are here to stay. The point is that there is an entire universe of popular and very useful data science tools and models (built around Python, R etc.) of which the current AI/ML/LLM's algorithms are just a tiny and rather extreme use case. At some point libreoffice must move beyond VBA if it wants to remain relevant.
- maxclark 3y agoAnd in 2 years they'll move back
- zelphirkalt 3y agoLess of my tax money into the hands of companies that do comply with EU law, ergo criminals, great! I hope they have some solution in mind for cooperatively working on documents. That seems to be a big hurdle. Maybe some Nextcloud thing, that outputs ODT and only for locally working using LO? Or does LO offer collaborative features now?
- mbs159 3y agoSomeone is salty as hell, chill bro. Also, calling Microsoft a company that complies with EU law is kind of funny. I guess they must be constantly fined due to some prejudice?
- CRConrad 3y agoThart was a pretty obvious typo for "don't"; if they did, that wouldn't lead to the conclusion "ergo, criminals".
- majoe 3y agoThere is Collabora Office [0], which is built on LibreOffice. It also has a Nextcloud integration. [0]: https://www.collaboraoffice.com/ https://www.collaboraoffice.com/
- darrylengel 3y ago[flagged]
- darrylengel 3y ago[flagged]
- darrylengel 3y ago[flagged]
- xyst 3y agoThe licensing costs associated with MS products is stupid high. In analyzing the budget for a county, across all departments the line item for MS was ~$322K for just a 3 month span (o365??). It was the top line item for the quarter, beating out health insurance line related line items.
- jhickok 3y agoSeems unlikely that an M365 license that tops our around 50 dollars per month would be more expensive than health insurance.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 2d8a875f-39a2-4 3y agoCue supply chain attack planning starting at APTs around the world.
- tombert 3y agoI haven't really used a WYSIWYG word processor in almost a decade (I like Pandoc), so these are old memories, but I remember feeling like the interface to OpenOffice (before it was split into LibreOffice) was more intuitive than MS Word 2007 and beyond. I feel like they doubled down on 90's-era MS Word-style interface, which I personally have just found to be extremely intuitive and easy to work with. That said, the equation editor for LibreOffice and OpenOffice utterly sucks. This bizarre, quasi-TeX, quais-WYSIWYG interface is extremely unintuitive and hard to work with. The equations themselves generally render fine, but back when I used OpenOffice on Windows I purchased a copy of MathType and would OLE equations in. This didn't work on Linux, which is why I stopped using LibreOffice.
- kevingadd 3y agoThe good news is that most state workers probably don't need advanced features like an equation editor, so hopefully this transition won't be super painful. Seems like it would be rough on academics though.
- tombert 3y agoIt's the main reason my dad (who isn't an academic but does work on R&D in the aerospace industry) won't touch LibreOffice. He's constantly bothering people to see if he can use one of their Office licenses because he hates the LibreOffice equation editor. My handwriting is completely illegible, even to myself most of the time, so ever since I was a teenager I would type out all my homework, including math homework, so I've developed pretty strong opinions on math formatting. I've gotten good enough with TeX that I don't really have anything I can't easily do, but my dad has, for reasons kind of unknown to me, has had a strong aversion to learning LaTeX, despite the fact that I have offered dozens of times to teach him, so he just sticks with MS Office.
- instagib 3y agoLibre office excel replacement doesn’t handle vba well and many programs break. Idk how many macros they are utilizing with vba but would find out quickly switching to libre. Then there is Microsoft project which has no libre office clone. Those are just two examples and I’m sure there are more nuanced ones. I get it, Microsoft is slowly getting away from local copies but this is the same news every contract cycle of going to Linux or whatever bullshit they say they will do but IT knows it will turn into a tire fire.
- outcoldman 3y agoRussia had the same story when about 15 years ago they tried to move their postal service away from Microsoft. They spent a lot of money to teach personal, and I believe it was a disaster at the end. Microsoft just gave them a discount later and they stayed on Microsoft products. B2B is expensive, but so many companies just don’t understand how much money they will have to spend on education and support. Not sure what is the story with LibreOffice, if they are getting it with support or not.
- nogajun 3y agoLibreOffice may be useful for German, but not for Asian languages. This is because it was designed without regard to the typographical rules of the Asian-speaking world. You could say that TDF is "committed to Asian languages". But text is meaningless unless it can be used according to typographic rules, not just to display characters. They do not understand that. And the problem is that the user interface is stuck in the 2000s. They don't understand that the Ribbon UI has been around for 17 years and generations have changed. They say, "There's the Tabbed UI," but the Tabbed UI is nothing like the Ribbon UI. They're in denial and they don't want to get out of the 2000s.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- CRConrad 3y ago> They don't understand that the Ribbon UI has been around for 17 years and generations have changed. The bubonic plague has been around for hundreds of years, so it must be great, right?
- welzel 3y agoTo get some context on this, you have to look into the local administration of munich in bavaria. They messed up the switch to OpenOffice on the desktop by not supporting all use-cases and then it seems Microsoft used the opportunity to reverse the change by use some "convincing". Anyhow, it would be extremely simple for all of Europe to role out OpenSource: just ban the transfer of critical user data to the US. Microsoft Windows is technically a gigantic NSA backdoor, therefore installing it on a government PC should be considered treason. So, maybe we should start to put politicians on trial for treason and see how quickly MS gets kicked out of Europe...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mfiro 3y agoThat's a great news but does not surprise me. In the University where I studied in Germany, almost all Library computers had Ubuntu (and also LibreOffice). The Windows machines were limited to use only 2 hours a day and they were almost always occupied, so I had to start learning linux. Years later and I work half of time at my current job as Linux admin.
- Aerbil313 3y agoThis is the best thing to happen to Linux desktop, ever. Linux has dominated the server OS market since a long time. This is likely be the butterfly’s wing, the trigger to make Linux desktop break into consumer market. Libreoffice will likely get much more investment after this, likely triggering a cascade of investments to the desktop Linux ecosystem.
- CRConrad 3y ago> This is the best thing to happen to Linux desktop, ever. That's what we all said about Munich in 2003, too. So, I'm hopeful, but not exactly holding my breath.
- neycoda 3y agoMaybe this will help spurn some necessary and long-overdue problem fixes with LibreOffice, which have gone ignored after being reported seemingly because just not enough people are making a stink about them. I've tried to get Microsoft Office workers to switch but they won't because of these things. If only the LibreOffice devs would take these problems and inadequacies more seriously. Please I hope the German workers report problems and make suggestions and stick to them to improve the product so we have a good free or non-profit office suite to compete with the billionaire companies.
- easwaran 3y ago[dead]