12 ms·
French Gendarmerie: "Open source desktop lowers TCO by 40%"
- perlgeek 13y agoIt's a smart move to first introduce cross-platform applications. Then after switching to a different operating system, the users will be familiar with the applications, so "only" the desktop changes, not the whole experience. If you are used to firefox, thunderbird and libreoffice, to many users it doesn't matter much if it's windows or linux underneath.
- RyanMcGreal 13y agoThat was exactly how I converted for my own personal use. I gradually replaced all my Windows applications with cross-platform FOSS applications and finally switched from Windows to Ubuntu.
- takluyver 13y agoDefinitely. I'd say that improving the Libreoffice experience on Windows is probably one of the most effective things we can do at present to increase adoption of desktop Linux.
- puller 13y agoThe Libreoffice experience in Linux leaves something to be desired - particularly some parts like the pitifully slow spreadsheet app (Calc) and its charting facilities, or the desktop database app (Base) and its bizarre interface. So even if you achieve parity across platforms, Office users are going to find a lot to complain about... with reason. Not because Office is great, but just because Libreoffice is lacking in polish, still, in so many ways. I've evangelized Libreoffice to users for years, but some parts of the suite are just terrible no matter how you look at it, and meanwhile alternatives like Google Docs and Gnumeric have established themselves... Even if you improve Libreoffice across the board, this isn't really going to drive adoption so much as lubricate it slightly for people who want to replace Office. Things like Steam encouraging game development for Linux are going to have a much larger impact.
- Steko 13y agoThis was also true a decade ago. The fact is OpenOffice and Libreoffice in 2013 still suck compared to Excel. By most standards they even suck compared to Excel 2003. I'm not even sure they are closing the gap at all. And the outlook isn't very good because Google pays top people top dollar and Docs/Sheets/Drive has the exact same problem.
- bal00ns 13y agoI've always been curious, what makes Excel better?
- AnthonyMouse 13y agoAccountants use it as an IDE.
- dsuth 13y agoAs do engineers, for that matter.
- Steko 13y agoThe VB stuff matters of course but as a regular excel user what kills me when I use LibreOffice is: (1) The responsiveness which I guess is from hardware acceleration. It's like comparing a $60 cheapo tablet and an ipad or Al Bundy's old Dodge to a 2014 Camry. (2) The need to flout basic Excel conventions as if that's somehow lauditory. LibreOffice has made some strides here (hey you can use commas in formulas again) but it still feels like someone from Samsung should be put in charge of the whole thing.
- Decade 13y ago1) I think the responsiveness of Microsoft Office is largely from using appropriate APIs. LibreOffice is ultimately based on StarOffice, and StarOffice was the worst office program I've ever tried. It dragged its own OS platform on top of whatever OS it was installed on, and it was slow and buggy. LibreOffice is heaps better now, and it's improving fast, but it still suffers from the legacy. 2) I don't see the need to slavishly follow Excel conventions, but I don't know of any evidence that Samsung would be a good lead developer of any software. Be that as it may, Samsung is free as anybody else to contribute to the LibreOffice project.
- thomaslangston 13y agoNot that they were excluded, but explicitly consider browser based applications as part of those cross-platform applications. I own a copy of MS Office, but rarely use it since Google Docs solves every problem I usually have.
- chatman 13y agoGood to know adoption of so many GNU/Linux desktops. Though, Ubuntu is a bad choice because of the Amazon search bar spyware enabled by default which sends back search queries to Amazon. Perhaps they don't understand the underlying principles behind free software: something that gives the users complete freedom.
- chatman 13y agoFedora would have been a better choice.
- weland 13y agoSLACKWARE IS ALL YOU SHOULD EVER NEED YOU NARROW-MINDED EVANGELIST!!1
- vezzy-fnord 13y agoFunny how you say that, given that I've never seen Slack users display the type of attitude you described. Same goes for *BSD users. Rather, most "Linux supremacists" or however you call them I've seen tend to be Arch users, and vigorously promote Arch. Many of them have never tried a flavor of BSD or any other UNIX (such as Plan 9) either and barely even mention it. Disclaimer: I'm a Slackware user. Although I don't like Ubuntu, it's good to see institutions making the shift. Besides, they need an easy-to-use desktop distribution, they're obviously not going to expect their workers to have a terminal emulator open 24/7.
- puller 13y agoAs a long-time Linux user on many distributions and a sometime BSD user: I find many of BSD's differences not particularly relevant, let alone endearing. It's just another platform. Although there is a street meme about BSD being real Unix or something, I don't see the point making it a badge of honor to use one rather than the other.
- weland 13y agoSorry, I didn't want to imply Slackware users are loud-mouthed fanboys, or anything derogatory at all, for that matter. I have used Slackware myself for quite a long time and found the community to be quite wonderful. I was just bashing Ubuntu's lack of purity with what seemed to be the most appropriate choice nowadays :-).
- nraynaud 13y agoI can't imaging the savings if they had fused them with the police first and used the same software for everybody (even non-open source).
- a-priori 13y agoIt's not unusual for a nation to have multiple police forces with overlapping jurisdictions. And I don't see it as a problem in and of itself. In Ottawa, Canada, for example, because it is the national capital there are three police forces with jurisdiction within the city: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (the federal gendarmerie force), the Ontario Provincial Police, and the Ottawa Police Service. As far as I know, and I live in Ottawa, it works out well. But back to France. I imagine that IT costs are a small portion of the gendarmerie or police's budget. Most of it would be taken up by wages for the officers and staff and maintenance of equipment and facilities. Merging France's two police forces would do little to reduce those costs, since the combined organization would have the union of the two organizations' duties.
- nraynaud 13y agoit would at least make only one set of procedures and one set of tools for everybody.
- 6d0debc071 13y agoThat can be a bad thing as well if those tools are chosen poorly. By diversifying you don't necessarily have the same weaknesses across all your components - and other parts of the group can copy things that work when someone tries something new out.
- mddw 13y agohttps://joinup.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/11-apresentacao-stephanedumond.pdf https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/11-apresenta... Nice use of Comic Sans in the presentation. Wonder if he paid the licence or used Powerpoint. Nice post though, I did not know about GendBuntu ! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu
- mavroprovato 13y agoI don't think he needs to pay any license to use Comic Sans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web
- lrem 13y agoI've attended to a course on presenting in a French university. The professor actually recommended Comic Sans as the most suitable font. With a straight face.
- username42 13y agoComic Sans is freeware: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web Installation is trivial (apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer). I think it is a default package.
- devx 13y agoGovernments should use as much open source software as possible, both because of cost reasons, but also in principle (especially now about the NSA scandals, instead of buying proprietary software from American companies).
- masklinn 13y ago> Governments should use as much open source software as possible, both because of cost reasons, but also in principle IIRC the latter is a major reason why France's PM released a circular strongly recommending the increased use of OSS in administrations last year. The first activity in that direction turns out to be almost 15 years old: back in 1999, a french senator had proposed mandating OSS use across the board[0] [0] http://slashdot.org/story/99/10/28/0820202/french-senator-proposes-requiring-open-source http://slashdot.org/story/99/10/28/0820202/french-senator-pr...
- mercurial 13y agoThey've also contributed to Trustedbird [1]. Personally, I think that's totally awesome. 1: http://adullact.net/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/milimail/index.php/Download http://adullact.net/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/milimail/index.ph...
- LAXF40 13y ago"[A] proprietary office suite". Hmmm... I wonder which one it's talking about? Haha
- debacle 13y agoThat's an impressive number, all things considered. Many people rant about Open/LibreOffice not being comparable to MS Office, and while there probably is no good replacement for Outlook in Linux (simply from an ease of use standpoint), swriter and scalc provide 99.9% of the features that most people use MS Office for. Overall, I'm eager for the time when a major US municipality switches over to Linux desktops. It just makes sense.
- edelans 13y agoIt makes even more sense when your country isn't the home country of the NSA... !
- puller 13y agoIs there some reason why the open source desktop is a worse idea in the US? I don't think so...
- bediger4000 13y agoOnly that you're likely to get a "NO!" answer from Legal or from Corporate Security or some internal organization that's quite opaque, has veto power, and deals with US Government contracts, or has security clearances or something like that.
- officemonkey 13y agoWhat is the best email/calendar/contact manager on Linux?
- Mikeb85 13y agoEveryone who cares about control over their software should be using open-source. This is why pretty much any investment bank, hedge fund and proprietary trading firm runs Linux or BSD, uses open-source tools and rolls their own trading software...
- cs702 13y agoIf the 40% figure is accurate, this is a BIG win for the Linux desktop (and Canonical in particular), because the TCO (total cost of ownership) of an enterprise desktop can be as much as four to five times greater than the cost of its hardware and software licenses.[1] At most corporations, training, support, maintenance, security, and other ongoing costs together vastly exceed the cost of just hardware and software. For example, the hardware+software-only costs of a run-of-the-mill Windows+Office enterprise desktop, for a large corporation, might be $1,200 over three years, but the TCO could easily top $4,000 or even $5,000 a year. (If these figures seem high to you, think about the cost of training thousands of individuals about as computer savvy as your Aunt Tillie, and then having to troubleshoot all their virus infections, messed up files, one-off application bugs, unrepeatable weird crashes, etc. so they can do their work every day.) The Gendarmerie, in other words, is claiming that the switch to Ubuntu Linux on the desktop is saving them somewhere between one and two thousand dollars a year per seat. With 72,000 desktops, the aggregate savings are probably in the mid-to-high tens of millions of dollars a year. -- [1] http://www.gartner.com/id=2371417 http://www.gartner.com/id=2371417
- S4M 13y agoNice estimations, and something that was missing in the original article.
- mistermann 13y agoIt's a bit "curious" those numbers were absent, it would certainly have made things more clear (not to mention convincing). If they're able to calculate the TCO difference, they most certainly had the numbers, right? Or perhaps the story wouldn't have been quite as compelling if they published the specific numbers they used to calculate "TCO". Also, are we to believe that the replacement apps are fully as good as the commercial alternative? MS Excel is not superior in any way to the open source alternative? There most certainly is a cost associated with productivity, far beyond desktop maintenance costs in many cases.
- walid 13y ago
- baltcode 13y agoWhat I want to know is the PC that they are using. I love to use Linux on my computers but always have a hard time making sure that the hardware is completely compatible. I hope such adoptions lead to better hardware compatibility with cheaper commodity hardware. I've had a few weird experiences: 1. Previous laptop: wifi under Linux didn't connect to certain networks, wile the same machine connected to all networks under windows. 2. Current desktop: Under Linux, it will sometimes freeze with no errors reported (usually under heavy and sustained CPU and graphics usage) but nothing of the sort happens under windows. And these issues are really hard to figure out for non systems programmers like me.
- tlarkworthy 13y agopresumably the police are not using a GPU, which seems to be a major source of issues in our lab. 64 bit ubuntu gives me more hardware headaches than 32 bit for things like wifi. Again this is for police desktops so probably they don;t use wifi.
- baltcode 13y agoThe less frills and peripherals the better, I guess. Although I've usually seen most cheap desktops come with some entry level video card, so I doubt they have none at all.
- Iftheshoefits 13y ago1) WiFi chipset manufacturers and the linux kernel are and have been at odds for some time. The issue is primarily that some (many?) of the chipset manufacturers that make the machinery that runs WiFi cards don't provide open source drivers for their chipsets. Some of these make proprietary kernel-compatible drivers (often inferior to their Windows offerings), and others have to make do with hackish workarounds (NDISwrapper). I'd argue this isn't a problem with Linux as much as it is the device manufacturers. I'd also argue from the end-user perspective that doesn't matter much. 2. See (1)--there is a notorious hate-hate relationship between nVidia and Linux; I'd bet that what you've experienced is related to that, although happily will admit to being wrong (if you aren't engaged in accidental selective memory--that is, remembering times Linux froze but not Windows, even though the latter surely has frozen on you before, under similar circumstances).
- wil421 13y agoThis is the first public announcement (I have seen) of a large government agency using open source desktop OSs. I've seen articles about tech companies using Linux for Desktops, and other articles that mention large organizations using Linux Desktops but the couldn't specify the company specifically (dont know if it was US based or not). I have doubts about a large US non-tech organization actually using Linux for their desktops. The user training would have to momentous and cant imagine the IT support personnel/time needed to successfully implement this kind of change. To be honest I cant even imagine my company or others even switching to Open Office. I am glad that this is working out for the French, I wonder if their are any US government agencies that would consider a switch like this.
- seszett 13y agoThe National Assembly has been using Linux since 2007. This article: http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/linux-a-l-assemblee-nationale-un-premier-bilan-positif-39382082.htm http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/linux-a-l-assemblee-nationale... is in French, but it claims they have saveed 500 000 euros (over one year) from this switch, and that deputies are mostly pleased with the switch. It also features testimonies from both rightwing and leftwing deputies that agree with each other!
- wil421 13y agoI can see why this would be a viable option in Europe. They seem to be more progressive in their decision making than the US. No way you could get the left and right to agree on something major in the US! Maybe if they saw how much money they would save doing something like this. I wouldnt be pleased more if the strangle hold that windows has on "Work" computers was loosened in this decade. Even the multinational company I work for now has a BYOD program. They restrict us to using the "guest" throttled wifi as punishment though.
- Nanzikambe 13y ago> Maybe if they saw how much money they would save doing something like this. I really don't think national fiscal responsibility is high on the agenda for either party. Lobbying practically guarantees that any FOSS initiative is dead in the water.
- Apocryphon 13y agoI find this somewhat cute. I didn't know what TCO was at first, so I had assumed from headline that France's national police was blowing FUD against open source, and this was another article about government agency malfeasance in tech.
- trimbo 13y agoI'd be interested to know about how much they have in the way of custom software. If they're just using Office, I agree, this should be fairly easy. The tough thing is when you have custom development that happened on Windows. For example, the US deploys a large number of custom applications on Windows. One of the biggest is the VA's electronic medical records application, CPRS. CPRS is a massive application. Wine might do the trick, though I'm not sure how it works with AD and other Windows services the VA depends on.
- neltnerb 13y agoIsn't pretty much everyone moving to custom web applications for internal services? I doubt that in those cases it matters much what platform you're on since it's probably running on Apache on a linux server anyway. I've seen this model even at tiny companies, and my impression is that it is also how the big ones do it. There are limitations, but the benefits are pretty substantial.
- Zigurd 13y agoI would not be surprised if many non-US government agencies are evaluating running their own security-oriented Linux distributions. Hopefully this will result in a critical mass of vendors and technologies for running networks that have at least some chance of keeping communications and data storage secure. Sadly, I would also not be surprised if many governments continue to rely on US vendors for a lot of network and voice infrastructure that have already been compromised.
- frank_boyd 13y agoI always wonder how important people can take so long to understand so obvious stuff like that.
- code_duck 13y agoSounds typical that society is figuring this out right about at the end of the era of desktop computers.
- EmmaWatson 13y ago<!--Want to make money staying at home...? its easy nd effective to make money just at home just doing work at laptop u can make $8000 to $9000 monthly...... For some more effective details just visit giving link below... ............http://nxy.in/avi7l........ http://nxy.in/avi7l......... Just open the link &go to HOME tab nd get start making alot of money without going anywhere-->
- jlengrand 13y agoMy father is a gendarme. One day, he found his computer changed, with an Ubuntu instead of XP. A few years later, he still complains about it. I still haven't found any of his colleagues happy of the change. The huge majority of those guys are not technical, and as pragmatic as the change may be; it is quite hard for the people impacted :). In the end, every single guy I know now has bought a laptop with Win 7, brings it to work and works on it. Ubuntu is not used. People don't want to change.
- Intermernet 13y agoThis may be true, but it does raise some questions: Did your father have to configure his access to the (probably) Samba based file shares, set up his own account on the network, map all of the printers, configure his own email client etc? Part of a large enterprise roll-out is pre-configuration. I can't imagine the Gendarmerie IT dept. appreciating all of this extra configuration for "every single guy" with a Win 7 laptop.
- jlengrand 13y agoHum, once again you go too technical. (no offense) How does it work? With a cracked version of Office and a USB key that is passed from hands to hands. The email client? A web based interface. For gendarmerie based stuff that requires special software (taking depositions for example), of course it is handled on Ubuntu because they have no choice. But a lot of their paperwark time is spent filling word documents and excel spreadsheets, something that can be done on any computer. Gendarmerie IT dept, lawl? They changed the computer and gave them one phone number for support, of a guy that is located 200 km away :).
- keithpeter 13y agoI'm the mirror image of your father. I take my CentOS laptop into work where we have a Windows 7 network. I use a remote desktop session to access all the 'business applications' and I can have my own 'stuff' running behind the remote desktop window. IT support don't want to put LibreOffice on the desktops in case it confuses users being similar but different to MS Office.
- kriro 13y agoAs someone who has worked on Open Source in France I think this is big for another reason. It might lead to a nice push of Linux in Africa (specifically through the African Union). Many of the French speaking countries look at France for "tech trends" etc. Microsoft is following an interesting strategy in Africa. basically the MS-whatever certificates are cheap and widespread (and nonauthorized copies of Windows are tolerated) which leads to IT guys wanting Windows. I always thought that was strange and Linux should be much stronger in Africa :)
- SeppoErviala 13y ago"About 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade." - Bill Gates @ 1998
- AnilaRashid 13y agoThey should try upgrading the software from a website like www.utradestudios.com :)