Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows
techrepublic.com
techrepublic.com
"At the time the report was released, the FSFE questioned why Accenture was commissioned to co-author a report assessing the use of Microsoft software, when the consultancy runs a joint venture with Microsoft called Avanade, which helps businesses implement Microsoft technologies. For its part, Accenture said it has an "independent view of the technology landscape".
"At the time Munich began the move to LiMux in 2004 it was one of the largest organizations to reject Windows, and Microsoft took the city's leaving so seriously that then CEO Steve Ballmer flew to Munich to meet the mayor. More recently, Microsoft last year moved its German company headquarters to Munich."
Everything else that is written there points towards it making no sense to switch back to Windows.
It's arguably a much bigger threat than home users switching since businesses could switch many thousands of machines at once
Attention Governments: Go deploy Linux on your desktops and Microsoft will appear tendering huge sacks of cash. Tell your friends. Don't let them leave with a dime.
Accenture will get you the answers Microsoft needs regardless of your situation. You can count on it.
To be fair, the headquarters were in Unterschleißheim before, a suburb of Munich just 5kms from the new location.
Several comments mention "läuft wie geschmiert" which can be translated as mobbed-up / bribed.
There's also Occam's razor: less than 2% of people choose Linux on the desktop. Maybe it's just not that good for this purpose.
Linux advocacy has also changed. It's now so entrenched on the server that the quest to get it on desktops is less relevant. A lot of the OSS advocacy was also aimed at proprietary formats, and the web (mostly google docs) has increased competition for MS Office more than OpenOffice ever dreamt of.
The one where I am productive and don't expose my data to third parties like Google.
Additionally, almost no workers will be using anything other than Windows or OS X at home. Having to find explorer or the "add column" button in libreoffice will be annoying at first, so users probably need more help to get started.
It's a sad state of popular systems remaining popular... Personally I use Linux both for ideological and practical reasons, and I recommend it to other power users and computer-related professionals (software or security people), but for users... until there are real advantages, I'm not sure I should recommend it for fear of them going "everything is wrong" when really it's functionally equivalent and they just have to re-learn where stuff is (the cost of change..).
There are exceptions, old computers mainly, but generally I recommend users stick with what they want in the desktop space. I'll just keep making remarks about privacy and modifying scripts in my OS to change whatever I want. If that doesn't trigger anything, they don't want to anyway.
Maybe some people don't realize, how much they have contributed upstream. For the past couple of years I have worked with them as a volunteer in LibreOffice. They regularly host hackfests for Debian & LibreOffice.
There are certain parts of LibreOffice like the KDE UI backend and mail merge that they practically maintain by themselves. Recently they posted three job openings for full-time LibreOffice developers. They already have several inhouse + contractors (for LibO alone).
Could you ask these people to explain why they think investing in LibreOffice is worth it (and well, just remain silent if their experience is bad :-))
It just seems odd to me given my good experience switching my fairly computer illiterate parents over to Linux previously.
To be fair they presently use Mac, but I found the Linux switch a great advantage initially as I ended up with much less tech support dealing with anti-virus software, clicking links they shouldn't, malware etc.
If I were to speculate a key problem is that so many people treat MS Word as the standard format for exchanging written documents. Computer illiterate people very frequently send emails with their main info written in MS Word. They seem to have no idea that you can format your emails from a regular email client.
Or how many people bundle images by pasting them into powerpoint rather than just zipping them?
It would be interesting to know whether these are the sort of problems causing a desire for a switch back to Windows or whether there are real legitimate reasons.
Having IT supported a similar type heterogenous mix of departments in big name Ivy academia, it's typically workable productivity/interop to have each group of users to standardize on the same OS... usually either Window or Mac but not both (because of app compatibility, even between same vendor isn't always 100%: filename character set, fonts, so on.)
- Office VBA: OpenOffice is good enough for people who just make docs and spreadsheets, but some of the more savvy folk (usually in finance and engineering) use MS Office VBA as a development platform. OpenOffice just doesn't cut it for them.
- Old stuff: Critical sensors, HVAC systems, fuel management systems, etc. that have proprietary windows-only clients. Some work well enough in Wine, others don't.
- 3rd-party support contracts: A lot of places rent their copiers, and even though those copiers have Linux print drivers, the support that is bundled into the contract is windows-only, so you're on your own with Linux.
- AD / Group Policy Deployment: Samba4 is closer, but without windows desktops on the client-end, it's still no substitute for the one-ring-to-control-them-all nature of a bunch of windows boxes under AD, and I'm not just talking SSO.
I think the key-problem with windows is that most users--even in a lot of AD-controlled corporate settings--are full administrators. If you can drop everyone down to limited-user status, it greatly improves things. Not to Linux levels, but still a lot better.
No joke. Around mid 2000's worked at a scientific lab part time. We still had Windows 3.1 machines in there because measurement equipment (sensors) had older DOS based drivers. So would run the experiments then had to use floppies to shuffle results around.
The first Windows-based software I ever shipped was for programming ESC dataloggers. Last I heard, it was still in use by the IEPA Bureau of Air.
http://jalopnik.com/this-ancient-laptop-is-the-only-key-to-t...
AD: Have a look into FreeIPA. It is Active Directory equivalent for Linux and Unix systems (but not Group Policy). Centralized updates are done using Spacewalk/Satellite.
Old stuff: that's the thing with old stuff. Going forward, these things are undergoing a change to web and snmp interfaces. I'm currently looking into thermometers and moisture meters, and this is the standard.
3rd party support contracts: you don't have to accept the stock contract, ask for changes that you need. The providers are not going to say you no, it's just not there because most companies are not asking for it, so they won't be proactive in providing that.
That said, I'm surprised they wouldn't try to support Office via Wine for those users that needed it. Also, for information exchange, the defaults for LO changed to MS Office formats for a given organization... though that still has some issues.
Randomly the keyboard attached to the dock doesn't initialize and I need to unplug and replug.
Unreliable docking is IMO an excellent reason not to use Linux on laptops. And most people use laptops these days because of work from home optionality.
This is with a mix of Dell and Lenovo laptops with Intel display chipsets, fwiw.
One thing I've found that's drastically cut down on the frequency (possibly eliminated it? not sure) is this: Always wait ten seconds between display state changes. Waking the computer up from sleep? Wait ten seconds before you dock it or connect an external monitor. Undocking it? Wait ten seconds before putting it to sleep.
Also: never make more than one state change at a time. For example, don't put the computer to sleep while docked, then undock it. Undock it first, wait ten seconds, then put it to sleep.
YMMV, but like I said: I think this has eliminated this problem for me. I've been using this process for some months now, and I'm doing much better at the uptime game (28 days since my last restart, right now).
Yes, that's a good thumb rule when dealing with hardware+software. Not just for displays either. Seen many cases of it. I have a USB modem for mobile Net, for which I wait for a few seconds after it shows the login dialog, to make sure it has fully initialized, even though the dialog seems to indicate it is ready. If I click Connect in the dialog a few seconds too early, it connects but often then the speed comes down to zero quickly. Disconnecting, closing the dialog, removing the modem, waiting 5 seconds, plugging it back in, waiting for the dialog to come up again, and then waiting an extra 5 or so seconds, fixes the issue.
Remember issues like this from my system engineer days too (Unix and related support to customers in the field). Once a Unix minicomputer was not booting. (Was working for a large Indian Unix hardware vendor then - India got Unix early and became a Unix country, because of an RBI mandate on bank computerization.) This was at a hospital and they had a lot of critical patient and billing data on it. Backups could have been restored after changing the hard disk, but that would mean machine downtime on a live hospital system. Maybe a lot of time to get a replacement hard disk too, from head office.
Others had tried - hardware engineers. I was called in (I was a system engineer, aka software troubleshooter). Tried rebooting. Did not work - hung before kernel boot messages. Rebooted again. No luck. Did it again. Nope. Others said, drop it, lets try something else. I said - wait. Rebooted it again. It came up fine. End of story :)
Of course, I did a lot of other (and some harder) kinds of troubleshooting stuff in that role too, not just rebooting boxes :) But the point is that this kind of experience and common sense often worked when sometimes other things didn't. So it takes all kinds of skills ...
Yes, good point, and a fundamental tenet of troubleshooting in general. Also to make each change reversible, as far as possible. You can bork a system by one innocent / ignorant change to a config file in /etc, for example. A lot of us learned it on our own (sometimes the hard way, ha ha, got a few stories there), later I also saw it mentioned in an early part of the O'Reilly book Unix System Administration by Aileen Frisch. Very good book, as is another book (thick one) by Nemeth et al - the Unix System Administration Handbook (later there was a Linux edition too).
Also whoever's decision it was that if you drop the right 10px at the left edge of the screen, it should only show those 10px and not overlap onto the neighbouring screen by default obviously does not use double monitors.
However, the IT support had a list of 'recommended' distros (Ubuntu LTS if memory serves) and kernels and they preferred very much if you stuck to those.
My hope for Europe is lost in this regard, but I think Russia or China could come up with something interesting.
Short of completely dismantling Microsoft, or even seizing their assets by governments (two options I don't approve of), I don't see a way to break that monopoly as long as this kind of Office Software is relevant.
LibreOffice Calc is missing features that are required by many users? The government should pay for it to be developed.
The ironic thing is that it is not even expensive to break this monopoly. So many countries share this interest in breaking the monopoly.
Why the EU spends billions to protect farmers but is not willing to spend millions to finish and maintain a nearly workable independent software infrastructure is beyond me.
Most politicians are old and most old people don't understand computers, the internet and it's consequences. They don't get what is at stake. I still hope that some day people will get elected in Europe that understand theses issues.
Government can very rarely outpace private business in terms of getting things like this done.
For example Continuum Analytics is partly funded by public sources to work on open data science, competing against commercial offerings from SAS, for example. The Blender Foundation has some public funding for developing new features for the Blender 3D software suite, partly through public film funding.
Why? Governments are the only ones with the tools to actually deal with monopolies properly without competing with them: breaking them up, fining them extremely fiercely, etc.
That's not really true, it's never ever really been true. It's capitalist propaganda that 'the Government is useless', and it's mainly propped up by extremely liberal governments (Republicans and Democrats, for example) that make the Government useless on purpose then say 'hey look the Government sucks'.
Not that it should ever need to be Government writing software to compete against Microsoft. Governments have much, much better tools for dealing with monopolies than trying to outcompete them. They're the only ones that have those tools. They should use them aggressively.
I'm not entirely in favor of governments competing with business... or propping them up. They should only interfere when there is a lack of opportunity to compete, either with unfair practices, or coercion.
Also, is there something wrong with capitalism? Note: that what we have is not really or nearly a free market, and that patent/copyright protections really need to be adjust to move in that direction.
Instead, they... did nothing. Classic US government.
>The ironic thing is that it is not even expensive to break this monopoly. So many countries share this interest in breaking the monopoly.
It's not expensive at all, no. It's the opposite of expensive. Microsoft has done countless things that are completely explicitly illegal to do, that are very anti-competitive. They should have been fined billions and broken up a decade or more ago. No lawsuits, no juries, just the FTC doing what it was made to do.
>Why the EU spends billions to protect farmers but is not willing to spend millions to finish and maintain a nearly workable independent software infrastructure is beyond me.
I have no idea how you think it's okay to blame the EU for 'protecting farmers' while not blaming the US for its much more pervasive farmer protectionism and subsidies (including paying people not to farm their land) and not dealing with Microsoft themselves, an American company.
>Most politicians are old and most old people don't understand computers, the internet and it's consequences. They don't get what is at stake. I still hope that some day people will get elected in Europe that understand theses issues.
Saying that 'politicians are old and don't understand computers' might have made sense three decades ago, but it makes less and less sense today. Politicians today grew up with computers.
To be fair, food is a bit more important than software :)
Otherwise, I agree. This absolutely needs to be a public policy issue. Movements like the Pirate Party are a step in the right direction, and hopefully victories like in Iceland will prove to be more than just one-off occurrences.
Break up Microsoft into a company that makes Office, a company that makes Windows and a company that does .NET.
I remember setting up a 3-head system back in the day custom coding my own XFree86 Config file by hand. That was about 15 years ago. Frankly, it doesn't feel like things have improved much. And I have less desire to hand code things that, frankly, should be sorted out by now for a desktop OS.
In 2014, dual monitors didn't work by default and I had to find some command to put in my startup scripts. Maybe this is better now, but that wasn't that long ago.
Package managers seem to be trying to straddle the world of library management for C/++ development and app stores at the same time, doing a subpar job at both IMO.
I get the impression that needing to fiddle with the system is seen as normal in Linux-land, when it's really not.
But the fact that users are presented with a choice and have the opportunity to screw things up sort of shows the misalignment between Linux and the general public.
The general public wants and needs a computer they can't screw up, not something endlessly configurable.
For most people, if things don't work out of the box, they might as well not work at all. Many people don't even know drivers exist because they've never had to manually install them.
I love it for server-side workloads headless... but UI on linux still isn't nearly as consistent as it is on even windows, let alone mac.
You have to consider this is an administration of one of the largest cities in Germany with lot's of custom processes and tools. Also workers there vary from their IT background and I guess most are not power users.
Their approach was basically eliminate Windows everywhere and tell everyone Linux is better.
They even gave everyone notebooks with with their own flavor of Ubuntu and KDE4 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux) and more or less forced them to use this. They were using Kolab - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolab and while I appreciate the effort if they really forced all users to use KDE Kontact with KDE4 I can understand that frustration was there. In my experience it's a UI nightmare and source of endless bugs. There is a difference between using out of personal interest or depending on it for work.
Their OpenOffice addons called WollMux was written in Java and at least judging from the screenshots is also an UI nightmare.
There was also criticism that the project was badly managed in parts and incompetence in the IT could have played a role.
These are all rumours, but it's believable.
Add to this that basically everyone else uses Outlook and MS Office and consider the difficulties when opening .docx stuff in LibreOffice and you can guess where the frustration might come from.
Another aspect is that Microsoft has quite a good story and technology with .NET and Active Directory / Group Policy and Powershell as well as .NET Integration to Office. Everything is accessible and .NET devs are plenty. Linux is more or less a wild garden of different solutions of different quality. This might contribute to the problems as more effort is needed to bring the software up to scratch. It's not something that is nice to hear but I can imagine that in the reality of public administration this stuff matters.
These might be reasons besides the political aspect of it. The polical stuff has some conspiracy touch to it and while I can image that a successful Linux toolkit for public administration that works well enough and can be deployed would easily kill Microsoft in that sector it's also likely that the opensource software is just lacking in some key aspects. Maybe it's a mixture of both.
"According to Kirschner, Munich's IT problems are not so much down to the use of free software as they are the result of poor management and organizational structure, a view backed up by Accenture's study."
Here is the full study (10MB PDF): https://www.ris-muenchen.de/RII/RII/DOK/SITZUNGSVORLAGE/4277...
1) replacing the free software with microsoft software
2) see 1
3) need a third option ?
4) see 1 again
Something should be replaced, that's for sure.
But they have an organisational structure where demands from users get stuck between departments and improvements/testing does not work. Fixes and updates are not delivered on time and contain new problems. There is infighting between departments that have to account for their needs and this leads to local modifications that cause problems.
Issues they found are printing, software bugs and problems displaying documents. Quite a big percentage (30-40%) still running KDE 3.5 and Ubuntu 10.04 with OpenOffice 2? 3?
They had no Windows concept until 2012 and before that every department that wanted to use Windows had to roll their own and that led to installations without AD and updates. They still run XP and 2000 on 30% of Windows machines.
They can also only pay below average and Munich is expensive so it's probably not a first choice for IT guys. Additionally they don't have a budget for new hardware.
Well, but that's how it works, isn't it? I wish I could go to an employer and say "Please remove that horrible MS Office 2013 from my computer, it is a steaming pile of orc manure, and I will not be forced to use it!", but that's just not how companies (or bureaucracies) work.
On one of my previous jobs my employer wanted to give me a macbook pro.
My view of OSX and Apple in general is very close to your view of MS Office 2013. I told them “let me try virtualization first”, inserted more RAM to my own Windows laptop, and used VmWare virtual machine for iOS development for the next couple of years.
My main customer insists all work be done on a company computer, using only company-approved software, installed by company admins. And don't even think about desecrating the machine by inserting a non-company USB stick!
Which is, admittedly, quite good from a security standpoint.
And even for larger companies with more bureaucracy, developers who do native code development often need to be local administrators on their PCs. To do my job, very often I need the permissions to install and upgrade software, debug stuff, install system services…
Well I also do some native code development.
That's why I have been given a tool that grants me limited time local SU privileges, given I enter at least 3 words in the field for "reason", and a valid cost center ID. I kid you not: It seems that executing a piece of code that grants me time limited local SU privileges leads to some company-internal financial flow to the IT department!
Edit: Installing s/w, btw, is usually done by opening a ticket with IT. If the required s/w is approved by IT, it will be queued for installation in the company's own s/w and configuration management tool chain in a few hours.
About your administrator tool, yeah, that sucks.
I once worked in a company where the managers were paranoid about us leaking the source code of the game we developed. We all had 2 PCs, one for development, another one for the Internet, two physically-separate local networks, a one-way network share to copy stuff (read-write from the online LAN, read-only from the offline LAN), and a KVM switches so we only needed a single display + keyboard.
It was very inconvenient, e.g. unable to copy-paste stuff from stackoverflow.
I used to have to do w/o the web for the longest time - but fortunately not w/o email!
So in desperate cases I used my telephone for web access and copy/pasted stuff into an email to myself@company.
In the mean time I do have web access there, but I had to ask the head of department to e-sign his approval on the application. Fortunately, he's a cool and reasonably guy and signed it no questions asked.
Not necessarily unwarranted; I still remember the leak of the source code for Half-Life 2 making headlines back in 2003.
https://games.slashdot.org/story/03/10/02/1547218/half-life-...
(Good grief, has it really been that long since Half-Life 2? I feel old.)
Exactly my experience. I use Windows at work (lots of .Net) and Linux on side projects (Python mostly). When I get into a bind on Windows, the solution is typically a Google search and couple clicks away. On Linux, I find the Google search results often return a plethora of similar solutions each branching with every distro and major version change. This means I'm often sorting through similar (but not exact) issues on forums and trying them out one by one and then cleaning up a mess of packages when it doesn't work out.
I worked there. The biggest problems back a few years ago:
1) So-called "Fachverfahren", basically software for stuff like managing drivers' licenses or other bureaucratic procedures, is written and supplied for Windows only. Often enough that meant Munich had to pay a boatload of money for a Linux port. Or the software HAD a Linux port, but for RHEL or other "enterprise linux" crap distros - which meant using stuff like "alien" or, worse, manual repackaging to make them compatible with Ubuntu. Yay for version hell - statically linked programs were an exception.
2) DRIVERS. There's a lot of custom hardware - special printers for printing on documents like ID cards, fingerprint readers for the new national ID cards, RFID readers with support for said ID cards... you won't believe how much stuff there is. And all of this needs to have Linux drivers and tooling.
3) Employee training. Back in my days KDE was used (and I believe it still is), but it's different enough from Windows that people need training. And there's 35k of employees, most of which don't have any IT experience outside from their Windows computer at home.
4) The computers themselves. Let's just say that the computers in any public agency are almost always horribly outdated. Many users complain(ed) about the speed of LiMux, which mostly was caused by old or underpowered (esp. RAM, given that OpenOffice and Firefox are really really memory hungry) systems.
5) Networking. Depends on the building and agency, of course, but e.g. my school was connected via a 16 mbit uplink, over which the entire Internet traffic went...
I believe the biggest problem LiMux had and still has is a lack of proper funding - especially for hardware.
As far as I know, your points 1) and 2) are the main issues. Having to work myself with software talking to Windows hardware drivers from MacOS via Parallels, I can understand the problems of this additional complexity.
The lack of staff is especially a problem as the employees have to be trained in a lot of different areas of law and procedures (because the Bürgerbüros/KVR are quite generic and offer all different kinds of services), so you can't just shift employees around... and Munich has the added problem of extremely high living costs combined with extremely low, un-competitive pay.
Thank you for confirming my suspicions, fellow Munich-dweller.
While the mayor's office even publicly admit that the staffing situation is atrocious, they probably can't resist to pass at least some of the blame.
But they also deliberately shrunk the staff levels a few years ago to save money.
4) and 5) would've been problematic on Windows, too (in fact, Windows would've struggled even more with 4).
Hopefully 2, 3, and the remainder of 1 will continue to improve, but they are indeed obstacles even today (users tend to get frustrated with Linux's "quirks", and the driver situation is still abysmal for printers and scanners, which are vital in offices; Wine is getting good enough to be a viable solution in some situations, but it's by no means a universal solution at this point).
I wonder if it's not just the sort of annecdote between techies and non-techies which makes the difference. I think a non-techie will ascribe too much weight to their user-experience (a file doesn't display the same when sharing files) and conclude the file is somehow corrupt or unreliable.
At best, I suspect office workers, whose work is absolutely and entirely within the realm of email, text docs and spreadsheets, don't have the patience to deal with these irreularities.
Or, at worst, in a hard-driving efficiency oriented workplace minor inconveniences add up. I tend to favor CSV to xls to begin with, but this clearly adds additional steps when I utilize functions which can only be saved natively.
For myself, I'm inured to these inconveniences from web and software development and ignore the efficency costs in some office-task-contexts (txt, csv, email) because I'm already committed to working with specific workflows.
Yes I'm sure people moan about IT. They moan about Windows where I work. They probably moaned about the quality of the quills 100 years ago.
Libre office is perfectly capable for most users, and is very compatible with MS Office. It is easy for users to transition too.
I doubt any of this has anything to do with any of those points.
I am known as an Excel power user, and Excel is better at some things than calc, but not very much. Calc is better at exporting unicode CSV, which is big news for a developer.
365 starts at $99 a year, per user. That is quite a lot in my book when you have thousands of users
It's really not. Office is the single MS product that is actually better than the competition (Libre, Apple, etc) and it's also THE core business software. Most businesses might have huge ERP systems, but the war is won in the Excel trenches. If you're an organization of 1,000+ users, $100kpa is nothing.
Mostly, better at interoperating with Microsoft Office. LibreOffice works really well, but if you need perfect metric-compatibility, or macros, then it doesn't quite suffice. Likewise for Google Docs (and additionally, Google Slides lacks numerous features desirable for building good presentations).
And at $150/yr it includes Exchange/SharePoint/Skype/Teams. The latter three aren't particularly exciting but not having to worry about email/calendaring is a big win.
Could I get by with LibreOffice or OpenOffice, yeah, and did so for a couple years straight and off/on before and after that time. I use to be annoyed to no end by the bloat and heaviness of MS Office... and then after prolonged use of LibreOffice/OpenOffice (yes, both), I came to greatly appreciate MS Office. The only part of office which I use regularly which I'm not very happy with is Outlook (OK, really only use Word, Excel, and Outlook... can't comment on the other parts of the suite as it's been more than a decade since I regularly used things like Access). I'm also disappointed by the Office 365 cloud integration/features: feels very much like a philosophical approach to technology that has lots of Microsoft servers in your enterprise's data center and the outside world is kept at bay rather than collaborated with... Google does that much better... LibreOffice not at all.
The number of quirks that caused something to not be quite right or the performance differences I experienced (noticeable in spreadsheets) makes free LibreOffice look very expensive and $99/yr MS Office look cheap. Much more productive in MS Office overall. Having managed IT operations in the corporate world, same experience there: the only place I would (and did) deploy OpenOffice (LibreOffice didn't exist yet) was to the field and the field being to retail chain store personnel. In the chain in question they only wrote simple letters and used spreadsheets for simple lists, generally had very little/no computer experience, and they didn't do office suite work with any regular frequency at all. In that case, the productivity hit was drowned out by the noise of overall lack of computer literacy and they didn't do those tasks with any real frequency, so the Office licenses really didn't make for good investment... but I can tell you that I deployed MS Office to all of the HQ staff and middle managers and glad to have done so.
In the past few years, I would probably rank the desktop office suites (meaning available for use on the desktop) as MS Office, G Suite, LIbreOffice. I have Office 365, but tend not to use the online versions of the apps so won't comment on them.
Also, for those that are part of the teams of these managers and that have to collaborate with those that can gain direct advantage from the MS Office products, the MS Office/LibreOffice compatibility is simply quirky. It's not so bad if you're simply consuming the content, format isn't essential, and you're not contributing edits and such, but if format is essential or you are contributing/editing... again, the price of the license is not expensive given the productivity loss of people futzing with output due to incomplete compatibility. Finally, those in the office are more likely to already be familiar with MS operating systems and products. Even on the Mac I believe MS Office is still dominant in the office suite space. The productivity hit during training for a new UX vs. just paying the license is again, not supportive of using LibreOffice in any serious business context.
It is my opinion, so take it for what it's worth, that many will argue for the likes of LibreOffice on philosophical grounds rather than on the basis of the economics or product features/functions. And, in order to make their case, they nonetheless feel they have to rely on utilitarian arguments rather than on the merits of their root philosophical commitment. I don't think that's a useful strategy for that interest group when it's apparent that the value for money is actually there compared to the alternatives. I don't want to say that @jimnotgym is in this camp: I don't know; but I do see a similar commitment and line of reasoning from those I know to be.
Style support for documents. LibreOffice doesn't have complete style support. This is the one thing right now keeping me from even considering it.
And fact is, Excel or Word, are quit known everywhere so you don't need much of support.
So no, I don't think there's much of a need for support...
My understanding has quill usage declining more like 200 years ago.
Munich native here.
Not even the mayor's office denies that the entire public service organisation is woefully understaffed.
While I've heard disconcerting things about the quality of especially their bespoke applications, it feels like they are looking for scapegoats.
That doesn't even consider hardware variations and compatibility issues with drivers.
Driver issues are indeed significant, however. It's a lot better than it was when I first started using Linux, but printing and scanning is still a major pain point. Enterprise environments have a much easier time here than home users due to being able to constrain driver problems to a select few print/scan servers running CUPS/SANE instead of having to deal with this on a workstation-by-workstation basis, but it's still far from ideal, and very few businesses are truly "paperless".
Now, being bespoke apps, they'd probably just as horrible if they if they were Windows apps, but it just gets rolled into the Linux blame.
As if my tax money couldn't be spend on something more useful.