Another German regional government is switching from Linux to Windows
theinquirer.net
theinquirer.net
Trying to support all of the email clients, calendar tools and obscure media decoders will never lead us to an usable Linux based Desktop.
Isn't this Ubuntu?
But, Ubuntu failed them miserably. They had a hard time using because, their words - "what works one time, doesn't the next time."
When my dad closes the lid, he expects the laptop to go to sleep mode, and again open the lid to wake it, just doesn't work all time, give some kind of messages only a tech person would understand.
Their observation - "text is not sharp". I checked it on their laptop display, Windows is rather sharp and usable while Ubuntu's default font rendering is too soft and they need to squint a bit to read.
internet connectivity - There are so many issues with the default wifi setup on their laptop. Dad gets frustrated if it shows him a dialog box with information he does not understand. So, often times the laptop lies there gathering dust until I or a friend goes to their house to "fix it" - often times just reboot the damn thing.
After this struggle, they bought a Windows laptop.
The article is light on details, but I think the issue is really in interoperability. When everyone around you runs Windows, you either have to be very good at interoperating with key Windows apps (all parts of Outlook, Word, Excel, Visio, MS Project, etc), or to run Windows, too.
Part of the problem is that many of these things operate on closed data formats, and MS has little incentive to help with interoperbilty. Conversion tools can exist but they are often cumbersome, imperfect, and thus painful for regular use.
This is how an ecosystem lock-in works. BTW it's not specific to Windows; every platform makes it simpler to use this platform's tools, and, because of that, any out-of-platform tools become harder to use in comparison.
Well, technically Linux ecosystem has Open&Libre office. Many times when they show up in news feed, I download and try to use it. But, one thing thing I can always feel - awfully slow/laggy and looks like they are stuck in a decade ago and refuse to change. This makes it uncool for anybody to switch to it from MS office. Perhaps it is great for those obsessive tech users who tinker the heck out of it, but out of the box, it IS inferior in most ways. If anything incentives like these huge government implementations have the potential to start and fund a project that will develop an open & usable alternative to MS Office. One can dream.
It's probably considered anti-competitive but let's image they scrap 1 billion of their budgets and invest in opensource:
- polish Samba to be a viable Windows Server replacement. Replication, missing Kerberos functionality, Implement ADWS, ADFS - maybe Exchange APIs. Save millions on server costs.
- unfuck LibreOffice, develop a strong foundation to implement typical processes
- polish KDE / Plasma to macOS/Windows usability/stability - rewrite kmail/korganizer with modern usability/ui
Not sure if that's possible but it feels like a lot of things are 60-80% done - maybe taking a leap and fixing the other 60-80% might make a difference.
- have an EU wide service agency that supports municipalities in implementing OSS
- demand opensource software for public money.
- create strong open standards and enforce them by law for public institutions.
maybe it will take 5 to 10 years but everyone should profit.
I have a small deployment of Linux machines running GNOME and the typical office suite applications, including LibreOffice. I'm using NixOS to ensure everything runs extremely controlled versions of software. It's rock solid.
Furthermore, the users are really technologically illiterate. And they like the UI. They have no issues.
I think the big problem is usually that people expect a perfect replacement for MS Office. They try to open DOC (not DOCX files) in LibreOffice. And it's not perfect. It can't be perfect, as it's playing a very hard catch up game on ill-defined file formats.
Nobody owes it to LibreOffice to use it when a superior alternative exists. DOC support is minutiae - there are certainly people who do use it, but intentionally switching away from the default (DOCX) while Office moans at you about reduced functionality seems like a huge degree of dedication to a file format. Two huge reasons why LibreOffice is currently not good enough for me:
* The UI is functional and tolerable. It's not pleasant to stare at all day. Menus, toolbars and floating windows are fine if you hail from the 90s. Mozilla are a shining example to other OSS projects of what users expect in 2018[1]. Make it work, make it right, make it fast. OSS needs to learn that there is another step: make it beautiful. And they like the UI. Do they love it?
* Advanced integration with Dropbox or what-have-you. Microsoft has Sharepoint. So far as I know, Office is the only thick-client suite to offer collaborative editing on top of file sharing. When you have dozens of users collaborating on a project this stuff is incredibly important. Email is not scalable - your users shouldn't be opening a DOC from an attachment in the first place.
There are 13000 reasons why Lower Saxony is switching away from OSS. Dismissing what the competition offers is dismissing those 13000 reasons and means that a project will never address those reasons.
Good enough is not good enough.
Public money should be spent on making FOSS better rather than making private companies richer thereby helping them kill FOSS.
Also, I have not had trouble opening OOXML files (.docx, .xlsx) in LibreOffice.
The main problem with LibreOffice, from my point of view, is that there are many third-party applications that expect MS Office to be installed or use it exclusively for data import/export. For example, Autodesk Inventor can create a bi-directional link to Excel and export the list of parts of a model to Excel; ePlan, too. Our PDM system comes with an Outlook plugin that allows users to upload emails. Our ERP system can export stuff to Excel, but not to LibreOffice. The list goes on and on. For a large number of use cases, LibreOffice is perfectly cromulent as it is. But as long as all those third-party application rely on MS Office, it will remain dominant, regardless of the price or technical merits.
GUI work in general is a lot of work.
Who gets to decide if it's better to use LibreOffice or OpenOffice? What are the features that are the most important for the office replacement? How is it going to be supported? Is there a line where people can call to complain about the product? Taking all that OSS and packaging it sounds a lot like running a company, especially when multiple "consumers" are involved.
How to organize this in such a way that it will be successfull and efficient? Let's start researching it now.
It's such a shame how European universities and every other part of the state is switching to Microsoft because the on-premise alternatives mostly suck.
Technically, it uses the latest Qt and CPP world have to offer + QML Declarative UI's and is among the last projects pushing for a community based mobile operating system, designing a touch-based mobile-specific UI.
The only difference is that the desktop metaphor is not being manipulated to become a one-fits-for-all solution.
Instead, a whole new interface is being created for mobiles.
Why not government? FOSS is for free public use like any other public infrastructure. It benefits all so it seems proper for government to fund it.
EDIT: If anyone wants to downvote because they disagree (not that I think that's proper use of the downvote), please at least state your opinion. I want to know.
I have come to realize that capitalism is a narrow-minded approach towards progress. It does not work in the long run.
Capitalism and democracy are incompatible.
If one is looking for a managed solution with heavyweight apps including an office suite, email / calendar, etc., then anything other than Windows is going to be unsatisfactory to people who expect Windows. I even include macOS with Linux in that assessment. Let's call this model of centralized control of fat clients the culmination of the 1990s enterprise desktop.
On the other hand, if a company has gone down the road of Google / web apps for everything, then Linux starts to be a very effective bootloader for a web browser.
Personally, I like the fat-client model of the 1990s, and feel that Linux best satisfies my desires. But it's hard to deny the comprehensiveness of Windows & Active Directory for those enterprises that also want to stick to this model.
The web-only model feels a little too lean to me. In any enterprise, there are bound to be instances where web apps aren't going to cut it.
This is where I have hopes for Chrome OS once it begins to support native Linux apps. At that point, it's not a thin client, and it's not a fat client. I wonder then if we may see some of these enterprises walk back from Windows.
As a paying FastMail customer, I'm right there with you on Google's privacy posture. But given the number of corporate G-Suite customers, I don't think principled rejection of Google over privacy concerns is the major impediment to Chrome OS adoption.
There is also not a single email client that integrates resource management as well as outlook good luck linking Thunderbird to your conferencing and meeting room management systems.
This is an argument I've never understood. Why do you want your calendaring mashed together with your mail? I much prefer the macOS model, where mail, calendar and contacts are separate applications. Nothing prevents them to use the same data store, but not having to switch them in modal mode is a big win.
The latter is especially important when you have different conferencing / dial in systems in different regions that all need to be reserved and tied to the same meeting request.
This isn't about having different apps that model has no advantage or a disadvantage the ability to see the presence of people and resources across the entire organization is the big important feature that is not available on other platforms at all or without a momentous amount of work.
For some reason I thought that you where still talking about German provincial government. Which was extremely funny for me to imagine since those guys are not even allowed to speak English in official capacity.
It's not possible anymore because Asian food and chopsticks are a decent and cheaper alternative.
Also not allowed to pack lunch. Also you get penalized for not being able to eat fast enough to meet your targets. Also you have to eat that food 8 hours a day, every day, for as long as you stick around. Well... imperfect analogy but I hope the point is clear. :)
So it's not just the fact that enterprise support for Linux solutions is flaky at best, that the tools themselves are many times nowhere near as powerful as they need to be, or that there is no coordinated strategy to push Linux in the enterprise where it should be going because the promoters never seem to be interested in having the "end-user" tell them what they want and how they want it. Sometimes it can be a lot simpler: the users don't want it. They don't feel comfortable with it so they won't do a good job with it.
This is one of the most common things IT departments all over the world get wrong: instead of enabling their users to do their job better they try to just dictate how to do it with solutions picked in a vacuum.
Just pick the right tool for the job and make sure you have the people using the tool to confirm it's right and you're good.
So your job would be finding those of the few type Y folks and work with them. Even if they are enthusiasts, they still might not see the forest for the trees. Also, that doesn't necessarily mean, that their info you will get you near your objective; you will still have to satisfy many more people, who will not use it, but have their own ideas how it should look and behave, even if it will make life harder to those using it (see also: exactly which programmer wanted open space office?).
There is no perfect answer for these problems.
IT taking decisions in a vacuum without implicating the people who know the business is how you end up spending millions to implement some solution only to see how things get even slower and people spend more time avoiding it, adapting it to their needs, complaining about it, than doing actual work.
Good IT is based on a set of principles that tend to be more stable, not on a set of tools that can change from one day to the next. And when you overlay the needs of your business over those principles you'll come up with the best tool to use. Putting the tools first means you're doing it wrong.
So if it's an accounting firm you might want to talk to some accountants or to someone who really understands their work and their needs before deciding that "EZ Spreadsheets" is the way to go because it's free, or because it's open source (and you love open source), or you worked with it in the past and liked it.
Just because they are separate application does not mean, that they do not operate on the same data. However I appreciate when I can use the full-blown GUI to look at calendars in another window, even when I'm in the middle of composing an email. The modal switcher in Outlook was one the worst thing I've experienced in productivity software.
I’ve noticed that a lot of Linux users equate “free” (as in price) with “better”, and this isn’t necessarily so.
As a programmer my company shelves out a few hundred dollar per year so I can use a high quality IDE. In the end this saves time and money.
If I would be a business analyst or PO I would expect the company I work for to shelve out a few hundred dollar per year for the apps I need in my day to day work. In that case it would be MS Office (and Windows).
(MS Windows Enterprise edition is only $90 per year, Office $360, that's a lot less expensive than my developer tools).
Good tools save money, and currently I can't think of anything that surpasses MS Excel, MS Word, or MS PowerPoint
Just in scientific consulting alone, for example, frequently the codebase is best manipulated in Linux, but documentation (reports, analysis) must be done in Windows, as there's a back and forth with the client who is frequently using Windows. Wine is unreliable, and often the only real options are either dual-boot or VM.
Don't take each solution in a vacuum. Consider that you have to use one and put them head to head. Unless you're a very flexible company or with some very very niche requirements the MS solution will win every time.
People usually understand "Linux (open source) is no good" instead of the real conclusion: today it's not the best for everything so why assume it should be everywhere?
But then I suppose that editing a hundred page call to bids document in a browser tab does not really work well.
It wouldn't surprise me if they made the switch appealing by this sort of shenanigan, but client CALs are pretty much free already at volume. It's the server licenses where they kill you ... but with Azure flexibility as an option, not to mention O365, it's super-easy to see how MS makes lock-in look very, very appealing.
source: use to own the MS EA at an F200 company that tried to extract Office in favor of Google Drive + LibreOffice, and Windows Server + SQL Server for CentOS + PostgreSQL.
I think the main reasons are that big industrial printers are likely to support standards like IPP and Postscript. Also, Apple uses CUPS just the same as Linux. Some cheap home printers require proprietary binary drivers, but many printers are supported by CUPS with some minimal config definitions.
The work flows were slow and had too many unnecessary clicks.
If MS was offering them "cheap N years contract," than it is already decided that they will jack up prices the second their contract expires.
Unlikely. Yes, this is a political decision as most actual users of the systems were ok with the linux client. However, the article is a bit misleading. They are bringing the systems used by a subdepartment of the states department of finance in line with the stack used within the remainder of the department (about 1/3 were linux clients, the state already owns over 50.000 other windows clients (lower estimate, most likely more if you include organization which manage their own infrastructure (like universities)), they know what to expect from microsoft). While the systems worked it always required special attention when interoperating with other states (for example: certain informationrequests by other states are standardized between all states (based on a shared windows solution). Lower saxonian employees could not interact with it directly and had to rely on their inhouse solution instead of reusing the existing and proven solution used by all other states). There are notable costs associated to beeing a special flower while maintining conformance to financial regulations.
Yes, I believe that biting the bullet and migrating more departments to open systems would be the better longterm solution (which would also force vendors to port their solutions). But there will be several elections before that pays off and would require a significant investment before the benefits show (and possible coordination between the states) and in the midterm moving to Windows might be the better option. Moving to linux doesn't win an election, but failing to move to linux might loose you one.
However, even after the move about 1/4 to 1/3 of the computers/servers owned by the state will run linux/bsd (iirc).
So my takeaway is that someone at the top was pissed off that he had to use an e-mail client other than Outlook and made a multi-million dollar infrastructure decision based on that.
Nah, decisions like this are usually greased much better than just by the good feeling of using Outlook again.
When you tell a CEO/CFO/CIO that you can bundle OS, updates, productivity tools, communication/colab tools all in to one monthly bill they almost always take the MS route. The predictability of the financing is the key thing helping MS kill it in enterprise.
It also helps that 90% of their staff have never known anything else and will need very little training.
That's the worst assuption ever. Not because everyone uses tool X, everyone understands how to make it work properly. Did you ever try to move a picture from a document you got from M. Johnson? You'll get a headache because moving that one picture will fuck up your title formatting in page 13 and the table in page 2.
Everyone using MS Office I met could use a good week-long training session about do's and don't's, how to write proper documents, presentations that don't suck, etc.