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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

Whats worse is they could all pull it off if they invest in existing Distros and hire people to build out the main infrastructure they need. If they rely on legacy Windowd OS' the licenses for new OS' wont matter. They need secure systems to avoid being hacked by external malicious state actors.

I would love to see some countries adopting Linux for government systems and funding research and development e.g. maybe fund Libre Office or the KDE one more and then build out other tools to be cross platform.

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"... and hire people to build out the main infrastructure they need."

There's a reason Microsoft was successful for years: they built turn-key solutions, and added new turn-key features their customers requested.

Switching from that sort of IT to a linux-based, 'we need a system architect' model doesn't happen overnight. There's organization shift, cultural shift, firing unneeded people who won't retrain, retraining people who are worth it, and hiring talent to fill gaps.

Not to mention that talent's more expensive and less easily certified (e.g. all the official MS rubber stamp programs).

Not impossible, but it's a LOT of work. With dubious chances of success.

Basically Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). This is something people forget about. OS and app licenses are likely a drop in the ocean compared to the operating costs of supporting your infrastructure (regardless of whether it runs on Windows or Linux).

[edit: TOC -> TCO]

TCO was also a big part of the marketing campaign of Microsoft against Linux in the late 90ies, early 00s.

A big difference compared to one or two decades ago is that a lot of domain-specific services have moved to web applications. So, there are probably a lot of machines out there that are just glorified web browsing machines.

Also, the popularity of iOS and Android have made more applications cross-platform.

Of course, once Office documents or legacy Win32 applications are part of the equation, you can't really beat Windows. It is a common misconception that LibreOffice could replace Office. I use a Linux desktop and a MacBook and most of the Word/Excel paperwork that I have to do (luckily irregularly) does not open correctly in LibreOffice. Of course, it is an uphill battle for the LO folks.

I’ve switched to libreoffice from excel and find it totally viable as an excel replacement except for lack of vba support, but it has its own scripting language so even that isn’t a deal breaker. It’s just so much faster and less bloated than today’s excel.

For most users, "replacement" mean it can open and edit Microsoft's documents perfectly. For some users, it even means the GUI is just about the same so they don't feel lost.

By that criteria (which are real criteria from real people), the only viable replacement for Microsoft Office, is the next version of Microsoft Office.

The only way to break out of this, I think, is for governments to forbid themselves to use proprietary software that was not developed on their own soil. Because let's face it, it's not really about money (especially not about short term money). It's more about national security, sovereignty, and freedom.

And for why that's important: business teams who generate business-critical Excel sheets never got the memo about good ideas from the software development lifecycle. And have been cobbling together undocumented tools to get work done for decades.

Dealing with this at work now.

And it's not like they're disinterested or incapable of learning, literally no one thought "Gee, what those folks are doing looks a lot like code."

The biggest boost to interop would be requiring software vendors to release spec sheets for necessary software components and file formats... if they want government work. No more "It's too hard" or "We can't." You want the job, those are the rules.

> business teams who generate business-critical Excel sheets never got the memo about good ideas from the software development lifecycle. And have been cobbling together undocumented tools to get work done for decades.

So, business teams invented the all-too-common version of agile development even before “real” software developers, without the disadvantage of ignorance of the body of knowledge around the SDLC, got around to it.

The Excel file format has been a publicly released open standard for years.

There's a document that ostensibly describes the format, but I'm not aware of a free software reference implementation. Their format may be open in theory, but in practice Microsoft still takes advantage of vendor lock in.

> By that criteria (which are real criteria from real people), the only viable replacement for Microsoft Office, is the next version of Microsoft Office.

By that criteria, the only viable replacement for Microsoft Office is the _same_ version of Microsoft Office.

The delta between two Microsoft Office versions has often been larger than between a Microsoft Office version and a LibreOffice version...

But the two MS Office versions both have a Microsoft logo on them. People will grumble, but get used to the new version, whereas if you give them something with a different logo, they will scream bloody murder and demand that you get rid of that weird program and give them back their Office programs.

This kind of condescension is why people hate tech people. Is it any wonder they don't want to use Linux with sentiments like this being so common?

EDIT:

Perceived change generates just as much stress and associated opposition as actual change. You've just enabled me to make that explicit for myself. I feel stupid that took me so many years. Thank you for that.

Writing this out somewhat softens my frustration with people refusing to use anything but the blue e or similar intellectual laziness.

Have seen this exact problem get fixed by using the little blue E icon for Firefox.

Walk a mile in our shoes. You understand truths about your job we may not.

Where in my comment did you see any opinion being expressed? I merely described something that I encountered many, many times. You do not have to believe me, that is up to you.

Not everything is an adversarial thing about two opposing groups of people.

Condescension does not change the fact that that’s an accurate description of the behaviour of some people, any more than it would change a left wing sneer at right wingers who think climate change isn’t a big deal, or a right wing sneer at left wingers who think evolution in humans stopped at the neck.

Well, newer MS Office versions are still 100% file-compatible with older versions.

(With compatibility packages)

> For most users, "replacement" mean it can open and edit Microsoft's documents perfectly. For some users, it even means the GUI is just about the same so they don't feel lost.

Citation needed.

The company I work for switched wholesale away from Microsoft. Management moved first and the rest of us shortly afterwards. Haven't heard any complaints.

And the companies I worked with repeatedly stated that they couldn't possibly switch away because their clients (often the government itself) was using a particular version of MS Office. This often meant we had to use several versions of MS Office, depending on who we were interacting with.

The company you work for is one of the enlightened few. Or maybe it's a tech company with an enlightened management?

> The company you work for is one of the enlightened few. Or maybe it's a tech company with an enlightened management?

It is. We are a tech/consulting company, but management is management and we also have a good number of employees older than me (and I think that is great :-)

> For most users, "replacement" mean it can open and edit Microsoft's documents perfectly.

For that use case, there's always SoftMaker Office[1].

1 - https://www.softmaker.com/en/softmaker-office

Sorry, I was implying free software only. The "free trial" I see on the front page looks proprietary.

Yeah, it is, unfortunately. But the question then becomes, is it better for them to use GNU software and Linux, with maybe one or two closed-source apps, which they could migrate from over time, or use Windows and everything proprietary, even if the only use case LO doesn't cover is opening MS Office files 'perfectly' (yet)?

Unluckily in my case Libreoffice Calc (using it privately) is a lot slower when using formulas than MS Excel (using it for work).

Linux workstations, Office 365 -- skip LibreOffice.

In my experience O365 office web applications are no competition even for Libre/OpenOffice. Has that changed lately?

Try OnlyOffice. Works a lot better re compatibility with office files IMHO.

TOC seems to conveniently leave out risk as a factor too. At least at the sales level. And yet the amount of failed systems migrations I've seen...

If I have a 50% chance to cut my IT budget by 15%, if I remake my org, is it worth it?

I've seen some spectacular cockups over the years and eye watering sums of money burned because no-one factored in risk properly. And they more often than not happen on government projects, and usually some big name consultancy is heavily involved - Capita, PwC et-al.

Having worked the consultant gig for a bit, we never talked about risk.

Honestly, because most customers sponsoring projects were morons. If you told them there was a 25% chance of failure, they'd go with someone else who claimed a 0% chance of failure.

I finally decided most of this was just sponsors covering their ass. If they initiated a project with risk and it failed, that reflected on them. If they initiated a project and the consultants claimed (winkwinknudgenudge) there's no risk, then if it failed those lying consultants were the only ones to blame.

Or just not the right expertise to launch and manage such a contract. Sadly really difficult for government to hire the right expertise - either hiring procedures are too complicated (equitable!) or slow (thorough!) or not interested (salaries not competitive as citizens would be outraged about gov paying high salaries for high expertise).

This is pretty much the reason consultants exist. They are the employee's risk insurance.

Not to mention it's a LOT of work that needs to be coordinated by someone with the vision and skill to make it happen. People like that are not exactly common in the public administration of any country.

Mostly because government and small-scale enterprise balk at the salaries they command.

Income inequality is a concern, and some people are certainly overpaid. But at the C* or technical architect level, the cost of pinching pennies is dominated by the cost of choosing a wrong direction (or not recognizing a changing situation and correcting quickly enough).

Public sector salaries are simply set a certain way - through a political process, covering all employees. There is little leeway to give higher/lower salaries to a few as that smells like cronyism. You can't negotiate a gov salary, except for externals.

Yeah finding talent and making good choices way outside what your traditional IT competency is pretty risky.

The French police uses a custom distro based on Ubuntu 16.04: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu

Why are they using a custom distro? Is it just different graphics or do they have changes significant enough that a customised Ubuntu installer wouldn't suffice?

They have some customized parts.

For example, IIRC, they use a smart card to authenticate on their workstations, and also on their web applications. For that you need to customize a bit (better out of the box support for pkcs11 devices, integrate the Certificate Authorities needed, drivers).

There are a few contributions to open source projects:

A few years back, they were contributing to a fork of Thunderbird called Trustedbird for example.

There are also a few individual contributors inside the Gendarmerie, for example Xavier Guimard creator and one of the current developers of LemonLdap (SSO portal).

Also just as a side note, this distribution is used by the Gendarmerie, which is not exactly the national Police. In France you have both a Police Nationale and the Gendarmerie National. The Gendarmerie is military personel (the Police is civilian). I'm guessing national sovereignty plays a small role in that (VS using MS Windows, which is completely controlled by a US company, bounded to the US government).

When you run Windows you can use GPO to override loads and loads of behaviours, and WSUS to customise which updates get picked up by the computers.

When you run Linux you do it by creating custom packages and changing the package manager to point to a different server, at which point you have created a "custom distro".

what's the difference between a custom distro and a customized installer?

Likely it's simply Ubuntu + some custom repos + different graphics (because why not).

Funnily enough North Korea runs their own Linux distro, Red Star OS

It's not funny at all, IMO, it adds a unique identifier to each file created on the OS for tracking dissidents.

Technically interesting, though.

For anybody interested in a more detailed look on Red Star OS, check out this CCC talk [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/8LGDM9exlZw

My fiancee who is from South Korea thinks very highly of the North Korean engineers' skills. Even under hunger and adverse conditions, they can produce their own Linux distribution and nuclear weapons program.

> Whats worse is they could all pull it off if they invest in existing Distros and hire people to build out the main infrastructure they need

I don't know about that, I've seen what kinds of systems the existing distros build and I'm not impressed. Which isn't to say that Microsoft would definitely better, seeing as they are doing their best to become a Linux distro themselves while embracing all the bad behaviors that entails, but your statement certainly isn't a given.

> while embracing all the bad behaviors that entails

What do you mean by this?

Increasing user hostility (see: forced updates "for your own good"), poorer quality software released more often, no QA, ridiculously convoluted dependency management...

What distro are you using that has these issues? My Debian server has been running solidly for years without crashing or (automatically) updating. I've also never had any problems with QA or package management; everything installed with the system package manager has always run, installed, and updated smoothly. I'm not a linux expert, but what you described are all issues I associate exclusively with Windows and, to a lesser extent, recent MacOS, both of which I also use frequently.

A server is generally a single purpose device, and the server stuff in Linux is pretty mature because people make money off of it.

Run Linux on a Desktop and it's a whole different story. Shit breaks all the time, the package dependency spaghetti is insane, no one seems to test anything (or they don't listen to the people who do), etc.

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