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Comment by CalRobert | Hacker News Reader

My 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.

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Don'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_1325...

Similar moves been done in various agencies and entities in France and Germany as well.

Another article about migration to linux after 2019 https://computerhoy.com/noticias/software/barcelona-cambiara... and a Gemini sumup https://g.co/gemini/share/74fe50828fa1

I think most of the french gendarmerie has been using openoffice then libreoffice + thunderbird for 2 decades already. Initially on windows that have progressively replaced with linux over the years.

I've read 4 years ago that out of 85k desktop computers, only 8% where running windows 10, the rest was running ubuntu LTS.

I would say that being a branch of the french army, migration was easier.

It's an outlier in Germany as well. The municipal government in Munich tried to migrate to OSS around ~2004, but had to roll back after a couple of years. Most municipalities and government agencies would _like_ to utilize more OSS, but don't really have any concrete idea of how to proceed.

This was probably completely, utterly unrelated to the migration of the german Microsoft HQ to Munich at that time and there was no corruption involved at all.

Indeed. Microsoft is extremely aggressive in such situations. I used to contract for this big corp here in Belgium that was on track to replace office and windows with Linux and LibreOffice. A few months later, they got a new VP of something, previously working for MS… fast forward to the next all hands meeting announcing the return to Teams and O365.

This is definitely new for me as a dutch person, would you care to say which company? Seems like a cool company

Sure, https://svi.nl. They do pretty interesting work!

Do you know, if that company offers remote jobs for developers? And what company is that?

All in-office I'm afraid.

>>> her office uses Ubuntu and LibreOffice

>> remote jobs for developers?

> All in-office I'm afraid.

The irony of using LibreOffice.

Why? What's ironic about this?

I am guessing GP means:

Libre -> Free -> Freedom to choose -> Freedom to choose your office.

If 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.

Normal no but it's in the 2-3% range so not completely unthinkable and usually supported well enough by the core organisations that an company must interact with to be entirely feasible.

If you don't mind me asking, what type of job is it?

She's not a developer but the company makes software used to process microscopy images - Huygens Deconvolution, I think is the term.

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