German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice | Hacker News Reader

German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice

zdnet.com

508 pointsCrankyBear323 comments

I can remember the same or very similar news from Germany appearing every now and then for over a decade.

This time I almost believe them as there seems to be no alternative to LibreOffice given the changes Microsoft introduced during the recent years - forcing everyone to log-in with their Microsoft account at best, also moving from a classic desktop app to a web app. Conservative users like me and probably German state institutions consider classic desktop apps and web apps distinct tools for different tasks and don't want their desktop to depend on cloud.

It is also worth mentioning that LibreOffice became much better since the time the discussion began.

The Office Apps still have desktop versions and they still work very well.

It will be interesting to see how long that remains true.

Management of resources is the enemy of profit for both sides in the market. Businesses lose out on money by spending time that they would be using on their core competency for managing software licenses, versions, data backups, servers, etc. And of course cloud providers lose out on you giving them more money than their cloud services cost them to deliver.

Azure now makes up the largest percentage of Microsoft's revenues. Obviously the business model scales very well. It likely scales better than Office does. Eventually the less-profitable thing starts taking up internal development resources that could be going to more profitable divisions, and that gets someone mad.

> I can remember the same or very similar news from Germany appearing every now and then for over a decade.

Yup I can remember (mainly via Slashdot) this being a thing going backwards and forwards for two decade or more. Back to the days of it being called StarOffice if I remember correctly.

Sometimes it seemed the city or state was just doing some elaborate license negotiation.

I remember using the original StarOffice to write up some consulting work that I’d done, it just have been the early 00s at the time, and I thought it was excellent - a worthy competitor to MS office of the time.

And then over time it felt more and more bloated and slow, to the point where I started to think I maybe misremembered how good it was when I’d first used it.

Is it just me? Or did it fall deeply into a hole? My recollection is that it hitched its wagon to Java for no good reason that I could see.

Not just you. What happens to all software is this feature expansion, until it's as bloated as it's predecessor.

You have allowed the Dark Lord to twist your mind until you've become the very thing you swore to destroy!

Hell, I remember a time when Jira was responsive and people loved it.

It was always pretty laggy. It didn’t and still doesn’t scale to any reasonable size document. The last thing I wrote in libreoffice was a technical specification around 200 pages long in 2019. It crashed regularly, wrecked the document and caused me a lot of work. I literally cut and pasted the entire thing into word, applied styles and cleaned it up over two days and had no problems with that. This made me dirty so I learned LaTeX and now use that.

I have colleagues who still use Libreoffice for study and have the same problems.

By 2019 it was way gone. But in 2004 I reckon it was pretty good and not laggy at all on Linux. Or that’s what I remember.

I've assembled and done editing passes (back and forth to an editor, using comments heavily) on two 200+ page novels in LibreOffice with none of those problems, so it sounds like something in your doc must have hit some specific edge cases/bugs.

Not doubting you - I find it clunky and fully believe there's bugs there too. I did most of my writing in Google Docs, but chapter by chapter both because I find it easier to keep individual chapters separate and because Google Docs certainly can't (or couldn't, anyway) handle anything approaching that size without slowing to a crawl, but it just felt better than LinreOffice for the actual writing.

Mathematics and image embeds killed it.

> This made me dirty so I learned LaTeX

Yup. Intermediary markup languages are king when you need to decouple editing from presentation.

I personally find the extended versions of markdown (and CSS) a lot easier to format but that's what 25 years of HTML does to someone.

Probably because it’s misrepresented every single time. The headline is “Germany is moving to X” and then you click the link and it turns out it’s a single state.

This is the equivalent of “South Dakota is ditching Microsoft”. It’s 30k users which isn’t nothing, but it is VERY different from the German federal government moving away from MS.

You don’t have to log in with O365 and office and windows can stand entirely alone and there is no requirement to be cloud connected. It all still works offline as a classic AD setup. You have to be an enterprise customer though. I literally have one of these on my desk. This is not a problem for state level organisations unless they are throughly incompetent at infrastructure provision.

As for libreoffice I throughly dislike it compared to MS software. I have opened reproducible bugs against it in bugzilla that have been there for over a decade with no solutions. I got fed up in the end and just walked.

Saying that I dislike office packages entirely. They are a Swiss Army knife. Lots of mediocre tools in an inconvenient format but simple enough for the lowest denominator of poorly trained staff to use. We can and should do better. I managed to switch entirely over to LaTeX document authoring and dedicated software to replace spreadsheets (all open source tools). The only remaining spreadsheet I have is personal finance which I can’t find a better solution for.

As for cloud we just send PDFs around and collab on GitHub so O365 is dead for us anyway.

A lot of the office stuff can be handled by templates that allow only editing relevant parts - there's not really a need for majority of office workers to have access (and needing to know) all the features of an Office suite.

Over two decades ago I was tasked doing a pilot with IBMs Document Connect for Lotus Notes - it was clear that it pretty much was an Alpha they've been selling us, but it was showing promise. In the end it went nowhere, probably because not too many other companies were interested in trying out a different approach at handling their documents.

> I managed to switch entirely over to LaTeX document authoring

I tried and found it the weirdest language (BrainFuck aside) I ever seen. Sure you can copy-paste-modify it to do something similar to what everyone does but doing anything atypical seems prohibitively hard.

I really miss a modern (first-class Unicode to begin with, also more intuitive while more rich and less verbose than HTML+CSS) human-oriented typesetting language. Perhaps it's time to invent what MarkDown is to HTML but to SVG.

> As for cloud we just send PDFs around

Can MS Office make hybrid PDFs the way LibreOffice does (embed the source document into the PDF)?

Well it all makes a lot of sense but you have to understand it first. That takes time. I’m typesetting stuff which has complex mathematics in it so there are no better solutions. This is the best human solution we have.

There are some workflows that you can’t do with anything else as well. For example I am doing a lot of semi hand drawn diagrams on my iPad in Goodnotes. These are exported as vector PDFs and trimmed and included in the LaTeX documents as figures. They are fully vector end to end which is a complete pain in the ass on any other package.

As for hybrid PDFs I don’t know. I am mostly interested in not shopping the source document.

https://github.com/typst/typst looks promising, both the language and the tooling. I wonder where it will find its place in a world that is dominated by either Word or LaTex.

LiMux (Linux for Munich) was started in 2004: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

Of course, Microsoft did some of their... persuation of politicians and initially killed the project in 2017, but it seems that since 2020 it's back. I do think that LibreOffice could need some more full-time User Interface people to polish some rough edges (please none of the hackjob wanna-be UX people that ruin all modern apps by obnoxious popups), so that could be a good use of some tax money.

You just copy office 97 and can't go wrong with it. The problem with having UX people on a team is that they need to jusity their existence which they do by change for changes sake. I've yet to meet anyone who appreciates ms office UX changes that happen every 5 years and move everything around.

> You just copy office 97 and can't go wrong with it.

Clippy had its debut in Office 97, so let's please NOT copy that one. Other than that, yeah, I agree. Anything up to and including Office 2003 really, those were all great. (Also includes one of my favorite, underrated Office Apps, InfoPath)

> The problem with having UX people on a team is that they need to jusity their existence which they do by change for changes sake.

This can be said just about any profession working in software. The real issue is that nobody wants to accept that software can be finished especially management - because then you don’t have anything to sell.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there were designers who fought tooth and nail against arbitrary changes. Surprise surprise good UX designers understand UX. But its like the developer who fights for keeping the PHP website because it works.

Sorry i just dont like treatment non-programming workers as something lesser. So many software companies are sucessfull despite having fucked up technology (by programmers). And its sucessful only because they have great design or marketing or sales team.

Software always has bugs that need to be fixed. It is never finished because it has an infinite number of ways it can go wrong. The same is not true for any of the non-software parts of software design.

If you're a software shop you should have everyone who doesn't write code on a contract and not be afraid to terminate them when the product is mature.

> should have everyone who doesn't write code on a contract

Does that include tech support? What a horrible world you are creating...

A software can only ever be mature for a period of time. Technology advances, work practices change, and your software should adapt to it. Imagine text editing stopped at Notepad, or image editing at Photoshop 1.

Also, your second paragraph leaks of Americanism and undoubtedly, people are happier and healthier with stable jobs.

And consumers are better off when we don't keep the candle stick maker employed in the led factory.

Not only does that metaphor not hold up (is UX obsolete in your opinion?), it's absolutely false.

This is software after all - surely you're aware how throwing out the old solution and trying to build a "better" one results in a long slog of making the same mistakes the old team/product made and fixed (but could have warned you about if they were kept around).

This is so rich and self-serving it’s hilarious . People that “write code” are just as susceptible to making busywork for themselves.

There is a financial incentive for software to not be finished and users would probably complain that the software has not improved enough.

With that said, when you look at Word today compared to 20 years ago the functionality really isn't much different. The main changes are the UX.

I fully agreee. It's similar to older versions of Visual Studio.

On the other hand, I'm annoyed by the omnipresent File, Edit, View, ... stuff in the menu bar. Even if those functions make no sense for a given application. And then I have to open several brittle layers there to reach a certain function.

I think UI research can do better. And by that I don't mean stashing everything into a hamburger menu.

Research such as.....

* Looking at the context of what the user is doing and dynamically showing options

* Using those dynamic interactions to surface lesser-known but relevant features that were previously hidden deep in menus along with hundreds of other features

* Adding a search bar for the user to explain what they're doing or find something they know the name of

....oh, wait, you just invented the Ribbon.

There are two kind of issue:

- the first is that the office paradigm suck, no matter the specific implementation. We need to teach people about good desktop computer usage paradigms, like "hey, learn LaTeX, maybe ConTeXt not a WYSIWYG tool", "hey learn R, or Python not a spreadsheet", and that's sound nearly impossible even if (I've tried) it's not on NEW/computer virgin users;

- the second is "the rest of the world", a Public Administration must deal with Citizens, let's say in EU we have started to roll out ID card as smart-card usable also for on-line authentication BUT most users do not have a reader, so many have invented crappy solution to use a smartphone NFC support to read them while authenticate on a desktop. The result is a good idea, having a smart card to identify users, a thing we should have spread since at least 20+ years in the past, turned into a mess. Similarly we have "certified mails" where a third party certify message delivery like a postal mail delivery, but again they are implemented in messy ways and nothing is really uniform across EU states.

These are the biggest obstacles not the software per se.

Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office.

I was helping an elderly relative who works as a translator and hasn’t touched a modern version of word in about 5 years.

They had a new computer and I got an ms office sub for them.

The poor person re-did about 4 hours of their work 3x because they couldn’t find the file MS Word had guaranteed them it had saved, so they had to start from scratch.

It did save it. In their fucking cloud and made it so opaque that the user couldn’t possibly understand wtf was happening. It took me, a tech professional a good 5 minutes to snap out of the dark pattern and realise what was going on.

Don't the most recent documents appear on the welcome screen when you open MS Word?

They do, and right below the file names is its path. However, the elderly relative had never opened the file on the new computer/Office install, and likely never had any idea where they'd originally saved the file.

> Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office.

My mom had to buy a copy of MS Office. Her university provided free ms office online, but there were certain features missing from it she needed for her papers. I am remembering wrong, but it was annotations? Citations? I do not remember.

Libreoffice kinda could do it, but I could not find how online, while MS had it properly documented on their website and so many youtubers making videos on MS Office had it listed on their website.

Edit: also found out MS Office can screen record and record her webcam. Very useful for her giving a remote presentation during covid.

Annotations, citations, bibliography management I can understand, even if I use LaTeX for that and consider it a far superior tool.

But video recording and streaming? Why would anyone prefer to use MS Office for that when OBS exists?

Is it as obnoxious as having to use Teams for chat?

That's certainly a case of having a hammer and thinking all problems are nails xD

> But video recording and streaming? Why would anyone prefer to use MS Office for that when OBS exists?

OBS is very powerful, but the complexity of its UI can scare non-technical newbies away. MS Office gives you a lot less power, but is much more welcoming when you aren’t technical and this is the first time in your life you’ve ever done it

> But video recording and streaming? Why would anyone prefer to use MS Office for that when OBS exists?

OBS was a lot more complicated. Yes, professional streaming you should use it.

She was doing a ph.d in social sciences. She had little desire, or really need, to use it when MS Office did what she wanted out of the box. Screen recorded presentations with powerpoint.

> Is it as obnoxious as having to use Teams for chat?

They did not use teams for chat. They used gsuite for almost everything else.

> That's certainly a case of having a hammer and thinking all problems are nails xD

No, it really is not.

> Annotations, citations, bibliography management I can understand, even if I use LaTeX for that and consider it a far superior tool.

Really? My mother was struggling to remember how to use a Windows desktop. You really want to suggest learning latex when she had term papers to do for a $60k degree? The required document format was ms word.

> why, in a world of Google docs

The answer is in the first sentence of the article: data sovereignty.

Most governments don't want to store their data with a foreign corporation.

Writing/editing offline, complex formatting, familiarity.

I'm not an Excel jockey but friends who are testify to its power and flexibility.

I use Word a lot and the ease of use still beats gdoc's. For example, the macros and the "customize keyboard" options are great. cmd-l for "next edit," cmd-j for "accept and move on," cmd-; for "reject change." The speed is paramount.

Word and Excel, like Photoshop, are dominant because of their maturity as well as the muscle memory of their users.

People were pissed 18 years ago when the Office ribbon was implemented because it broke their workflow. MS might have gussied it up now, but they haven’t dared to reinvent it since.

I honestly still hate office ribbon.

Same here - there are 1000 options, across 15 tabs, and I have to look through all the icons and labels till I find the one, with active tab and even displayed options changing depending on content selection.... It's a constant battle if you don't spend hours a day in MS apps and develop muscle memory.

I do realize that there are probably no ideal UIs for accessing such a breadth of options, and it was a valid attempt, but not really successful, imo. With some adjustment and practice by users, I believe something like Alfred within the app, with smart search and suggestions, would be a quicker and more efficient approach for tool activation. Since there has to be also a good way to discover features without explicitly searching for them, maybe something like the Start menu is the right approach - quick search, but also categories and lists of tools.

> maybe something like the Start menu is the right approach - quick search, but also categories and lists of tools.

Sounds like Google Docs.

I already use the search function in Office to find everything I need. Is that what you had in mind or was it something different?

The search bar is excellent and being keyboard driven fast too.

The ribbon is also entirely keyboard-drivable and fast that way. I’ve seen the data on why it was introduced; it was a scaling issue- the old toolbars simply could no longer fit all the functionality in apps like Excel, so they made them context-aware.

Importantly: The ribbon also makes the shortcut chords discoverable, so people can find shortcuts for the stuff they use often by themselves. It lets you get at tons of functions both as a first-timer discovering stuff visually, as well as a seasoned veteran with keyboard alone. There's some things they could polish a bit (colour pickers, mainly), but the system is overall really good.

I don't hate it but it didn't solve or improve anything.

>People were pissed 18 years ago when the Office ribbon was implemented

Wow, now I feel old more than any "movie X was released Y years ago" factoid could make me feel.

I’m old enough that any reference after 2000 doesn’t even make me feel old, it’s damn near recent memory.

To be fair, or maybe only in my opinion (but i had a teacher who agreed with me so :/), from at least 2008 until at least 2012 (So from when i discovered how nice it was until after i quit using word/openoffice entirely and only used Latex), OpenOffice/libreoffice templating features were more powerful than word's, although less intuitive.

Gdoc is shitty however and i don't see how/why i want to use it over any competitors. I think i prefer Nextcloud's editor, even without the privacy/data mining consideration, and i really think that could be improved.

Gdoc is better than Jira and Confluence editor though, and better than the standard redmine editor froma few years ago (the non-markdown one), so that's nice.

I can buy all of this. I've periodically played around with Libre Office on MacOS and usually found the text rendering leaves something to be desired. It's one of these things that I'm glad exists and yet don't really use.

edit: I just downloaded the latest version and the text rendering looks good! Now time to see how it handles dark mode (white or green text, black background).

A lot of productivity type people on Twitter are to some extent slaves to fashion, and in that world eg. Microsoft just doesn't exist. Cool people don't use it, so we end up in a comedy world where ostensible productivity experts gush over random startups' products while M365 is like six times the size of Google Workspace, which again dwarfs all the startups by itself. It gets really silly sometimes when they start gushing about like, a new way to make slide decks. Then you read some essay about all the ways GSlides is torture, and you start to understand.

So many microcosms with tech. I'm always reminded here on HN how terrible Office is and why we don't just use Google Docs. I hold this same opinion personally. However I go to other communities (I think the last one I remember was some startup subreddit) and GSuite is being mocked and everyone is recommending Office and Teams as the obvious choice for starting your business.

I assume it's just that we prefer the devil we know than the one we don't.

I don't think that the decision is being driven by bad company A v/s bad company B, and it's implicitly technical.

All of us here probably will know when to jump out of spreadsheets and have some knowledge on how to approach things then, so a simple spreadsheet on Google Docs is fine for us.

The problem outside, is that they are somewhat locked on the spreadsheet and have to stick with it, so more advanced features are welcome even though it comes with the price of the so called evil company according to the other group.

And is Office really better than Google's Spreadsheets? Idk, I don't care about small differences, but they surely annoy hardcore users, plus no one really got fired for buying IBM

Google is definitely the devil I know of those two, still I would not like it if one my main tools were provided by Google. Currently they seem to manage to both lack in innovation AND be unreliable.

> and everyone is recommending Office and Teams as the obvious choice for starting your business.

Welcome to astro-turfing and shilling. A pretty commonplace occurrence since about 2014 or so.

You can only really rely on people you know and their experiences. always discount "what everyone says".

>and GSuite is being mocked and everyone is recommending Office and Teams as the obvious choice for starting your business.

These must be paid shills. While it's actually quite understandable why real people and businesses would want to use and recommend MS Office, no one in their right mind actually thinks Teams is the best video chat tool in the world. Any serious business uses Zoom, Slack, etc.

Lol any serious business. Shoutout to all the people at mega-corps using Teams!

Teams and Symphony are my industry’s weapons of choice. But I guess we’re just playing around.

Not a paid shill, but Until recently Teams had capabilities Slack was laughingly behind :-/

Biggest one for me was that I could

A) start multiple chats with same audience and rename them - so I can have chat with thom dick and Harry on system architecture over a few days and separate conversation with them on performance testing issues. This is trivial in teams. I have to create awkward channels in slack to approximate the functionality.

B) seamlessly start a conversation with two people, then as you troubleshoot and expand, add more people, then jump in a call, then finish a call and keep chatting. Until recently slack would force you to start a new blank conversation when you added people - absolutely useless. Now they've hacked a solution that works up to arbitrary number of ten people and is so clearly a script in the background which still creates a new chat with added person but helpfully copies all conversation over. Then you need to add 11th person and too bad you've hit the magic number.

In operations setting and evolving incidents, teams was just better. And don't get me started on slack "huddles"!

My inlression has always been the opposite - startups used slack because it was cool. Serious businesses used teams because it worked and integrated well.

Now. I've realized lately that when people talk about slack vs teams, they're usually not actuslly talking about slack vs teams. They're actually talking about their companies security and usage policies, as incidentally instantiated through the collaboration tool of choice. I've become aware that my experience with teams is bit everybody's, due to various policies and limitations imposed, and similarly for slack.

But mostly... Not nearly as many people that disagree with average internet forum dweller are paid shills as may be believed :=)

Teams, as much as I may dislike it, seems to have more built-in features than Slack, including a files feature that supports editing MS Office documents in place, and integration with Outlook calendar and email and other Microsoft apps. I also think that Slack didn't have video conferencing until relatively recently?

As with the IBM model, I imagine it's simpler for companies to have a single source and a single support channel. It is possible to use Exchange sign on for non-MS systems and apps however.

The problem with Teams isn't features, it's that the thing barely works and is dog-slow, especially on certain platforms.

Agreed. I once cross-compiled for Intel on an Apple Silicon machine while being on a Teams call. Guess what was heavier on the CPU…

> Teams, as much as I may dislike it, seems to have more built-in features than Slack

Isn't that the problem with Teams? Instead focusing on highly usable text chat, the focus is growing the pile of integrations with other mediocre Microsoft products.

(Not that Slack is great; it's been bloated and slow for a long time and has likely been on steep downward trajectory since the buyout by Salesforce.)

Unfortunately my "serious business" of $2B revenue dropped Zoom and Slack like a hot rock when they signed an enterprise Microsoft deal, because Teams is free, and usability, productivity and job satisfaction be damned, and your jobs are moving overseas anyway and nobody dares complain there.

Teams has network effect behind it. Because so many businesses already use Teams, in a B2B-setting you're almost expected to already have Teams as well.

I generally don't see people recommending teams, typically business users seem to prefer zoom while the ones who use teams are forced to because it's bundled with other Microsoft products.

Excel on the other hand is still miles better than Sheets for non-trivial use cases and I've seen business users revolt multiple times if you try to force them to use GSuite. To a lesser extent that's also true with Word and to an even lesser extent Outlook.

I haven't yet seen someone threaten to quit if they don't get a Teams license (but I have seen that for Zoom).

The interesting one is PowerPoint which I've noticed a lot of power users are migrating to Figma for. Also 10 years ago people would send nasty grams if they couldn't get Visio licenses but Lucidchart seems to have eaten that marketshare.

>I haven't yet seen someone threaten to quit if they don't get a Teams license (but I have seen that for Zoom).

Uhhh what? I suppose I am a novice video chat user who just uses it to talk to people and share a screen, but I am clearly missing some killer feature. From my perspective, all of the platforms suck for one reason or another. Bad CPU usage, latency, but hey, they have background swapping and fun emojis!

> Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office.

For knowledge workers who live in these tools, the difference is stark. Even for companies who've standardized on Google Workspace or Apple iWork, advanced users will need Microsoft Office.

What features in Office are essential for those users that you don't get from Google?

If you're talking about Excel I can imagine there are such features but not so much in other apps.

I think it's less about feature parity and more that the users have spent tens of thousands of hours in MS office and don't want to relearn all the shortcuts and menus and subtle behaviors -- muscle memory stuff.

All the plugins for excel, word and powerpoint integration. And we have to be able to send attachments with actual files, not links. Law firms and banks are pretty set in their ways here. It has to be office and windows. Google sheets doesn’t remotely compare to excel for serious financial modeling.

It’s always mainly about Excel, but some people are really set on Outlook, too.

From my experience it is Excel first, PowerPoint second, followed by Outlook and, last, Word.

The order varies depending on what you do, each can become absolutely critical.

Oh boy. Outlook users are in for a surprise with "New Outlook" is forced on them in the near future. Microsoft has been pushing and warning about this change for some time ....

I use outlook for work mails and tried new outlook for a short while. It’s like an alpha version, it’s not even close to feature parity, a pure showcase for a new design. If it ever becomes the only version, I’m switching to thunderbird.

I used the default Mail Microsoft Store app for the past 2 years at work. The past 6 months, it's been telling me to move to Outlook desktop app. A couple weeks ago, it wouldn't allow me to use the Microsoft Store app anymore, so I installed the desktop version, tried to login, and got an error message that my account would only work on the webapp.

Set up Thunderbird on my work desktop that day, and haven't looked back. Wish I would have way sooner, to be honest.

You inspired me, decided to set up Thunderbird and give it a week or so to see how it feels ;)

Hope it goes well!

Thanks, but I just switched back. Just far too bad performance (for my use case of ten-thousands of mails in subfolders), and as a bonus a spam filter that ignores actual spam, but marks real mails as spam consistently.

The interface is far nicer than outlook, but the performance is just too annoying for me.

Wino Mail is native and nice.

Oh, very cool. Thanks for sharing -- glad to know I have this option if I want to go back. Now that I have Thunderbird set up, I'll probably never use the UWP Mail and Calendar app or this Wino Mail app.

If some kind soul wants to point to an email client that has a capability like Outlook rules I'm dying to know about it. I have a mate whose business is entirely based on a big set of Outlook rules to do processing and there doesn't seem to be any good alternative.

Outlook online doesn't seem to have any rule capability and can't talk to 3rd party email servers.

You don't need an e-mail program for this if you are ready to work with Imapfilter: https://github.com/lefcha/imapfilter

Awesome thank you will look into that

> What features in Office are essential for those users that you don't get from Google?

Backward compatibility with existing documents that are already in Word. Also, for those knowledge workers who aren’t in tech, the high likelihood that the recipient can open the document with correct formatting.

...why not just print to PDF then since all browswer support PDF?

...since then they will send you back a scan of a printed-out copy of said PDF in which they scribbled their comments and modifications with pen and marker?

I am exclusively Google office user, but... Out of the top of my head:

* Google docs are uglier than Microsoft word documents. This matters when I prepare an offer that I want to send to a client, and it should look good.

* Google slides are hideous, and the only reason I get away with using them is because programmers (including me) have no taste[1]

* Related to the looks, I sometimes buy paid document templates that I can use to format my offers. They often have an option to download a docx file, but it's complex through that you can't important it to Google docs without breaking it completely.

* Word/Libreoffice works offline (maybe docs with serviceworkers too? It never worked for me when I needed it).

* You can use word to generate documents using a template, don't think it's possible with Google docs

* Macros are not supported in Google docs

And I'm a complete noob when it comes to document editing software and actively avoid it. I can only imagine how much powerusers miss.

[1] https://medium.com/@laurajavier/google-slides-is-actually-hi...

Is it just about the default font? Most office workers have 0 sense of aesthetics and sometimes official guidelines actively make things ugly (like forcing fonts like Times New Roman on everyone). Or the cutesy Calibri on official notices.

MS Word templates are one of the most awful things I've ever messed with. I had a fun time using them with pandoc to produce autogenerated word documents. ARGH! The nightmares!

We should just all get off our butts and learn LaTeX! Not that I have. ahhahahaha.

Word is also ugly. When I care what it looks like I use LaTeX.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/linear-format-equ...

As a commercial lawyer, I often have to exchange drafts with another lawyer somewhere else. Almost everyone will accept Word, far fewer are happy with a Google doc. Obviously I can generate a Word document from Google, but that isn't quite the same.

A specific problem in this scenario is tracked changes. Google has a history/version control but it does not map particularly well onto Word's tracked changes, which the other party will understand and is likely to want to use. Passing things into and out of Google will often result in loss of useful information like that.

Personally: Word is the absolute best piece of software for dealing with numbered lists that is easily available. In many ways it is terrible of course, but it is less terrible than anything else. Getting numbering right is important.

Google has gotten better. It used to be very bad at larger and more complicated documents. But it still doesn't have all I need to write a really good contract (at least by my standards of "really good").

Google Docs can't automatically number headings, figures, and tables. It also can't automatically update cross-references ("see Figure 3 in Section 3.4").

Some colleagues have issues because it can't handle very large documents too (above a few hundred pages).

I hate Microsoft products in general but Excel is just good. It is not one feature but the whole package as a system.

It is basically the opposite of most MS products. There is not one feature that stands out as to why I hate Word, it is the summation of all the little things I hate about it that is the issue.

In that case, they can use FreeOffice, whose office suite is indistinguishable from MS Office and works on Mac and Linux! (Granted, I say that as someone who very much does not live in those tools except as a rare hardship imposed by normies society.)

Suggestions based on ignorance of the product isn't the best place to start.

This. Believe me, Office and Office clones are very distinguishable. It's like saying a Macdonalds burger is indistinguishable from a Gordon Ramsey burger. They may both be food, but they are very much not the same thing.

There's a reason people use Office. Pretending that reason does not exist does not make the argument for switching better.

I've been using libreoffice for maybe 10 years now? I don't remember what I'm missing, could you name one or two killer features of ms office?

You're happy with what you are using, so that's great, and I'm not knocking that.

But the difference is not 'killer features". The difference is in the million small details and polish. The integrations, formats, UI, workflow, things it just "gets right" that I don't even know its doing.

I try Libre Office every once in a while. But each time I try it just feels old and clunky. It's all in the tiny details that add up to the overall experience.

Clearly you're not missing anything since you're happy with what you have. But going from Office to LibreOffice is painful. Not bullet-wound painful, more like thousand-paper-cuts painful.

A lot of things are just different. In a way that makes it hard to switch, but isn't because microsoft office is a better/premium experience.

Imho it doesn’t come down to one or two killer features, it comes down to momentum.

Stuff like font rendering, grammar- and spellchecking, the exact set of Excel formulas, graphs, templates, and VB scripting matter. The office suite’s localization changes keyboard shortcuts, Excel formulae names, and swaps between decimal points and commas. It is absolutely horrendous, but people rely on it for their daily work.

In essence, if we accept that Excel is both an IDE and a dialect of a programming language, we can compare it to asking what makes C# in Visual Studio worse when people are used to Java in IntelliJ. The answer might be “nothing, but I’m used to my setup and it’s ridiculous that I’m even having this discussion about my main work tool” for programmers, Office users, and video editors alike.

Sort of unrelated, but, VB scripting not working on web versions felt to me like it really killed a giant moat of legacy code to draw from.

If you're forced to script in something else then why not just go to something else. Additionally, having tons of forms written by long gone employees just not port over is a tough sell at smaller offices.

I think that’s very related. It’s hard to get people to migrate to Office for Mac or the web version because they’re subtly different enough.

Well probably the reason most people use it is because they are ignorant about the alternatives and ignorant about the vendor lock-in character of M§.

There are significant feature differences that enterprise users consider dealbreakers just between MS Office for Windows and MS Office for Mac, let alone Office clones.

This is true. Among other things, I do a lot of label printing and the tools in MS Word are miles more mature. You get these same types of responses when people list off all the alternatives to Photoshop. Just not the same.

Well it really depends on how you use the programs you are comparing.

Yes, my pet peeve is printing as pdf. You can control line thickness, size, placement of row borders to pixel perfect in Excel & it will get printed to pdf or paper exactly as it is. But not from Google Sheets or Excel Web, even same excel sheel imported in these & then printed will have slight difference in what you see on screen and what gets printed. I understand its because of browsers limitations to place stuff on pixel scale.

Mostly because of network effects and wanting software that will be supported for another three decades potentially and can open my document long-term. Google cancels products all the time and has practically no vision.

Office has become a bit of a UX mess in parts, due to the cloud and web integration, but the overall functionality and integrations are still unmatched. Many people also continue to prefer native applications.

Their offering strikes a decent balance between the two. The fact that it is a native application really helped me when I traveled internationally, where my connection was spotty at best. I had a minimal slow connection on my phone that I couldn’t tether, and otherwise, I had to offload periodically where Wi-Fi was available from my PC. In places where you can assume to have a strong, always-on connection, they don’t make much difference, but in situations where I can’t count on it, Microsoft’s structure, which can tolerate offline usage, is very useful.

I use MS Office and Softmaker Office, both native and with perpetual license. Works fine for me. Not sure why would I need online service that can cut me off at any point with no recourse

I use Markdown, with no license. (Usually) Works fine for me. Not sure why I need proprietary file formats only usable by on vendor's software.

I'm somewhat joking (obviously MSFT file formats can do a lot more than md if you need that), but I rarely need more complicated documents.

> Not sure why would I need online service that can cut me off at any point with no recourse

But both of those can cut you off at any point with no recourse. Read the EULA carefully.

The only one that can't is LibreOffice.

> Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office.

I see you have never opened a large spreadsheet in competing software or you wouldn't call MS Office bloated. Sheets and Calc are extremely slow, inefficient software. Excel alone, if you have a use for it, makes it well worth the price of admission. It simply has no competition and neither Google nor Libreoffice can serve as drop in replacements for that.

Most of the features in the Office suite get out of the way and are only there if you need it. It's no bloat to the people who need the features. Office is where Microsoft still shows love for desktop software and it shows, they open very quickly and feel responsive in a way most other software they produce don't (opening the widget board on Windows 11 is a more stuttery experience at times than opening something in Word or Excel)

> It did save it. In their fucking cloud and made it so opaque that the user couldn’t possibly understand wtf was happening

You can't save it in the cloud "by accident". When creating a new document and clicking to save you explicitly have to pick "onedrive" or "this computer" as locations.

> It took me, a tech professional a good 5 minutes to snap out of the dark pattern and realise what was going on.

It took you 5 minutes because you had no idea what the user did. It's not the fault of the software if the user clicked to save to onedrive.

You can also still create new blank documents directly in the explorer.exe (right click -> new -> word document) as you always could since Windows 95 in which case you would have set a local location for the document you're working on before writing the first line of text.

I also find it interesting you're suggesting Docs, a piece of software that is cloud driven only, as a replacement for Word because a user mistakenly "saved to the cloud"

And if giving people the option to save to onedrive is a "dark pattern" then what is a piece of software that can /only/ save to google drive, exactly?

Microsoft 365 Family subscriptions is the whole desktop suite + the online apps (which are pretty competitive with Docs if you need to access something on another computer in a pinch) + 1 terabytes of storage + up to 6 users (each with their own 1tb of storage) on the same subscription for 99 bucks a year. Google can't even begin to compete on that level of offering. Some of the apps have no real google alternatives either, OneNote is an incredible tool for personal organization of ideas and clipping online content you want to keep. It's also very snappy and responsive, again, the Office division really cares about quality of desktop software in a way that has become all too rare. The people working on Windows's desktop/UI elements would do all too well to take inspiration from them because 11 is a damn sham.

The pros you mention above are true for the desktop versions, but most definitely not the browser versions, in my experience. The browser versions feel squishy and feature incomplete and the interface is different enough to be annoying enough for me to avoid it like the donut with a hair on it.

Mine is a very Excel-centric view. I wouldn't miss anything else in the office suite.

I’m keen to understand what features you found lacking in the web version of Office. My initial impressions aligned with yours; however, upon recent usage, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by its extensive feature set. While advanced data extraction capabilities in Excel are notably absent, the web version otherwise provides a comprehensive array of functionalities.

Might depend on how recent. As a result of past annoyances I haven't revisited it in the last 12 months, except accidentally. The memory of the annoyance remains, whilst the specifics have been lost to time.

I'll give 'er another shot. I'm aware of my tendency to happily burn big tech for the slightest sleight.

Microsoft in a nutshell… I swear they offplanered their ux people to the moon where they couldn’t do anything. Or they have no ux people. Or their ux people have no effect.

They fired all the testers and figured user telemetry could be everything they need.

Does that include voice to text when users yell at the computer and chuck it at a wall?

Lots of reasons. Here are some: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-law-school-applicants-sho...

Some institutions have requirements that files don't leave your computer or network

People always forget about Outlook. Name me a competing desktop app that does integrated calendar, email, todo, and meetings as well as Outlook.

Thunderbird is (unfortunately) a joke, and web clients aren't as nice when managing complex folder arrangements and lots of mail.

outlook has a gazillion things that are far far more of a joke than those lacks in thunderbird, those are just things people accept because they cant change it, and impose a 1:1 feature/bug requirement on a new thing, or its "not ready"

Honest question, what's wrong with Thunderbird? I never used Outlook, and I use Thunderbird daily so I wonder what I miss [1]. It also picked up development a bit and got some nice improvements, maybe check it out of you didn't recently. But I'm really curious why is it bad.

[1] I'm pretty sure outlook users miss good GPG support, at least.

Supernova has fixed a number of the performance issues with large mailboxes, but that was fairly recent. People steeped in Windows still prefer the sleek/modern UI in Outlook over TB, in my experience, but the biggest benefit in Outlook is just the tight integration in MS/365 land.

Calendaring in TB always felt like a bit of an afterthought compared to email, and for personal use, that makes sense. For business, strong calendaring with meetings/shared calendars/availability and the tight link to meetings (Teams)is not done as well anywhere else.

RIP then. https://proton.me/blog/outlook-is-microsofts-new-data-collec...

Ironically, we used thunderbird at at old job, because it was easy to screenshot for QAs instructions on how to check both the HTML and Text versions of sent emails.

On macOS/iOS I like Apple's suite of apps (and its desktop-mobile integration), and arguably Google's advantage is that it's web-first so it works well on cheap ChromeBooks that you don't think twice about replacing when they are lost or broken.

And Teams is a clunky Electron app.

It’s not anymore, the current version is WebView2 and much faster.

Among other things, Office comes with support, a word most Googlers can't spell.

Is the suopprt first or third party?

First party of course. MS has gold plated support agreements especially for public sector customers, where you can get a real person on the phone, not at the mercy of some automated Google bullshit.

Is it expensive? Yes. But if you're running an entire city as opposed to a small dentist's office, it's likely worth the money.

The popularity of all these paper emulators seems odd to me.

Like, how long after the advent of software will it take before our workflows find their authentic shape? Or was that shape really just a list of flat rectangles all along?

I love the question as I'm constantly faced with the absurdity of user-hostile software. It was supposed to be built to help humans. Instead it creates PTSD.

Hmm, maybe the problem is more of a drift towards hostility instead of an inability to move forward.

I'm not a psychologist, but I think it's the same reason I still can't get into IntelliJ.

Let me explain: I cut my teeth on Vim. I've been using Vim since I was 17 (I'm 33 now). Nearly everything I do for fun has been with Vim. Most of what I've done for work has also been with Vim (or NeoVim). I write documents in Vim with Pandoc. I compose emails in Vim (using Mutt). I use Vim whenever I do an interactive rebase in git. I do CAD Modeling with Vim using openSCAD. The keystrokes are just second nature to me, I think in Vim keystrokes now, for better or worse.

The IntelliJ Vim plugin is actually very good, but it's not quite perfect, there's subtle, intangible things that I have to adapt to, but are different enough to annoy me. For 99% of people, I think this is more than "good enough", and I still use it when I write Java, but I still am just unable to "like" it.

I don't use MS Office, but I suspect that if you've been using it for a long time, even tiny differences that you'd experience with Google Docs would become infuriating.

I just started down Vim rabbit hole. It's a cult I am more than willing to spend time diving into head first.

I think it's worth it, but just a warning, I'd be skeptical of the claims that some people make, where they act like "learning Vim made me 10x faster at coding!"

I do feel like Vim allows me to "translate my intent to the screen" really easily, and I avoid context switching as much, but I doubt it makes me appreciably faster at writing code. It's pretty rare that typing speed or "how fast I can edit" is the blocking factor for writing software.

There are a ton of very specific pieces of functionality that are built into Microsoft Word that caters to business edge cases. Features that have worked the same way and have not been touched for years for compatability reasons and are not duplicated in other software/services. Word is a bloated mess, but incredibly feature rich.

Office is Final Cut Pro. It is brimming with features and power.

But lots of people aren’t working at some corporate office. Mom and Pop can get far with the iMovie option like Google Sheets and Docs.

Actually now that I say that… what I want is a LibreOffice equivalent of Google Docs and Sheets and Presentations. Google is the only bad part of my Docs experience.

Because Google Docs only has 10% of the functionality? Also your anecdote is user error.

Yeah these are reasons I had to set up a a VM for my dad while he finally went off Wordperfect 6 to LibreOffice for word docs.

It's been interesting to watch because he's happy to embrace better tech but hates dark patterns.

I've had to use Google Sheets a lot recently, and it doesn't hold a candle to excel. There are a lot of basics missing esp. when it comes to charting.

But I don't like excel much either. If working with spreadsheets was a bigger part of my day job, I'd switch to excel

Excel blows Sheets out of the water. Try opening a million row CSV in Sheets.

This is a feature few people need.

Yet it is the status quo expectation. If you offer up an alternative, do not be surprised if people expect it to be comparable in all features.

for the money your governments spend licensing MS products, they could develop libreOffice from scratch in better, faster and nicer looking.

Or just pay a few devs or a few hundred to make it better and still pay less in fees every year.

I doubt it's very uncommon for businesses to work with million+ row worksheets. Personal usage, I'd agree.

Google Docs is just flat out terrible. It's also highly insecure - imagine trusting an ad company with your governmental information.

Yeah, they got it so fucked up that the average user has no idea where their files are. It is absolutely unbelievable how user hostile it is. Typical software designed for the goals of the creator. The world of computing has truly descended into hell for the average non-technical person.

Google docs has no dark patterns. All sunshine and roses.

> Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office.

You don't want Google to have data that is used to govern a federal German state.

Very hard for me to understand why as the owner of a computer you want to put precious data on someone else's computer. Especially someone that has no customer service, a history of killing products with no good options for their users and frequently breaking laws.

Try editing a 200 page document in Google Docs. Last time I tried I had to give up. I detest MS Office too, and Google Docs is perfectly fine for a whole lot of my use cases, but it's not a complete replacement, and that'll be a problem for a lot of places where some subset of users will need other applications anyway if you pick Google.

The "lost" MS Office doc is infuriating, though - have had to help my son with several different variants of that for school over the years, including the reverse, where it's insisted there is no document at the location in the cloud drive it is meant to be, but where it turned out this was because it hadn't been synced from the local drive...

> Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office.

Precisely because some of that "bloat" is useful for others. Off the top of my head, I really dislike that Google Docs doesn't support stuff like creating your own styles to apply in the document. My use case, for example, is having a style for inline code, with a monospaced font and a different colour, which I can do in Word creating a new style and applying it, but can't in GDocs.

> The poor person re-did about 4 hours of their work 3x because they couldn’t find the file MS Word had guaranteed them it had saved, so they had to start from scratch.

It should appear as a recent file once you open word, no matter if it was saved to OneDrive or locally. And it certainly isn't so hard to choose where to save it, if OneDrive, a SharePoint site or locally. At least nowadays.

We'll have to see how long it takes, as it did with LiMux (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux) when Microsoft Germany headquarters magically moved to Munich and everything got back to running on Windows again.

My question is what the heck?

I read that same thing every 2-3 years “German state goes Linux/libre office”.

Then it turns out that it is not really true. Some parts yes then some other parts are already on it and some parts move back.

I do understand there might be different parts of rather big country doing different stuicf

I imagine the tide will lift and fall over the years. Some applications (new and old) will only run on specialized platforms. Exceptions will exist in a large enigh environment.

It's a German of Schleswig-Holstein which is like the state of California or the state of Kentucky in the US doing a change like this. And it's only the state government and not the municipalities in the state.

Apparently, it's how one bargains with Microsoft to get a better deal on software or employment in that location or whatever.

Surely there's a limit to how many German headquarters Microsoft needs though.

From the link:

> The city reported that due to the project, it had gained freedom in software decisions, increased security and saved €11.7 million (US$16 million).

That's kind of nice. An org that I worked for gave everyone LibreOffice installs by default and if you needed any of MS offerings you could just ask for a license for those. Most people were just fine with LibreOffice. Depends on what you're doing with said office suite, though.

I like this conspiracy theory as much as the next person but in fact they moved only around 10-15km south, to be in Munich proper. Yes, I know, that would be irrelevant regarding possible tax breaks or bribes or whatever. But physically it was not far, same people working there without relocating, etc.pp

The relevant part is that they moved from another city to Munich, which means that certain company taxes would be paid in Munich instead of Unterschleißheim (the city where the HQ was located previously). This means a increase of tax revenue for the city of Munich of tens of MEUR/yr from this tax alone, without even considering secondary effects.

The small physical distance just means that this would be quite cheap for Microsoft to implement, compared to trying to pull the same stunt with another city.

I'm sorry, what year is it? Am I posting on Slashdot still? Is this year finally going to be the year where Linux desktops become something for normies?

When Munich did this it never got to a majority of their desktops, is my recollection, it maxed out in the 40%s. Now we're going to do it all over again with a different, much poorer, German state?

Curiously, I was going to bring up that very same slashdot article (and the one describing how it has failed). Howdy old-timer!

Schleswig-Holstein is not poor. It is next to Denmark, and it is really nice and well developed.

I think transitioning to a different platform is mostly an organizational and political, rather than technical problem, and the main roadblock is educating users and altering processes to migrate away from MS Office.

That said, modern Linux distributions like NixOS or Guix could be great to manage large fleets of computers, keep them up-to-date, and upgrade things without fear. In my experience, that is the main technical issue administrations are experiencing.

And of course, running free software is great because it brings freedom to change things.

As a long time Linux user, I think problems are partially technical. For example:

* A lot of software used by them is certainly Windows only (they will have to find alternatives, change their workflows or invest in some windows virtual machines)

* Windows tooling for organizations is much more mature. There's a reason virtually everyone uses AD.

* Linux is very focused on user freedoms. This is not usually important in the office. But freedom to configure things is a freedom to break thinks, and cause admin headache.

The problems are solvable, but it doesn't mean they don't exist.

Oh and I love nixos, and I always wonder how realistic would it be to use it in a company for management of thousands of desktop machines. Sounds like it would be perfect for it, but i don't know any stories.

> There's a reason virtually everyone uses AD.

The reason everyone uses AD is that you can have a functional Linux client in AD. But you cannot have a Windows client in any Linux-based LDAP+Kerberos setup.

The problem isn't that there isn't a good solution for Linux in big organisations, the problem is that Windows is only compatible with AD, nothing else, so the more compatible system (Linux) gets shoved into AD.

AD is also better and more feature complete. It was born out of necessity, but it's had decades of refinement in thousands of deployments that the OSS solutions haven't had.

So, why does Microsoft want to kill AD and move everything to their cloud ?

Because AD is a security nightmare. It is a collection of ~30 distinct protocols, e.g. bastardized versions of LDAP, Kerberos, DNS, DHCP, X.509 and a few RPC protocols that are all weirdly intertwined, with 30 year old designs. Every few months there is another CVE like 'oh, we forgot to checksum and sign that one field over there, please install this incompatible patch or you will have unauthed RCE'. Since all those patches make things break, there is a lot of vulnerable AD installations out there because most people need to be on "compatibility settings" that are insecure. And even the "secure" settings drop a CVE every few months.

They want you to move everything to the cloud, for obvious reasons. However, if you have on-prem/non-cloud servers, AD is still in the mix. They actually recommend running an AD DC as a VM in the cloud as a backup and to integrate cloud resources in scenarios that are more complex than Entra and Intune can handle.

Every large organization that I have worked at has a solution for desktop and server Linux. The downside is you typically have a password hash stored in ad or a separate service. Ultimately, it isn’t terrible, but you do have a lot of enforcement at the border. So trouble can surprisingly appear when you connect remotely.

The reason everyone uses AD isn't that AD is good. It's that they either have no other choice, or they don't have any competent people in setting up other tools since all basic sysadmins only learn AD in schools.

According to wiki here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_cities_by_GDP) Munich in 2021 had a per capita GDP of 86k euro. According to wiki here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_states_by_GRP_p...) Schleswig-Holstein had a per capita GRP of ~42k euro in 2022 (note that the years are different). So these figures suggest that Munich is roughly twice as rich as S-H, which they list as below average for the BRD, as the 8th richest of Germany's 16 Lander. I took German in high school (back when I was on slashdot), I actually had tests on where all of the Lander were, I know a few things!

That's a bit of an unfair comparison as Munich is a city, whereas Schleswig-Holstein is a state.

It's not very different from Bavaria or neighbouring areas such as Jylland or Lower Saxony: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_states_by_house...

And published on zdnet.com?! Did I mention that Netcraft has confirmed BSD is Dead?

I'll admit, I miss Slashdot.

Yeah, it was a sad day when Netcraft confirmed it was dying.

Oh wow, I wasn't really online at that point in my life but I wanted to read more about it - were these the articles/threads you remember?

Munich Finally Starts to Embrace Linux, September 26, 2006

- https://slashdot.org/story/06/09/26/0236246/munich-finally-s...

Munich Reverses Course, May Ditch Linux For Microsoft, August 18, 2014

- https://linux.slashdot.org/story/14/08/18/2219253/munich-rev...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...

Those articles for sure, but my memory is that it came up an awful lot in most linux slashdot discussions: Munich was cited the proof that this now was finally the time that normies would use desktop Linux, it was just turning the corner, this time definitely. Definitely remember going rounds with people over whether OpenOffice would be the spear to destroy the evil MS/Wintel monopoly (this discussion was definitely before the LibreOffice fork and Oracle murdering original flavor OpenOffice) and Munich was the main example to discuss.

Of course, nowadays there are more *nix based GUI's in the world than Windows: between all of the various Apple products (XNU) and Android (Linux) you have the vast majority of the consumer GUI's in the world. Because most of us wasting our time in the linux slashdot forums missed how the world was actually going to change.

Any resemblance to us now sitting around on Hacker News is purely coincidental I'm sure.

I had the exact same thoughts. At least this time around it’s basically done out of the box.

Linux desktops will never be for normies because desktops are not for normies and are dwarfed by mobile devices and have been for a while now.

Many, Many people use only mobile devices and the ones under 40 who still have computers have them for work.

Well, the article was about work.

Mobile devices may be well-suited for chatting and general entertainment but I seriously doubt that many people could do effective work - more than a couple quick changes - with the mobile versions of Word or Excel.

> When Munich did this it never got to a majority of their desktops, is my recollection, it maxed out in the 40%s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

> September 2006 — "Soft" migration begins.

> October 2013 — Over 15,000 LiMux PC-workstations (of about 18,000 workstations)

> December 2013 — Munich open-source switch was "completed successfully".

> September 2016 - Microsoft moves its German headquarters to Munich.

> November 2017 - The city council decided that LiMux will be replaced by a Windows-based infrastructure by the end of 2020. The costs for the migration are estimated to be around 90 million Euros.

> May 2020 - Newly elected politicians in Munich take a U-turn and implement a plan to go back to the original plan of migrating to LiMux.

They've still got a website up where they say some stuff about it, which itself is hosted MIT-licensed on GitHub with pretty regular commits:

> Our strategic guidelines also provide for this:

> > If economically and technologically or strategically sensible, LHM prioritizes the use of open source solutions, in particular to avoid company dependencies. LHM pursues this approach in both the application and infrastructure areas.

https://opensource.muenchen.de/use.html

https://github.com/it-at-m/opensource.muenchen.de/commits/ma...

Well, it's not just about "FOSS" or whatever, is it? As a German state, you're better off not relying on making payments to a North American company.

LibreOffice specifically was indeed decommissioned eventually in Munich (just within the last couple months!), though:

> LibreOffice was used as an office package as part of Limux until the end of 2023.

Though the Microsoft headquarters do make this seem like possibly a special situation, and as another commenter said, surely they don't need a national headquarters in every German state…

Go Germany go!

In the diesel repair shop I work in, I managed to convince the suits to switch out ms office for libre office. 90% of our stuff is now libre by default...only 2 users have full office suites and theyre both in the bean counting department. We print our BOMs, labels, envelopes and invoices using libre. Compared to office it runs like a scalded dog and never crashes.

That’s awesome. What distro did you go with? Do you have to help maintain them, or have they ever broken?

Windows for the majority of machines (we already own desktop licenses) but i keep 3-4 old laptops with ubuntu we nicknamed "crap outs" in case someone's PC dies, someone needs a laptop ASAP at a jobsite, or the IT gang needs to get fix someone's main PC. Our shops big label maker and 3d printer machine is currently 100% Ubuntu and is a favorite for a Lotta guys on the floor.

"it runs like a scalded dog"

https://themonticellonews.com/im-fixing-to-run-like-a-scalde...

lol. Glad to hear the solution's working for you.

I find it funny that there are suits working in your diesel repair shop.

I've tried LibreOffice, periodically over the years. The same thing always sends me back to MS Office. MS has really sweated the details of their UI in ways that can only be done by maintaining a huge army of coders. When I use LibreOffice, the lack of responsiveness is immediately noticeable, and actually makes the software physically laborious to use. I've also noticed something like a 10x or even 100x difference in the time to recalculate a large spreadsheet.

Maybe you'd be happier with it if you just stuck to LibreOffice and never looked at Microsoft products. It works for me.

> When I use LibreOffice, the lack of responsiveness is immediately noticeable, and actually makes the software physically laborious to use.

I say the same thing about Windows. Why is its UI so sluggish?

Odd comment. The UI has nothing to do with recalculation speed. Anyway, the MS ribbons continually move stuff around - it's a pain for the casual user. Maybe people who use it all day long get used to it?

Regarding spreadsheets, yes, that is one area where LibreOffice genuinely has not overtaken MS-Office.

Munich did it a few times already since 2003. Last one was in 2020 :

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...

Munich reportedly chickened out of Linux a few years later - due to lobbying.

This, definitely remember reading about this on slashdot decades ago. Must've gone well...

I've seen this story every few years, perhaps this is just how they Munich negotiates its contract with Microsoft.

Like every time North Korea needs more aid it launches a missile into the sea of Japan?

At least Munich's bargaining chip seems a bit more friendly.

While I work for msft, I'm all for open source, even more in this space - consumer and office apps - however, my government has tried this and rolled it back a while later in some branches, while others just suffer with it.

Office is much superior to any open source and even paid alternatives, and we must remember that most people using the software don't have a degree in CS.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see the reverse news a few years later.

> Office is much superior to any open source and even paid alternatives, and we must remember that most people using the software don't have a degree in CS.

Germany is investing in improving free software, see https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/. Though not sure if this is linked to that state switching.

I think LibreOffice is riddled with loads of small "paper cuts". Basically loads of small issues that make it annoying to use. I hope that they understand it shouldn't be about cost, it should be about being sovereign. So hopefully the investment (ensuring additional developers, UI/UX people, etc) increases as they use more free software,

The more people use free software, the more it will become cost effective to improve it using government funding.

There can be enormous net savings (zero license fees), which is fantastic for the taxpayer.

Without an actual design vision, all open source software will flounder and never replace commercial counterparts.

What a ridiculous thing to say

Gimp, blender, firefox and obs are all very successful OSS alternatives that come to mind.

Gimp is a classic example of OPs point.

Mozilla really ? Lack of vision and focus driving Firefox into irrelevance. And also started on the back of a commercial product.

Blender started as a commercial software and is being spearheaded by Ton ever since (my very uninformed impression), which again reinforces OPs point.

Yeah, gimp is pretty crap and it is what it is sure. Clearly they work in a world that has more smaller boutiques where replacing Adobe with supporting OSS alternatives isn't a clear winner. Industries that have a ton of engineers are more likely to build their own alternatives, and some of them realize that they can cost share by being OSS.

Gimp is fine for my purposes, whipping up a favicon or making a bit of random developer art as filler until an actual artist can do the job.

Yeah I think that's exactly the point. Libre office would need a Blender like visionary management to flourish.

Their point was that it's impossible for OSS to have visionary management, the projects I listed prove that's a false claim.

Right gimp mightn't be as good as photoshop, but it's always satisfied my needs, granted my needs are pretty limited when it comes to photo editing/art.

I'm not claiming OSS projects are inherently better or even equal to their commercial closed source alternatives. I just think the claim that an OSS project haven't have vision is rubbish.

Oh, yes, gimp, the software that is still going "we'll have non-destructive editing.. maybe.. soon.. probably" when its first elements were introduced in Photoshop in the mid 90s. The. Mid. 90s.

It's such a productivity boost that it would be a lack of self respect to one's own time to use a tool that doesn't have it.

You really gimped your argument by including it; otherwise I'd agree it can be done.

Krita would have been a much better example I think. They've had some reasonably successful crowdfunding campaigns and ongoing monthly income, with focused visions of the product they create, and they've proven capable of attracting actual users who are in it for the art instead of just your "FOSS"-radical Stallman types.

Blender represents an outlier in the OSS landscape, largely due to its unique product vision. Its development was driven by practical use in creating open movies, which provided a built-in customer base. As a niche 3D software, it was subject to less conventional expectations in its presentation, allowing it to stand out. Despite this, Blender’s UI/UX design has faced criticism, suggesting that if it were applied in other domains, the reception might be even less favorable.

> I hope that they understand it shouldn't be about cost, it should be about being sovereign

Makes sense in principle, but practically speaking Germany would seem to have higher priority threats to address than software from the United States?

Countries are big. They can do more than one thing at a time.

Mhm. Spending less on licenses would free up money for other things.

The Document Foundation is a German organization.

> Office is much superior to any open source and even paid alternatives

Bullshit. The only reason to use Microsoft Office is compatibility with Microsoft Office files. What improvements have been made in the last 10 years in Outlook and Word? Nothing. There are some new bugs that didn't exist before, but no advancements. That's what lack of competition gives you.

Exactly. Especially for contract negotiations & track changes with a counterparty. Only MS can figure out their screwed up document formats. Office is terrible these days, it is so damned slow. I remember Office 97, so fast and responsive on a Pentium 90, now back in the dark ages of slow bloatware and network latency. It takes so long to open a document, I forget what I was doing the week I double clicked on the file.

While I'll agree the "eye candy updates" may not be there (apart from marketing-driven AI additions and visual updates), there are some big features that aren't visible until you enter the enterprise space. For example, Purview Information Protection [1] and Data Classification integration [2] make data protection, audits/compliance a no-brainer, and are _extremely_ compelling arguments for an integrated suite at the CISO level.

(The downside of course is this is a single-source stack, which can be a risk in of itself)

I have no real background in Libre (apart from using it, which I enjoy), but from cursory searches, there doesn't appear to be equivalent features available (very happy to be wrong here FWIW). Are there alternatives in this space?

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/information-protec... [2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/data-classificatio...

Objectively there have been an absolutely enormous number of "improvements" to MS office (including Outlook and Word) over the last decade. The biggest is probably cloud/simultaneous editing capabilities. See https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-life-hacks/sto... .

Interestingly, there is a decreased emphasis on the file format- the opposite of your point. In addition to cloudy used on mobile devices, sharepoint, etc; since 2007 or so Word has used docx, which has better cross compatibility with other suites, even Google Docs: https://www.howtogeek.com/304622/what-is-a-.docx-file-and-ho... .

My personal use patterns- I use LibreOffice quite a bit, Google Docs rarely, and MS Office daily for work. Outlook and Word have changed a lot and continue to evolve (watch for copilot integrations).

This depends on what parts you use. For many Microsoft Word 4 was probably peak Word. At this point Office is becoming an OS into itself.

Enormous number of improvements? That link shows barely any improvements. If there was healthy competition you'd actually see enormous number of improvements.

> The biggest is probably cloud/simultaneous editing capabilities.

That was in response to Google Docs and is more than 10 years old (added in 2013?).

The bar for Outlook was so abysmally low- and even today it is pretty much the IE6 of mail clients. But good news! With the New Outlook, it won't even be a mail client at all.

> What improvements have been made in the last 10 years in Outlook and Word?

Microsoft Search makes it much easier to find stuff. Word got near real-time co-editing (or perhaps that was closer to 11 years ago) and later (<10 years ago) got real-time co-editing. Which is such a huge game changer for users with complex documents that GDocs falls down on.

Lots of other improvements in Excel and PowerPoint, data access/visualization, various presenter modes, and then you've got that AI stuff all mixed in.

Microsoft Search? Where is that exactly? Search is the biggest weak point of Microsoft products. Try finding anything in Teams. Now try the Search box at the bottom of Hacker News. See the difference?

Microsoft's revenue from Office was $211B in 2023. That's almost a quarter of a TRILLION dollars in annual revenue. And for that you got what? A presenter mode and data access? Imagine if that revenue was split between three equally strong competitors. That would have spurred innovation.

If you're unaware of what features/functionality are part of the M365 suite, why are you commenting that it is stagnant?

It seems like you're discussing a subject you're objectively unfamiliar with. And no, of course the couple things I mentioned aren't all that's happened in the M365/M365 Apps space. They're what came to top of mind. It doesn't mean they're the biggest or best features.

I use Teams every day and I know exactly how much its search sucks. I am very familiar with how Microsoft doesn't innovate, does not have a history of innovation, and only copies competitors' successful products and features. Unless you were born yesterday you should too.

In Word and Outlook not so much (and the “new Outlook” is much worse), but there have been substantial improvements in Excel.

Does libreoffice do hotkeys similar to excel/powerpoint?

>Office is much superior to any open source and even paid alternatives, and we must remember that most people using the software don't have a degree in CS.

For a fraction of the money spent on these sorts of enterprise contracts you could hire dozens of full-time developers to improve LibreOffice. Clearly something easily within the capacity of the EU, if they were capable of good strategic decisions.

When the reverse happens, it generally doesn't make the news.

> Why? Schleswig-Holstein cites cost, security, and digital sovereignty - though not necessarily in that order.

It's been attempted before and costs has always been higher. But it's not a matter of costs. Reason and responsibility should make it mandatory for certain institutions and the government to own their data. Companies would be well advised to keep owning their data as well or try to get it back. We've all seen what happened with the "privat" Github repositories. No access from Github employees, but as they admitted by AI bots. I don't remember and it doesn't matter if it was on purpose or accidentally.

If using cloud then at least with true E2E encryption. The cloud should only hold strong E2E encrypted blobs and meta data. There're providers out there that I think can be trusted.

My (very large) employer has surrendered to Microsoft. Everything is Office 365 and in Azure. Our IT told us proudly that it's all E2E encrypted and Microsoft can't in any circumstances read our data. But how come I can search for content of Powerpoint and Word docs on Bing for work? A colleague of mine found secret project information this way before the classification levels were on place.

Am I missing something about E2E encryption or is our IT that stupid and naive?

EDIT: And recently our IT announced proudly that we soon can use Copilot.

Can anyone tell me what this means:

"Other countries, notably China, have proverbs that say they are much more stubborn when shifting gears from Windows to Linux."

Proverbs? A stitch in time saves nine. Many hands make light work.

Please, anyone, show me a proverb that says "they are much more stubborn when shifting gears from Windows to Linux."

No tux, no bucks!

Wait, that would be the other way around.

All Tux, no bucks?

Here's one:

"Switching a Windows user to Linux is like moving mountains with a teaspoon; both demand patience and a miracle."

I was trying to remember a Confucius proverb that applied to Linux. Or something from the Art of War?

“The clever combatant looks to the effect of combined energy, and does not require too much from individuals.” Art of War

1. Every software needs resources to be maintained and improved. Those resources finally will need to be paid for by someone.

2. Getting Linux and LibreOffice does not get you a functioning productivity environment. You still need mail, calendars, shared document storage, web conferencing, security etc. There are various levels of usability in those and on basic levels you could get those already 30 years ago mostly. But not on a level, where you could reliably have your workforce be flexibly working from home.

So, let's see how it plays out, but it is not making life easier for the IT admins I guess...

There is https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk/info

lol the latest Microsoft Outlook removed a ton of features. Like for instance, you can no longer drag and drop emails and attachments!

All of the above things you talk about have solutions in the Open Source space.

Duplicate thread,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39928173 ("German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice", 322 comments)

Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39916133

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39928173

Previous reporting (from over two years ago):

https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2021/11/18/german-s...

Wonder what will happen to this… The UK didn’t seem to get that far 10 years ago. I remember this article coming out, but was unable to find any follow up / outcomes:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/29/uk-govern...

For me Linux is so much better a user experience due to the lack of bloat in the operating system. Microsoft seems to be getting more and more intrusive with its data collection, in addition. Furthermore, being a foreign government that has been subject to US espionage in the past, I'm sure it's better for Germany to use an open source OS rather than US-state back software system.

I feel like I've read this exact story a couple of times in the past 15 or so years.

I have been using Libreoffice/OpenOffice continuously pretty much for last 20 years (mostly Impress/presentation part for teaching/presentations). And the number of bugs, crashes, issues with video etc occasionally gets very annoying. I was hoping over the years things would improve, but I don't quite see that unfortunately. If I could get something to replace LibreOffice that is not online and works on Linux I would pay for it.

The other parts aren't much better either. Calc is unbearably slow on large spreadsheets.

It's always been a janky and stuttery experience and the massive improvements in computer performance (CPU, SSD etc) have never managed to bring it up to par, you can see how much faster Word loads even on a simple document compared to Writer. It's been that way since before it became open source: Star Office made you look at its splash screen for a decent while back in the day.

There has been a lot of work on performance in Calc. Do you have a concrete example of such slowness nowadays, or has it been a while since you last opened a large spreadsheet?

Also longtime user of OO/LO just because that's what's available on Linux, even though it's clunky. I've been particularly disappointed with things like typesetting control in LO Writer, printing management, and PDF handling. When I'm doing something where the details really matter, I still usually resort to commercial tools on Windows.

Serious question: Why don't you use LaTeX to prepare the presentations?

A few things I could think of: the templates for presentations are less varied, less diverse, could look repetitive. With Office, you can make the most crazy designs.

That's it. LaTeX generates PDF presentations that work everywhere and look very nice, they even have navigation buttons on the corner.

I wonder if we could teach ChatGPT to create LaTeX presentation designs.

I use LaTeX to write papers, so I am comfortable enough with it, but I tried beamer several times, and it just doesn't fit my personal flow of how I write presentations/lectures. I want to manually move things around, add figures. I don't won't to do all the LaTeX voodoo for that. Also, although I know know how to add movies to beamer, it's a PITA, I'd like to just be able to insert them.

Try out SoftMaker Office or WPS Office.

My current and past employers are all-in with Microsoft because (like it or not) managing large corporate fleets is easier. Our Linux and Mac machines are treated as exceptions.

This has nothing to do with user experience, it's all about risk management. If we need some software on our Mac, we need to sign a waiver accepting responsibility for any security issues. With the corporate issued windows laptops the IT department is responsible for risks.

That’s because their primary setup is Microsoft based.

The opposite is true for Apple-first companies.

Frankly I am shocked that they went with LibreOffice over OnlyOffice.

OnlyOffice supports online collaboration already, works online and offline, and has a much more familiar interface. Compatibility is also better with MS Office documents.

OnlyOffice is developed online-first but they provide an electron app that works fully offline on all OSes: https://www.onlyoffice.com/download-desktop.aspx?from=deskto...

Yep, an electron app is better than native LibreOffice. That's how low the bar is currently.

That means LibreOffice is not native but Java?

Using OnlyOffice promotes Microsoft Document format even further. Microsoft will again change their spec and OnlyOffice won't know how to render it correctly.

For long term, it's better to choose LibreOffice which uses open standards and does not purposefully change specs to break others.

Does it not have support for odt? I haven't used it much, but I do generally prefer it to libreoffice if I need to create or edit a document nowadays.

It doesn't have a file creation dialog (nor global setting for this behavior), hence "promotes". New files are docx/xlsx/pptx. You have to manually use a "Save as" dialog to choose a corresponding LibreOffice format.

OnlyOffice, being Russian and embedded into the same autarky processes there, wasn't an option to begin with.

Microsoft is hilarious : We have created codeQL, the perfect solution to search all of source code in the world for known vulnerabilities at a scale very few can even comprehend.... but first it says you dont have candy crush installed, we are going to go ahead and install that for you and even pop up an unskippable ad taking up your entire screen every time mandatory windows updates completes, YOU ARE WELCOME

A few of the smartest people in the world get their reputation stomped into nothing by the sleeziest pieces of shit management that has ever existed

Guess they realized the Microsoft and Google "Research" centers to build up german software- are nothing more then thinly veiled recruitment pools for competent software developers who then get shipped of to redmond or mountainview.

Still amazing that eastern-europe could build up vibrant software companies- and germany just cant. They get wirecard if they try. I really would love to read more about the cultural causes for this. France seems to suffer from the same problem. Italy too.

[dupe]

Lots of earlier discussion on the official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39928173

I have no idea why ppl don't use tools like LibreOffice and OpenOffice over MS Office and the other cloud (joke) products.

If you're working on a file in the cloud instead of a local file then you probably should've already written/bought your own locally hosted server product instead.

OpenOffice Calc (and similar products) are a staple for ppl who need applications that work without all the "c-suite needs their bonus" silliness.

Can LibreOffice on Linux deliver management solutions?

Think of 1,000 workstations, a small to mid-sized network: you need software that automates installation, configuration, security, etc. It's not like at home: Even if everyone is in the same building, you can't manually install, configure, change configuration, upgrade, etc. 1,000 times (think about it; not only the time and quality issues, but you'd spend a total of days just walking around). With Microsoft Office, you click a box in Group Policy and the entire group, or whatever subset you desire, changes configuration. You can automate installs, patches, etc.

Linux has directories and config/package/fleet management as well. No one in the past 20 years should be walking to every desk in 1,000 desk building installing software.

> No one in the past 20 years should be walking to every desk in 1,000 desk building installing software.

Maybe even 50 years, if one considers that they could've automated the installations through telnet.

I remember walking to every computer in primary schools to do operations in the 90s, so I figured might as well play it safe with “20 years.” :)

There’s definitely been solutions to this problem since the dawn of computing, albeit with uneven availability.

Linux has multiple options for configuration management: Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Salt, Nix, etc. You can even write a quick loop on the shell of your choice and orchestrate your machines that way if only want to rely on stock software...

Yes. I should have framed the issue more carefully: Are they as efficient as Windows' Active Directory and Group Policy? It's a bit of a hard-to-define question, and not many people have the experience to answer it.

I've seen plenty of deployment and configuration management tools that definitely fit the definition - those are easy to make - but were inefficient for one reason or another; that's the hard part.

One major advantage of AD/GP is the market power of being the tools for the dominant corporate OS: Every application vendor who hopes to put a toe in the corporate market makes their product work with AD/GP, including GPOs (Group Policy Objects) that provide the settings to manage their product, makes sure they work sufficiently well (at least they have incentive to try!), and supports them. If they don't, then corporate IT usually won't give them the time of day - it's a job requirement; their 'resume' goes in the circular file. Given Linux server share, I could imagine some good tools there.

A secret of IT management - the difference between what even highly skilled hackers do at home, and IT administration - is that the time resource is highly constrained; it's the most valuable asset and you spend it very carefully. You don't have nearly the time to do everything you need to do; you certainly aren't spending it trying to make some application work with your Linux config management for purposes of - what? your FOSS hard/wide-on? what is the big ROI here for this major project that you're going to bring to the VP? - and do it over and over again for each application. It's not even a consideration.

> but were inefficient for one reason or another; that's the hard part.

The efficiency of such tools is mostly just a matter of familiarity. It's like asking what programming language is most efficient to do e.g. web development. There may be arguments for X or Y language depending on the specifics of what you're going to do and what you value, but ultimately the most important factor that determines whether it feels efficient to work with or not is how familiar you are with it.

> you certainly aren't spending it trying to make some application work with your Linux config management

I struggle to think of them needing to be aware of one another. Configuration management is pretty much completely a matter of moving configuration files and running commands. It's pretty universal. There's no "make some application work with your Linux config management". Configuration management systems may provide application-specific helpers that make things neater, but if you can copy files, maybe template them, and run commands, you're pretty much set.

> The efficiency of such tools is mostly just a matter of familiarity.

That is just not true. Think of making that statement about any software - is the efficiency of all software roughly equal?

> I struggle to think of them needing to be aware of one another.

IT administrators have an order of magnitude less time than you seem to imagine, and an order of magnitude more systems and subsystems and components to manage than you imagine: It's not that they can't copy files and run commands, it's that they don't have time to learn to do that, manage it (including documenting procedures, changes, etc.), and implementing it for every action for every application on every system. It's not like your personal computers - the magnitude makes it a different thing entirely.

The application needs to provide a management component that integrates with the admin's system management tool, just like your new railcar needs to integrate with the train tracks. Now if your railcar is really valuable, the train company might adapt it themselves, and IT admins do that, but it's a real cost. (OK, the railcar analogy is a bit of an exaggeration, but not as much as you think.)

Ansible could easily do this

Your admin uses cfengine for example

https://cfengine.com/

This is basically core reason why LiMux failed - previous German project doing exactly the same - and will be the reason why this project fails as well.

ORLY? My understanding is that LiMux failed because the then mayor was trying to get Microsoft to move to Munich.

Linux has far superior management solutions when compared to anything Microsoft has.

First, start with software packaging: In Microsoft-land, there is MSI, but there is also stuff delivered as .zip, .exe (generated from tons of different install builders, so completely inconsistent) and a handful of half-assed package non-solutions like chocolatey, nuget and others. When you want to install something, and there is an MSI, and the MSI can accept a proper set of parameters, you are in luck. If its an .exe (and even most Microsoft software doesn't consistently come as an MSI), good luck finding the right set of parameters for an unattended install, repackaging it as MSI or one of the other proprietary formats du jour. This repackaging is of course done in each and every company, all over again, for each version.

In Linux, there is a consistent format per distribution, and the distribution does all of my packaging for me. If I want libreoffice, I'll type something like 'dnf install libreoffice' and I'm done. If I want to update all the installed packages on one machine, 'dnf update', wait a little, done. No hunting for a bazillion updates in various weird formats (even Microsoft patches come as .exe with inconsistent parameters and stuff) on a bazillion different websites. And removing software, the bane of any windows installation? The stuff where the solution is usually 'reinstall'? dnf remove libreoffice. The package manager keeps track of all installed files and does a reliable, reproducible removal. If necessary, configs can be kept for a later reinstallation or deleted automatically, no guessing what to save and what to delete. No "nobody tests the uninstall.exe ever".

If I want to install a thousand packages on a thousand machines consistently, I'll give the package list to dnf on each machine via my preferred management software, be it 'for i in $hostlist ; do ssh $i dnf install ...' or (far better) something like ansible, puppet, cfengine, ....

Consistent configuration? Easy, same software, use a regular ansible, puppet or cfengine run to distribute necessary changes.

Update management and keeping older versions for a staged beta/testing/production software rollout? Easy, you can host your own package repositories. Want it fancy? Use Foreman and Katello, then your former windows GPO click monkeys can now click through staged Linux rollouts. Meanwhile cursing about how many years of their lives they wasted on Microsoft "solutions".

Sorry if I come across somewhat annoyed. But any Windows setup I've ever seen has been abysmal compared to even the worst-run Linux shop out there. Just even something as trivial as a for-loop and ssh being possible makes such a huge difference. And the openness and distribution model make it easier to automate everything and be reproducible and consistent.

Another Internet rant. Does that make it more likely or less likely to be accurate?

Have you adminstered autmomated, managed networks? Using Windows? Some of the things you say indicate not. For example, things are not nearly as difficult as you say and consumer Windows installations aren't used:

> removing software, the bane of any windows installation?

Also,

> Just even something as trivial as a for-loop and ssh being possible makes such a huge difference.

I'm not sure what you are saying is missing in Windows. You can run remote commands from a cli and automation definitely supports loops.

> any Windows setup I've ever seen has been abysmal compared to even the worst-run Linux shop out there

Oh, I forgot, nothing was meant literally, it was just a rant. sigh.

> If I want libreoffice

Yeah, but no one wants LibreOffice xD

(And I am writing this comment on Ubuntu)

I would say that's more a Windows feature than something tied to MS Office.

But yes, Active Directory is unmatched for administration of a big number of computers and local networks.

Governments should use only free software or software that's built in-house IMO. They shouldn't keep giving easy money to big corporations.

Dup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39928173

I tried using Libre's alt to MS Access (database). It couldn't open an Access file (couldn't create a connection).

Wouldn't an Access alternative be based on SQLite?

This is of course false.

The real government business in Germany is done on paper and on-site. Everybody knows that.

Bad move. Libre office is awful for an employee coming from MS

Hopefully they have a plan to contribute to LibreOffice.

Clickbait headline. Should be German state of Schleswig-Holstein.

Neither one of the bigger nor one of the more industrial states.

Didn't they try this very same thing, many years ago, and ended up coming back to Windows?

German state employees must be excited for this move.

..... again?

I think it was, what 2005 or so?

They do that every now and then but eventually they come crawling back

Yeah, because of lobbying.

Or corruption, as it's called when it happens in a less developed country: https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/25/22995144/microsoft-foreig...

You're 100% right.

I've seen this one a few times before...good luck.. again

> ...cites cost, security, and digital sovereignty...

With the recent XZ Utils backdoor fiasco, I would really think twice with this decision.

Might be worth sticking to MS for a little bit longer, who knows if the backdoor code has been reused somewhere else? Besides, wasnt it a MS employee who uncovered this backdoor?

What makes you believe Microsoft Source Code is somehow more immune to bad actors?

It's wasn't just "an MS employee". It was an experienced postgres developer. Someone who understands the benefits of open-source.

We simply don't know how many backdoors there are in closed-source software... do you prefer to live with your head in the sand?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/03/microsoft...

As if Microsoft never got hacked before...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/edward-snowden-claims-mic...

Ridiculously silly to say. Because ONE recent security flaw in open source fucking M$ is better? That is laughable.

But yes, open source is used more by private users and even in government the hackers may target it more. BUT Linux is already in use for like 99% of the internet, all datacenters, everything runs on it. Every big company, even M$ is involved in it heavily, they have their own Linux called Azure Linux or something like that. So it makes zero sense to claim using some shitty close source software they want way too much money for is better. M$ 365 bullshit might as well connect to some online services run by M$ ON LINUX that have bugs exactly that you mention that somehow then also make it to users of office that connects to the net for no reason. I think it's some software as a service crap now.

Because the absolute amateur hour of Microsoft using null IV in cryptography (ZeroLogon) and telling you that "it's all fine trust me bro" certainly works better. Yeah. And this isn't the sole example of sheer incompetence from this company, we got like 4 decades of stupidity to go back to.

Also: https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-04/CSRB_Review...

> Microsoft’s decision not to correct, in a timely manner, its inaccurate public statements about this incident, including a corporate statement that Microsoft believed it had determined the likely root cause of the intrusion when in fact, *it still has not*

Anyone still using O365 is absolutely irresponsible.

I WannaCry after reading this comment.

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