Switzerland's Federal Government Is Replacing Microsoft on 3k Computers
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Plus, if countries moving off Microsoft put a fraction of the savings into libre office product development, it might get an even more lopsided comparison!
Having Tuxedo, System76 and co is great, but what most people care about is what there are in regular consumer shops.
Linux adoption among consumer hardware has only been a success where it is invisible to the user, like the Linux kernel on Android or WebOS, firmware on DVD/BlueRay players,...
Initially a post order-only for consumer electronics, but added bricks & mortar stores because many customers (of all ages, btw) prefer IRL service, viewing and touching actual hardware.
That did Fry's in, didn't it? People coming in viewing, touching hardware in store and then buy it on-line (elsewhere) so that they could save 2.5%. Or worse, buying it in store and returning it two weeks later when they found a better deal or didn't need it anymore.
Here a lot of places has a sort of price guarantee that I guess is supposed to work against this. Basically, if I know Media Markt sells something I want, but the very same thing is available for cheaper in other (big) store, I'll show them their competitors pricing and they'll lower their price to match it.
Assuming by the fact that the physical stores still exists, don't seem to be going anywhere soon, and these companies tend to get rid of stuff that doesn't make them profit anymore, I think it's safe to assume they at least are net positive on having the physical stores.
"Linus Torvalds Explains The Reason Linux Lost The Desktop"
Even if Canonical wanted to create a perfect version of Ubuntu with driver support for almost everything and as many desktop bugs removed as possible, they still can't afford to do it.
A credible Linux-on-the-desktop needs a global or multinational consumer-oriented foundation that can herd all the cats and turn desktop Linux into a professionally-managed project with proper beta testing and some interest in user experience.
That's a 180 from Linux culture, so it's unlikely to ever happen.
The Linux Foundation is not that Linux foundation, because it's not remotely desktop or consumer-oriented. freedesktop.org is a nice side project but doesn't have anything like the budget or the profile or resources required.
That is literally the only way to make a desktop version that can compete with Windows and OS X.
There's an obvious opportunity for someone to do this for governments now - a standard gov-optimised distro with enhanced security and access control and a collection of boring productivity software.
As someone who regularly uses both, and even in spite of the ad avalanche that (a bog-standard home install of) Windows has become: [X] to doubt. I regularly have issues on my corporate Linux laptop that I suspect wouldn't ever happen on Windows. Fleet management is easiest on Windows, with Active Directory, Group Policy, images, etc. Maybe package managers make software management easier on Linux, but fleet sysadmin is basically built-in on Windows.
Linux is superb for servers—I use Proxmox VE as the hypervisor on my homelab—but it still has a rather long way to go as a sharp-edge-free desktop OS, regardless of whether it is for home or corporate use.
I'm also having a lot of issues on my corporate linux laptop (such as dbus crashing) that just do not happen normally.
They are due to all the proprietary ~~spyware~~ security software they install, that hook pretty deep into the system and isn't as well tested.
But even when the platform is well supported, you’re left with the user experience.
Libre is generally ok, but they deal with lots of documents from different ppl/orgs that just need to have similar rendering. Windows is so bloated it's insane
This will be fixed only by a govt push to do full replacement for all doc sharing at all levels, especially schools. But since in this country office is mostly pirated anyway, it's not such a big push
I'm not sure about that outside of Excel and even then only for a small proportion of users.
As an individual that makes MS Office hard to replace in the workplace. But maybe entire agencies switching over will have enough weight that they can force everyone else to adapt to them
But comments like this one makes me think people don't realize what a MacGyvere'd together hack job a Linux distro truly is.
The idea on paper is that a company like Microsoft can offer a more consistent and stable experience, but apparently they're even failing at that these days.
But to look at a Linux distro as an alternative to consistency and stability is pretty funny to me.
The truth is that any org that chooses to migrate from Microsoft to Open source will face completely new challenges. And the end result will be +-0, if they're lucky.
Seriously I've learned about the death of hundreds of people when I switched on my music PC (the only reason I have one windows machine is music software) - I haven't asked for this, and I removed news before, they just patched it back in
I have one setup with all my media/games and have removed every piece of Microsoft possible.
There are other reasons that Windows sucks, even (or especially?) in a corporate environment, just not those.
Every other onboard tool or software wastes space to advertise for some AI or office subscription. I wasn't able to disable that at all.
And for notifications there is seems barely any control at all. All software is able to constantly nag me with weird notifications.
You make it sounds like I could just turn it off, but I googled a lot and turned out I can't. But maybe it's just me?
Guess that's like adblock these days. You need domain specific knowledge or you get not what you expect.
Imo windows users are just blind for all the bloat
Or is the underlying system still bad, as in drivers, compatibilities, audio and video codecs, networking, etc. I know on servers when some of these break they take a bit of mucking around. But it seems many companies are trying, why are they failing?
Rather a Java/Kotlin/C/C++ userspace with the Linux kernel as implementation detail, or Web/WebAssembly, equally with Linux kernel as implementation detail (Crostini runs in a VM similar to WSL, and lacks several features).
I bet Googlebooks might achieve more sales on regular consumer shops than any proper GNU/Linux distro, and it is basically Android on laptops as per what we know about them.
Second, they don't buy this kind of thing every week.
But it would never work without my help. On the other hand, Windows wasn't working too well either and I just couldn't help with that.
RHEL was the most stable alternative I could think of when her Windows computer stopped being reliable.
I have setup rustdesk on it for remote support.
Linux has made a lot of progress since 2010.
If low tech ppl in family get phones, I want them to be apple, less work for me (not an Apple user). If they get a PC, I want them to use Ubuntu. Less work for me.
And if there's some work, I'd rather ssh into their PC and fix it using a shell with bash, then get annoyed with Windows and it's quirks.
Of course there are exceptions like Excel but that is rarely more than a small portion of the workforce.
Excel is still a huge (ginormous) moat, particularly as MS have built basically all of their data tools into it.
Unless someone creates a better Excel, MS will be around ~forever.
And even if only a small proportion of the workforce needs excel, those people tend to be concentrated in the portion of the business which measures money, which means it'll never get cancelled.
That being said, I do think that basically all institutions in the EU/Europe need to get off the US tech stack, as inevitably it'll be weaponised against us.
I don't understand why. The vast majority of people doesn't have to know about the OS below: they run a handful of apps, that's it. You just need to get them to start those apps and learn to use them. It's not like government employees would have to compile their kernel...
Firstly, I would wager a large amount of personal computing is now done on a phone/tablet. None of my relatives have laptops for personal use. They may have work laptop (which will be running Windows). I this often with a lot of Linux users where they are still fighting the last war which has long been lost.
Secondly, Every single Linux/DE distro has a bunch of issues. Doesn't matter what it is. There are loads of odd bugs (doesn't matter the DE or Distro) that are present, that simply don't exist on Windows. These are things around device and display handling
e.g.
- My bluetooth mouse needs paired again every kernel update. My solution to this will be to buy another mouse probably.
- One of my USB wireless headsets doesn't work with Pipewire. The solution to this was to buy another one.
- Games while it is great that I could finally ditch Windows for playing games. You have to be using the right DE. This is because Mutter (which is Gnome's Window Manager), completely fucks the frame-pacing in some games. KDE that doesn't happen. This is why Gaming distros exist because all these stupid problems with Gaming are pre-fixed by the distro.
- When I changed from Gnome to KDE, all my browser sessions tabs, logins etc were gone because KDE Keyrings and Gnome Keyrings for some reason don't use the same underlying store.
All of these issues need either new hardware / obscure settings to be enabled via the terminal to fix, or require two large projects to actually talk to each other.
Thirdly, it isn't just the OS. For every application on the computer you have to either see if the program is supported on Linux and/or there is an alternative, or they may have a bunch of stuff tied into the Microsoft Ecosystem. Sometimes there isn't really an alternative.
Finally, Unlike big corporations you get bizarre things happening in Linux-distro land almost weekly due to some personal drama. This is seldom reported on because honestly this happens in smaller enthusiast projects normally, but they have a way of trickling up into the wider ecosystem.
The point about "fighting the last war" is interesting as there's a lot of uncertainty right now about how personal computing with a PC is going to look in the next few years. The angle I've been wondering about with the pressures on consumer hardware pricing/availability is if manufacturers can use it as an opportunity to establish new standards if/when it's easier to buy new again (eg, a major ATX revision/rethink) or if they keep following the same template. Over on the software side, what could a non-stagnant OS offer that would be attractive to consumers, what can consumer/desktop linux do that isn't following windows/macos, what would create a need for a mirror image of WINE as linux is leading with new features first?
If you look at things that have got people interested in Linux. It wasn't just that Windows 11 is awful, because a lot of people just install Windows 11 LTSC and call it a day.
Hyprland was/is something that excites people. There was a lot of hype around Omarchy (I don't care about the guys' politics, and please don't bring it up; I find the discussion tedious, and it goes nowhere). Ricing your desktop and terminal can be fun and everyone done it when the first started mucking about with stuff and broke their whole install. "I use Arch BTW" became a meme, much like "The Glorious PC Master race". While I think projects like Debian, Mint, etc., are great at bringing users a boring but stable desktop, you need hype to gain people's attention.
They are replacing Office365.
Or: if Microsoft are very smart they'll have Office for Linux and a GPO connector to manage Linux devices (and divert logins via Entra) in the wings, so much less retraining will be required.
People don't like to even try something else, but when they have no choice, it doesn't take them 5 years to understand how to select text in one of the Microsoft Word competitors and click "bold".
Users seem to have become much more combative, yet shorter in attention span and shallower in understanding
Such a key feature and probably the one thing that keeps me locked into the Apple ecosystem
Well I think it's not ok without at least a fixed deadline for removal of MS365. People usually have work to do and learning new ways to get it done means extra work, and (almost) nobody takes upon extra work if they don't have to. So the new software will be largely ignored by default.
I guess that when you "test" something, it means that you have not yet decided that you will completely migrate there?
As a Finish/American citizen. Not sure why people should trust the rest of what you write when you cannot even get the basics correctly.
Edit: Aww, you were so wrong you had to edit the complete comment to say something else? Boo! Come on, stand up for being wrong when it happens.
- They feel like the Swiss person above shouldn't say stuff like "the US were never friends". And... you know... they are entitled to their feelings, I guess?
- Switzerland should not have become dependent on BigTech (or any kind of external tech). Which goes in the direction of digital sovereignty.
Outlook freezes all the time. And in the past year or so AI “helpers” became very intrusive and distracting.
Office 365 usually has an authentication snafu twice a year-those days are completely lost for me. But even in the days without outages Office 365 is glitching and requires multiple attempts to login.
Or maybe he in fact is not logged into onedrive, and 365 simply sucks.
At a certain point I’d expect that tech sovereignty concerns will tip while governments out of the US-vendor mindset.
https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20260417-france-to-remove-windo...
https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows/france-has-ditch...
The technical part is probably relatively easy in comparison. Especially because the stakes are low (parallel run with the existing system, good will from everyone involved).
True, but that's not accounting for a bunch of typically Swiss cultural factors:
- Swiss people tend to love to death the "one standard solution for one particular problem" approach
- Swiss people tend to be quite change-averse relative to other nearby cultures.
Don't get me wrong I love the Swiss to death, and the above cultural biases actually have their advantages, but re-training government employees is not going to be easy, however well educated they may be.
Fortunately, there is another cultural Swiss bias that's going to help: most large Swiss organizations have been designed using the army as a model, which mean Swiss employees tend to obey orders quite well.
So if the mandate comes from the top, it'll likely succeed. Eventually. Cause in Switzerland, they tend to take their time (yeah, that's another base cultural cliché, but I couldn't resist. And we're already deep into those already, why stop :-) ).
1. We have a wide, per-canton range of solutions for everything even up to school system or tax software. Almost nothing is the same everywhere in the country (not even mentality...)
2. I am quite surprised about the "chage adverse" comment as well, except maybe in rural/conservative villages, people are on the contrary quite forward looking. Our economy is regularly listed as the most competitive in the world. How can competitive economy exist if nothing ever changes? Where does your impression come from?
3. My wife works in the Swiss government and uses a linux desktop at home...
They do have a tendency to complain (but so do a lot of Europeans) but that complaining does often translate into action (something, seemingly, a lot less common in the south of Europe) so perhaps that gives outsiders the impression that the Swiss are change adverse?
Every organization has their own hacks, bespoke tools, processes and hardware that has to be painstakingly replaced, reprogrammed and users retrained. In many cases, Linux alternatives don't exist so they either have to be written or processes/hardware replaced.
These are OLD organizations and none of them is really the same as any other. Legendarily, companies like SAP made their whole fortunes managing this kind of complexity.
It's just a lot of work with a lot of edge cases you've never thought of (or seen in your life) that takes years.
Just do not go on the ground of their "complexity", if you do, you are done for, going to be hell (specs subset only of file formats/protocols, and/or very simple alternative file formats/protocols, think docx vs utf8 text file).
And you better work on those technical regulations, and it is hard since it must not imped real and pertinent "progress".
News article: https://www.rts.ch/info/suisse/2026/article/microsoft-l-admi...
TLDR: any govt would be crazy not to at least trial it, and see if it works.
If you use Linux Mint you can replace Office with LibreOffice (offline) and Outlook with one of the many email clients available for Linux.
- One, that probably, for most of the users, what's is locking them to Windows is a bunch of Microsoft applications. Once you've moved out of those apps, you're free to move them to any other OS.
- Two, on government computers there are usually a bunch of things that might be a bit custom and not readily available in other OSes. Smart card readers for weird standards, custom software for security or administration processes, uncommon peripherals...
- Three, there are departments that are going to be tied to Windows for a long time, due to very specific software, for example CAD or things like that
So I'd say Office is a big and easier win that could allow later allow to move a lot of workstations to Linux. Then, you can focus on the other less common uses of Windows and see how feasible is migrating them. But starting directly moving to Linux would mean starting directly with edge cases and problems.
Also Linux Mint isn't community supported. Large corporations and governments like to have operating systems with long support cycles. That why RHEL has like 10 year support cycles.
If only the title had a subtitle or even a full article to provide more information.
But eventually you'll find the power users who do business critical stuff in excel sheets that you notice can't be done in any other way, and if you stop doing it then people aren't paid in time or whatever.
This doesn't mean it's a good idea to not try this. But Microsoft also aren't dumb. They know exactly how common this is, and what fraction this is. And they will make sure that it costs little more to keep the Microsoft products across the org, than it costs to keep them for specific users and deal with the mess that happens.
This could be said for other things than Excel, but Excel has been one of those moats for decades now.
In my experience, non-basic formulas are beyond 99% of people and they use it simply for adding stuff up in a grid. This is why Google Sheets is used in many places as a replacement (even if it balloons RAM usage when presented with a large sheet of data), simply because all of the wonderful features of Excel are unused.
The most complex operation some people do seems to be lookup tables.
The problem is that they all utilise a different 10%.
What can't be done in any other way?
I think if we focus on "has been", and not consider something dire like "will always be"...then i see it as an opportunity (and opportunity for LibreOffice and others like it). Because i do agree that a small % of people do use/need advance features from excel...so if i were the European Union, then i would gather such data for advanced usage (which is best done when pilots are rolled out), and throw a little money at addressing that (by a little, i mean little for big governments, so talking like a few million, etc.). I'd throw some money at the devs who contribute to LibreOffice, openDesk, whatever...and specifically address whatever shotcomings might exist in the free and open source offerings. Maybe its not an overnight solution, but it would serve to produce 2 things:
1. You pay devs to address the issue...reducing or removing any gaps between excel and offerings like LibreOffice, etc.
2. The devs you threw money at will gain ever more experience addressing needs for this now more expanded marketplace...creating possibly some more jobs and/or opportunites for more local vendors to support these govs, and any businesses that follow suit in adopting such open source offerings...
...I think these create or expedite a marketplace...and one that is not controlled by the U.s. or any single dominant player. So, i think while it might be slow, its a good long-term approach.
Overall Trump is a stress test on the world and found many defects that is slowly getting fixes.
It's almost a standard negotiating tactic when it comes time for license renewal.
There isn't really anything worth attention here. Pathetic, indeed.
I am genuinely happy for you, I wish all you the very best, more competition is good for everyone, and now please stop telling me about your upcoming Swabian clone of MS Paint or how the Moldovan Ministry of Transport is convening a subcommittee to discuss switching to RedoxOS by 2043.
It's not actually hacker news. It's not even tech news. It's European bureaucracy news. And it's drowning out far more interesting things on HN.
Why not just hide/flag the story and move on with your life? No one is forcing you to comment. And apparently the rest of HN disagrees with you, it is on the frontpage after all which happens after we all vote or don't vote for it.
If I didn't knew better, it does sound like you're slightly jealous of something...
I stopped using HN recently, as a long time user, because the direction of the site has gone away from neat tech things ("Hacker News") towards boring bullshit like this ("Politico.eu, but make it Reddit").
I still have an RSS feed pointed this way, and it frustrates me. I vented with this throwaway account and comment. These stories are actual garbage. The front page is now full of AI spam and Europeans falling in love with Juche economics. On repeat, forever. Think of all the slow interesting things you don't get to read, because people with rage meters stuck on 11 want to argue over this crap. Think of how difficult it is to discuss anything with any degree of nuance when the Eurobrigade comes out (maybe Europe should have a serious and mature discussion about structural reforms required to boost competitiveness? a reform to the common fisheries policy so that places like Iceland would actually be interested in joining? no no, much easier to just holler about how America is mean and Europe is sunshine and unicorns.)
Think of how much more HN is like all the other places on the Internet now. It's been a dramatic change in the last year or two (new moderator... ).
I suppose I should just remove the RSS feed and move on. A little sad, honestly.
Haah, well, at least you put a smile on this Europeans face before you left us for good, good riddance :) Imagine if Europe actually had jawi, life would have been good probably.
I'm all for Europe weaning itself off American tech. Genuinely, totally in support. I think people misinterpreted my original post - I actually want a European HN. I want all of this content to migrate there asap.
Btw I built a tool exactly for this, feel free to try it: knoless.app
I don't think we should argue over it.
We have issues with privacy rights, elder burden, geopolitical turmoil, growing debt burden, environment and so on in all places we need to look forward and stick together...
That's life, spies going to spy, state psychopaths from the military and the three-latter agencies exist regardless whether you see them or not and they don't care about the "common good". They must be taken into the account.
The less power humans have over each other - the better. Instead of pressuring each other to bring profits people would be able to speak like equals.
The correct choice, in my opinion, would be to invest in a new EU_Office project that uses the Microsoft XML formats. If you're trying to run your government on a new platform, that would also be a hedge against TDF pulling in a direction you don't want: an "independent self-governing meritocratic entity" has possible failure modes that need to go on the risk register.
The results have been pretty surprisingly good. There’s a lot of functionality missing on first use, but I think if I let it churn through a few million more tokens it could get close.
I would be very concerned if I were a MS, SaaS or Adobe about what’s to come in the near future.
Second, the EU has been pouring money into an OpenOffice fork for official use and replacement of Office 365 for a while. https://office.eu/
The simple/cheap answer I think is to just keep the power users and legacy systems on the tools they need/want. Because that's where the pain point is that cause these projects to fail. If you aim for 100% you'll end up with 0% eventually. If you aim for 90%, you can do it.
But Microsoft know this, and would make sure that a 90% migration saves you much less than a 100% migration. Which is why this is so rare still.
(I think the number is probably 99% not 90%, but the point is the same)
SaaS and mobile has taken over many apps. We sell SaaS to business and govt clients where most end users are either on a browser or a mobile app. There is a Windows application (path dependent history) but it is almost vestigial for configuration/management.
Not a problem in the age of infinite redesign churn.
Linux and open source software are a good alternative for personal usage, but for government usage, wouldn’t they have to port every custom software they have built over decades to Linux? Not to mention driver support for legacy/custom hardware. Also, from where would they get the support and guarantee that critical bugs and issues are patched and distributed without disruption to every single computer in time?
Replacing MS office would be the easiest and what’s the point of migrating away from MS Office while still using Windows eco system? Is it just political symbolic migration because they don’t have anything better to do with tax payers money?
It will fail because employees want "mouse point and click", "mouse point and double click" interfaces and are unable to use anything else.
Maybe not the case for everyone, but this has been the reason for making as much in-house software as possible behind a web frontend.
The point of migration seems to be data-storage compliance anyway. They can later migrate off Windows easily once openDesk gets them going.
That was more than 20 years ago.
Half of our laboratory PC rooms used Linux or BSD and we had licences like Matlab for Linux early on. The other half used Windows and yes, we could get very good license prices from Microsoft precisely because we had so many Linux machines. It was almost free.
You could even say that Microsoft spent money on us trying to buy the University sales gatekeepers with things like free expensive travel to States' conferences, free laptops and stuff.
We were probably not a normal University as we were a technical University and regularly organised conferences inviting people like Stallman.(Our technical University also managed the servers of the Humanities side of the University).
It was not that hard. Today, with so many programs running in Webassembly, it should be much easier.
>Is it just political symbolic migration because they have anything better to do with tax payers money?
Usually when you replace privative software with open source you spend 10x or so less in licenses. The problem being that the open source software is not as capable as the privative.
I did not understood why instead of spending 10 times less with open source, you spend half and pay for the necessary capabilities improving the open source software.
I understood it later. In the past it was a scheme lots of politicians used for getting negotiation power against Microsoft. Digital sovereignty was very down the priorities list compared to getting a good price.
Now, after the Ukraine war, and Trump actively using the US dependence against Europe, digital sovereignty is a very real issue, even critical.
And MS Office corporate licenses account for a significant part of MS's revenue stream. More than 400 million Office 365 licenses paid in 2024, not one-off Windows licenses. So a business might save $150 per person per year on a large group of staff migrating them to a FOSS alternative for email and a replacement for light users that only ever touch Word/Excel/PowerPoint. And they might never know the difference, functionally. That's also less of a tangled web than switching operating systems and network setups that would require work for any users of critical systems. I can see the logic in migrating the willing as a test out of Office, then a few more people every month until you have one pool of FOSS users, and one pool of must use Office 365 users.
That shift might not be nothing to a small business as well, and at scale, might also be significant to larger businesses. Even if 5% of Office 365 users moved over, that's tens of millions of users.