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Comment by Atariman | Hacker News Reader

As a Swiss, I'm happy they finally try it. It's only around 5% of all government machines, but at least it's a start and I wish them all the best! We have to get independent asap from the US, they never were our (or any other countries) "friends" and most likely never will be. OSS ftw!

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I’m disappointed they did. M365 represents a tiny proportion of the budget especially in light of the high Swiss salaries in government (~ $100-250k per employee per year) and all the surrounding infrastructure costs. Microsoft software became really good over time and the loss of productivity and the inefficiencies introduced by the change to clunky software will absolutely not be worth it.

Sorry, none of what you just said makes any practical sense.

Could you elaborate?

I think I can. In 2026 Excel is unusable for me (I cannot see the active cell at a glance, I cannot trace dependent cells to “debug” my formulas, I cannot save directly to my local hard disk with a keystroke combination- I have to click around to avoid OneDrive)

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.

Why are you logged into OneDrive if you don’t want to use it?

Actually I am not logged on OneDrive (AFAIK I did not create any OneDrive accounts) Excel insists that I should save my spreadsheets on OneDrive. Thus the infuriation.

Maybe he did not deliberately log into one drive, but was tricked with dark patterns and suggestive interface design. Which makes it even worse.

Or maybe he in fact is not logged into onedrive, and 365 simply sucks.

Which OS are you using? On macOS I don’t have any of the issues you reported. It’s snappy and fast, no freezes whatsoever and sane shortcuts.

Linux is largely financed by American corporations. Without that, Linux wouldn't be anywhere near what it is today.

How far you wanna go back to figure out what Linux would/wouldn't be without specific companies and individuals? You're taking "stealing credit for something" to a whole new level.

Linux is 100% created by an ethnically Swedish guy in Finland. Your point is?

fnord

Ouch, so many wrong statements with your comment, where to begin. For starters, you seem to imply that Linux is done created, but Linus is still actively creating more of Linux, so check mate, mate.

You sunk my battleship!

> as American citizens

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.

I’m a European who has contributed to the kernel (a single, pathetic patch but a patch nonetheless). That means at the very least it’s not 100% created by Linus

I should have been more specific about what “created” meant, but my point was just to emphasize how ridiculous it is to ascribe national provenance to a massive open source project like Linux.

And without American AI to patch security holes, Linux and the software running on it will become hopelessly insecure.

Yeah, because the only thing that's for certain is that American LLMs are so special that they cannot be reproduced, as everyone has been knowing already in 2023 from the public "we have a gigantic moat" Google memo.

lol somebody didn’t hear the news about Kimi and GLN 5.3 cyber

Wouldn't a true Swiss person be neutral and cautious, and wouldn't they refrain from parroting all sorts of nonsense in public about other countries? Anyway, it doesn’t exactly seem like smart move when a government agency tasked with protecting its citizens’ sensitive information switches on a large scale from local, closed networks with energy-efficient desktop applications to externally hosted SaaS infrastructure, with wasteful, fragile, unsecure browser-based applications, sending each byte over many borders. This development should never have happened in the first place.

That’s a lot of misconceptions for one paragraph…

What misconception? The administration wrote themselves few years ago: https://www.edoeb.admin.ch/de/07032023-bundesverwaltung-fueh... Now (eventually) they seem to reconsider that this dependability might not have been a good idea. I worked for the Swiss administration myself as an external consultant for many years and have I pretty good insight.

I believe they are saying two things:

- 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.

To the point, thanks.

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