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Comment by Igglyboo | Hacker News Reader

I think it would be great for them to switch but I can think of 2 huge reasons they wouldn't. 1. Retraining the users, very few people use linux so it would be a massive undertaking to retrain their thousands of mostly non-technical workers to use a new, unfamiliar, operating systems. 2. Microsoft Office. Say what you want about LibreOffice and OpenOffice but when it comes to enterprise grade software MS Office is unrivalved, especially concerning Excel.

It would be much more expensive in terms of hours lost to make the switch.

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It would cost them a tenth of this XP license nonsense to fix whatever makes LibreOffice or Calligra "not enterprise grade enough" for them.

And they are switching to 7. Inherently, they have the retraining costs already, and Lubuntu or Zorin is much more linear a change than going from no-search no-dock quicklaunch to Windows 7.

The government, for various reasons, is not really in a position to direct their employees to fix LibreOffice to make it suitable for them. They also aren't in a position to offer a grant to some organizations/individuals to do the work. They need something that exists at this moment. If free software proponents (myself included) want the situation to change, then we have to improve the status of free software in the enterprise (either by improving its image if the software is ready, or improving the software if it's not).

EDIT:

Also, retraining to Windows 7 is not really an issue. The issues with going to * nix are numerous. Non-COTS applications that'd need to be ported/recreated. Email infrastructure (what's the state of support for MS Exchange in the * nix world? That is, any applications that integrate as well with Exchange servers as Outlook?). I forgot about the server side in my other post. So much is running on Windows servers. SharePoint has become the de facto document sharing system, this is nicely integrated with MS Office, any * nix equivalent? Exchange is their email server, but does far more than just email - keeping contacts up to date, calendars, shared/group inboxes. Is there a singular application that can replace Outlook in the * nix world? Would they have to switch to 4 or 5 applications to do what one application did before? Will they play well with each other and properly share information (that is, if I create a calendar event in the calendar app will it be integrated well enough with the mail app to let participants now, and then re-sync later on once they've replied? I've never tried to do that in the Linux world, what applications support this?).

EDIT AGAIN: Anyone know how to insert a * next to a word without triggering italics? * <space> nix just doesn't flow right.

Addressing the Exchange part, no they're really aren't any good nix applications capable of using exchange. Thunderbird can do it with a plugin but you aren't getting contacts or calendars and you'll only get email if the guy who setup the exchange server allows IMAP.

I tried the HTML code for asterisk before 'nix': * but it seems it doesn't process them. Too bad, might be a bug.

LibreOffice and Calligra are not the only thing stopping the switch. For instance, smartcard support is big within the government, and while it can be done with enough effort on Linux, paying for "enough effort" would make the switch impractical almost by itself.

And it's not as if KDE 4 (or God forbid, GNOME 3) is so similar to Windows XP as to minimize retraining costs.

http://i.imgur.com/ipHo50B.png

I just booted a live Kubuntu and just switched the launcher, removed the activities / show desktop / virtual switcher widgets, switched the desktop from widget to folder mode, and added a quicklaunch widget. Looks and feels exactly like XP at that point. The only exception would be the file manager.

And it is not like you wouldn't be deploying custom images to all your machines - you could tweak all the theming to use MS Windows styles. Hell, some people even got KDE looking like 7 years ago: http://www.lirent.net/2009/05/windows-7-transformation-pack-...

> Looks and feels exactly like XP at that point.

Did you remember to remap Alt-F2 for Krunner (which looks nothing like on XP...) to Win-R?

Did you fix the Lock Screen to look exactly like XP?

I can tell you as a KDE dev myself that although you can do amazing things regarding look-n-feel, there is still a big difference. Even on things that are not very different between the two, that simply becomes an "uncanny valley".

Excel is great to be sure, but it's only the really advanced features that LibreOffice Calc is missing. Things like advanced macros or embedded VB scripts.

I really doubt that people in most government agencies are using these features.

And if they're intelligent enough to use these features, learning to use Unity would not be a huge hurdle.

These things get used all the time --- especially when statistical, economic or engineering analysis is being performed. Also, most users aren't using these features directly, they're using a template created by someone who did know how to use them. Most of what the end user does is punch in this years data and interpret the output.

For a specific example: unless LibreOffice or Google Sheets develops a solid equivalent to the Solver add-in, replacing Excel will be a non-starter in any department that deals with Engineering data.

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