[HN Gopher] German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreO...
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German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice
Author : jrepinc
Score : 385 points
Date : 2021-11-18 12:44 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.documentfoundation.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.documentfoundation.org)
| lvass wrote:
| I really want this to succeed, but I think it's the wrong
| approach in the grand scheme. OOXML is the de-facto "document"
| standard, and I think it's reasonable to say that it is
| deliberately too complex, giving too much advantage to the
| company who created, implemented and pushed for it's adoption.
|
| There's also a lot of research applied in not how to make the
| proprietary user interfaces better, but how to make it hard to
| move away from. Couple with how bad WYSIWYG actually is for any
| serious task (it saves you 30~300 minutes of learning in exchange
| for a life of pain), and it's hell unleashed on the poor souls
| who are forced to sidegrade like this. We can do better.
|
| Existing free plaintext tools like tex, org, ledger, groff,
| beamer et al are the best solution IMO. Anyone can learn them,
| and they surely should when it makes their work better. We're
| giving people too little credit when we act like they need
| WYSIWYG and too much pain when we realize we screwed up.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| This is an opportunity to rant about what makes MS Office so hard
| to be compatible with. It's a mess of ancient and modern
| features, that mostly, but not always, work as you'd expect them
| to, but the overall complexity is mind boggling.
|
| This is used by normal humans. Who don't want to spend a lifetime
| getting good at all this complexity, so they muddle around until
| stuff gets done.
|
| And then you end up with a table in a document where one row is
| wider than the others (sticks out at the side) and nobody knows
| how to fix it, and eventually in frustration the whole table gets
| deleted and redone.
|
| And you end up with lines in graphics that are almost, but not
| quite, horizontal. And hacks where only the depth arrangement of
| opaque objects hides the compromises that had to be made to get
| graphics to look just so. Don't even get me started on localized
| hacks to page headers and paragraph formats, or extra blank lines
| or "start on new page" attributes all over, because the "keep
| with" stuff just doesn't work the way you think it should, that
| have to be fiddled every time the text reflows significantly.
|
| And that's how you end up with documents that just don't work
| right in LibreOffice. It's simply impossible for an open source
| project to keep up with all that by glorified reverse
| engineering.
|
| As a counterpoint though, you can have exactly the same mess with
| LibreOffice in the first place. A bunch of documents with muddled
| weirdness in them that will only display correctly in the tool
| they were done with. No problem as it all stays in its native
| tool i.e. doesn't need to export cleanly to MS Office.
|
| One problem with LibreOffice (or whatever it's called this week)
| is that not all tools are equally good. The spreadsheet and word
| processor look solid. I'm not so sure about its Powerpoint
| equivalent though.
| throwaway123x2 wrote:
| MS Office was so much more functional and nicer to use than
| libreoffice when I last checked.
| tmalsburg2 wrote:
| What did your check consist of? I'm asking because I know
| people who've been using both Word and LibreOffice for many
| years to write huge amounts of technical documentation and
| their experience is that LibreOffice is much more reliable with
| longer and more complex documents. When a certain document size
| or complexity is reached, Word apparently starts to behave
| erratically and even crashes occasionally. They'd prefer
| LibreOffice any day but some customers require Word.
| bserge wrote:
| You should definitely check again. Office 2010 is over a decade
| old now, it's been going downhill ever since.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I didn't check the latest LO version but I agree. LO shines on
| import export but the UI lags, the functionalities are limited.
| Even macros are weird compared to VBA which is sad.
|
| FOSS community needs to gather up on this.
| mopsi wrote:
| And what's worse, lot of functionaly that appears to exist
| turns out to be broken when you actually try to use it. Basic
| things like pivot tables, conditional formatting or automatic
| data import at regular intervals (from a file) are
| ridiculously broken in LO, and have been so for many years.
| Feels as if no-one's actually using it beyond a simple
| document viewer.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 10$ the most used button is export as pdf
| pbasista wrote:
| That is possible.
|
| But apparently, people in Germany are looking for software
| based on attributes that reach beyond the elemental metrics
| like "nice to use" or "supports corporate integration".
|
| They might care more about the ability to audit the software's
| behavior and to easily make changes where necessary. They might
| also like to contribute patches back to the original
| LibreOffice community because they know that they themselves
| will benefit from more people reviewing their work and making
| it better as a result.
| leokennis wrote:
| Devil's advocate here. Recently my employer (large corporate)
| went all in on (as it is now called) Microsoft 365: Teams,
| SharePoint online, OneDrive etc.
|
| While I have no illusions about Microsoft's business model
| and motives, the truth is that "it just works" and makes
| collaboration very easy.
|
| Create a team in Teams, add a document which everyone can
| edit (if needed at the same time), click a button, share it
| with someone outside the team, have a meeting with them,
| click a button, save the meeting video to OneDrive, click one
| more button and you're collaborating on a whiteboard. And all
| this works fully synchronized on my phone too.
|
| As far as I can see (from their terrible website) LibreOffice
| does not offer this at all. Maybe Germany, known for being
| "digitally outdated" by 5-10 years, will suffer no
| consequences from that and their basic workflow is still
| "type document - print it - sign it - fax it". But it will be
| a sad day for my productivity when I am forced to switch to
| LibreOffice.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Consider OnlyOffice or the version offered by Collabora
| with on-line features. I really don't know how good these
| options are but they exist.
| periheli0n wrote:
| we're using this for document management in a large
| European research project. It sort of works but has its
| quirks. The UI is not really smooth, and the whole system
| could be more stable. I once lost a day's work because of
| a bug in the writer component. That was quite
| discouraging.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| > the truth is that "it just works" and makes collaboration
| very easy.
|
| My org does that too for different reasons for years now.
| It just works is a lie. We also have a lot Apple devices
| for all our external employees. That doesn't 'just' work as
| well.
|
| Sadly I have to deal with SharePoint integration which a
| lot of MS services are based on. Digitally outdated has a
| complete new dimensions here, even if you add half baked
| services like Flow on top of it. There are far more modern
| alternatives than what MS brings to the table, there are
| countless alternatives that are better to control and
| easier to adapt.
|
| You could use teams on Linux and while the office
| integration is nice, it isn't essential at all. This
| "collaboration" in the MS cloud is a nightmare to archive
| or access and some of the APIs are in a beta phase. We
| killed our fax a long time ago...
| periheli0n wrote:
| The big question is: Is the aim to have the best possible
| software integration? Or is it about freedom from MS and
| contributing to open source?
|
| If it's software integration, MS is hard to beat. It comes at
| the price of total dependence.
|
| If it's about freedom then going full open source is great.
| But the cost in efficiency is huge, since the OSS
| alternatives will never be as streamlined as MS's stuff. not
| having to spend money on licenses is great but a lot of extra
| footwork will be required to get the job done.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| And Germany is unable to find and pay programmers to make
| Libre Office better ?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Does a German state have the ability to audit software or
| contribute patches?
|
| And what would the patches be for? What use-cases do they
| have that are so unique that they need custom software?
| albertopv wrote:
| This. At home I use Ubuntu I tried Libreoffice few months ago,
| for anything non trivial it just sucks compared to Office,
| years behind. I don't know what kind of documents this German
| state creates, maybe for them Libreoffice feature are good
| enough. And I'm just talking about document creation feature,
| whole Office 365 collaboration ecosystem is huge and on Windows
| PCs it works just fine, at least most of the time.
|
| I really would like them to succed, we really need a real MS
| Office competitor, but it's very hard, MS can be a powerful
| opponent[0][1]
|
| [0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-
| munich-i... [1] https://www.neowin.net/news/munich-germany-
| realizes-that-dep...
| frakt0x90 wrote:
| I've seen these stories pop up from time to time about large
| entities switch to linux or open source software in general and
| it seems there's a large number who end up going back to
| windows/proprietary. Hopefully this is not one of those.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| One doesn't even need to ship the change. Having a viable
| alternative (ahem, _BATNA_ ) is all that's required to improve
| the terms of the original deal.
|
| Or to put it another way: as long as you let Microsoft think they
| are without competition, you will get an awful price.
| aimor wrote:
| How do the workers feel about these changes? I hate being told
| what tool to use. I've worked in computer labs where the admin
| had very strong opinions on what software was good and only
| installed those tools, no alternatives. It stinks. Imagine for
| yourself being told you can't use Jetbrains IDEs anymore, but hey
| there's VS Code and that does the same thing you'll get used to
| it! Some people won't care, some will adapt, and some will be
| miserable. If this type of transition isn't responsive to
| feedback people will find terrible workarounds like using the one
| unmaintained Windows machine kept around the office or doing work
| on a personal computer.
| shireboy wrote:
| I'm in a position to recommend similar for a large organization,
| but am on the fence. They have SharePoint on-prem and Office, and
| are being pulled to Office 365 by MS sales folk. I'm definitely
| pushing to linux containers for apps, etc, and part of me wants
| to recommend Libre. There's a lot not to like about Office and
| SharePoint, but I've yet to find decent open-source document
| management software that does all the things SharePoint does. I
| could recommend they stitch together some things, like some of
| the low-code projects I've seen here, some calendar apps, some
| dropbox clone, BI/reporting tools, etc. into a Kubernetes
| environment. But that's more complex than "go pay N/user/mo for
| this service". You have to get SSO working for all the things,
| and each has their own quirks, etc.
|
| Any HNers out there have recommendations for open source tools to
| replace SharePoint/Office 365?
| jlkuester7 wrote:
| Also wanted to add my +1 for NextCloud + OnlyOffice! They
| integrate well and honestly IMHO have reached a maturity where
| a "normal" user should have no problems (if your people can
| handle the insanity of SharePoint, NC is nbd).
| MayeulC wrote:
| I haven't used SharePoint/O365 much, so I don't know how it
| compares, but I've been quite happy with Nextcloud and its
| OnlyOffice integration.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| I've heard good things about OnlyOffice as a drop-in
| replacement for Microsoft Office, with online collaboration out
| of the box.
|
| It's open-source and free for individual use, paying for
| companies, I think?
| rob74 wrote:
| Ok, so it's " _A_ German State " (Schleswig-Holstein), not "
| _The_ German State " (which would be the federal government) - of
| course this is big news too, but the title is a little bit
| misleading...
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| Oh, wow, that's super underwhelming. The title is incredibly
| misleading.
| ghunky wrote:
| Didn't they do something similar a decade ago and reverted to MS
| Office?
| schroeding wrote:
| Maybe you're thinking about Munich, which changed from MS
| Office to OpenOffice to LibreOffice and then back to MS Office.
| They may change again soon to something open source, too :-)
| soco wrote:
| Yeah the new coalition signed all those agreements back in
| 2020 (Munich, Hamburg, Dortmund...) but I don't know how far
| are they with actually implementing those plans.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| Munich reverted to Windows in 2017, then reverted back to Linux
| in 2020. it is expected that the 2017 rollback was a case of
| corruption and a waste of money. The first shift was allegedly
| explicitly against the wishes of many users.
| dathinab wrote:
| > case of corruption
|
| Probably, I mean the arguments where supper questionable.
|
| Like oh mail on my phone is not working, that is because mail
| is now run by Linux we must switch back ... but it wasn't,
| Mail was one a the few systems which didn't switch to Linux.
|
| Or very questionable calculations about the price of buying
| some "customer support" (Linux IT Consulting).
|
| At least as far as I remember.
| [deleted]
| bflesch wrote:
| They just use it as negotiation tactic with regards to MS. Last
| time Munich attempted this with LiMuX, even Bill Gates flew in to
| personally give them a discount.
| a_square_peg wrote:
| I really would like to pay to use a viable alternative for MS
| Office on Linux that's not clunky like Libre Office. I'm trying
| Softmaker program now and it's fairly decent.
| aembleton wrote:
| Have you tried WPS? https://www.wps.com/
| Nohortax wrote:
| I hope other countries will do it. I have some doubts about
| Belgium which is not really great to do right choices. Also I
| feel like Germany is often ahead its neighbors. Anyway, that's
| good to read !
|
| Edit : LibrOffice is not really complicated but Linux requires
| some knowledge to be well used. Will people have a training
| course to survive on Linux ?
| orangepurple wrote:
| This is the annual shakedown to lower Microsoft license costs
| with threats
| scanny wrote:
| Seems to be a running trend in Germany to move toward open
| software. Tangentially related to this: The city of Munich has
| flip-flopped between their own version of linux and windows [0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> Seems to be a running trend in Germany to move toward open
| software._
|
| Yeah, until the Ms sales guys wine and dine some German
| politicians and promise to build a new campus in $BIG_CITY that
| creates ## jobs, then they suddenly decide to renew their
| windows and office licenses instead. Rinse and repeat.
| emteycz wrote:
| Sure, it has nothing to do with overall better UX that the
| actual users of these computers require, it's all corruption.
| hulitu wrote:
| Better UI ? Ten years ago, yes. Now the UI in Office 365 is
| a disaster. And yes, some german politicians are very
| sensitive when money starts to flow.
| pitaj wrote:
| Whether it's a disaster or not it's subjective. I think
| you'll find many people prefer how it is now, including
| the useful new features like xlookup.
|
| Either way, it's what people are used to, and changing
| everyone's well established memory will be very difficult
| and expensive.
| freeflight wrote:
| _> Either way, it 's what people are used to_
|
| The only reason people are used to it is because MS has
| spend decades, and plenty of money, getting their foot
| into pretty much every IT education of relevance.
|
| Free student/teacher versions are just one example of
| that, which then leads to MS products being everywhere,
| and consequently MS products are what most people get
| taught on in most educational settings.
|
| This doesn't just apply to Office software, it applies to
| whole operating systems and is what keeps the MS monopoly
| entrenched to this day.
| nomel wrote:
| > The only reason people are used to it is because MS has
| spend decades, and plenty of money, getting their foot
| into pretty much every IT education of relevance.
|
| This is the same argument that people have used for the
| last 20 years of "this year is the year for Linux on the
| Desktop!". I don't think it was true then or now. People
| that use Linux consciously, or unconsciously, build/buy
| systems that work with Linux. I've tried many times in
| the past but gave up and moved to OS X after getting
| tired of fiddling with wifi, sleep/wake, trackpad,
| graphics switching, and battery life problems. If I'm
| going to buy a system for an OS, I might as well optimize
| the integration by buying an integrated system/OS. I
| suppose you could claim those are the fault of MS
| popularity, but I claim it's the result of volunteers not
| having financial incentive to add support for the random
| hardware that was in my computer.
|
| I was used to Windows, but I'm not using Linux only
| because I didn't buy a system for it.
| periheli0n wrote:
| At least Office 365 does proper kerning.
|
| Edit: I don't get the downvote. Last week I spent 10
| minutes of a meeting waiting for the presenter to apply
| some fix to his LibreOffice presentation because font
| kerning and sizes were corrupt in the full screen view.
|
| I would love to ditch MS completely and use LibreOffice
| for all my work, but it has its weak spots.
| dm319 wrote:
| I usually export to pdf and present it like that (partly
| because I'm often presenting on Windows machines).
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| I came here to say the same thing. Linux is fine for us
| devs and sys admins. The general populace wouldn't tolerate
| all the quirks to each DE one bit.
| aasasd wrote:
| Yeah, pretty sure I was hearing about German cities switching
| every few months for the past ten years or so.
| dgellow wrote:
| It's the same story every ~2 years since at least 10 years now...
| It's mostly a way to negotiate Microsoft prices down.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| I think the main "drawback" of LibreOffice is that it is not
| widely used. If you receive a docx document and it formats funny,
| or vice versa (common on LibreOffice and not entirely their
| fault), it's on you for using weird software, or penny-pinching
| on a MS Office license.
|
| If it becomes common, people just accept the minor
| incompatibility and move on. It will also get better as funds and
| attention flow to these projects.
|
| As far as I'm concerned, LibreOffice lacks no features I would
| remotely consider using.
|
| It's like when Windows was the sole mainstream OS, it wasn't an
| excuse "oh but I'm on Mac and can't run this". Now Macs are
| mainstream, and Linux is not, it's still in a "weird nerdy"
| corner. But not so if it just gets more widely used (it's
| happening, just slowly).
| pessimizer wrote:
| > If you receive a docx document and it formats funny, or vice
| versa (common on LibreOffice and not entirely their fault),
| it's on you for using weird software, or penny-pinching on a MS
| Office license.
|
| But the funny thing is that Libreoffice has better
| compatibility with documents composed with older versions of
| Word than newer versions of Office do. When MS Office loads up
| an old MS Office document badly, people gripe about Microsoft.
| When Libreoffice loads an old MS Office document badly, people
| gripe about whoever made the decision to install Libreoffice.
| jcelerier wrote:
| In France I've always seen OpenOffice and then LibreOffice
| being used in schools & administrations, and it never was an
| issue
| toss1 wrote:
| >>LibreOffice lacks no features I would remotely consider
| using.
|
| Yup. I use it all the time just fine, and set the default
| format to .XLS and .DOC (not the X versions which are bogus MS
| bastardizations of XML anyway) and I've had no interchange
| problems.
|
| Over the last decade or so, I occasionally see some Excel
| feature that might be switch-over-worthy, but then the whole MS
| setup is so much of a hassle I don't bother -- NO I'm not
| interested in a monthly subscription, NO I'm not interested in
| online-only or Online-First, HELL NO I'm not interested in a
| Microsoft Account -- I just want a package I can install
| locally and run when needed.
|
| Then, the next version, LibreOffice has that feature.
|
| So, great move by Schleswig-Holstein and also very strategic -
| right to repair, right to not be held over a barrel by a
| monopoly, etc..
|
| Let's hope it catches on.
|
| (And now that I'm writing about this, I realize I haven't sent
| LibreOffice a donation in too long, so I'm off to do that
| now...)
| Zigurd wrote:
| You are right that Microsoft Office, Google Apps, and Libre
| Office are all fine for 98% of all users' needs.
|
| Microsoft office does more. If I were to produce a book with
| proper front matter and index, glued together from multiple
| chapter documents, I would choose Word. But Microsoft Office
| does not work collaboratively as well as Google Apps, which
| were born cloud-based. Microsoft Office is laggy and fails
| completely with large numbers of collaborators (i.e. 20+
| simultaneous editors). But these use cases are for 2% of users.
| kevincox wrote:
| > If it becomes common, people just accept the minor
| incompatibility and move on
|
| If LibreOffice becomes more popular people will receive an odt
| document, MS Office will format it funny and it will be their
| fault for using weird software.
| edanm wrote:
| I think the situation parent writes about is more likely (and
| more informative). Namely that there are places with _two_
| major-enough platforms such that everyone has to accommodate
| both (e.g. browsers).
| PaulHoule wrote:
| German local governments have been playing this game for a long
| time. Usually they try off brand software and then the employee
| union complains and they switch back to Microsoft.
|
| Microsoft Office is buggy, but off-brand office suites make it
| look positively reliable.
| soco wrote:
| Some more contextual infos about challenges of moving German
| officials to opensource: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-
| windows-why-munich-i...
| whalesalad wrote:
| I tried to use LibreOffice recently and that lasted about 30
| seconds. Terrible software.
| justtocomment wrote:
| I tried to use a CNC mill recently and that lasted about 30
| seconds. Terrible piece of equipment.
| yetanother-1 wrote:
| I like your argument, but there are some truth to what he
| says, not that I agree with him.
| nodejs_rulez_1 wrote:
| That's a very clever argument actually. Clerks in
| government just want like better utility knives, instead
| they will be offered CNC machines!
| flerovium wrote:
| _Clears throat_. LibreOffice: https://xkcd.com/743/
|
| Published in 2010.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| This is interesting since LibreOffice started life as StarOffice
| which was created in Germany.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice#History
| jhgs wrote:
| Has been done multiple times before. Re-training users and
| increased support expenses usually nullify any license cost
| savings over time.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| That's the Microsoft side of the story yes. The old "Linux
| Myths"
|
| In reality many admins see much easier management, see other
| posts in this thread too.
|
| The problem arises when you don't go all-in on Linux and try to
| have the two ecosystems work together. This is when it becomes
| a mess.
| Kjeldahl wrote:
| I'm all for using free / open source where it makes sense and is
| cost effective. And frankly, Office is probably overkill for most
| of the actual needs of users. Having said that, I tried making a
| three page brochure a year ago, using the most recent LibreOffice
| release at the time. Just a mix of some screenshots and
| paragraphs of text. It was just too slow to be useable. On the
| same computer, Google Docs running in the browser was able to
| handle the same brochure without any noticeable slowdowns of any
| kind. That's a strong indication that LibreOffice is just ... not
| up to the task.
| moolcool wrote:
| This whole thread seems to love the principle of LibreOffice,
| but ignores the fact that actually using it is a slog and a
| half.
| tryptophan wrote:
| As much as I want to support libreOffice, my experience has
| been the same as yours.
|
| The whole office suite just feels so janky/stutter-y/not-
| smooth. Its like there are fps drops or slight pauses before
| many actions. It is quite irritating. Also on a hidpi/4k
| display, many things still do not scale properly.
| 3np wrote:
| I wonder if there some specific bug you're both hitting? I
| have a modest workstation and have not experienced this (fwiw
| 99% Writer/Calc, with the occasional slideshow)
| sneak wrote:
| Same experience yesterday running latest stable from the
| website on a brand new M1M MBP with Monterey. Laggy, with a
| garish UI straight out of 1998.
| shubb wrote:
| I think what people get wrong with FOSS is, they assume that it's
| free as in beer.
|
| If I was a big company or national government planning on moving
| to FOSS I wouldn't count on a cost saving at all. Instead I'd
| take all that licence money 'saved', ring fence it, donate half
| of it to the opensource projects being used (to pay full time
| developers to maintain them), and half to a contract developer
| house to create and contribute the features that turn out to be
| missing.
|
| Secure software that works well and does boring useful things
| costs money. All FOSS does is let you choose who you pay to do
| that work.
|
| Unfortunately, due to how organisations work, it is much harder
| to create and defend this 'optional' expenditure into the future
| than it is to just keep paying software subscriptions that turn
| the lights out if you stop.
| AdamN wrote:
| That's all risk and no gain. If you're successful you've saved
| no money and just moved platforms. If the community thinks FOSS
| is an end in and of itself you've accomplished something but
| only if the community thinks so.
| echelon wrote:
| > All FOSS does is let you choose who you pay to do that work.
|
| Until Amazon makes it available as AWS and corners the market.
| Then you're paying the largest vendor again.
|
| The only reason this hasn't happened to desktop linux is
| because the market share is so small. (Oh wait -- Red Hat,
| OpenSuse, etc.)
| GatorD42 wrote:
| Excel is 100x better than any alternative I've used (it's been a
| while since I used an open source version though). Any savings
| would be offset by loss of productivity if it's a spreadsheet
| heavy workflow. MS software is good, I don't know how much it
| costs for enterprise but it's probably dwarfed by employment
| costs.
| AdamN wrote:
| Yeah, everybody focuses on Word but that's the least
| interesting one. It's all about Excel and there is no
| competitor that has hundreds of thousands of trained users and
| works so well that it is the standard itself.
|
| Luckily I don't use Excel and therefore can rarely use
| Microsoft.
| jamil7 wrote:
| Do they plan to fund and/or contribute to the development of
| LibreOffice as well? I couldn't find anything in that article or
| the linked paper.
|
| Edit: Actually one of the slides seems to indicate they have the
| intention to contribute and/or fund in someway.
| titannet wrote:
| It is highly doubtful. German public authorities are notorious
| for not voluntarily sharing anything with the public.
| schleck8 wrote:
| https://prototypefund.de/project/microg/
|
| https://prototypefund.de/about/
| nicoburns wrote:
| This is great, but they seem to be missing the other part of it,
| which is that (at least some of) the money saved ought to go
| towards funding development of the open software. If that
| happened then Libre Office could hope to outcompete MS Office on
| merit sometime in the near future. As it is, it's unclear how
| much this really supports the free software.
| laurent92 wrote:
| This is a 20-year-old problem. It won't improve. And we've lost
| the cloud fight (practically no site is Affero GPL).
|
| OSS is dead.
|
| Even Linux - I bet half installs nowadays are on AWS/GCP/etc.,
| and they run custom distros, and one day Debian won't have
| enough funding to fix all CVEs, and the only ones which will be
| constantly viable to run when you have liabilities (=all the
| time) will be cloud provider-maintained ones.
| gopiandcode wrote:
| > OSS is dead.
|
| Given that OSS was a corporate sponsored perversion of
| Free/Libre software designed to trick naive developers into
| contributing unpaid labour without getting anything back, I
| would hope so.
|
| Free software, on the other hand, is roaring ahead, and doing
| better than ever.
| md8z wrote:
| I used to volunteer for the FSF and I can't agree with that
| at all. The FSF is politically/socially irrelevant and GNU
| has largely failed and been relegated to an extreme niche.
| The "free software movement" as it stands is still a
| reactionary movement, a desire to go back to the good old
| days when hardware vendors also wrote all the software and
| shipped the source code along with their products. It's
| just not a realistic goal.
|
| It also doesn't seem to really matter whether you call it
| open source or free software. Either way the projects that
| I see are all struggling for cash in the same way. It's not
| easy to fund a product when the entire point is you're
| giving away your labour for free to everyone on the
| internet.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Largely failed? Everyone is using the GNU userland on
| Linux.
|
| I don't see it struggling either really. The Linux
| desktops are in a better state than they have ever been.
| md8z wrote:
| To me that just further illustrates the point that GNU
| failed. I mean it's right there in the name, it's
| supposed to be "GNU's not Unix" but the only parts anyone
| actually uses are clones of Unix that get used on a
| different Unix-like operating system (Linux) which is not
| GNU. And the desktop environments also don't have
| anything to do with GNU. IIRC the only official desktop
| environment of GNU is GNUstep, which I don't even think
| is actually packaged by any distros at the moment.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| GNU's not _SysV /BSD_ UNIX. It isn't literally meant to
| be for a different OS altogether. Even Hurd has a POSIX
| syscall API.
| md8z wrote:
| Come on now, that is a pretty big stretch. And it's not
| even true, coreutils and glibc implement a lot of SysV
| and BSD compatibility. My point here is that GNU as an
| operating system is dead. People can make up some new
| goals for it but it seems obvious that the original goals
| have mostly been a failure. Even if you disregard Hurd
| and count the "FSF approved" Linux distributions, few
| people actually use those because most of them are just
| ordinary Linux distributions but with the only major
| change being that some proprietary packages and drivers
| are removed. Is that really adding value to the software
| ecosystem? I personally wouldn't recommend those to
| anyone beyond hardcore GNU nerds, for most people I'd
| still say just use Ubuntu.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| The desktop environments are not from GNU, no. But they
| are all GPL. In that sense the FSF still has a strong
| influence IMO.
| md8z wrote:
| Yes the desktop environments are still using GPL but
| those are already established projects, not growth areas.
| For newer projects it seems there is a shift away from
| copyleft towards Apache-style licensing. The newer
| copyleft licenses (GPL3, AGPL) just haven't gotten that
| good of a reception. And in the areas I've seen that do
| use them it seems it's despite the FSF, not because of
| them, for example the FSF seems to have completely given
| up on license enforcement or helping with anything in
| that area.
| gyulai wrote:
| One of the photographed slides [1] seems to portray it
| precisely as a two-part strategy. The right-hand side mentions
| "Forderung/Entwicklung nutzbarer Losungen" (The word
| "Forderung" means "advancement" usually including the financial
| sense of contributing to funding) with the flip side of that
| being "Berucksichtigung von Anforderungen", i.e. the German
| state wanting their requirements addressed in the development
| process.
|
| [1] https://de.blog.documentfoundation.org/wp-
| content/uploads/si...
| lordleft wrote:
| I feel like I've read this exact headline like 5 times over the
| last 7 years
| dsego wrote:
| A few years ago I started writing a few pages of tech specs in
| libre office, then it crashed and lost all my work. Being used to
| google docs I forgot that software from the 90s doesn't autosave
| my work.
| edgarvaldes wrote:
| I Ctrl+S on G Docs all the time. Muscle memory.
| nodejs_rulez_1 wrote:
| Not the worst habit. One vague possibility of a
| bonus/promotion and they will mess saving feature up one way
| or the other.
| cat199 wrote:
| "digital sovereignty" is a nice phrase
| nivenkos wrote:
| Especially in contrast to the current digital colonialism.
|
| US Big Tech companies pay almost no corporation taxes in the EU
| (and if they do, only in Ireland / Luxembourg), and compete and
| buy out European companies, shipping the high-paying jobs (and
| the economic benefits and taxes those bring) back to the US
| (much like the oil industry in Nigeria, etc.).
|
| The EU must take a stand against this, like has been done
| against Huawei. Ultimately the American Big Tech companies are
| no better than Huawei - the US is not an ally of the EU, and
| has been interfering in European democracy ever since the May
| 1947 crises.
| Flatuscents wrote:
| Let's not overgeneralize. The US is not in lockstep with all
| EU goals and ideas, but not an ally? As someone who grew up
| with nuclear drills every week I can assure you I think of
| the EU as an ally, AND I want you to have a robust Big Tech
| environment. We share a common cultural interest in freedom
| and fairness, more or less, despite all the craziness in the
| world right now. Maybe the US isn't always the BEST friend,
| but we have to be in the top five right? I would hate to be
| replaced by Belarus and Russia. ;)
| [deleted]
| nivenkos wrote:
| It's well known that the CIA has spied on European industry
| to benefit their own (e.g. Boeing over Airbus) -
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32542140
|
| And on European leaders -
| https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-security-agency-
| spie...
|
| How does that differ from Huawei and China?
| Flatuscents wrote:
| We are treaty bound to protect you and possibly die to do
| so in times of war, just like you have for us. Let's keep
| it in perspective. If you really think the US is no
| different from China, I'm not sure there is anything I
| could ever say to convince you otherwise. If you live
| long enough, you see governments make bad decisions, some
| in retrospect, some from the beginning, and when you dig
| deep, you can often find it is associated with some
| individuals who had a lot to gain from those decisions.
| We spy, you spy, we all spy. Defense is at the base of
| the pyramid in terms of national security. I can see some
| well intentioned individual in the CIA thinking that
| spying re: Airbus is important because it could impact
| our national security in terms of aircraft manufacturing
| and production, and how do we accommodate for the future
| as we lose market share and lay off skilled workers?
| There are legit reasons to know how the world is changing
| so you can adjust to it, but yeah maybe the US Government
| should have just asked. But I doubt they wanted to use
| this knowledge to bury Europe or keep them under or
| thumb, or whatever. Yes we compete but it is more flag
| football than ultimate fighting. With China I am not so
| sure - we will see.
| loudmax wrote:
| This is the kind of story that would have been cheered on on
| Slashdot twenty years ago. But here we are in 2021 and a major
| organization having the temerity to not pay the Microsoft tax is
| newsworthy. This is not what a free market looks like.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I think it's misguided.
|
| 1) Some orgs are stuck with older LO versions 2) veresions that
| aren't good enough, MS marketing team probably doesn't have to
| make a lot of efforts to entice organizations to pay for their
| stuff. For instance Writer custom fields UI is way too hard to
| use (to the point i'm not sure it's not a bug). You can't make
| people work with that no matter how trained they are.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| Didn't Berlin attempt to convert to Linux but had to revert
| back because all their end users were too stupid/scared to
| learn a new OS? I know a German city did that at one point.
| wahern wrote:
| It's the kind of story that _was_ cheered on on Slashdot.
| Multiple times. I can 't count the number of times I've seen
| "Some German [agency|municipality|state] [is planning to
| adopt|has adopted|cancels adoption|reverses adoption] of
| [StarOffice|OpenOffice|Libreoffice|Linux]". I think it's some
| kind of meme, the product of peculiar German administrative
| politics, or a result of vigorous Free Software activism in
| Germany because I don't see such headlines nearly as often for
| any other locality.
| nivenkos wrote:
| Also there a _lot_ of different cities and municipalities in
| Europe. And when it succeeds you don't usually hear about it.
|
| Like when I worked at an MPI in Germany, all the machines
| used Ubuntu. In Catalonia, most of the universities also use
| Ubuntu. The Ayuntamiento uses LibreOffice (and maybe also
| Ubuntu in some parts) - and for the most part, it all just
| works. It was the same in Zaragoza too.
|
| You only notice it when they accidentally send a .odt file to
| someone who is only using Windows for example.
| [deleted]
| marcodiego wrote:
| This is mostly because the "Munich case" was a star example
| for a long time. Also, star division, the company that
| started star office, is from Germany.
| kzrdude wrote:
| That's why Germany is a great place that would adopt open
| source more, because they have prominent "own" projects
| like Suse Linux or that office suite. Now, nothing much has
| come of that in that way (but the German university I
| briefly studied at, did use Suse, of course).
| chrisseaton wrote:
| It's not true that there is a MS tax on office software - you
| can now run Google Suite, so there is at least one major
| competitor.
| freeflight wrote:
| One major competitor who's also a massive corporation and has
| an even more questionable approach to handling user data.
|
| So while it might not be a pure "MS tax" anymore, in a way
| there still is a corporate monopoly tax.
| frockington1 wrote:
| Why is it that nobody can compete? I've tried various
| versions of excel/word clones and none seem to operate as
| well despite it seeming relatively straightforward
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| These days it's more and more the lack of online
| collaborative tools that is a problem.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| How many different implementations of basic office software
| do we need? There's no point having hundreds of companies
| independently building the same thing.
| freeflight wrote:
| Putting all your eggs into one basket is a bad approach
| for pretty much anything, particularly when that basket
| is one that has its own monetary interests as its main
| motivator.
|
| You want valid alternatives to keep the products offered
| competitive, and the competitors honest, as entrenched
| monopolies are rarely conductive to innovation and often
| extremely opposed to consumer interests.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| There are several commercial alternatives to MS Office I prefer
| WPS Office or Softmaker Office to OpenOffice.
|
| In my personal opinion OpenOffice is not a suitable
| alternative.
|
| I still let MS suck money with Office365 due to great grammar
| and spell checking (in multiple languages),
|
| A set of features I use a lot that are not available in the
| competition,
|
| A couple of useful add ins/integratioF
|
| Full compatibility with other Office365 victims.
|
| Plus, a huge set of templates are available for free or for
| purchase.
|
| Corel Word Perfect Suite
| https://www.wordperfect.com/en/product/office-suite/
|
| WPS Office Suite https://www.wps.com/ Quite a few people I know
| switched to WPS Office Suite when Microsoft demanded
| subscription fees. It seems ok for most things. Much easier for
| people to adopt coming from Office than Open Office.
|
| The Apple Office Apps
|
| Softwaker Free Office (German) https://www.softmaker.com/en/
| https://www.freeoffice.com/en/
| Arainach wrote:
| >This is not what a free market looks like
|
| What do you mean by this? Companies choosing the best option
| rather than the cheapest option is perfectly compatible with a
| free market. MS Office has been designed for decades to be easy
| to manage and support and has plenty of training resources
| available. LibreOffice still has plenty of rough edges in those
| areas. As an individual user, maybe those are worth overlooking
| for you. At the scale of a company where time is money, it's
| much more important to get something reliable.
|
| Also, an unregulated free market always turns into a monopoly
| (or at best an oligopoly) eventually. It's been shown time and
| time again.
| loudmax wrote:
| > an unregulated free market always turns into a monopoly (or
| at best an oligopoly) eventually
|
| Free doesn't mean unregulated.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| Awesome. I know how people in offices work and for their use
| cases LibreOffice has become the safer and more fitting choice.
|
| Yes, MS Office isn't bad and I wouldn't pull Excel from the dead
| hands of physicists, but the whole MS cloud deal is bad for
| government.
| ginko wrote:
| > I wouldn't pull Excel from the dead hands of physicists
|
| Accountants I understand but physicists? I'd have thought they
| mostly use Matlab or maybe Mathematica.
| valenaut wrote:
| My physics undergrad had about equal parts Mathematica (for
| theoretical subjects), MATLAB (for engineering crossover),
| Python (for CS), and Excel (for labs).
| ahartmetz wrote:
| And / or Jupyter Notebook
| raxxorrax wrote:
| That too, but many aren't firm with such tools and Excel is
| very prominently used. They often employ special software (I
| mostly worked with them on optical systems) that use Excel as
| a common output format for visualization. Don't know the name
| of their simulators.
| OneTimePetes wrote:
| Would be nice to have a german software culture. But all we got
| is politicians who wish for that and then turn a blind eye on
| fraudsters like WireCard. Something is missing from the german
| cultural dna, that our neighbours have.(Swiss,Luxemburg,
| Belgians, Chechen Republic, Poland, Litauen).
|
| Seems the most important thing to be big in software in europe,
| is to foremost be not german ;)
| kall wrote:
| Feels like a good chunk of OSS development is happening in
| germany. By some accounts, the entirety of linux is being
| ruined by one german. The biggest software companies like SAP
| are maybe not shining examples, but when you go lower, there's
| a lot of good stuff. What differences do you see to the other
| European countries? Who's big in those countries?
| __m wrote:
| I'm not familiar with linux development, what did that one
| german do?
| kall wrote:
| Lennart Poettering created systemd, which is a rewrite of
| many different things in linux that where seperate before.
| Some people don't like it.
| periheli0n wrote:
| Things will hopefully change now that the political tide has
| turned. Digitally, the old government was essentially stuck to
| the status quo of 2005, when they took over.
|
| In my view the weak digital culture in Germany is a direct
| consequence of political non-engagement with the matter during
| the last 15 years. Many areas are affected, first governance
| itself (fax machines!!), in education (universities and schools
| "discovered" digital tools mostly in March 2020, when they were
| forced to), business and trade (card payment still not being
| ubiquitous, let alone contactless; Some trivial contracts still
| require ink signatures and paper being mailed around etc).
|
| Other European countries are a lot more progressive, e.g. the
| UK.
| jaclaz wrote:
| >(fax machines!!)
|
| Maybe not the best example, fax machines usually work.
|
| E-mails - for a number of reasons - may not.
| OneTimePetes wrote:
| Latvia comes to mind.I think, germans aging population plays
| into this conservative mindset. Now add the manufacturing
| culture, wanting to add a physical object/machinery to every
| piece of software and you can start to see the brakes.
| bserge wrote:
| Nonsense. Germans are bad at creating new things but excellent
| at improving anything to its highest potential.
|
| Kinda doubting the Chechen software industry, though.
| jaclaz wrote:
| Well, specifically about "office like" software there is
| Softmaker (that is Germany based) that offers a (Commercial)
| suite that is (IMHO) a good, low cost, alternative.
|
| They also offer (or offered?) a free version for personal use,
| I have on one PC at home a few years old version and it was not
| shabby at all, IMHO faster than Open/Libre Office.
|
| https://www.softmaker.de/softmaker-office
| JJMcJ wrote:
| I've worked at a couple of companies that used Linux and Libre
| for their standard setup.
|
| It's just fine for internal usage.
|
| Of course 90% of the employees were technical people, which may
| have had something to do with it. Nobody wet their pants when you
| called it a directory instead of a folder.
|
| Now if Photoshop or Excel with VBA had been needed it would have
| been a different story.
| nomdep wrote:
| Ten years ago I used to be excite by news like this. Now I don't
| care that much because, unless is a commitment to openness on a
| cultural level, is just a n inconsequential gesture, maybe even
| just a cost-saving measure
| schleck8 wrote:
| > [...] and the Windows operating system is to be replaced by
| GNU/Linux
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I wonder if they are using the "community" edition or the
| "enterprise" version that LibreOffice wants organizations to use
| https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2021/02/03/libreoff...
| bluedino wrote:
| What is the open source alternative to Office365? 'Regular'
| Office is becoming more and more rare.
|
| Which is a shame, between the licensing costs, having to re-
| download or re-install the desktop apps, having to deal with
| OneDrive, etc.
| mfru wrote:
| I'd say a combination of Nextcloud together with Collabora
| Office.
| MayeulC wrote:
| Collabora is quite nice, but also complicated to setup (at
| least last time I tried, could be true only at individual
| level too). OnlyOffice has less features, but that also makes
| it simpler to use and deploy.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| Hm, depends what part of Office 365 you need, the offering is
| truly gigantic. If you need something like Word Online, there's
| some stuff floating around (search "open source google docs" to
| find them). As for the rest, Exchange Online, Sharepoint,
| especially how it's all integrated, I'm afraid there's simply
| no alternative.
|
| Nextcloud offers some integration in that regard.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Hope this encourage them to invest in improving OOXML
| compatibility. I think right now this is the biggest reason
| people avoid LibreOffice.
|
| Also, some action must be taken about MS behavior. They are the
| same company they were in the 90's. It is easy to find commit
| messages in LO explaining things like 'this is what MSO does but
| not what the specification says'. They recently change the
| algorithm the justifies text in MSO and it is not explained in
| the specification. So, even a simple text file without any
| especial formatting may not be viewed correctly with anything but
| MSO.
|
| This is ridiculous. The use of such a format should be forbidden
| for governments. ISO shouldn't have ratified it.
| jlkuester7 wrote:
| Does anyone know of any large-scale implementations of
| https://www.onlyoffice.com/ ? I wonder if that suite would be a
| better solution than LO simply because it is OOXML native
| (unlike LO which AFIK is ODF native and has a conversion layer
| to be compatible with OOXML). I think that OO's feature set is
| still limited in comparison to LO, but they are making a lot of
| progress (and being web-native seems like a huge advantage as
| well).
| marcodiego wrote:
| They have a list of costumers but I really don't know of any
| large-scale implementation.
|
| I've been testing it on my notebook and its compatibility
| with OOXML is much better than LO. Of course, harder cases
| break on both. So, even combining both, something I've tried
| to do, is not enough to achieve good compatility with MSO.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| This being the government, they have the power to flip this
| around. Why invest in compatibility with Microsoft Office when
| you can use the good old native OpenOffice formats instead?
| When the state is working in LibreOffice, there's no need to
| save files in Microsoft's format anymore.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Makes sense. That would be even better.
| open-source-ux wrote:
| The last photo in the article shows a slide that states:
|
| _The 4 commandments of trusted internet services:
|
| 1. A service you use must be available from many providers
|
| 2. It must be possible to move your data from one to the other
|
| 3. The service must also be available as software
|
| 4. The software must be available as open source_
|
| I like this criteria - and it's not new. Think of a popular
| online app that has met these conditions for over a decade:
| WordPress.
|
| If the criteria above were more popular it might make SaaS lock-
| in less attractive too.
|
| Consider the following scenario:
|
| Hosting companies agree on a standard installation API for server
| web apps. This lets developers create server web apps that can be
| installed on any hosting provider that supports that installation
| API. A simple one-click process.
|
| Businesses and indivduals can shop around to find a suitable
| hosting plan that will run the app. Like WordPress, there will be
| cheap-and-cheerful hosting plans at one end of the scale and at
| the other end are managed services with SLAs (Service Level
| Agreements) and premium support.
|
| The open, standard installation API enables data to be
| transferred from one hosting provider to another allowing easy
| data transfer from one hosting provider to another. (Or at least
| an easy way to download your data).
|
| Think of the above as the 'WordPress' model and imgaine if it was
| widely available to all cloud apps. It would unlock countless
| opportunities for developers. It would also mean management of
| servers is offloaded to hosting companies - while developers can
| simply concentrate on building their apps. Alas, it will probably
| never happen.
| nivenkos wrote:
| Now switch to Linux too.
|
| The more we invest together, the easier it becomes. German states
| can help Spanish states, and Finnish schools, Danish
| universities, and French businesses, etc. - collaboratively
| investing so that everyone benefits and Europe can build its own
| Tech industry and have some independence from the US.
|
| This is absolutely critical to move away from the dominance of
| "Big Tech" to FOSS solutions that independent, small co-
| operatives can maintain together.
| pfortuny wrote:
| I agree with you but they did in Munich and then they undid it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
| fbn79 wrote:
| They undididing the undid
| rbanffy wrote:
| I wonder whether the person or company who paid for the
| first undiding got the payment undided.
| pasabagi wrote:
| Aside from the obvious strategic/people power side of it,
| honestly, I think being a user of closed-source is just the
| wrong model for a big organization. Ultimately, closed-source
| software is like running a factory with a machine you aren't
| allowed to repair.
|
| Having your core means of production and security essentially
| at the mercy of somebody else's support team seems kind of
| insane to me. I get the point in the 90s, when software was a
| smaller part of all institutions, but these days, it's just
| such a massive strategic disadvantage that even if the software
| is way better, it's still worse.
| namdnay wrote:
| > Ultimately, closed-source software is like running a
| factory with a machine you aren't allowed to repair.
|
| But that's exactly how big organizations handle most internal
| needs! They don't have mechanics on the payroll to repair
| company cars - they take out a lease with someone who handles
| all that for them. They don't employ cleaners, they contract
| it out to a service company.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Ultimately, closed-source software is like running a
| factory with a machine you aren't allowed to repair.
|
| That... that is exactly how factories operate. When something
| breaks, they call the manufacturer to bring someone in to fix
| it.
| pasabagi wrote:
| I actually thought this when I was writing the comment. The
| difference is, you call the manufacturer when you actually
| _need_ their specific expertise, and when they 're your
| best option. You're not obligated to. They haven't
| generally purposefully hidden the internals of the machine
| from you - and most machines are designed to be serviced by
| end-users.
|
| If every software supplier was like hilti when it came to
| support, I don't think there would be a problem - except,
| they aren't. An engineer from microsoft isn't going to turn
| up at your office if your computer won't switch on.
| GravitasFailure wrote:
| > you call the manufacturer when you actually need their
| specific expertise, and when they're your best option.
| You're not obligated to.
|
| That depends entirely on the terms of your lease and
| service agreements. For high end equipment, like the CNC
| systems at my work, you may not even be given the option
| to purchase them, and they're so specialized you probably
| won't have someone that can competently work on them even
| if your service contact permitted it. Electronics
| manufacturers are also notorious for sanding off
| component info or burying components in epoxy blobs to
| hide information from competitors and customers alike.
| pasabagi wrote:
| I guess specialized equipment isn't really the analogue
| for most software. Most software is a bit like a hammer -
| a generic tool with worldwide application.
|
| I can see the closed-source approach working for really
| complicated subdomains (like a geometrical constraint
| solver) where you really can't fix it unless you're
| immersed in the relevant maths - but that's just not what
| most software is, or where most bugs lie.
|
| Another thing is, how many of the machines in any given
| factory are that specialized? My dad works in a factory
| with a bunch of different machines, and only in a couple
| of cases would it make sense to call an engineer if they
| broke down, because most of the machines are pretty
| straightforward. Is that just warping my expectations?
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Another thing is, how many of the machines in any given
| factory are that specialized?
|
| As always: it depends. An automotive factory may have
| highly computerized systems in the hundreds for a dozen
| or so employees.
|
| Or you may have mostly simple machines entirely
| serviceable by the factory personnel.
|
| And anything in between.
| GravitasFailure wrote:
| >I can see the closed-source approach working for really
| complicated subdomains (like a geometrical constraint
| solver)
|
| Ha! Funny you should bring that up. CAD is one of the
| reasons why I don't run Linux as my daily driver and I
| just don't see the current projects ever catching up with
| companies like Dassault or Autodesk thanks to the size of
| their teams. Overall I think I agree with your
| assessment, there's nothing that special in most software
| that most people or companies need, but wow does it suck
| when you're not most people.
|
| As for specialized equipment...if you're making boutique
| soap, the equipment is specialized but not terribly
| special, so you can and probably will work on it yourself
| or contract with a local service company rather than
| getting a factory tech for every little thing, but if
| you're cranking out high precision parts it's pretty
| standard for a tech to hop on a plane at a moment's
| notice to get your equipment running again because it's
| usually cheaper to do that with an expert than to suffer
| extended downtime. I couldn't say what the exact
| breakdown is of total machines in the US that falls into
| the two categories, but the more precise and automated it
| is the less likely you are to own or work on it.
| pasabagi wrote:
| CAD is really emblematic of the tragedy of closed-source.
| The few times I've used it, it's been obvious that the
| solidworks constraint solver is amazing, but the
| interface you use to work with it is a kind of horrible
| design-by-committee abomination. In the open-source
| world, solvespace has a way less good (fast/robust)
| constraint solver, but the interface is obviously made
| with care and love.
|
| It feels like a lot of closed-source software is like
| that. They have a few core components that are simply
| gorgeous, then over them, they just tack an inordinate
| amount of trash.
|
| Stuff like geometry libraries, math libraries, etc are
| just so universally applicable that it makes sense to
| treat them like infrastructure. Treating them like secret
| sauce is such a waste.
| sgt wrote:
| Didn't Munich do this like 20 years ago and it was a complete
| failure?
|
| Linux and OpenOffice. I think one of the major concerns at the
| time was that OpenOffice didn't work well with all the Excel
| and Word documents they needed to open, so people opted out and
| installed Windows instead. To the regular office worker, it
| didn't matter much if the computer ran Linux or Windows, as
| long as it worked.
|
| To the IT admin, it might have been more work to administer
| thousands of Linux machines, due to the slightly less mature
| environment.
| slightwinder wrote:
| It wasn't a complete failure, more the opposite, a great
| success. Until Microsoft moved their HQ to Munich and some
| old conservatives started complaining about some miniscule
| problems. Of course, there were issues, every software has
| issues. And Bavaria's IT is very problematic in general,
| having many issues overall. But those were all solvable, at a
| cheaper price than the rollback to Windows had cost at the
| end.
|
| And fun fact: now 4 Years later, after the reigning political
| party has changed, they are switching back to Open Source and
| probably Linux.
| usrusr wrote:
| I'd say success, period. Not in migrating to one software
| or the other (who cares), but in migrating a large
| company's national headquarters to your city.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Did it fail? https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-
| why-munich-i... (2020)
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > To the IT admin, it might have been more work to administer
| thousands of Linux machines, due to the slightly less mature
| environment.
|
| Perhaps they weren't used to non-GUI automation.
| bildung wrote:
| > Didn't Munich do this like 20 years ago and it was a
| complete failure?
|
| No, it was reversed for political reasons. The majority of
| users were happy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
| freeflight wrote:
| My favorite part about that whole story is how Steve
| Ballmer, back then VP of MS, and even Bill Gates personally
| visited Munich to have a talk with the people involved, to
| convince them how much of a mistake it would be [0]
|
| [0] https://www.golem.de/news/von-microsoft-zu-linux-und-
| zurueck...
| cies wrote:
| Yups. From another thread:
|
| > It got rolled back after they elected [a] mayor who got
| Microsoft to move their German headquarters to Munich.
| earthnail wrote:
| I keep reading that all the time in tech forums, and it's
| just so far off the truth.
|
| It always baffles me how we tech people lose sight of a
| product's quality and usability the moment it's a FOSS
| product. We feature new products here on HN everyday,
| which is "like X but better", and it gets lots of upvotes
| in the style of "OMG finally someone builds something
| better".
|
| But then you have a FOSS initiative, and because of FOSS,
| we turn two blind eyes?
|
| People in an administration don't care about FOSS or not
| FOSS. And they shouldn't. Their job is to solve other
| problems. IT and software is there to _serve_ the
| administration. If, as a user, I can 't get my actual job
| done, or only with much more hassle than before, then
| that's all that matters.
|
| If we want FOSS to succeed in administrations, we have to
| put the same product hat on that we wear when we look at
| all the other software showcased here on HN. And Limux
| (that was the project's name) just brutally failed here.
| y4mi wrote:
| > _Didn 't Munich do this like 20 years ago and it was a
| complete failure?_
|
| Yes, but the failure was basically manufactured. You cannot
| keep every process as it was before and just install
| Linux/libre office, yet that is what they did.
|
| Their current processes are optimized for windows to a degree
| that usage of the Microsoft office suite is part of the
| training they undergo.
|
| Switching at this point would be a multi-year process that
| cannot be rushed. Each task needs to be evaluated separately
| and a new solution has to be tested and likely engineered
| from the ground up.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Their current processes are optimized for windows to a
| degree that usage of the Microsoft office suite is part of
| the training they undergo.
|
| Isn't it just regular office software? What processes do
| you have for dealing with spreadsheets and text documents?
| martin_a wrote:
| The problem with Munich was lobbyism, they were almost done
| with porting all their systems.
| [deleted]
| RedShift1 wrote:
| I agree with your arguments but the Linux desktop sucks, I
| would never want to use it full time let alone support it (note
| that I used to be a full time Linux desktop user, I left after
| KDE 4 came about). Linus Tech Tips is running a series on
| desktop Linux and they are hitting the hammer on the nail where
| exactly all the pain points are.
| sjcoles wrote:
| For what it's worth I have about 200 Linux Laptops and VDI
| (about 3:1 ratio) and the support burden is much less than
| Windows.
|
| Need to perform an update on the fleet? Click a couple
| buttons to version a repo to dev, old dev to test, test to
| prod, schedule a remote execution of `yum update -y`, wait.
| None of this will it won't it work song and dance of Windows
| updates.
|
| Need to perform a config change? Branch the ansible playbook
| repo, test your changes, merge to master, pull down repo on
| foreman, and schedule playbook execution.
|
| No bullshit, all text files, all standard protocols. It just
| works as I would hope Windows would.
| winstonschmidt wrote:
| I really don't get the hate that Linux Desktop gets. When
| comparing Mac OS to Gnome the difference feels marginal (at
| least for normal users) these days - everything feels snappy,
| consistent and looks nice. What exactly are the pain points?
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Hmm, I use Ubuntu for casual non-work stuff on a couple of
| old laptops, and it's totally fine for that, but the few
| times I have tried to do work things start to get a little
| less fine. Even with a clipboard manager, copy and paste is
| less reliable than on macOS, keyboard shortcuts (and
| ability to tweak them per-program or OS-wide) are clunkier
| or just not possible. Of course, I feel the same way when I
| have to use Windows for anything other than games...
| raspyberr wrote:
| I can imagine Linux desktop being made to work pretty well
| for a constrained work environment like an office.
| cardanome wrote:
| I would agree that the Linux Desktop sucks in absolute terms
| when we think what a sane Desktop experience could look like
| but compared to Windows, this does not hold true.
|
| Linux has quite improved from the early KDE 4 days. These
| days, you install Linux Mint with Cinnamon and you are good
| to go. Super easy to use and just works. It is based on
| Ubuntu, so you can use all the packages but with the bad
| stuff and experiments removed.
|
| Modern Windows is absolutely dystopian in comparison. Not
| being happy with getting money from licenses, they try to
| gather all the data about you that they can and try to shove
| their other services into your face. And then the whole
| update story. Not only do you need to restart the computer,
| you can't even do anything else while it is updating and it
| is taking its time.
|
| Plus every damn Windows Computer in every school, university
| or whatever has always been maddening slow. (Yeah, I know it
| all depends on the specs and how it is configured and if you
| are running some silly antivirus and so on but still. Install
| Linux and you get a fast and responsive experience and it
| stays that way.)
|
| Honestly I don't see any reason to run Windows instead of
| Linux in 2021 except maybe running very specific software
| that does not run well on Wine.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| This has been said ad infinitum. My experience is that
| Windows works, but very poorly. It is slow, hangs, steals
| my data and treats me like an abusive parent treats a
| toddler.
|
| But for me, Linux doesn't work. Or maybe it works 90%.
| Something's always broken, and a different thing is broken
| with each update. It requires constant tinkering.
|
| One flawless and amazing experience I had was working on
| Linux at a medium-sized tech firm, which had a dedicated
| sysadmin team who knew what they were doing. As a decent
| Linux user I could never maintain anything like that level
| of service on personal machines.
|
| I think it's quite telling that so few vendors sell you
| hardware+Linux+promise of it all working well. There are
| quite a few who will sell you hardware and pinky promise
| you can install Linux on it yourself, but that's not the
| same.
| cardanome wrote:
| What exactly does not work? What Distro were you using?
|
| Serious question because my experience is that I install
| Linux Mint and everything just works. Updates never break
| anything. Why should they?
|
| The only arguable pain point is maybe graphics drivers
| but honestly installing proprietary ones is just a few
| clicks these days. Plus you don't need them for office
| work anyway. (Maybe also some power saving features on
| certain lesser known laptops? As a ThinkPad user I always
| enjoyed great support.)
| aembleton wrote:
| Fingerprint reader does not work in Manjaro.
| nick__m wrote:
| If you have "supported" hardware, the Arch wiki probably
| have a solution to that problem:
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Fprint
| aembleton wrote:
| Yep, I've looked at that and my hardware isn't supported.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| I recently installed Ubuntu on an old laptop. Everything
| worked for a week. Then the touchpad stopped working.
|
| There are many pages telling you how to debug a touchpad.
| I tried various incantations of installing, reinstalling,
| uninstalling drivers, one set or another. I ran some
| special commands to capture messages coming out of the
| touchpad - showing it actually, at some level, worked.
| Just didn't move the mouse. Nothing helped.
|
| That it's even a thing to debug a touchpad is precisely
| what's "wrong" with Linux. Windows, crapware that it is,
| for me had never this kind of 1->0 failures. It's just
| all meh.
| rightbyte wrote:
| I believe the hardware stores state internally somehow.
|
| I dual booted a laptop Ubuntu/Windows for a while. And if
| a closed down Windows with the power cable connected then
| the NVidia card would not work in Ubuntu.
|
| The touch pad probably need some magic numbers to reset
| some state.
| 9dev wrote:
| This is the standard reaction I've heard so often from
| experienced Linux users, but you tend to forget all the
| trouble you're able to solve because you know what you're
| doing. Consider proprietary graphics drivers - ordinary
| people won't even know why that is an issue, where to
| look if the display flickers, or what even drivers are.
| And that's just the start of it... I've never had a Linux
| box that didn't require me to open a terminal to fix
| something after a while. Updates definitely break
| something sometimes, because the people publishing them
| are humans that make mistakes. Why shouldn't they?
|
| If you're using a Thinkpad, you're well of. Try a cheaper
| machine, and be surprised by exciting tinkering
| opportunities like fast battery drainage, issues
| connecting external displays, external printers not being
| recognised, or Bluetooth speakers not playing audio. We
| can fix it, my mom cannot.
| Symbiote wrote:
| None of that matters in this case, since the users don't
| purchase or administer their computers.
|
| The IT department selects appropriate configurations that
| support the software they need. My university has no
| problem supporting a Linux laptop and desktop, and
| Germany's administration would be doing something
| similar.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Consider proprietary graphics drivers - ordinary people
| won't even know why that is an issue, where to look if
| the display flickers, or what even drivers are.
|
| Why would an employee that wasn't part of IT procurement
| ever be thinking about that? If you're telling me that
| it's impossible to hire a single person for procurement
| who can figure out whether your machines will run on the
| OS your organization has chosen, I'm going to insist
| that's not true.
|
| > I've never had a Linux box that didn't require me to
| open a terminal to fix something after a while.
|
| I'm going to make the guess that you never run a stable
| distribution for your own personal desktop, like Debian
| stable, for example. For some reason, most individuals
| pretend to need a bleeding edge desktop. Organizations
| don't. Debian Stable is as fragile as a mountain.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Because there are only two ways to get up to date
| software on Linux: 1) run a bleeding edge distro, 2)
| compile from source.
|
| Neither of these are good options.
| trulyme wrote:
| What does "up to date" even mean in this context? It's
| not like there is a new version of Kmail every day. Why
| do you care if your version is a bit older?
|
| That said, the exception is a browser, where I would
| prefer to use the upstream version for security reasons.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > What does "up to date" even mean in this context? It's
| not like there is a new version of Kmail every day. Why
| do you care if your version is a bit older?
|
| Honestly, anything that a developer has pushed. Sometimes
| I want an SVN build of DOSBox or need a bleeding edge
| feature of some tool I use all the time. On Windows, this
| is simply a matter of downloading a binary, but by and
| large Linux software doesn't work that way. Distros
| expect that you will use whatever version of a package
| they have seen fit to grace you with, or you compile from
| source like it is 1975.
|
| It is not unreasonable or unrealistic to ask for a stable
| platform upon which one can run bleeding edge
| applications, yet this remains painful on Linux Desktop.
| cardanome wrote:
| For this we now have the AppImage format! (or
| snap/flatpack depending on your preference)
|
| For the few cases were you need bleeding edge you can
| just download and run it just like on Windows. For most
| applications bleeding edge is really not necessary and
| you can just normally install via package manager.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| If only that were true, but there isn't an AppImage (my
| preference, but same applies to flat and sanp too) for
| every program. Or even most programs in my experience.
| stelonix wrote:
| I'm not the parent but I'll answer as a 9 years Linux
| user and advocate.
|
| Things just break with updates, or sometimes do not work.
| I'm on Ubuntu 20 right now and Firefox can't detect the
| microphone on some websites like FB or instagram, but
| works just fine on Chrome. On my home computer running
| Arch and similar setup Firefox detects the mic just fine.
|
| It's brittle, it feels like it's duct tapes all the way
| down and the breakage is mostly because not many foss
| projects really care about backwards compatibility.
|
| However, on topic, the awful mess that is the Linux
| desktop experience does not matter since we're talking
| about public servants and not home use.
| cardanome wrote:
| Your example sounds more like typical Firefox to me.
| While I use it as my daily driver, video calls should
| always be done in Chrome in my experience. (Yeah, I know
| that is not exactly a point in favor of free software but
| it is what it is.)
|
| Honestly at least relative to the general mood of the
| software industry I wouldn't say that foss projects don't
| care about backwards compatibility. The kernel is famous
| for caring a lot about it. The Debian project is quite
| known for being relatively conservative. Unfortunately
| Ubuntu is known for experimenting on its users but thank
| god nobody is forced to use that.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Why are you doing video calls in a _browser_ in the first
| place ?
| cardanome wrote:
| Did I use the wrong preposition or are you telling me to
| always use proper apps for it?
|
| I don't see the issue, yes Teams is crap in Browser but
| most WebRTC based solutions work fine, at least in
| Chrome. Plus if I can avoid installing proprietary
| Software that is always a plus.
| com2kid wrote:
| Because that is how it is done now days?
|
| Browsers have supported video calls for years now. Heck
| there are plenty of Show HN posts about the latest in
| browser virtual chat rooms with full video and audio.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| Ubuntu, The system will only display 4 letters per line.
|
| https://askubuntu.com/questions/1330100/only-the-first-
| four-...
|
| As one recent example. For me MS works much better than
| Ubuntu on a day to day basis. I would much prefer a
| Linux, but I want one that gets out of the way and allows
| me to do work instead of hand hold it.
| trulyme wrote:
| Interesting how our experience with Linux is exactly the
| opposite. I love the fact that once I set it up, it
| simply works (Ubuntu). Flawless updates. No changes, no
| endless forced updates + restarts, no ads, no tracking,
| and most of all, capable terminals (no, git bash and wsl
| on Windows can't compete). I am saying that from a
| position of someone who is on Linux for 15 years now and
| works on Windows at $JOB when requested. Windows XP
| weren't even that bad, but Win10... awful.
| 2143 wrote:
| You're all talking past each other!
|
| It depends on the machines.
|
| I'm biased towards Linux. I also really like Macs.
|
| I've had Linux machines that just works. Buuuuut, before
| getting my hands on those machines I researched online
| and ensured that Linux works well on those. In my
| personal experience, Dell (Inspiron/Vostro/Latitude/XPS)
| and some ThinkPads usually work fine.
|
| On such machines, everything works out of the box. I've
| had to do nothing special on those machines to make
| anything work. Things worked right from the first
| install.
|
| Now, there are definitely plenty of machines out there
| where Linux DOES NOT work well out of the box.
|
| So, I guess Windows gets a brownie point for that -- you
| don't have to investigate upfront if Windows is going you
| work on a given consumer machine; it probably works on
| more consumer computers than Linux. (However, there's
| more to it than this if you think about how this
| situation came about; I don't want to open that can of
| worms here).
|
| My hope is that, if enough people choose to run Linux,
| then manufacturers might be incentivised to support Linux
| better so that even more people would choose Linux, and
| so on.
|
| I refuse to run Windows because:
|
| * I honestly just really like Linux, BSD, and unixy
| environments.
|
| * Windows had a clunky developer experience the last time
| I tried it (a decade ago); I hear it has improved, but
| frankly I don't care.
|
| * Statements like "Linux is cancer" from you-know-who
| never sat well with me. I suspect they're still evil.
|
| I also refrain from running Cinnamon because that reminds
| me of Windows from long long ago, and I'd rather not be
| reminded of Windows.
|
| Having said all that, I think LibreOffice is inferior to
| MS Office. It was the one Microsoft product that I
| actually liked.
| slightwinder wrote:
| > These days, you install Linux Mint with Cinnamon and you
| are good to go.
|
| This story is told since early days of Ubuntu. Reality
| still is not like that. As always, it strongly depends on
| what you do and what not. I'm using Linux as my main driver
| for 25 years, but still have a windows-install for certain
| tasks like gaming and certain hardware&software. And
| overall I consider the user-friendliness of windows still
| higher than linux. From my experience, casual task are
| working far better with windows out of the box than they do
| with linux. Though, this is of course not so much true for
| cases of heavy modification, as we have them in companies.
| In that case Linux seems to be overall better.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| KDE 5 is also really good IMO. I like it much more than
| Mate or Cinnamon.
| dachryn wrote:
| Linux came a long way since then. For projects like this,
| Zorin would be a great way to start. But even a standard
| desktop like Mint would already be a very good starting
| point.
|
| Don't forget that LTT is has two things that are not relevant
| for administration work: they try to game (which heavily
| influences their OS choice) and they need to figure out
| everything themselves. These cities can offer curated
| packages, the user does not have to figure out which package
| to use for what, the IT team provides them.
|
| With those two things in mind, the LTT story shows exactly
| that this can actually work, provided there is support for
| the rough edges. Windows also has rough edges by the way.
| jhgs wrote:
| >Linus Tech Tips
|
| Sorry
| nivenkos wrote:
| I've used Linux full-time at home for 10 years, and now at
| work (in an enterprise). For the most part, it works well and
| doesn't require a whole lot more support.
|
| The LTT video hit one specific packaging bug in PopOS that
| was present for only an hour, and was unfortunate. But to
| judge so much on that is unreasonable, shit happens in
| software engineering, it'd be like trying to use Facebook in
| the window where it was down and concluding that Facebook is
| completely unreliable.
|
| I'm not a PopOS user myself, but I have a lot of respect for
| everything they've achieved. It's not fair to constantly
| attack them for this one incident.
| Folcon wrote:
| As someone who used to be an avid linux desktop user, but
| has subsequently moved away from it and is interested in
| the current ecosystem with a view to maybe coming back,
| what would you say is a good entry point?
|
| I used to run Ubuntu back in the day if that helps.
|
| I'm curious to get a sense of how much has changed.
| FpUser wrote:
| I use Ubuntu and Linux Mint as my Linux Desktop. While I
| write enterprise backend server software for Linux ( C++
| usually) I am far from being anywhere near "the Linux
| Expert". Most of my Linux development / debugging is done
| using Visual Studio (the real one) and Visual Studio Code
| right from the Windows Desktop.
|
| Still I do some work on Linux Desktop. For example I am
| using Linux Desktop and Lazarus / Freepascal Combo to
| develop Linux Desktop GUI applications.
|
| From my experience go with majors - Ubuntu and Mint. My
| reason for it is that those have most answers on Internet
| when doing search. Easiest to find packages for as well.
| Every time I tried something more exotic I was stopped by
| having to deal with the different package management and
| way more hassles to find up to date software packages I
| need or trying to build from sources. I am sure the
| "experts" could solve it but I have better things to do
| with my life and am not willing to learn some not really
| exciting stuff just for the kick of it.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I've been using Arch Linux on Lenovo hardware (desktops
| and laptops) and have had no problems in years. I imagine
| the "easy" distros are even better with even more
| features. I wouldn't sweat it too much.
| lolinder wrote:
| Ubuntu is very stable and easy to get started with. I
| know there's some frustration with Canonical's direction,
| but it's still very much the distro I'd recommend to
| anyone who's just getting started. Everything more or
| less works out of the box for me (as much as it ever did
| with Windows), and Ubuntu still has the advantage of
| being the primary focus of most online documentation.
| t43562 wrote:
| You have so much choice! That's where Linux scores.
|
| In my way of seeing it, there are 2 main classes of
| distribution at the moment:
|
| 1) Rolling update distros like Arch. 2) Distributions
| which offer "releases" some of which are long-term ones
| that don't change much except for security fixes e.g.
| Ubuntu.
|
| I love the rolling distributions like ARCH and its
| derivatives because I hate having to do the once-
| every-2-years "big upgrade" that you get if you want to
| have a modern linux.
|
| You pay for that with the potential for slightly more
| breakage from time to time (that is usually quickly
| fixed).
|
| This suits my personality perfectly but you might just
| want a safe drive and you'd choose one of the Ubuntu-
| derivates and download the Long Term Support release. You
| could be experimental within containers or virtual
| machines and benefit from having a more robust host.
|
| NB. I wouldn't waste time on Fedora - it's not too stable
| _AND_ releases age quickly so I found it a pain to deal
| with.
| Iolaum wrote:
| Go with a mainstream distro to experiment and get a hang
| of it like Ubuntu, Fedora, PopOS, Mint etc.
|
| Main reason is that searching for sulutions in the web is
| much better for distros with a big user-base.
| Additionally understanding the trade-offs of different
| distros is very hard if you are not already in the
| ecosystem, hence just go with something to get your foot
| in the door and don't sweat it.
|
| Once you experience the papercuts and you get comfortable
| with them you can go into more advanced distros like Arch
| (derivatives e.g. Manjaro), Fedora Silverblue (what I
| currently use), etc.
|
| If you can get a friend to help you go with the
| installation process, that 'll be very useful.
|
| P.S. my TLDR suggestion would be to go with vanilla
| Fedora and use flatpaks for proprietary apps like
| steam/zoom/etc.
| Folcon wrote:
| I didn't get on much with fedora when I last used it, it
| sounds like it's gotten better though.
| nivenkos wrote:
| I'd recommend Arch Linux for developers.
|
| It takes a little bit of set-up / learning at the start.
| But you can easily try it out with a tool like ALMA -
| https://github.com/r-darwish/alma
|
| See my preset files here -
| https://github.com/jamesmcm/arch-i3-usb
|
| But PopOS is probably the closest to the previous
| beginner Ubuntu experience now.
| Folcon wrote:
| Thanks for the presets, I'll have a glance through it.
| nvrspyx wrote:
| As a counter-recommendation, I'd recommend openSUSE
| Tumbleweed for developers. It is also rolling-release,
| but packages are more heavily tested. It's easier to set
| up. And by default, it uses btrfs and provides a useful
| snapshot tool called snapper.
|
| While breaking has become relatively rare on Arch, it's
| simply easier to set up a stable environment without
| having to keep a close eye on updates with Tumbleweed.
| Iolaum wrote:
| > I'd recommend Arch for Linux developers.
|
| fixed it for you ;)
| cyber_kinetist wrote:
| Also, if you don't want the hardcore(!!!) installation
| experience of Arch Linux, try Manjaro Linux instead. It
| has one of the most sane defaults and the best GPU driver
| management system, and you can customize a lot of it
| since it's just Arch under the hood.
| ndiddy wrote:
| > The LTT video hit one specific packaging bug in PopOS
| that was present for only an hour
|
| The PopOS install ISO was made during when the packaging
| bug was occurring. and remained up for months. They finally
| replaced it after the Linus Tech Tips video came out.
| Anyone who installed Steam without first updating the
| system broke their install.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| I can understand why you left after kde 4 came out. That
| release gave me more trouble with desktop Linux than anything
| else in the last 10 years.
| heurisko wrote:
| My favourite desktop is the Unity desktop by Canonical, which
| used to be the old Ubuntu desktop.
|
| I felt like I could tell they were building it for actual
| users. There were things like the corner pixels activating
| logout, so you could just drag your mouse straight to the
| corner of the screen.
|
| It also ran well on old hardware.
|
| Ubuntu moving to the Gnome interface again was a step back in
| my opinion, but it shows what can be done if there is a
| business with a clear vision.
| bubblethink wrote:
| Ditto. Unity still works but is increasingly broken and
| will never work on wayland. However, kde plasma can be made
| to work like like unity. I recently went through this
| exercise a couple of days ago, and I think I'll be able to
| manage with plasma once unity dies.
| zeppelin101 wrote:
| I quite liked Unity, myself, but I recall that the Linux
| community was very upset and vocal at Canonical for having
| ditched Gnome. It's really hard to please everyone.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Honestly, all desktops suck these days. I find GNOME quite
| usable if you don't approach it as "fake Windows" or "fake
| macOS", while Windows 11 feels more like an incomplete KDE
| fork that tries to be Windows 10.
|
| The problems the LTT videos are pointing out are problems
| that office workers don't need to deal with. They don't need
| to deal with package management, drivers or games. They need
| a browser, a home directory and an office suite. The LTT
| videos struggle with the obvious problems, most of which come
| down to very specific use cases (say, video streaming) and
| compatibility stuff (getting things developed for Windows,
| mostly games, to work). Also note that while Linus has been
| having tons of issues, his counterpart Luke has mostly been
| encountering minor annoyances.
|
| I think the Linux desktop is great for a) advanced users and
| b) beginners that only do basic home and office work. The
| pain comes when you need to do moderately advanced stuff like
| automations, system configurations and obscure tools that few
| other people are using, or that aren't designed to run on
| that platform. In those circumstances, the community will
| direct you to the command line more often than not, and those
| users don't have the experience (or even the need, normally)
| to use it.
|
| In a recent podcast the LTT folks said they were considering
| doing an episode approaching Windows from the same standpoint
| as Linux. Getting some basic stuff working on Windows (or
| macOS, for that matter) can be as much of a pain as getting
| it done on Linux, but we've been teaching kids how to use
| those systems for decades now.
| JTbane wrote:
| >Linus Tech Tips is running a series on desktop Linux and
| they are hitting the hammer on the nail where exactly all the
| pain points are.
|
| I watched it, they failed to install Steam (the game
| platform) on Pop!_OS via the package manager, then tried to
| remove it. A bug also caused apt to remove the entire desktop
| shell (with 3 separate warnings to NOT DO THIS), and Linus
| happily typed "Yes, do as I say!" and broke the desktop env.
| vancan1ty wrote:
| I like KDE 5 very much, personally, and am a user of the KDE
| Neon distro. If you've looked again at KDE recently, what are
| your primary paint points?
| niibe wrote:
| As italian I can't agree more
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Munich did that a few years ago, which got rolled back after
| they elected the dude mayor who got Microsoft to move their
| German headquarters to Munich. Completely unrelated events, of
| course.
|
| There were of course some technical problems as well, e.g.
| because a number of administrative tasks can only be performed
| using Excel 2003 with VBS macros enabled and stuff like that,
| as well as "technical problems", like "users can't install
| software themselves" (i.e. users don't have root on the
| clients).
| mfer wrote:
| > "users can't install software themselves"
|
| This is one example of a real problem.
|
| Linux desktops are great for professional Linux people and
| hard core enthusiasts. Once you try to take them out to non-
| technical people trying to do everyday tasks it's much
| harder.
|
| I've driven numerous distros and keep running into UX
| problems masses will run into.
|
| How do we get distros that can be good daily drivers for the
| masses? How do we get people interested in crafting those?
| deknos wrote:
| this is misrepresentation. you cannot install systemwide
| software on any enterprise-installed system
|
| THAT was their problem. before limux there was no
| permission management and everybody was admin.
| mfer wrote:
| Windows and macOS allow you to install software (most of
| the time) without being an admin on the system. You only
| need to be an admin if the software to be installed needs
| certain capabilities.
|
| On Linux this isn't typical. You usually need to be an
| admin to install deb or rpm. Things are changing but it's
| not fast.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Wait, what?
|
| You mean, the Unix way of "you run your software from
| wherever you want" needs admin for installing software,
| while Windows doesn't?
|
| You can lock Linux down so that normal users can't
| replace almost the entire system on their sessions. This
| is possible. It is also usually a lot of work.
| oblio wrote:
| > How do we get distros that can be good daily drivers for
| the masses? How do we get people interested in crafting
| those?
|
| Heh, you might not like the answer.
|
| There might be a ton of alternatives somewhere out there,
| but there's only 1 real thing that seems to work with the
| information we have so far.
|
| So, what's the answer to these questions:
|
| > Q: How do we get distros that can be good daily drivers
| for the masses? How do we get people interested in crafting
| those?
|
| <<A. You pay them.>>
|
| Desktop environment polishing work is technically boring
| work and a thankless job. It's grunge work. Only a minority
| of experienced devs will do it willingly for a long time.
| apexalpha wrote:
| To be fair, you're probably downlplaying it. How much
| enterprise software runs on Linux? Probably not a lot.
| LibreOffice is nice, but it can't compete with MS office. let
| alone Exchange, outlook...
| deknos wrote:
| funny, the users didn't mind.
| sofixa wrote:
| What "enterprise software" is needed at a public
| administration? Almost all of it is custom ordered, so
| Linux compatibility can be a part of the requirements.
|
| Outlook is a dumpster fire, and there are perfectly fine
| alternatives. Very few people actually need the full might
| of Excel, and you can always RemoteApp it to them, and have
| the rest use Libre Office. Or heck, provide them with
| actual tooling better fit for their requirements than
| Excel.
|
| And in any case, IMHO, "public money, public code". Nothing
| should be paid for with public money without it being
| publicly accessible afterwards ( excluding weaponry of
| course).
| oblio wrote:
| > Very few people actually need the full might of Excel
|
| How's the groupware situation on Linux? Mail, calendars,
| adding shared meeting rooms, etc.
| ognarb wrote:
| KMail, Kalendar, Thunderbird, Nextcloud Groupware are all
| open source groupware solution what works on Linux.
|
| KMail was actually financed for some time by the german
| gouvernment.
| sofixa wrote:
| On Linux you can use a number of thick or web clients for
| any sort of groupware - Exchange, Office 365, OnlyOffice,
| Nextcloud, Collabora, Zoho something?
| avh02 wrote:
| you have web portals for outlook at least (doesn't make it
| usable though, my daily struggles!)
|
| Then there's MS teams. I'd rather it just not run anywhere
| (die) instead of being a "good enough" solution bundled in
| to the suite. At least if it weren't there we could use
| something usable like slack instead.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| I haven't used OS X in awhile, but IM clients should just
| copy Adium. It is (was?) so simple and light and easy to
| use, it integrated perfectly with OS X's Contacts app,
| and it was also being easily themed and styled by users.
| Also its dock icon showed the last few people who had
| messaged you in the background, rather than just the
| count of how many messages you had missed.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Strange that so much of it moved to the web then, isn't it?
| earthnail wrote:
| I'm from Munich. As much as I would've liked that project to
| succeed (I really did), I can tell you that Limux - that was
| the project's name - was a brutal usability disaster. As in,
| almost meme-level bad. It's like the Berlin airport in
| software.
|
| Sure, Microsoft has a huge office in Munich, and they
| definitely applied political pressure, too (it'd be naive to
| assume they didn't). The project's stated goal was to be a
| showcase of how Linux can work in the public sector. But
| because of that goal, there was also _massive_ political
| pressure the other way around.
|
| The simple truth is that Microsoft's products were/are just
| _far_ superior than what the Limux initiative shipped. The
| Linux transition caused massive productivity losses in the
| municipality 's administration. It's easy to say that VBS
| macros are evil, but if you migrate away from them, you need
| to provide an alternative.
|
| Simple things like a good calendar, working printing
| functionality, LOTS of basic stuff - it just felt like the IT
| was a decade behind. Here on HN, Windows continually gets
| roasted by how bad its UX is compared to Mac OS. With Limux
| vs Windows, the difference was practically 10x as large as
| that.
|
| I REALLY hope the LibreOffice transition goes well.
| Hopefully, this is a much wiser approach than trying to
| migrate everything off Windows at once.
| fsflover wrote:
| Actually, the Limux project is well alive:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux#Timeline
|
| _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._
| azangru wrote:
| Fascinating!
| ilamont wrote:
| Was a post-mortem of the Munich project published anywhere?
|
| Some people may remember the hype over the One Laptop Per
| Child Project, which had a noble mission that many people
| could get behind. In 2011 I heard from someone at MIT who
| criticized aspects of the program such as no real planning
| for support when the devices broke down in the field. Other
| issues came out years later, including unrealistic cost
| estimates and the crank:
|
| _If you remember the OLPC at all, you probably remember
| the hand crank. It was OLPC's most striking technological
| innovation -- and it was pure vaporware. Designers dropped
| the feature almost immediately after Negroponte's
| announcement, because the winding process put stress on the
| laptop's body and demanded energy that kids in very poor
| areas couldn't spare. Every OLPC computer shipped with a
| standard power adapter._
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17233946/olpcs-100-lapto
| p...
| nivenkos wrote:
| It's a shame it failed and there are no real cheap
| netbooks anymore (aside from Chromebooks).
|
| I used an Acer Aspire One when travelling through Germany
| as a student (to research jobs and conferences) - and it
| was amazing being able to program and write papers on
| such a small device.
|
| Reading about the hardware issues reminds me a lot of the
| ZX Spectrum reviews (especially the keyboard!) - keeping
| a low price means a lot of compromises unfortunately.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| The modern equivalent is a tablet with its corresponding
| type cover.
| nivenkos wrote:
| AFAIK I can't really run Jupyter notebooks, R, LaTeX and
| Rust on a tablet though. Perhaps the JingPad.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| You can on any Android tablet that allows root. You can
| run an X server via Termux and get a full graphical Linux
| environment. That will be necessary for Rust.
|
| R, JupyterNotebooks and LaTeX can be done without root.
| monocasa wrote:
| The GPD laptops fill that space for me now. My GPD Pocket
| literally fits in some of my pockets, is a regular x86
| machine. Came with Windows 10, but I'm running Mint on
| it.
| deknos wrote:
| > I'm from Munich. As much as I would've liked that project
| to succeed (I really did), I can tell you that Limux - that
| was the project's name - was a brutal usability disaster.
| As in, almost meme-level bad. It's like the Berlin airport
| in software.
|
| Bullshit
|
| > The simple truth is that Microsoft's products were/are
| just far superior than what the Limux initiative shipped.
| The Linux transition caused massive productivity losses in
| the municipality's administration. It's easy to say that
| VBS macros are evil, but if you migrate away from them, you
| need to provide an alternative.
|
| ah, because of that, departments nowadays cannot exchange
| word documents with universities, still after the said this
| would work then? bullshit. And Macros were replaced if the
| department and users cooperated and didn't wall the project
| off.
|
| > Simple things like a good calendar, working printing
| functionality, LOTS of basic stuff - it just felt like the
| IT was a decade behind. Here on HN, Windows continually
| gets roasted by how bad its UX is compared to Mac OS. With
| Limux vs Windows, the difference was practically 10x as
| large as that.
|
| lol, funny. the exchange solution still does not have all
| the features the old one (which was ugly) had. Bullshit.
|
| I was there. You are just biased. And there are known bugs
| with Windows and with Office. And ask what? Nobody fixes
| them, users have to live with it. Back with LiMux and
| LibreOffice we fixed and repaired stuff.
|
| You use network-manager with openconnect or 802.1x with
| hooks? or the KDE printing dialog? or libreoffice with the
| QT interface? you can thank the LiMux project for that.
|
| i'll tell you a little secret: half a year ago there was
| still no replacement for printer administration which the
| limux team built, the administration is still done with the
| config-/deployment solution for limux there. (i do not know
| the current situation, but that's just ridiculous)
|
| LiMux worked. Stop your shilling. Because NOBODY could tell
| us real technical problems we couldn't solve. One of us
| even fixed the borked intel graphics driver once.
| necovek wrote:
| It'd greatly help if you focused on the arguments you
| want to share -- I understand the frustration from
| someone claiming your work is "subpar", but this way your
| message gets lost altogether.
| deknos wrote:
| Well, when others overreach, why should i not be allowed
| to overreach? otherwise it's tonepolicing. when people
| ask neutrally i explain neutrally and i am polite..
|
| but "brutally disaster" is almost slanting in my eyes.
| afavour wrote:
| > I was there. You are just biased.
|
| That doesn't mean you're free of bias. If anything it
| means the opposite.
|
| "Limux worked" and "we solved a whole ton of problems and
| had to implement printing dialogs, QT interfaces and
| more" feel like statements somewhat at odds with each
| other. Were all these bug fixes complete on day one or
| did they have to be done after the Limux switch had been
| made?
|
| Obviously I'm an outside observer here but boasting that
| you had to do a whole ton of work including _network
| management_ and that no one has done much to it since
| makes it sound to me like maybe Linux isn't or wasn't
| ready.
| deknos wrote:
| LOL, damned if you do, damned if you don't
|
| > That doesn't mean you're free of bias. If anything it
| means the opposite.
|
| Maybe, but at least i know what i talk about. You observe
| from the outside and talk about "meme-level bad"? do you
| believe anything BILD and AZ writes?
|
| > "Limux worked" and "we solved a whole ton of problems
| and had to implement printing dialogs, QT interfaces and
| more" feel like statements somewhat at odds with each
| other. Were all these bug fixes complete on day one or
| did they have to be done after the Limux switch had been
| made?
|
| again, damned if you do, damned if you dont:
|
| Linux can do something, which windows cannot || : eh, wo
| cares
|
| Linux can do what Windows can: oh, they just copy
| windows, windows is surely better.
|
| Windows can do, what linux cannot do (perhaps it does it
| in another way): linux is not ready!!!!
|
| Linux implements stuff, features or bugfixes: linux is
| not ready!
|
| Funny thing is: we often implemented requirements which
| were dropped, if windows could not fulfill them. NOBODY
| said windows is not "ready". Ready for which value?
|
| > Obviously I'm an outside observer here but boasting
| that you had to do a whole ton of work including network
| management and that no one has done much to it since
| makes it sound to me like maybe Linux isn't or wasn't
| ready.
|
| This was 5 to 15 years ago. Windows also had a lot to
| improve in that time. Do you say then, that Windows was
| also not ready?
|
| And we not only did Bugfixes but also Improvements (the
| network manager stuff was one such thing).
|
| There was a time, when Linux for public institutions was
| not ready. But that time is long gone. (conservatively 5
| years i would say, some would say more).
|
| I see shortcomings, but there are those also with
| Windows. But nobody says "Windows is not ready". And that
| makes me kinda angry, especially if people do not know
| what they are talking about with "meme-level bad" or
| "brutally disaster". That's just outright lying and makes
| people angry who poured their soul into making it work
| for the users.
|
| Because we also trained users on the plattform, even with
| libreoffice, so we could get their feedback.
| eitland wrote:
| > Linux can do something, which windows cannot || : eh,
| wo cares
|
| Exactly.
|
| We who have used Linux for a while have had fun a couple
| of times before asking if Windows is ready for our
| desktops and the answer was most often a resounding no.
|
| Lately I've made do with just Windows and WSL and to be
| honest, it still isn't ready for my desktop.
|
| Recently my laptop had overheated in the bag a number of
| times.
|
| Knowing I would probably have some work to do to work
| around Microsofts new "bake your laptop feature" (also
| known as "modern standby") permanently, I dug into power
| settings.
|
| The reason this has been more problematic recently became
| very clear immediately: some recent software update has
| managed to set action on closing lid to "Do nothing".
|
| If this was Linux there would be a major outcry about how
| it is not ready for ordinary users.
|
| For Windows it is an ordinary Tuesday.
|
| Same goes for a lot of other things: waiting for half a
| minute before git returns (admittedly on a collection of
| 500 files, but still), it is just the way it is.
|
| Still can't match apt-get or any other package manager?
| Deal with it.
|
| 30% longer compiles? You are welcome.
|
| Ads on the logon screen of my work PC with Professional
| license? Of course. Same with ads in my start menu and
| even in Soltaire like in some cheap Android app. Yep.
| ploxiln wrote:
| Yeah, in my experience, with big orgs, it's like:
|
| Windows has bugs that don't get fixed: haha, computers,
| what can you do, eh, haha
|
| Linus has bugs which can get fixed: see, nobody can use
| this thing!
|
| I kinda get it though, people prefer to have the
| "industry-standard bugs", it means it's not their fault,
| they can explain it easily to anyone they have to work
| with ...
| gentleman11 wrote:
| The problem is that a lot of organizations see foss as
| purely a free thing and not an investment. If they put half
| the money they spent on licensing into paying people to
| improve the foss packages they use, the ecosystem would
| transform and everyone would benefit. Massive cost savings
| overall, and it would push paid software to work harder to
| compete (who knows, it might even force Microsoft to offer
| decent privacy policies and remove ads from their
| manipulative desktop)
| [deleted]
| tdeck wrote:
| Organizations like school systems don't have a great
| track record managing custom software projects. They
| don't know what to look for and who to hire, and how much
| things should cost. It's very likely that these problems
| would translate into funding FOSS development as well.
| Also, it's a big headache to manage custom development
| compared to buying or downloading an off the shelf
| package.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| This is the opposite of custom development for the most
| part, with the exception of some integration work.
| nodejs_rulez_1 wrote:
| _> If they put half the money they spent on licensing
| into paying people to improve the foss packages..._
|
| Like in a legally-binding contract way or some hippie way
| hoping for the best?
| ipaddr wrote:
| Hiring developers to work on specific package
| improvements is what is normally done. Could be legally
| binding, probably would be a standard employment
| agreement but you could do it through a hippie way
| (coding circle?).
| mistrial9 wrote:
| great to see the "H-word" used as a slur, again (great
| for my own sense of antagonistic prejuidice being alive
| and well that is).
|
| for a more constructive reinforcement of what a "hippy
| way" might be, in business and government:
|
| anti-rascist, that is actively inviting and communicating
| with others socially; inclusive generally; valuing
| cooperation; building and valuing talent for its own
| sake; bringing in arts to shared spaces; generally
| vegetarian; health proactive; tolerance of personal drug
| use including tobacco; deeply environmentalist; generally
| opposed to military-style administration; generally
| opposed to authoritarian governments; use of non-monetary
| trade goods; valuing education and definitely advanced
| education.
|
| are these things "fail" in City Administration as the
| parent comment implies ? not necessarily
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| "node_js_rulez_1" decries hippy open source support
| model.
|
| ... ummmmmmm ... look in your username.
|
| Seriously, your stack is running on hippies, top to
| bottom.
|
| TOP TO BOTTOM.
| zoomablemind wrote:
| >...I REALLY hope the LibreOffice transition goes well.
|
| If anything that rings alert on my mind is the LO's Calc,
| which at times decides to become slow and consume the CPU
| for no apparent reason. Or equally annoying flacky
| interoprability betwen LO Writer and MS Office Word (works
| in general, but loses some alignment, magles styles etc.)
|
| As much as I'm for LO and want them to succeed, I feel for
| the clerks dealing with these counter-productive issues.
| olyjohn wrote:
| You say you want them to succeed, but I don't believe you
| are sincere. This negativity with anecdotal evidence is
| so annoying. Like the whole world will come to a halt
| because some document formatting got fucked up.
|
| I see this same shit with Excel all the time. It's
| fucking FULL of bugs that have just been around for so
| long, people just get used to it and work around it.
|
| I mean, if you selected a group of 30 rows in Excel, then
| use CTRL to deselect one row in the middle... it doesn't
| deselect it, it "selects" the row again, so now it's just
| darker than all the other rows. Is this fixed yet? It was
| a bug in fucking Office 2016 and goes back years. Nobody
| said it wasn't ready for use!
|
| It's such a fucking basic feature. To de-select a single
| row out of a group that is selected. It's the single most
| counter-productive thing ever. When I found this bug, I
| was blown away that nobody ever complained about it! I
| worked with thousands upon thousands of people with Excel
| and it was never a problem?!
|
| Word doesn't even play nice with it's own files... ever
| moved a file from Office 2013 to Office 2016? I've seen
| it garble files a million times. Move a Word doc from Mac
| to Windows and shit gets hosed sometimes.
|
| The clerks will get used to the issues. Just the same way
| that they got used to the hot fucking garbage that
| Microsoft charges enterprises and governments substantial
| amounts of money for, and provides precisely dick for
| support in return.
|
| EDIT: I mean look at this shit! Apparently deselecting is
| a new concept to Microsoft!
|
| https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/deselect-a-
| select...
|
| Note: This feature is only available in Excel for Window
| if you have Office 2019, or if you have a Microsoft 365
| subscription. If you are a Microsoft 365 subscriber, make
| sure you have the latest version of Office.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > This negativity with anecdotal evidence is so annoying.
|
| Isn't it.
|
| > " _It 's such a fucking basic feature. To de-select a
| single row out of a group that is selected. It's the
| single most counter-productive thing ever._"
|
| Probably not as counter-productive as throwing away
| thousands of person-years of learned skill and experience
| because of some Linux fanaticism.
|
| How is "it's not as good but we can patch it until it's
| equivalently buggy, people will get used to it" any
| compelling reason to change over?
|
| How is "but but I hate microsoft" any compelling reason
| to change over?
|
| And the techcommunity.microsoft thread from 2018
| announcing deselect has people who used that "multi-click
| makes a cell darker" feature and are bothered that it's
| gone.
|
| > " _Microsoft charges enterprises and governments
| substantial amounts of money for, and provides precisely
| dick for support in return._ "
|
| You mean like that feature you were crying out for and
| then found that they built? That kind of nothing?
|
| Or like how Office 365 has collaborative editing and
| LibreOffice has a page saying it's been in development
| since 2006 and isn't ready and linking to an old mailing
| list post from 2020 talking about deprecating he API they
| had built for it, as the latest update?
| [deleted]
| zoomablemind wrote:
| >... You say you want them to succeed, but I don't
| believe you are sincere.
|
| Not sure what drives your experience, but I've been using
| LO (Linux based) continuously for the past 10 yrs. Still
| do. More so, tried to convert other users. I don't
| believe I'm the only one to stumble on some usability
| issues with LO.
|
| Did I get used to dealing with the issues? Nope. This
| still annoys me every time, it's also a drag to
| interoperate with MS Office (no, it's not going away soon
| in this world). Other users? Well, most of my attempted
| converts now either pay the subscription or use the
| GSuite or ... stick to the older version of MS Office.
|
| So I myself do want the LO to get better, but for the
| most of the failed "converts" it's a lost cause for now.
| smartbettor wrote:
| thanks for mentioning the Berlin airport fiasco - I had
| never heard the story - hilarious and very troubling for
| those in Berlin!
| mlry wrote:
| Oh, if you find the story of BER hilarious and troubling
| you should read up on the 2021 vote for federal and local
| parliaments. Or the civil administration there in general
| where you have to make an appointment to get your
| passport renewed months in advance.
| pas wrote:
| > 2021 vote for federal and local parliaments
|
| tldr?
| DocTomoe wrote:
| Some people are unhappy with the results.
|
| One candidate was generally hated by the public and got
| fucked by the press with "creative photo editing", badly.
|
| One candidate was poised to become the first green
| chancellor, but then managed to have not one, not two,
| but three case of academic fraud and lying about her past
| tacked to her ticket. Her party came in second.
|
| One candidate was all about some nebulous idea of
| "freedom", which made him relevant enough that his party
| now is king maker, when the first-time voters, who
| traditionally would go to the Green Party, decided enough
| Covid Lockdowns is enough.
|
| And one candidate did ... nothing. Absolutely nothing.
| Which means he also couldn't embarrass himself (even
| though historically, he's a ... problematic ... figure).
| This guy came in first, so he's going to be the next
| chancellor.
|
| And that's just the candidates. Then you got the State of
| Berlin obviously unable to hold democratic elections,
| given
|
| - there was a lack of ballots in many voting offices
|
| - in some voting offices, there were ballots for other
| districts, which rendered those votes invalid
|
| - they accidentally allowed 16-year-olds to vote in the
| federal elections (where you have to be 18 to vote)
|
| - they accidentally gave a mandate to the wrong guy, who
| shared the same name, but not the same party affiliation
| with the actual winner
|
| - some votes were cast after 18:00, which is the official
| cutoff date
|
| - in some districts, there was a 150% participation rate
|
| - some offices sent people waiting in line home because
| "it's unlikely you'll be in in time"
|
| - ... I am sure I am missing a few catastrophes - a LOT
| went wrong in Berlin ...
|
| It was hilarious to watch this mess unfold.
| ruph123 wrote:
| I always wondered why they had to create their own fork. I
| had the feeling that this is unecessary maintenance work
| that they took on and a "not invented here" philosophy.
|
| Why not just use one of the avaible distros or why not even
| make a deal with SUSE (a bavarian company) to have a
| subscription model with support directly from experienced
| distro makers? Surely they could've made sure that all
| important features and workflows can be implemented.
|
| Of course this would've needed to be a public bidding but
| if Red Hat gets it or SUSE does not really matter and
| surely is much cheaper than Microsoft licenses.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > I always wondered why they had to create their own
| fork. I had the feeling that this is unecessary
| maintenance work that they took on and a "not invented
| here" philosophy.
|
| For the same reason there are hundreds of forks and
| counting: it is difficult to get the environment you want
| without rebuilding everything from scratch, and once you
| do that you have to maintain it.
| josefx wrote:
| They went with an Debian/Ubuntu based fork due to
| popularity.
|
| >if Red Hat gets it
|
| If your goal is to run a proprietary OS you might as well
| stay with Windows. No reason to endorse outdated IBM
| enterprise crapware after they killed the only compatible
| distro that didn't require paying the IBM tax to test and
| develop software for it.
| deknos wrote:
| because back in the day, no distribution was good enough
| for our needs. today is a completely other situation.
|
| redhat might, but they borked it somehow as they said we
| would not be allowed to change anything or loose all
| support. at least that was what i heard.
|
| and then there was supposedly the decision "we do not
| want any external company due to the bad experience with
| microsoft".
| ptman wrote:
| The big distros are quite customizable in order to suit a
| large audience. A large organization typically has
| defaults and customizations that need to be added. A
| common strategy is to _distribute_ their customizations
| by creating a distribution based on some more widely used
| distribution. Google had Goobuntu based on Ubuntu.
| sofixa wrote:
| Wasn't that only initially, and was drastically improved
| later on? Even Accenture (the biggest Microsoft partner)'s
| audit didn't conclusively say that switching back to
| Windows will be better than what Limux was at that point.
|
| Furthermore, the French Gendermerie is using Linux at a
| similar scale, and there are no usability problems. If they
| can make it work, i don't think it's impossible for anyone
| else.
| merb wrote:
| > "Accenture (the biggest Microsoft partner)"
|
| actually accenture's biggest partner is not microsoft,
| it's money. really, they would sell their employees souls
| for money.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| I think the truth between what you say and the other person
| accusing you of being biased is somewhere in the middle.
| They basically went too mach ahead of the time. Mind you,
| the project started 18 years ago! The computing landscape
| was very different back then. I know what you mean as I was
| forced by my employer to use Linux on the desktop at that
| time and it was mediocre - but many things changed in the
| meantime. Probably the most important: the web revolution
| has happened. Nobody is using abominations like the
| ActiveX/Silverlight/whatever anymore. VBS is no longer
| omnipresent (partly because of security reasons). Hardware
| support in Linux is incomparable to what was in 2004. SO
| yes, I can imagine it was terrible back then, but I still
| think it's very important not to give up and I'm happy they
| basically restarted the project recently.
| deknos wrote:
| the hardware thing was not a problem for us as we could
| dictate which computers were bought. so computers were
| bought which would be compatible.
|
| our problem was: none of the tools we needed were
| available in the quality and richness as they exist
| today.
|
| automatic deployment to hundred of PCs at the same time
| with extensive automatic configuration? session and
| configuration management per user?
|
| departments want to use different backgrounds per house
| or subdepartment. all that stuff had to be built in a
| scalable way.
|
| the solutions today were not available back then.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| I suspect the reason for that is nobody ever tried a Linux
| deployment as big as that, so the tooling to manage it
| simply didn't exist.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Uhh "users can't install software themselves" is how things
| are supposed to be. If you're still giving everyone admin
| rights you're going to have a fun time every time one of them
| falls for phishing.
| leodriesch wrote:
| Is this also true for developers? I've only seen "install
| anything you want" types of setups yet, are there companies
| that don't allow that on your work laptop?
| myohmy wrote:
| Yes, developers are a major threat vector in any non-IT
| company. Which is why large companies can't innovate.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| I just heard that our new hire got his company issued
| laptop and can't do work because he can't install the
| software he needs. He has to organise with it to get it
| installed. To do software qa.
|
| If i was in that situation I would just reformat the
| computer. Luckily I don't have a company issued laptop. I
| gave it back because it was a Dell XPS aeroplane. I use my
| own laptop for work.
| BurningPenguin wrote:
| I work in IT in a German company. Every user has admin
| rights on the local machine. Why? Because the IT-Boss
| couldn't figure out how to allow installing updates
| (software and OS) on Win 7 without having admin. And then
| there is the semi-official "shadow IT".
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| In my experience I would say that limiting users in this
| way, unless they have a very standardized workflow and will
| _never_ be expected to deviate from it, is a terrible idea.
| Most of the risks you 're actually afraid of don't need
| local admin to do significant damage. Locking people out of
| their local OS just protects the local OS (which is
| trivially reimaged), not their documents, and not the
| resources they have access to on the network; you know, the
| stuff you actually care about. Sure, there are a (very)
| small number of new attack vectors opened into your network
| by programs which can get local admin, most of which you
| should be mitigating against anyway, but compared to the
| added friction you cause the users by taking it away those
| are just not worth it. And that's before you consider
| privilege escalation attacks that make it irrelevant if the
| user even has local admin.
| necovek wrote:
| This is also why I always complained that no-root-by-
| default is not particularly advantageous for Linux way-
| back-when: basically, stuff I care about is in my $HOME.
|
| Main driver to want a Free Software system for public
| institutions is that it's a Free Software system,
| allowing for local companies to participate in
| development and fairly compete to only add on to the
| software, avoiding the entire provider lock-in.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Welcome to bigtime shadow IT then in a white collar / high
| performing workforce. People will be using personal
| laptops, spinning up AWS instances etc to get work done
| especially if they collaborate with others.
|
| I worked at a place, folks had to go to the neighboring
| copy/print place to FAX themselves documents, because IT in
| its wisdom had locked down their machines and prohibited
| scanning docs (ie, they faxed to a virtual fax, then took
| those PDFs and sent them on).
|
| I am convinced that part of the AWS appeal for many folks
| is to escape this "best practice" IT control that just
| results in no progress / ability to get work done. This was
| 10x during pandemic.
|
| When IT hasn't yet gotten Zoom into default image, and you
| need Zoom or whatever to talk with others practically, so
| annoying.
| mikojan wrote:
| Never forget, Gates actually went to Munich in a luxurious
| mobile office disguised as a delivery truck to cajole that
| mayor.[0]
|
| [0]: https://www.golem.de/news/von-microsoft-zu-linux-und-
| zurueck...
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| That sounds so wonderful! Hopefully the US can also come
| together by divesting from European goods and services and also
| participate in this independence movement!
| nawgz wrote:
| Trade might be a good thing in general, but this comment is a
| bit reductionist with respect to the role of US Big Tech in
| suppressing and controlling EU tech
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| The EU seems to have no problem legislating against and
| penalizing US Big Tech in return. IMO the European attitude
| towards entrepreneurship and startups does more harm to EU
| tech than "US Big Tech" ever would or could
| bildung wrote:
| What kind of harm, i.e. which stats to look at to compare
| the different approaches?
| biztos wrote:
| I was recently talking to a friend in Spain about a
| startup idea and he said no way could he join a startup
| (in a senior role) because if it failed his career would
| never recover.
|
| AFAICT it really is the attitude pushing so much
| innovation out of the EU and not the legal environment
| much less the competition. The newer members like Hungary
| and Romania seem to have a lot less of this problem (but
| more of other problems like stable business environment
| and predictable rule of law).
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Plenty of US people like and make open source software. You
| don't need to be worried.
| IdiocyInAction wrote:
| The US started this already by imposing tariffs on European
| goods like steel.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's an entirely empty threat. Our trade deficit is larger
| than the GDP of half the countries on earth combined. What
| are we going to do with what we purchase in Europe - switch
| to buying it from China?
| swarnie wrote:
| I think they tried that and it was an expensive disaster.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I'd like to see a better GUI before forcing that switch.
|
| Is there something more simple than the Gnome GUI that ships by
| default with Ubuntu? I've been playing with Gnome/KDE since the
| late 90's and they still are behind IMHO. Is there something
| more like iOS-simplicity for Linux distros? That would be key.
| dan00 wrote:
| You have to start somewhere and if you can switch just one
| software, which you can later also use on linux, it seems like
| the perfect way to go.
|
| Switching is always painful and will result in some troubles.
| So keeping it at a minimum is a good idea.
| go_elmo wrote:
| This could be a major ease on state budgets, also communal ones
| and allow to allocate resources where they are more urgently
| needed. Might require high initial costs for setup & staff
| education which would amortize over a few years for sure.
| f6v wrote:
| If you could save money by switching to Linux from Windows,
| I'd expect to see much more Linux machines in corporations.
| go_elmo wrote:
| I only saw linux machines in SE companies so far (at least
| remote ones). Maybe, just maybe, it is because non-tech
| people 1) cant handle it as cli is needed from time to time
| 2) because personal preferences & habits make it almost
| impossible to "force" using linux on staff..?
| namdnay wrote:
| 3) Excel macros and VBscript
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| 4) distribution madness
|
| 5) lack of userland backwards compatibility
|
| 6) poor commercial application support...
| go_elmo wrote:
| *aka cancer / high burden to switch systems to [insert
| any turing-complete language]
| f6v wrote:
| > because personal preferences & habits make it almost
| impossible to "force" using linux on staff..?
|
| I'm willing to speculate office workers won't care. More
| and more people will have smartphone as the only personal
| computer. So it won't be about them not wanting to use
| Linux at work because they run Windows at home.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| The only places I've ever heard of having linux on their
| computers are tech companies or software devs.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > collaboratively investing so that everyone benefits and
| Europe can build its own Tech industry and have some
| independence from the US.
|
| So you'll end-up having devs on the payroll instead of license
| fees.
|
| Also, you'll need to compete with the US for the best devs to
| work on your platform now that you are effectively building a
| competitor.
| silvester23 wrote:
| > Now switch to Linux too
|
| Yes, that seems to be the plan. Literally the first paragraph
| says
|
| > and the Windows operating system is to be replaced by
| GNU/Linux
| jotadevmc wrote:
| In Spain some steps have already been taken. At least on
| Madrid, all schools use MAX, which is developed by public
| workers and includes useful open-source apps that integrate
| with the existing EducaMadrid platform, entirely run on open-
| source software. With that said, people have a hard time using
| it compared to Windows, which they are most likely already used
| to use. It also becomes a problem when you need to use it at
| home. Most people dont know how to install an OS.
| mc32 wrote:
| Too little too late. Most "office collab" is going cloud.
| Neither Google nor MS are threatened by free/open thick client
| alternatives. Users will still need their onedrive googledrive
| for collab.
|
| Admittedly some work is non collab but more and more of that
| gets pushed to SaaS.
| nivenkos wrote:
| That's less of an issue though as it's a bit easier to
| migrate. If everything were already on Linux, then switching
| cloud providers is much simpler than switching the desktop
| systems themselves.
|
| Also from my own enterprise experience, Office 365 cloud has
| still got a long way to go.
| mc32 wrote:
| It depends. If you have regulations that influence
| retention and audit trail etc it's less easy to migrate.
| Yizahi wrote:
| That's the thing though - if cloud office has 80-90% of
| functionality of common desktop office then it's completely
| covers open source office value proposition. And for the
| rest several percent of power users open office is still
| lacking and not an option to switch.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Even more, on 365 you can have the full desktop app, with
| fully integrated cloud collaboration and storage
| yorwba wrote:
| I think this is Schleswig-Holstein's nextcloud instance:
| https://infonext.schleswig-
| holstein.de/nextcloud/index.php/l...
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| https://www.collaboraoffice.com/collabora-online/
| Shadonototra wrote:
| Great move! that'll encourage more people to contribute and
| improve the software
|
| I agree with others, next logical move is to switch to linux
| fully
| periheli0n wrote:
| This is a great move! I hope they will still have money left to
| train all teachers and office staff properly.
|
| Believe it or not, many German teachers have started using
| digital technology for real only in 2020, when the pandemic first
| hit. They are now totally entrenched with the Microsoft way of
| doing things. They know all the MS quirks and how to navigate
| around them.
|
| Free software alternatives to MS products have different quirks
| that will need different workarounds.
| pt_PT_guy wrote:
| next: use matrix.org
| Bathroomtaken wrote:
| Libre office sucks! Google sheets is so much better
| kgwxd wrote:
| Again? Must be time to renegotiate their MS Office contract.
| ksec wrote:
| Interesting as I have just been thinking about this as a thought
| exercise. Assuming one want to switch away from M$ Office, should
| Office software be an Open Source Native Experience like libra
| office or should it be a cloud based close source but free
| experience ( aka Google ).
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Again?
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