this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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This was proposed once before with Germany going open source. They eventually went back.
I hope this is different, would love some nation state backing of FOSS
Germany's attempt at switching to Linux is a prime example of bad management, wrong decisions and, well, idiocy.
If memory serves: they chose Debian, instead of Ubuntu and didn't do enough research concerning hardware compatibility. When they were already in progress, it turned out they had craploads of office hardware like scanners, printers and such, that weren't working under Debian.
Did they choose debian? IIirc they tried rolling their own release based on debian and quickly fell behind.
Faulty project management is spot on tho. No control of what hw they were working with. Should anyways have started with 5 years of requiering new hardware to be linux compatible. To weed out the worst win-only-devices
Could've written their own drivers, and shared them with the rest of the world on GitHub!
Reverse engeneering blackbox drivers without vendor support is insanly time and resource consuming. And would instantly remove any economic sense in their project.
I was obviously joking. I know it's pain because I've tried getting my unsupported fingerprint reader working to no avail.
I'm not sure how things were really, since across the years the message has changed.
In the initial "we failed, let's revert to Win" times, Debian was named. I remember those times and news well, since I made a bunch of flamewars on both Debian and Ubuntu forums concerning the choice, especially since I myself had similar - hardware compatibility - issues in our corporate environment and I perceive the choice of distro as equally puzzling and idiotic.
Exactly.
Or, they should check what hardware they need to replace on the spot and how much it'd cost.
Got a source other than "Germany" wanted to switch to Linux? The only thing I am aware of is the city of Munich switching for a couple of years, which went fine, but then a new mayor from the conservative shitheads who has about as much clue of technology as a towel probably rolled it all back to Windows.
What is "Debian, instead of Ubuntu" supposed to imply? Ubuntu is a piece of shit ever since canonical ramped up the enshittification, first with desktop search expressions being default-forwarded to canonical servers, and then with snap repositories under control of the corporation.
That we're discussing the topic older than a decade ago, when things were wildly different to how they are now.
I don't store bookmarks for that old events. Feel free to consult Google for that...
https://www.govtech.com/archive/german-government-goes-linux.html
wow - 2002ish - okay, that really went by me at the time, I was still running on Windows (2000) myself back then, maybe that's why. Indeed - back then, it was a wholly different story about HW support. Thanks for the link!
Noprob.
From what I gather, there were similar projects in the past attempted by great many deal of bodies and organizations. Some were quite successful. For example,CERN used and supported CENTOS-based computers and allowed Windows machines but on the "you care of this crap on your own" basis.
As far as I can tell, the most important challenges were:
luckily the relevant points have been solved in the past 20 years
In terms of support, however, competent Linux support on site is a lot more feasible than competent windows support. Most organisations nowadays hire braindead morons for IT support & IT management, and then use Microsoft cloud / Office 365 services, and for any ticket the dumb mtherfckers in house can't solve, they open a ticket at microsoft. And if that isn't addressed, the user is shit outta luck.
I have seen the same dumb and stubborn idiots in corporate IT first level (and second level) support across most major organisations whose core business is not IT, because - especially engineering - CEOs tend to think "IT is just enabling our "actual" work, so let's give the controllers authority to procure IT services from a contractor".
Oh, and yes, that's a lot of frustration speaking from my choice of words :)
I agree, but there's one thing, that needs to be perceived from different perspective: Linux Office suites > ARE < awful.
They look ugly. They overcomplicate certain, simple tasks. They aren't as compatible with MS' documents as they need to be. The only exceptions to it are WPS Office, but since it joined the dark side (ads(, it can no longer be suggested, and OnlyOffice - possibly one of the most recent entries to the list of possible MS' Office alternatives.
Yes, yes, I know "I can do in Libre everything MS packet can do, and more".
...but the problem is that it's not you who will need to work with it. People in business need a tool that gets the job done, is well supported and doesn't get in the way. Libre, unfortunately does - everyone who tried to apply an unorthodox page numbering to a document knows that it's too complicated for non tech-savvy user.
I haven’t worked somewhere that really requires a desktop office suite in like 15 years. Almost everyone seems to get by with browser based tools. The big exception being finance and their excel monstrosities.
I haven't seen an enterprise, where Excel wasn't present.
...and I am in IT since late 90s.
hardly anyone properly uses Excel capabilities though - I have seen way too many calculations using 5+ extra columns with provisional results used for the next formula, because people were incapable of opening a VBA editor and writing a custom formula to do what they need.
I am honestly surprised about the conclusions you came to. I use LibreOffice as my daily driver, and while it's far from perfect, Microsoft Office is not even playing in the same league in terms of usability & stability. MS Office is an abomination of bloatware, and the ribbon kills all productivity. Not to mention load times, and sporadic multi-second hangs on a quick CTRL-S. Literally the only thing MS Office has that LibreOffice does not, is MS Access - and the only thing MS Office does better is VBA, and that's probably more so for trademark / copyright reasons rather than LO not being able to implement the same thing.
I work with "people in business", and I see on a daily basis that most of them are unable to even memorize the simplest hotkeys / keyboard functions, such as shift + arrow keys to select, ctrl + arrow keys to jump words, wordstar (ctrl x,c,v) and so many others. I don't think you will find many people who prefer MS Office and can work more efficiently on MS Office than an avid LibreOffice user on LO.
The office suite directs the workflow of the user, and MS Office getting rid of the standard drop-down menus in 2007, guided all MS Office users down a road to insanity.
Not quite. 😉
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/office365-plans-and-pricing
E3 plan is the norm in more complicated workspaces now. Exchange, Outlook, Teams, OneNote, Sharepoint are commonly used in such an environment, followed by Forms (HR department loves these and rightly so), Onedrive and PowerBI. Viva (formerly Yammer) makes waves now. Teams entered the market aggressively during Pandemics and it had evolved almost as fast as Android. It can now connect to great many deal of applications thus expanding the possible workflow and collaboration.
The ribbon being the productivity killer you're talking about is a non-existent issue, since typical office workers rarely venture further than the main set of icons + they have the most useful shortcuts pinned to the quick access toolbar.
In every environment where people have been using both pieces of software (MS Office and Star/Open/Apache/Libre), the former was preferred for its ease of use.
Again: Linux/FOSS movements tends to produce the mindset that is hard to convince that there's something wrong about anything it does, while listening to people's - common people, instead of experienced power users - complains, and following tested and appreciated standards should be preferred.
Having worked and working with many of these:
FOSS office products have been far superior to what's available on windows for at least a decade. There's certainly occasionally one or the other app on windows that may shine in one aspect or two, but overall the bloatware user experience on windows is killing productivity of anyone who knows how to operate a keyboard.
I'm sorry, dude, but now these are emotions talking through you, not actual valid points., especially since it's obvious that your knowledge about MS dates back to 2010, I assume? It had evolved. Massively. So much it became hard to compete with, even if you take the "money vs free model" argument into consideration.
You didn't like it, but the fact is that I am now sitting in a corpo office, part of a body spanning across countries and continents, where what you don't like and think bad, works well enough that nobody complains. It's very rich corpo. It can afford a legion of experienced Linux technicians and sysadmins, and yet it prefers to pay money, serious money for licences in subscription mode. Think about it for a moment - corpos squeeze money of everything. They are greedy, to the point that they wouldn't spare a cent to save a dying man. And yet they prefer to pay for MS.
Once again: Linux/FOSS needs to start to listen to what users actually want. Scornful "this is better, use this" won't do.
Until it changes, "20xx - the year of Linux". 😉
This is true. I value FOSS immensely. But it’s not for everyone. It’s not for the non tech. It’s not for the people failing to embrace change; and let’s be honest ms has always done file sharing best. They still do. Yes you have to pay the man. Buy good things cost money.
Same.
FOSS is crucial to the survival of freedom in IT (broad sense) - whoever claims otherwise, doesn't understand what is going on all around him.
But it doesn't mean that Linux/FOSS is allowed to stay blind and deaf and resist evolution, especially if it wants to become something more than a set of tools for network administrators...
I disagree. The part that you don't see is that people prefer to use Windows products because that's what they grew up with and they never used anything else. The majority of windows users only likes windows because posts like yours scare them away from even trying Linux. Windows is a catastrophic user experience and the majority of users put up with that because they think "that's normal".
Furthermore, there's a corporate ecosystem where useless and incompetent IT management gets supported by Microsoft products because the paid support takes most of the expert work out of their hands. So companies are feeding a bunch of microbrains in IT who don't actually do anything worth mentioning, except wasting their user's time with dumb questions before opening a ticket with microsoft.
I worked in environments where MS Office and Star/Open/Apache/Libre Office was used, and Tbird was installed in addition to whatever Windows email client. I'm not even discussing other pieces of software, these are enough to make a point, I think. There was hardly a person who prefered the alternatives. These tools were perceived as slow, unreliable, uncooperative and the lack of compatibility, document-wise, only strengthened these opinions.
As for "posts scaring people away..." Do you seriously think that whatever people write in the Internet is enough to convince big corps, governments and other massive groups of recipients? Come on...
I disagree with your take on corpo environment. If what you're saying would be true, then it'd be far more profitable for corpo to hire a bunch of Linux-oriented technicians and thus save costs of IT layer. But corpos don't do that. You're suggesting a paradox - a body that relies on cost-cutting and making everything as profitable as possible, that also is ok with wasting money on something that's allegedly easy to replace.
Again: you're doing what Linux/FOSS community usualy does. Instead of acknowledging the points and asking "what can be done to make this work", you're saying that your choice is better, good enough to work no matter what environment, what userbase is there, all consequences and the contradictory evidence be damned. It's users that need to change their ways, certainly not Linux/FOSS.
This might work as Apple's strategy, but it won't as hell work in case of Linux/FOSS. 😉
Hiring Linux professionals would require competent IT management. Most corporations don't have that.
And again: you're allowing for your emotions to dictate your opinion. This is wrong approach and indeed one of main reasons Linux/FOSS is hard to sell on. After all, would you really want to work with, and give your money to people who think yourself to be incompetent in spite of knowing you? 😉
Debian 12 out for less than three months and people imagine that stable Debian was good with hardware :/.
But then Munich went back to Linux again did they not?