A German State is Switching Its 25,000 Computers From Windows to Linux (documentfoundation.org) 223
The north-German state of Schleswig-Holstein plans to switch to open source software..." reports Mike Saunders from LibreOffice.
"By the end of 2026, Microsoft Office is to be replaced by LibreOffice on all 25,000 computers used by civil servants and employees (including teachers), and the Windows operating system is to be replaced by GNU/Linux."
The tech site Foss Force writes: This seems to be a done deal, as the steps for the transition from proprietary to open have already been codified by the Schleswig-Holstein state parliament, and explained in plain language in an interview with Jan Philipp Albrecht, the state's digital minister, that was published in c't, a German language computer magazine (Google Translate version here). In the interview, Albrecht said that part of the transition to open source is already in the works, and pointed out that 90% of state administration conferencing is conducted using the open source video conferencing platform Jitsi.
"We have been testing LibreOffice in our IT department for two years, and our experience is clear: it works," he said. "This also applies, for example, when editing Microsoft Word documents with comments... No Linux distribution has been chosen yet to use as a standard, although Albrecht said they're currently looking at five distributions that suit their purposes.
"By the end of 2026, Microsoft Office is to be replaced by LibreOffice on all 25,000 computers used by civil servants and employees (including teachers), and the Windows operating system is to be replaced by GNU/Linux."
The tech site Foss Force writes: This seems to be a done deal, as the steps for the transition from proprietary to open have already been codified by the Schleswig-Holstein state parliament, and explained in plain language in an interview with Jan Philipp Albrecht, the state's digital minister, that was published in c't, a German language computer magazine (Google Translate version here). In the interview, Albrecht said that part of the transition to open source is already in the works, and pointed out that 90% of state administration conferencing is conducted using the open source video conferencing platform Jitsi.
"We have been testing LibreOffice in our IT department for two years, and our experience is clear: it works," he said. "This also applies, for example, when editing Microsoft Word documents with comments... No Linux distribution has been chosen yet to use as a standard, although Albrecht said they're currently looking at five distributions that suit their purposes.
Future headline: (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Future headline: (Score:4, Insightful)
Mod OP down all you want but he is essentially correct. We have seen this before, switch to desktop linux then in a little down the road they switch back to Windows. Maybe this time it will stick but not holding my breath.
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It is worth the cost to Microsoft to bribe governments to use Windows, because the primary reason anyone uses Windows is because everyone else uses Windows. Of course, Microsoft will only do this when the government shows it is serious about not using Windows, otherwise EVERYONE would be receiving this bribe and it would be self-defeating.
I wouldn't mind Windows if it just did its job. But Microsoft must go a step further and make Windows spy on its users for Microsoft's profit, AND Microsoft further uses
Re:Future headline: (Score:5, Funny)
It is worth the cost to Microsoft to bribe governments to use Windows,
Well you should never rule out the "suitcase full of cash" as a reason. I've been running linux in some form since day one, but if Microsoft rolled up to me and dropped a big enough sack of cash on my desk you better believe I'm going to sell out. I can be bought, I'm not cheap, but I can be bought.
Re:Future headline: (Score:4, Interesting)
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Mod OP down all you want but he is essentially correct. We have seen this before, switch to desktop linux then in a little down the road they switch back to Windows. Maybe this time it will stick but not holding my breath.
Do not hold your breath, because Microsoft is well aware of the PR hit, and will probably do something like buy all new computers to get the German state to switch back. There will be the usual excuses, but let's face it, noting works better than large scale bribes.
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A German State is Switching Its 25,000 Computers From Linux... back to Windows. Do you see what I did there?
I'll take bribes from Microsoft for 500, Alex!
This is the one thing that Microsoft has over Linux. Much deeper pockets.
Re: Future headline: (Score:2)
21st century and still can't get unicode right...
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Libre Office / Open Office will never feel right to an average cubicle worker.
Reluctantly agree, because I badly want LibreOffice to be able to interact with Word and Excel. But formatting and fonts continue to be an issue (yes, I know the problems can be mitigated). Getting better with every release, but still not seamless as far as Microsoft documents go. I doubt full compatibility will ever be achieved, simply because MS is always changing with every new release. As to usability, I find Libre Office apps eminently usable, and have no problem with them. I'll be using them more and
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Libre Office / Open Office will never feel right to an average cubicle worker.
Reluctantly agree, because I badly want LibreOffice to be able to interact with Word and Excel. But formatting and fonts continue to be an issue (yes, I know the problems can be mitigated). Getting better with every release, but still not seamless as far as Microsoft documents go.
This is not a fair comparison.
I doubt full compatibility will ever be achieved, simply because MS is always changing with every new release.
That's letting the big bad set the standard when they themselves are wildly floundering (windows 8, 10, what next?).
It's much more fair to ask whether 25000 people all using libreoffice can work nicely together, and if there are occasional problems with exchanging electronic documents with parties demanding or offering only microsoft-proprietary formats (this includes "docx" and its ilk: microsoft themselves do not adhere to that turd of a standard) that can be mitigated, well
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No, it's not. If you think otherwise, elaborate beyond saying the same thing three times in a row.
The ignorance, it be strong in this one, probably best he post as a AC. Yes, its is a fair comparison. I suspect the AC in this really hasn't worked in a real office before.
That means you elevate the floundering of microsoft to the gold standard
The only thing I really see worth correcting is that little line. First Microsoft is one of the most wealthiest companies on the planet. Number 2 the last time I checked. In no way is it "floundering."
MS Office is the most widely used office program on the planet. It is so widely used that Apple pays Microsoft to port it to the
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That means you elevate the floundering of microsoft to the gold standard
No, the defacto standard. Nobody said it's necessarily good.
and it means that any and all replacement must be adept at winning the unwinnable race of constantly moving goalposts.
No it means you need to be relatively in line with user expectations - aside from Windows 8 the process of running applications on Windows has been pretty much the same since Windows 95. Perhaps you don't remember that Windows 8 was horrible and everybody hated it and they reverted a whole bunch of their design decisions in the subsequent versions?
No, it's because people expected the free-as-in-unpaid alternative was better at being exactly that one shitty pile of commercial software they had been using previously.
The primary reason is because the ecosystem of applications doesn't exist and/or work together. LibreO
Re: Future headline: (Score:5, Interesting)
And, why should there be ?
Humm. I really didn't think I would need to point that reason out. I figured it would be obvious. It is the most widely used program on the planet of what it does. Business stop working and lose money when Outlook stops working. That alone, means there should be decent clones already for Outlook. An the fact that we don't have a decent clone for that means it must not be that easy.
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Fair enough. To a lot of people Outlook is just that a email client. What makes Outlook so powerful for business its integration with Exchange as a backend. Outlook has a calendar built into it. With that function you can schedule meeting, events, conference calls, and tasks from one application. This comes with coordination wizard that shows you when someone has free time and schedule meetings with lower conflicts. People can accept your invite, reject it, or accept it with a proposed new time.
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To be fair it has been many years since I tried to integrate any linux clients with Exchange. Getting the mail was limited to pop/imap if I remember. There was a way to get the calendar and other features to work on a read only mode. It was a pain and I deemed not worth the trouble. There was no way to get anything to work like Outlook did seamlessly. Things may have changed but I doubt it.
I'm not sure if its a technical problem or a legal problem. Maybe every time someone figures out how to do it
Re: Future headline: (Score:2)
Even Microsoft canâ(TM)t be interoperable with itself in many cases. Between Office for Mac and Office for Windows there are lots of changes, New Outlook doesnâ(TM)t support Exchange anymore and every version between Excel 1997 and 2019 has some minor differences that break something somewhere.
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Even Microsoft canâ(TM)t be interoperable with itself in many cases. Between Office for Mac and Office for Windows there are lots of changes, New Outlook doesnâ(TM)t support Exchange anymore and every version between Excel 1997 and 2019 has some minor differences that break something somewhere.
Yup, I've had more trouble trying to go between Windows and MacOS than is at all excuseable.
That's why for my use, needing compatibility which goes between Windows, MacOS, and Linux, LibreOffice provides the right solution. Microsoft Office is useless for that.
Re: Future headline: (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft works very hard to make sure it obfuscates its "standards" to make it impossible to have perfect compatibility.
Best to just go cold turkey and ditch Word completely and not even try to interoperate. Just mandate odt as the file format and ditch doc.
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Libre Office / Open Office will never feel right to an average cubicle worker.
Reluctantly agree, because I badly want LibreOffice to be able to interact with Word and Excel.
If these average cubicle workers used LibreOffice first, you could say the same thing if O365 came along.
Can't you see it - 500 years from now, the rest of the world moves on, but still remains on Office 365 because that was good enough for my great gtrea great grandparents, it's the true standard! 8^)
Re: Future headline: (Score:2)
LibreOffice is no problem. I have used it professionally for years for documents and spreadsheets.
InDesign and Photoshop are bigger challenges. Scribus works okay but is not a polished product. GIMP is functional but is also a steaming pile of UI garbage. Krita is better but not yet a complete solution, and also has some UI quirks.
Perhaps the biggest challenge is technical writing. Unless you use straight LaTeX for everything. But I am not aware of a comprehensive XML solution for Linux like Framemaker or M
Re: Future headline: (Score:4, Interesting)
Now that I am retired my home desktop is Linux and LibreOffice is a fine solution for my use. Previously, I was appalled at how many academics used the Windows version of Excel as a "standard" numeric computing platform. In those days, I needed to keep a copy running that I knew was bug-for-bug compatible, which I found quite frustrating.
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Re: Future headline: (Score:5, Interesting)
You forget that most Europeans do not use American English as their default language. MS Office on Windows with a foreign language, simply doesn't work very well and is a permanent pain in the derrier. Linux is more configurable and really works better with a multitude of foreign languages than Windows. Using Linux in Europe, makes a whole lot of sense.
Sorry but I live in France and *everyone* uses Microsoft and it works just perfectly well in French. I really don't know what you are babbling about. Linux works perfectly too. I'm all for ditching MS in favor of Linux, but blaming it on poor translation is not one of the reason.
Re: Future headline: (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is (or used to be the last time I had to use Word, which admittedly is a while ago) that the localized version also localizes the style names, so "Heading 1" becomes "Kop 1" in Dutch. This is a pain in the ass when you share documents between one computer that has Word running in Dutch, and one running Word in English, because the style names are not considered the same, so your TOC will fail, etc.
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Well, there is always TextMaker [softmaker.com]
OK, I know, it's non-free and proprietary.
I personally am not too font of Libre Office .. well, Calligra [calligra.org] in my case, didn't get round to install Libre/Open Office after reinstalling Slackware.
But for personal use, if I have to deal with a project again with MS Office files, I may invest on TextMaker. I love their fonts collection too.
Oh, and it's German company, btw.
(Ps: Not a Shill!)
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Seen this song and dance before (Score:3, Informative)
That will shave some time off their distro selection process.
Re:Seen this song and dance before (Score:5, Insightful)
LiMux wasn't ditched and rolled back to Windows in Munich because of "Linux" and "LibreOffice" and "Open Source", but because of Bill Gates intervening personally with the promise if bringing Microsoft's EU headquarters to Munich. Also, it was a mistake to create their own LiMux distro instead of relying on one of the well-known existing ones, which is what Schleswig-Holstein will be doing.
Then Just Say It Re:Seen this song and dance... (Score:2)
Save you some time folks:
Munich decided much the same thing [wikipedia.org] nearly 20 years ago. Ten years later the city government was basically running on it and has been with a couple of hiccups, since.
Why not just say that instead of the smarmy "I'm alluding to something but I won't say what unless you follow my clever link" BS? I wish people would stop that.
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Well, it could work... (Score:2)
If they set up n actual linux savvy support infrastructure, then why not?
In my experience, linux is just as capable of running your pc as windows is... the GUIs are just as convoluted or buggy as windows is, it spies a bit less on average and you WILL need to google the issues you're going to have, and you're going to have them.
The problem these days is that there are no well traveled forums anymore and Google sucks ass. And since so much fewer people use linux, chances of encountering something you cannot
Re:Well, it could work... (Score:5, Interesting)
the GUIs are just as convoluted or buggy as windows is
KDE Plasma 5 has worked like a charm for many years. Is much less intrusive than the Windows or MacOS GUI. As someone who hates faffing about configuring things, I haven't had to do any major configuring for anything. The out-of-the-box configuration has been fine for almost every aspect.
you WILL need to google the issues you're going to have, and you're going to have them.
I've never used a Windows or MacOS GUI that didn't require Googling for things I didn't know.
chances of encountering something you cannot solve by googling are much higher on linux.
That's nonsense. As someone who Googles Linux stuff, I regularly find stuff on forums, from recent to many years old that is applicable.
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KDE Plasma 5 practically is Windows. Look at this screenshot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It's a clone of Windows 10. Same start menu, same system tray, same task bar, same window controls, same window drop shadows and missing borders, same half-arsed dark theme that doesn't work everywhere, same monochrome icons, even the same clock.
The main difference is that when a user wants to make their mouse wheel scroll a bit faster, they google it and get a bunch of command line hacks that don't work and give
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Yes, I was thinking this. Funny how Windows 11 looks like Elementary OS did a few years back too.
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It doesn't work. I tried, it's broken.
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Look at this screenshot
I'm USING it all day every day. Even things like the start menu in KDE works much better than Windows. You can even change the start menu to something completely different. I use the Application Dashboard, which works much nicer for me, but that's a personal preference. Hell, I can just also press Alt-F2 and type, and it will also suggest the programs or files to open.
The main difference is that when a user wants to make their mouse wheel scroll a bit faster
That's a Linux problem, not KDE. I haven't noticed the issue with scrolling at all without doin
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That goes for many mainstream SDKs today.
2 GB is nothing. The last one I downloaded was over 60 GB.
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kde/qt is a bloated dysfunctional mess
No it isn't.
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Now yes, probably they could have found the issue if they dug deep enough, but that was just my pc. When new PCs we
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Linus Tech Tips are doing a challenge to switch from Windows to Linux for a month. One guy only used Windows until that point, the other has some Linux experience.
It started badly with driver issues for both of them. The Windows only guy managed to brick his install trying to get Steam to run and following a guide he found on a forum.
The government might do better because they can buy specific hardware they know works, and because they aren't worried about running games. On the other hand, an issue that bot
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It's interesting that not even the commercial Linux vendors seem to have sorted all this stuff out. For all the flack that Microsoft gets, apparently building a consumer OS is actually hard.
Just a few things to work out. [youtu.be]
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I think some of the issues with stuff opening on the wrong monitor was down to driver issues.
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Re:Well, it could work... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Today in MS Office I am regularly collaboratively and simultaneously editing Word docs that are in OneDrive with multiple other users inside and outside my org. For those who have not tried this, it is like Google Docs in the local Word/Excel/Powerpoint "Apps". I rarely use telephone to ta
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It's been done in Munich. (LiMux project).
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And since so much fewer people use Linux, chances of encountering something you cannot solve by googling are much higher on Linux.
I've rarely if ever had a problem on Linux desktop or server that I couldn't find at least one solution to fairly quickly & easily by a simple web search. Linux users & people who write about it tend to be more competent at IT & more likely to be 'power users' so there's a plethora of well-informed, easy to follow articles, tutorials & solutions for Linux out there to be found.
I also do a lot of writing -- tutorials, teaching resources, instruction design plans, academic articles, etc.. --
What year is this? (Score:2)
Itâ(TM)s bringing back memories of 2004.
At this point collaboration software should be on the web, almost any software really, and desktops should be more like ChromeOS things.
Hope They Learned From Munich (Score:2)
And cooperate with the publishers to getting distros that suit themselves and perhaps even other organizations.
Thinking a set of civil servants can outperform professional publishers is arrogant, condescending and a recipe for disaster for which tax payers will eventually foot the bill. Also, it'd be yet another failed desktop Linux migration.
Stupid shortsighted thinking (Score:2, Funny)
What the Germans have totally overlooked is that if they replace windows with linux, their computers won't be spying on them and reporting everything back to microsoft! Ergo the german economy will collapse and a cloud of locusts will cover the land.
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"a cloud of locusts will cover the land", so you are saying MS will release a cloud of Ballmer clones on Germany. Those bastards!
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Who knew the German government was using the home version of Windows?
You might want test with a user (Score:4, Insightful)
who doesn't work in the IT department. Not just a question about the OS and GUI. Expect there will be users who have some crazy advanced documents and spreadsheets. In the IT department, you would probably code or script your way out of some data collection or indexing task. Outside the IT department, people often "code" in Excel.
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Re:You might want test with a user (Score:4)
My users could not care what OS the run as long as it has shortcuts to Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint and these days Teams.
This has been my experience, with the big one there being Outlook. There simply is no comparable application on Linux like Outlook. Sure there are email, and better, clients on Linux. Hell, I think we should all just use mutt like Old Ones intended. But Outlook is not just a email client is a complete office organizer. There are places that I've worked if Outlook stopped working the place would shutdown.
An I know some one s about to toss Evolution out there. I've been there, a Linux desktop user in a Microsoft world. Evolution is not a replacement for Outlook.
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It is the calendar integration on Outlook that I'm thinking about. Outlook is a decent email client but there are dozens of those; many of them being much better with email than Outlook. A great deal of modern offices now revolve around the calendar integration that Outlook does.
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Comparing outlook to an email client is silly. Ultimately these days it's such a small component of a large ecosystem, and that's really the problem in any larger company these days.
The question isn't: "Can you edit a word document?" or "Can you send an email?" Those were questions from 1999.
The question is: "Does the Word editor integrate with Onedrive and Teams allowing multiple users to edit a file concurrently while sending each other messages?", the question is "Can I control my online meeting attendan
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Expect there will be users who have some crazy advanced documents and spreadsheets.
And that's fine for those users own affairs. But it's the government office (the one adopting GNU/Linux and LibreOffice) that define the user's interface to that department. If they send you a PDF or DOCX form to be filled out and some user tries to embed VBScript into entries that require simple text, those forms will be rejected.
Same as someone who tries to fill out their IRS tax forms using crayon instead of black or blue ink.
So their Windows VDIs on Azure? (Score:2)
It is good to sit out the first 2 years of any WINDOWS version upgrade on the desktop when buying hardware. In a global supply crisis makes a cheap thin client and Windows VDI from cloud vender such as Azure a good play for a few hours of support per desktop. For the ones who complain hand them LibreOffice and Gimp. The few who do real work on workstations, let them buy as a department whatever they need,
No, not again (Score:2)
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Related Question (Score:2)
How do you add a networked printer to all of the machines in a specific location on Linux? I've done it with Cups on one machine, but I've never had to manage this at scale. Do you have to use a tool like Chef or somesuch?
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It is not about Office anymore (Score:2)
Microsoft is not really pushing the on.prem standalone office suite. It is just "if you really need it, you can get it".
They are now selling Microsoft 365 subscriptions which is so much more than the traditional Word/Excel combo.
They want to sell Microsoft 365 with the traditional apps in addition to all the other apps that you can only get through the cloud, like Teams, Yammer, PowerApps, PowerBI...And that is how businesses are hooked. Give the users access to the Power*
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indeed. and personally i couldn't care less about private enterprise buying into these lock-ins, it's not really that they are a iota more productive but they just feel better and fancier. when it comes to public institutions, though, the entire software stack should be opensource simply for transparency and security reasons.
it's not the first time that a german land (not really a state) has opted to forfeit windows in favor of linux, with mixed to bad results not because linux is somehow inherently worse (
until they choose the distribution,it's a nonstory (Score:2)
It's not about if the software is good enough (Score:2)
A lot of the comments here are about comparing software. That's really far from the issue.
It's 2021, general office tasks are pretty much there in every thing from Google Docs to LibreOffice to MS Office. Whatever you need, you can make work reasonably well. I mainly use libreoffice or Google Docs at home and MS Office on my work laptop. There's quirks in everything, but life goes on.
The big decision is in the bureaucracy. You're not like to save money by getting out of Windows and MS Office because the way
Very sad (Score:2)
It looks like decision making isn't limited to covid style politics. Wouldn't it be nice if people made decisions based on their perceived best interest?
This has been tried before (Score:2)
It'll be interesting to see if they succeed, or if they end up switching back to Windows later. I think switching to Linux is doable for office automation these days, (my company is split windows/mac but is completely devoid of MS Office, for instance) but you come up against a very large well funded company that fights dirty, so the chances of getting to someone and causing a reversal is high.
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Yeah, we've seen this headline many times before on Slashdot, and it usually ends with Microsoft giving the company or government a sweetheart deal on software licenses to make them switch back.
It also doesn't help that Karen from Accounting probably has an Excel spreadsheet filled with macros that will NEVER work correctly in LibreOffice without completely rewriting it. Once you get enough exceptions from the mandatory upgrade rule like that one, the whole migration schedule starts falling apart and then M
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Differences from then to now (Score:2)
There is one thing that exists now that didn't during Munich's attempt...
VB is now open source, as are meaningful portions of VisualC / Visual Basic, and .NET
If it's really critical, it should now be possible for a development team to integrate VB into LibreOffice. Not saying it's a desirable thing for everyone, but...
Re:Differences from then to now (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Differences from then to now (Score:4, Funny)
Excel (Score:4, Informative)
As another commenter pointed out, the biggie is Excel. I don't think most people understand how many businesses and governments use Excel for a *huge* swath of stuff. If you can't get equivalent functionality on Linux, it's really a non-starter.
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And Access. It's all over the place in local governments.
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I've found LibreOffice to be a more than acceptable substitute for Excel. Even with my macro functions, which were mainly able to automatically translate from MS to Libre, or be copied and pasted either direction. (Note, these are functions used in cells to return
Re: Lather, Rinse, Repeat (Score:2)
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Yep. Don't leave out VW group, they are built just the same way. That is to say, they used to be built as well as they could be, and now they're built as cheaply as they can get away with. Literally all the German automakers got busted for diesel cheating, literally all of them are built out of most of the same shit (except that Mercedes builds their own transmissions, which are even more fiddly and fragile than the ZF boxes the others use) and literally none of them are designed to be repaired in your driv
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Who knows? Maybe Slashdot just rewards views into other worlds? I know that's much of what I come for. As a reader, one of my big payoffs is when I get a peek into some interesting world I don't understand. I was just triggered because I've been working on our Sprinter lately.
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What it takes is commitment and a large enough government body. A municipality has no leverage to get vendors to release a Linux-compatible version of their software.
Mostly now there's no good reason for them to have Windows clients anyway - the back end is often a Linux server anyway (or Oracle on Windows for some reason?) And a lot of the remaining stuff is now at the point where you're talking about browser plug-ins. It's not like rebuilding the entire suite from the ground up.
If a big enough governmen
Re: Again? (Score:5, Funny)
The world is already 90% clod based.
Re: Again? (Score:5, Funny)
Okay, that was a typo but I think it works.
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There are already exceptions to the rule, by necessity.
Re:We saw this before (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes we saw it before. It worked well. Very well. The only way MS could compete was bribery: offer of giving the city scads of cash by moving their HQ there. Linux can compete in software just fine. It cannot compete with bribery.
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The only way MS could compete was bribery
You look to nearly every other government and you see MS is used almost exclusively, and it's quite clear MS didn't bribe everyone. They only have so many headquarters.
In reality MS competed and lost, and then bribed. But pretending that "the only way MS could compete was bribery" does a huge disservice to the open source community by spreading falsehoods and further cementing Linux supporters as some kind of religious zealots out of touch with reality.
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In reality MS competed and lost, and then bribed. But pretending that "the only way MS could compete was bribery" does a huge disservice to the open source community
Very good, but I was clearly talking specifically about Munich.
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Linux is not fit-for-purpose on the desktop
That very much depends on what you are using the desktop for. If you are doing the same basic stuff that most people do, Linux will work fine on the desktop. Word processing, web browsing, and maybe some spreadsheeting are literally all most users do on their desktop, and you can do all that stuff very well on Linux. In fact, arguably much better than Windows, since Windows is now such a clusterfuck. It reached its usability peak in Windows 7 and has been going downhill ever since.
If you need specific appli
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Word processing, web browsing, and maybe some spreadsheeting are literally all most users do on their desktop, and you can do all that stuff very well on Linux. In fact, arguably much better than Windows
Perhaps you or I can. But for most of the world, it's not what's better, but what they know. The Microsoft way of doing things may indeed be a clusterfuck, but it's a clusterfuck that people are familiar with. And that's how lock in works.
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All this is true, I've seen it in my own company, but more and more the endpoint interface is in a web browser. Yes, there are funky Java applications but they're difficult to get working in the best of times. (Why Oracle can't get the latest version of their own damned applications working on the latest version of their own damned Java is beyond me. Coming to work in the morning and discovering Oracle apps have stopped working because of a drive-by Java update is more common than it should be.)
The compa
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xkcd covered this years ago. Since you do everything in a browser these days, the underlying operating system doesn't really matter.