German State Moving Tens of Thousands of PCs To Linux and LibreOffice (documentfoundation.org) 143
The Document Foundation: Following a successful pilot project, the northern German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein has decided to move from Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office to Linux and LibreOffice (and other free and open source software) on the 30,000 PCs used in the local government. As reported on the homepage of the Minister-President: "Independent, sustainable, secure: Schleswig-Holstein will be a digital pioneer region and the first German state to introduce a digitally sovereign IT workplace in its state administration. With a cabinet decision to introduce the open-source software LibreOffice as the standard office solution across the board, the government has given the go-ahead for the first step towards complete digital sovereignty in the state, with further steps to follow."
access, administration, domain (Score:3)
I think there is a big gap for business and government between Windows and Linux because I am not aware of a fully built out alternative to Active Directory.
Re:access, administration, domain (Score:5, Insightful)
It will then be helpful to other nations who wish to go Linux too
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Excellent time for the EU... One assumes there is already a crack team of MS lawyers and salesdrones trying to get this reversed before it can catch on.
Nothing critical to your nation should be dependent on a company ruled by the laws of a country you wouldn't trust to give you a shave with a straight razor. The US is one election away from becoming outright adversarial and belligerent.
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Re: access, administration, domain (Score:3, Insightful)
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I'm all for it, too. A multi-polar political world is better on average than one or two goliaths and their vassal states.
It's incredibly bloody stupid for the US to give up the role, though. It's had all sorts of advantages that are slipping away.
I just wish that multi-polar world had better poles.
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There is a massive opportunity for the EU here to become and alternative source of high tech, vehicles, food, medicine, etc for the rest of the world.
This will also give the rest of the world greater ability to say "NO", not just to the USA, but to Asia, and the EU as there is far more competition out there. This is important to 3rd world nations who are regularly bullied into allowing exploitation of their natural resources
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Merkel, with her habit of doing nothing as the world around crumbles, is directly responsible for the current sorry state of affairs.
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Re:access, administration, domain (Score:4, Interesting)
Seems like an excellent time then for the German government to fund the build out of these kinds of tools. It will then be helpful to other nations who wish to go Linux too
It also seems like an excellent time for EU regulators to get behind this. Given their recent crackdowns on Big Tech's abuses, moving governments across the EU to Linux and other FOSS might be an idea whose time has come. And the EU could easily fund Open Source development to fill in any missing bits and make Linux a viable replacement for Windows across the enterprise.
There would likely be some areas where Windows would still be necessary - various CAD and graphics packages for example - but even then it might be possible to run them in VM's.
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A lot of the new stuff is a web app underneath. That might be an actual javascript/html/css app, or it could be something compiled natively but using web stuff for the GUI. Either way, it's either trivial to port or a lot easier than the bad old days. Well worth doing for a major customer.
I bet 99% of government computers would do just fine with a web browser and Office compatible word processor and spreadsheet though.
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I hear you can run web browsers on Linux now. Without WINE even.
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I think there is a big gap for business and government between Windows and Linux because I am not aware of a fully built out alternative to Active Directory.
Is Active Directory a requirement, really? No functional cross-platform alternatives exist, seriously? Off the top of my head I can think of many, but then again I use Ubuntu and while I don't speak for everyone, I'm not lacking for choice.
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OpenLDAP [openldap.org]
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LDAP is but one component of ActiveDirectory. A specialized version of Kerberos forms another part of the puzzle.
Samba 4 implements ActiveDirectory including LDAP and the modified version of Kerberos Windows uses. Last I heard, it did not support the notion of a backup domain controller (replication and all that). But it does work as a primary domain controller. In fact I think you can even use MS GUI tools to administer it.
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AD also works with MacOS, so its pretty universal in its capabilities.
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Thanks for your reply! I had to look up what SSSD [sssd.io] means, and I am glad I did.
Re:access, administration, domain (Score:5, Informative)
389 directory server works great
https://www.port389.org/ [port389.org]
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I was surprised to find out that it's not uncommon for "Windows-only" IT departments to think they're using Active Directory when actually they're using OpenLDAP.
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On the security-side AD is more of a problem than a solution. AD is typically what attackers go for next after they are in and they are very often successful.
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Active Directory is a big blob containing LDAP, Kerberos, DNS, DHCP, and a few other services. To the best of my knowledge, Linux has everything Active Directory has, but does it better.
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Well, it comes with the problem that the sysadmins actually need to know what they are doing. On Windows, you can get far without that knowledge. Obviously, and as countless recent examples show, you can also pretty easily get hacked without that knowledge. As soon as you stop viewing system administration as a low-skill, low-pay job and see it more as a proper engineering occupation, Linux becomes a no-brainer.
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If you use Samba4 for AD, then you can use the standard Windows admin tools
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Possibly. But would you want to? Well, maybe for a time because of integration with other tools.
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Active Directory is a big blob containing LDAP, Kerberos, DNS, DHCP, and a few other services. To the best of my knowledge, Linux has everything Active Directory has, but does it better.
And some of those Linux versions of programs have choices, unlike the blob that is M$ AD.
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That depends on how you define "fully built" and, of course, you won't ever get 100% feature parity with MS AD. In the meantime, Samba has a lot of features (I tried a deployment myself some months ago) and 389 Directory Server/FreeIPA has also a lot of features (that one I didn't try yet).
Poor Microsoft (Score:4, Funny)
Will have to relocate their headquarters again.....
Checking the date.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait, are we now recycling articles from 10-20 years ago?
2002: https://linux.slashdot.org/sto... [slashdot.org]
2006: https://slashdot.org/story/06/... [slashdot.org] (and the switch back to Windows in 2017: https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org])
And this oops in 2012: https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
I'm sure all those German state and local governments will be happy and successful using Linux and LibreOffice on the desktop this time.
Re:Checking the date.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Came here to point out the same thing. This has been done in the past but never seems to stick. This time make sure you have IT staff highly trained in the art of Linux and that training trickles down to the users. Nation states DO need to leave Windows behind for the mere fact of how insecure it is and how Microsoft has been promising for years to bolster security but has not.
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This time make sure you have IT staff highly trained in the art of Linux...
Sensible.
...and that training trickles down to the users.
Good luck with that. If the success or failure of this project requires your run-of-the-mill end user to learn "the art of Linux" I don't like its odds. Windows has an unfair advantage in this regard in that you can reasonably assume that your users can muddle their way through.
I do wonder if that'll change as GenZ comes up through the workforce, with a much lower proportion of the generation having made extensive use of a desktop environment. If all you've ever used is an iPhone/iPad, is lea
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Simple things like loading and saving Microsoft formatted office documents into LibreOffice and using Thunderbird instead of Outlook. Using the FireFox browser instead of chrome based junk. Create cheat guides for common things done in Microsoft Office and how to do them in LibreOffice. Tasks like this should be easily learned by any office worker. Dedicate one person from the IT staff that is in charge of training users and handling their questions.
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Oh, and pay that dedicated IT staff member well. The hardest part of IT is working with the users.
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According to this report things have not changed with Microsoft's security culture: https://apnews.com/article/mic... [apnews.com]
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> Microsoft has been promising for years to bolster security but has not.
They do incrementally improve security for existing products, but add new layers and cruft over time with new holes.
As long as people are given a free pass for security when using Microsoft but held responsible for security when using an alternative it doesn't matter whether Microsoft is secure or not.
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1. If they don't have the level of tech support need for the initial hand holding. This should no more demanding that the support they would have needed every time they moved a Windows user to a new version of Windows. The key is to move people over at a rate that the support tea
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These are different stories. Munich is in the South, in Bavaria, whereas Schleswig-Holstein is in the North by the Baltic sea. There is no centralized authority that controls them, these are unrelated, independent initiatives.
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The assumption that LibreOffice is as rock solid as Linux is a delusion. I had to give it up because the simplest things I was trying to do in the spreadsheet and word processor were so buggy as to be unusable. LibreOffice works great if you don't try to use any of the features that don't work, or features that it lacks.
Again? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Germans... they will always try at least a couple times. /sarcasm
See WWI...
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In 2003 Munich did this, and in 2017, Munich switched back to Windows/Office. In 2018, Lower Saxony also switched back to windows. They really oughtta make up their mind!
It makes you wonder if there is a technical reason, or if Microsoft simply came back to them with a few wink-wink, nudge-nudge say-no-mores and moved them back for free with extra consultants on deck or something. I mean, if I were Microsoft, the very last thing I'd ever want to see is *ANY* government in the mostly free world having a successful long-term Linux roll-out. Because that shit would grow like a fungus. And we can't have that.
Or, some government goon somewhere didn't like having a corporate enti
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In 2003 Munich did this, and in 2017, Munich switched back to Windows/Office. In 2018, Lower Saxony also switched back to windows. They really oughtta make up their mind!
It makes you wonder if there is a technical reason, or if Microsoft simply came back to them with a few wink-wink, nudge-nudge say-no-mores and moved them back for free with extra consultants on deck or something. I mean, if I were Microsoft, the very last thing I'd ever want to see is *ANY* government in the mostly free world having a successful long-term Linux roll-out. Because that shit would grow like a fungus. And we can't have that.
Or, some government goon somewhere didn't like having a corporate entity to blame when they screwed the pooch on security. Either is completely believable as a possibility, and I won't claim to have any proof of either.
Uh, didn't like "not having" a corporate entity to blame. Gotta pay more attention.
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In 2003 Munich did this, and in 2017, Munich switched back to Windows/Office. In 2018, Lower Saxony also switched back to windows. They really oughtta make up their mind!
It makes you wonder if there is a technical reason, or if Microsoft simply came back to them with a few wink-wink, nudge-nudge say-no-mores and moved them back for free with extra consultants on deck or something. I mean, if I were Microsoft, the very last thing I'd ever want to see is *ANY* government in the mostly free world having a successful long-term Linux roll-out. Because that shit would grow like a fungus. And we can't have that.
Or, some government goon somewhere didn't like having a corporate entity to blame when they screwed the pooch on security. Either is completely believable as a possibility, and I won't claim to have any proof of either.
Uh, didn't like "not having" a corporate entity to blame. Gotta pay more attention.
^ ^ T H I S ^ ^
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The 2017 decision in Munich was entirely political and it was stupid.
Re:Again? (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft offered them 90% discount on Windows licence fee at that time in 2017. Then that Microsoft Munich headquarters, https://news.microsoft.com/eur... [microsoft.com]
As usual, that move to Windows had corruption and money ties.
News about this.
https://itsfoss.com/munich-lin... [itsfoss.com]
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Indeed. Crappy tech pushed with criminal and borderline criminal means.
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That's just a sensible policy in general. Demonstrating that you could drop in a competitor's solution with a tolerable amount of pain is an effective negotiating tactic.
If your vendor knows that the pain of switching outweighs their price rises, there's a natural temptation to gouge (see: Citrix, VMWare).
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I wand wondering myself too... if the Munich project failed, why do they think they will succeed this time? What is different? Maybe because the third time is a charm? Maybe because Balmer isn't there any more to fly to Germany and try to derail the project?
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I wouldn't get too excited yet (Score:2)
Remember Munich, with much fanfare, adopted Linux in 2003 only to abandon it for Windows 10 [engadget.com]:
The plan was prompted by gripes about both the complexity of the current setup and compatibility headaches. According to Mayor Dieter Reiter, having two operating systems on municipal PCs is "completely uneconomic" -- it'd make more financial sense to simplify. And unfortunately for Linux advocates, Windows was more likely to win out in this case. Munich's council has had to keep a minority of Windows PCs around for apps and hardware that absolutely needed Microsoft's platform to run, and those were destined to stay.
Reiter also pointed to complaints about IT performance, although there are disputes as to whether or not reverting to Windows is the solution.
In addition to politics and cost, the issue of having to work in a Microsoft-centric world are likely to kill this.
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Enterprise IT changes every few years as they lifecycle things. In reality I'm not all that surprised, especially if upper management changed over and the new regime had different perspectives.
Linux good, LibreOffice bad (Score:2)
Re:Linux good, LibreOffice bad (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh? I find it better on all counts. It still sucks, but MS office sucks much more and stands in your way constantly. Also, the MS crap ties you to just one OS. LibreOffice does not.
Re: Linux good, LibreOffice bad (Score:2)
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Ahahahahahahahahaha, good one! That is essentially an OS/library problem because memory management becomes dominant.
Try not doing it on crappy Windows. Oops, cannot even run Excel on a decent OS like Linux or FreeBSD!
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Well, you can with a translation layer or 5 in between. That will not cure any performance problems.
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Well i think the problem is that libreoffice is Java based.
Sorry, but you are dead wrong. LO is written in C++, Base is the only component written in Java. If/when LO ask you to install JRE, it always is for the database component, Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw can be used free of Java.
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Are you seeing that on Windows or on Linux as well?
If you have some publicly available benchmark spreadsheet, I can try it out and report back.
Re: Linux good, LibreOffice bad (Score:2)
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Well, trying it on the worst distro in existence is not that convincing. But yes, there may be weaknesses in some small border-cases.
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Recently I used it and it seemed pretty quck. However, the spreadsheet I was using was xlsx and it had to have specific formatting left intact to be fed into another system. So yes it was nice for reading the spreadsheet but in the end I needed Excel anyway. And I hate office 365. It takes two minutes to open a document, and then another two minutes to switch it to
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Which makes sense as that will be saving them a lot of maintenance and implementation work and Java is only used as a thing interface layer to native components, i.e. not a performance bottleneck.
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I agree. I do not think the human race can make an actually good one at this time. The IT field is just not mature enough. Maybe in 50 or 100 years.
My point is that LibreOffice is a tolerable one and it is really cross-platform (basically can be made to run on anything with enough power) and FOSS, while MS Office is a pretty crappy one with lots of serious problem _and_ closed and single-platform (effectively) and commercial and misused by MS to coerce people into using other MS stuff (that is not better an
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Linux is good choice, but LibreOffice not so much, there really needs to be another office suite or a complete redesign of libreoffice
I am not sure where you got the idea the LibreOffice was bad, but I have used it many times to repair corrupted files that MS office refused to even try to open.
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LibreOffice not so much, there really needs to be another office suite or a complete redesign of libreoffice
Redesign or rewrite? You are not happy with the UI, with the features or the internals? The use of "redesign" makes me think you talk about UI, then you know that LO actually has two UIs, Classic and Tabbed? Do you know it has multiple sets of icons? Also, do you know there are a few alternative office suites running on Linux? FOSS or proprietary. Do you know there are web based office suites you can run on Linux?
LibreOffice is Easier to Use - It Has No Ribbon (Score:2, Insightful)
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LibreOffice has a ribbon now as an option if your really want it. But why would I use that crap? The ribbon is the single most dysfunctional idea MS ever had and not only because it costs you a lot of vertical screen space.
Too much change at once (Score:4, Insightful)
A far better strategy is to adopt a gradual migration to open solutions. This is much easier to achieve on background systems, train your IT staff or hire new ones with Linux and other open source software experience and set out to replace things like Windows servers, Microsoft and Oracle databases etc with Linux and PostgreSQL. Users rarely interact with these systems directly, they are managed by IT staff.
On the user facing systems, keep the Windows or macOS environment they are used to, but replace some of the key tools they use over time. Again, don’t necessarily change everyone at once, and not necessarily start with the office suite that everybody uses. Perhaps start by installing Both MS and LibreOffice for users, start encouraging people to use LibreOffice for writing documents so they can get used to it for such simple tasks, wile still having Excel and PowerPoint available to work with. Over time with encouragement and given the time to familiarise themselves with the different interfaces, there will be less push back. Tell them they must use a particular tool and they will simply get frustrated, that they can’t do something and start demanding to use the commercial software again. There needs to be a properly managed transition period that focuses on everybody learning to try new things until they are confident enough to let go of the tools they used to use.
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Your parents are not average corporate workers. At my work place (public administration) I have to move office workers from Windows 7/Office 2007 to Windows 11/Office 2021 and the change is bigger than if they were moved to MATE/LibreOffice/Thunderbird.
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For the common desk workers, OS is irrelevant, they just need a screen with a few icons, to launch the apps they need on a daily basis. How the apps are installed and devices connected, they don't need to worry, IT staff is there to take care of that. Too many choices are confusing for the common desk workers, they need to know where to launch app for task X, app for task Y, app for task Z and that is all.
again? (Score:2)
Some German governmental body did this before and then went back to Windows.
I hope it sticks this time...
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Then Munich move back was entirely political and borderline criminal waste of taxpayer money. There was also quite a bit of sabotage before that move back and if you do not look closely, that may make it look like they had real problems with Linux.
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Well, maybe for some players. But they will have been a minority. What apparently killed the whole thing that they never managed to get to centralized system administration and provisioning because of political hurdles and that a lot of technological debt that could finally have been cleaned up did not get cleaned up, again because of politics. Hence they basically starved the project and it still did not do that badly. Then there was an election, and the conservative asshole that won clearly was in Microso
It is actually not that difficult (Score:5, Interesting)
A modern desktop linux with a small but competent sysadmin team in the back is easier and cheaper to maintain and needs less hardware power. On the LibreOffice side, the main problem for most enterprises are existing enterprise-specific templates. Get your templates ported over and the switch is easy, the usability of LibreOffice is significantly higher because it stands a lot less in your way than MS office and really stupid things like MS making it hard to create good quality PDFs from a presentation are a thing of the past. I have one audit customer (medium sized insurance), that uses LibreOffice (on Windows, but still) as their o365 replacement strategy for the scenario of a prolonged or permanent o365 failure. (Yes, they did really not like that cloud master key compromise that MS had last year.)
The main problem for most organizations is fending off the MS marketeers and lobbyists that spread lies and poison.
Libre Office runs on Windows too (Score:2)
Libre Office runs on Windows too. And Mac OS. If the concern is the integrity and interoperability of the documents then the underlying OS should not matter.
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Yes, maybe. It depends. But if the aim is to run Libre Office they why does the OS even matter? I've been living on Ubuntu & Debian since 2006. It's quite some time since I felt evangelical about OS. I think Debian is the most reliable, least mad, least exploitative OS out there. And if others prefer something else, so what?
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If your main software is LibreOffice (and perhaps a web browser, maybe mail app), there is no need to waste money and resources on Windows when Linux can do the job just as well. For the common office worker the OS is there to provide icons to launch a few apps, networking and printing services and that is all.
Again?! (Score:2)
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They seem to be doing this every decade or so...
Who are "they"? Germany is a federation, this happens in a different state (land) than the Munich project. Different "they".
Everytime.. every single time... (Score:2)
"Independent, sustainable, secure
Independent - as long as you spend significantly more on upskilling not just the engineers but the consumers
sustainable - As long as you don't mind extended outages every time kernel moves and reliant packages don't
secure - unadulterated BS and the strongest indicator they have no idea what they're in for
I thought we were an autonomous collective. (Score:4, Funny)
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Beautiful!
You sound like like a true Constitutional Peasant. Comedy Gold.
"Dennis there's some lovely filth down here". Gets me every time.
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This is a move on the client side. They will essentially be using mostly web-apps (i.e. OS does not matter) and Office by now. They will likely get huge savings alone from not having to throw Win11 incompatible hardware away. The timing is very suggestive in that regard. You can essentially run Linux hardware until it breaks and you can put in tons of standardized (!) remote (!) monitoring and diagnostic stuff on a Linux client, because it is actually a proper server OS, regardless how small or slow the cli
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Take a look at Thunderbird, the recent Supernova release made the UI modern and friendly. A few years ago the project was near death but since then it revived.
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There is NEVER an exploration or test of the alternatives.
Well, the summary literally starts with "following a successful pilot project, so I assume they did some exploration and testing during that pilot project.