German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2024/04/04/german-state-moving-30000-pcs-to-libreoffice/

by buovjaga • 2 years ago

594 381 2 years ago

blog.documentfoundation.org

reify• 2 years ago

Cool

Hopefully they will move 30,000 wonkdows PC's to linux once Microsoft imposes the £61 annual extended security updates fee.

let me open my terminal and start up python:

30000*61 1830000

£1,830,000 for the first year extended security updates and will double in consequitive years. A tad greedy! for a few old rotten wonkdows 10 machines.

They first collected our data for free, then had the audacity to charge us for it too.

Roll on linux

Dare I use the word Enshittification?

Hamuko4• 2 years ago

What's the cost of training a bunch of public servants to use Linux?

Stranger438• 2 years ago

Probably lower then people think once the applications are identical across the two platform. and if Linux turns too complex there is always macos.

The big push is going to be getting rid of old excel and word macro's and replace sharepoint/onedrive with something else as data migrations are newer as simple in reality as they look in theory.

gtvwill• 2 years ago

Train once and never pay fees for the lifetime of the worker. Or still have to train on windows and pay fees ontop of standard user training for the lifetime of the user. Remember just because it's windows doesn't mean it doesn't require training. All business computer use takes training.

pakitan• 2 years ago

The cost to show one person "this is the browser icon and these are the excel/word icons; click them when you need to", multiplied by number of people who need to be trained.

zihotki2• 2 years ago

If they manage to do the training and onboarding within 4 hours then that may worth it (considering minimal hourly rate 12.41 euro per hour). That doesn't look realistic.

steve1977• 2 years ago

Zero. Most of these people are probably not proficient in MS Office either. But since they are mostly not doing any real work, it doesn’t matter.

4878241143• 2 years ago

why not just use bc?

jhgb• 2 years ago

You have to be at least 41 years old to remember that bc exists in the first place.

ykonstant• 2 years ago

Here is a setup I use to make `bc` more handy if you don't know how many computations you want to do in advance:

    alias bb='bc -l <<X'

Now enter calculations and assignments one per line and enter X to exit.

pjmlp2• 2 years ago

You know to whom belongs many of the FOSS critical infrastructure projects nowadays, including some key CPython contributors, right?

joostdecock• 2 years ago

The English summary focuses on the move from MS Office to LibreOffice (it's a post on the Document Foundation blog, so it makes sense that this is their focus), but the original German press release (1) lists 6 pillars:

- Switching from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice

- Switching the operating system from Microsoft Windows to Linux

- Collaboration within the state administration and with external parties: Use of the open source products Nextcloud, Open Xchange/Thunderbird in conjunction with the Univention AD connector to replace Microsoft Sharepoint and Microsoft Exchange/Outlook

- Conception of an open source based directory service to replace Microsoft Active Directory

- Inventory of specialist procedures regarding compatibility and interoperability with LibreOffice and Linux

- Development of an open source based telephony solution to replace Telekom-Flexport

So it's a good bit more ambitious than replacing MS Office.

(1) https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/ministe...

(edited for formatting/typos)

yourusername2• 2 years ago

Ok now do the cost for moving all other applications from Entra/Active Directory SSO running on Windows to LDAP or some non MS Oauth implementation on Linux. I'm sure replacing all the legacy applications and retraining the government employees on their FOSS alternatives can be done but it's going to take years and burn many many millions in fees for IT suppliers and investigating alternatives. You really need to do it because of ideological considerations because i doubt you'll save a dime the first decade.

rad_gruchalski4• 2 years ago

You need python to do 3*61 and append four zeros to the result?

CRConrad26• 2 years ago

once Microsoft imposes the £61 annual [...] 30000*61 1830000 £1,830,000 for the first

What makes you think Microsoft would invoice their customers in Germany in British pounds? Weird unit to use when commenting on an article about Germany on an international site.

monospaced• 2 years ago

The will likely be using Phoenix: https://www.dataport.de/about-phoenix/

The German government developed a fully free and open source solution that is quite similar (consisting of Nextcloud, jitsi, Collabora etc.) and can be deployed using Kubernetes: https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk

jorvi• 2 years ago

It’s kind of a bummer that there’s a bunch of these separate OSS initiatives in Spain, France, Germany and a few other countries..

Instead of everyone rolling their own subvariant of Nextcloud, Matrix, LibreOffice etc, imagine if there was an EU mandate set up and some serious money was budgeted to it.

You’d get a triple multiplier of more budget, less duplication of effort, and a self-reinforcing cycle where more use means the product becomes better through contribs which makes use even more attractive.

unkoman• 2 years ago

I think I want less bureaucracy in my development so happy to see multiple versions and letting them battling them out

Arathorn• 2 years ago

Speaking from the Matrix side: it would definitely be preferable to have a large reliable source of funding for public sector Matrix deployments rather than juggling between loads of small overlapping ones (especially when they end up failing to route any $ to the upstreams). That said, Schleswig Holstein is looking to route $ upstream in this instance.

isodev3• 2 years ago

But isn’t this the very centralisation we’re trying to avoid?

tpm• 2 years ago

You are underestimating German federalism - there are several competing providers for each specialized software used by German municipalities, often with huge customisations. There is no way you could mandate a specific product. What can be done from above, in some cases, is specifying requirements (for eg data storage, privacy laws, code auditability...) and APIs (like APIs to federal agencies) and let the customers and providers create solutions. It might be messier, but in the end you are not dependent on a single product.

lyu072822• 2 years ago

Very typical for Germany, they rather roll their own solutions than cooperating with other countries and pooling resources. But it's even worse than that, each state within Germany does their own bureaucracy differently as well, to varying degrees.

lyu072822• 2 years ago

imagine if there was an EU mandate set up and some serious money was budgeted to it.

We saw what that looks like already. "Gaia-X" it was a huge clusterfuck and burned to the ground before it even began.

vasco2• 2 years ago

State mandated projects give you things like the Lidl AWS "alternative" who's pricing page is a downloadable PDF.

otherme1232• 2 years ago

This is a mistake at this phase. Right now, we europeans still didn't figure out what is the best way, so each country tries something different. With time, failures will be replaced with winners.

CRConrad26• 2 years ago

Yeah, then they could use it in... Jorvi. ;-D

Could be familiar to you, but if not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorvi_Hospital

cladopa• 2 years ago

They already did that before until Microsoft offered them new conditions and they went back to MS.

So take all those "digital sovereignity" with a grain of salt. It usually means: "We want you to lower your fees".

Isolus2• 2 years ago

No, they didn't. That happened for example in Munich. But that is on the other side of Germany. And there is already a joke that MS can't move their german headquarters every time a state or big city want's to move away from MS products. (They did this when Munich changed back to MS producs - but of course this was pure coincidence.)

elygre• 2 years ago

Microsoft started building their new Munich headquarters in 2013/2014. Their old headquarters were already immediately outside Munich. For example, the Munich airport is further away from Munch city than the old headquarters were.

The decision to revert to a Microsoft Platform was taken in November 2017.

non-chalad2• 2 years ago

Yes, Bavaria is practically an entirely different state, with its' own language, religion, politics, and culture.

lukan• 2 years ago

It was mainly in Munich and more about Linux in general and Bill Gates personally intervened. The next government rolled back to MS.

And no, data sovereignity means more than money, but it might cost more money in the end. There were quite some problems, but those could have been resolved. But not for free.

PeterStuer• 2 years ago

Sovereignty might have gotten a bit of a priority boost post Nordstream.

rchaud5• 2 years ago

So you're saying digital sovereignty provides leverage. That itself is valuable.

schleck82• 2 years ago

Opposite end of the country.

jraph2• 2 years ago

So take all those "digital sovereignty" with a grain of salt

Actually, there's actual money flowing from Germany to open source companies as we speak to build digital sovereign solutions (like openDesk [1]), so it's more than "We want you to lower your fees".

Real concerns have more and more motivated this kind of things in recent years.

[1] https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk/info/-/blob/main/REA...

Stranger438• 2 years ago

The germans have been tinkering with policies mandating non-cloud dependent products for a while wondering if this is a start of it actually getting implemented on a large scale or if the delay attempts will remain successful elsewhere across the region.

If this is a start of an actual migration away from cloud dependence, it's a matter of time before windows(which is as cloud dependent as office those days for enterprise management features) itself is targeted, and the entire federation of germany changing from ms office formats to odf in practice could set some interesting balls in motions.

But as we have seen this before where a product is started and then sabotaged or delayed by lobbying and inertia from people who dont want to change how theyve always done things, it could be another one-off that dont set a trend.

daeros2• 2 years ago

sane policy. Every time Office 365 is down I watch the maddening dash of IT workers who can't get anything done, it's amusing.

Rinzler894• 2 years ago

What's the alternative? Would they be able to do more without cloud office solutions?

Like in the days long last we used to email .doc files to each other? I doubt it.

Would hosting an on-prem alternative yeld better cost and a higher uptime? I doubt it.

zo1• 2 years ago

I live in a badly-maintained, "3rd world" country, and since we got office 365 maybe a half decade ago (probably more) it's been down once, for one afternoon. And that was due to what looks like an undersea cable sabotage.

What kind of internet/IT department do you have where you have any sort of regular office outage?

freetanga3• 2 years ago

Every time my MS rep brings up O365 I correct him: “it’s Office 363. It does not work twice a year”

datenhorst• 2 years ago

Is Office365 really down that often? I'm fortunate enough to not have to use it but I don't hear any complaints from my colleagues that do.

andsoitis2• 2 years ago

sane policy. Every time Office 365 is down I watch the maddening dash of IT workers who can't get anything done, it's amusing.

While there might be issues with Office 365's reliability (I don't know, I use Google Docs), the online collaborative capabilities is a fantastic tradeoff. Mailing individual files amongst a group of collaborators impede productivity (even though it has other benefits).

You could make the argument that cloud solutions are not a prerequisite for collaborative tools like Office 365 or Google Docs, but desktop peer-to-peer systems like those that Groove Networks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groove_Networks) tried to create did not take off.

cjk2• 2 years ago

I use O365 all day across two orgs and have done for about 5 years. Never had a problem. Not once!

Havoc4• 2 years ago

Yeah last time with Munich they moved back to MS after MS just so happened to move their HQ to that state.

Microsoft is clearly keen to avoid this becoming a thing. If governments can shift successfully then so can businesses

https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-germany-moves-into-a-new-h...

sgift3• 2 years ago

The link is just about a move from one part of Munich to another (MS German HQ has always been in Munich). From what I remember it was more that we had a coalition with the CSU for four years and unsurprisingly, the moment conservatives were part of the cities government all went back to "help the companies".

(MS had tried to pressure against the move from the start, but wasn't really successful in the first years)

TacticalCoder• 2 years ago

I remember that one... In the end the harsh truth for MS is that a guesstimate of 99% of all offices and administration users are using and, most of all, only need 1% of the features Office (including Excel) do offer.

The other harsh truth is that those using more advanced features are typically creating spreadsheets full of errors and bugs, which should be better rewritten in dedicated apps.

The world is using MS Office but the world really doesn't need that turd.

I ve both ported an Excel spreadsheet to dedicated app and helped SMEs move everything to Google workspace.

Fuck MS Office.

pixelpoet• 2 years ago

Do the americans exclusively use MS Office in government computers?

lrvick• 2 years ago

Yes. Most schools too. Microsoft has incredible political power here.

deaddodo4• 2 years ago

What do you mean by "exclusively" and "government"? Outside of the DoD/US Military (where hardened Linux has quite a few uses), I'm pretty sure the US Federal govt is fairly Microsoft-centric as they offer them the guarantees and concessions needed to sign contracts. It's not that the Fed thinks Windows or Office is better than the open source alternatives, as much as it is that if/when they do fail they have a direct point of contact with strict SLA guarantees to get things fixed and they have full control of all of their software to do so without hindrance.

Local and state govts usually follow suit, as it makes sense that what works for the Fed will work for them. But I've seen plenty of open source softwares being used in various municipal and state offices. LibreOffice and CentOS would probably be the most common alternatives.

So, to answer your question, no it's not exclusively Windows. It's almost exclusively Windows in the Federal govt as there are mandates there, but otherwise it's a hodgepodge of what works/can be afforded throughout all other levels of govt.

severino• 2 years ago

It's reasonable. What would be strange is that they relied on Chinese or Russian software to run their government. That's sort of what we, the Europeans, do when we use Microsoft tech in our governments.

ghnws• 2 years ago

Not just Americans. MS Office is the standard (at least) in the western world.

spogbiper• 2 years ago

America is a very big place with federal, state, city standards. I'm not sure it is possible to say "exclusively" about anything.

That said, I've been in the IT world for 3 decades and I haven't worked for/with a government agency that used anything other than MS Office since the WordPerfect and Lotus 123 days.

jrochkind1• 2 years ago

I feel like I've seen this very headline before in Germany specifically several times over the years, like I keep hearing that Germany is using LibreOffice/OpenOffice.

Googling to try to confirm this, I see that OpenOffice began when a program called StarOffice was open-sourced, and StarOffice was originally a German product most popular in Germany, so that could be part of German interest in OpenOffice descendents specifically. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#History

And here's an article that may be what I was thinking of -- but turns out it was about Munich specifically. That has a history of saying it was going to switch to OpenOffice as far back as 2003, that not working out for them, then trying again...

2020: Linux not Windows: Why Munich is shifting back from Microsoft to open source – again: Munich's flip-flop back to open source is the latest sign of Germany's political sea change over proprietary software.

However, the decision by the new coalition administration in Germany's third largest and one of its wealthiest cities is just the latest twist in a saga that began over 15 years ago in 2003, spurred by Microsoft's plans to end support for Windows NT 4.0.
Because the city needed to find a replacement for aging Microsoft Windows workstations, Munich eventually began the move away from proprietary software at the end of 2006.

— https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...

And here's a history of Berlin announcing/trying but not getting approval....

It is the second time the opposition Greens had proposed switching Berlin's 68,000 workstations to open source software, and the second time they failed, said Thomas Birk, the party's spokesman for government modernization, on Wednesday. The earlier effort was in 2007.

Oh boy, which also mentions:

Not every migration works though. The city of Freiburg announced in November it would dump OpenOffice and go back to Microsoft because of functionality problems due to a failed migration.

— https://www.infoworld.com/article/2611066/berlin-won-t-migra...

So yeah, German localities kind of have a history of trying this out without it actually leading to a sea change, although this one may be larger/at the state level instead of just city/etc. (Although I guess it's wrong to say this hasn't led to a trend -- its' an existing German trend of local governments trying to switch, without it necessarily working out!)

ckw4602• 2 years ago

You are spot on. I was just having the same argument with the recent news.... Thinking this is old news

ckw4602• 2 years ago

15 years ago. It was big news then. Germany has always had a rocky relationship with USA software.... Remember when Lotus.... software could not be exported from the USA because the encryption was considered a weapon of mass destruction?

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL6E8F276E/

CRConrad26• 2 years ago

although this one may be larger/at the state level instead of just city/etc.

I think that, like in the USA, some German states (Bundesländer) are smaller than some German cities.

7thaccount• 2 years ago

I figured the stated move to open source was a bluff to get a lower license cost.

bee_rider2• 2 years ago

I could swear this has happened before…

FloatArtifact• 2 years ago

I hope they set aside some budget/resources to contribute back to the open source ecosystem

NekkoDroid• 2 years ago

They already do at least a bit :)

https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/

selfselfgot• 2 years ago

Honestly I think the decades long tech bubble is winding down, once people move away from Teams, what is the need to pay OS maintainers? It will take a few years but we are heading towards an economy more balanced amongst sectors.

f_allwein3• 2 years ago

Did not work well in Munich, my hometown, in 2004. Hope the lessons have been learned. https://itsfoss.com/munich-linux-failure/

zoobab• 2 years ago

Microsoft spent so much money to make it fail.

Rinzler894• 2 years ago

Still. They got a Microsoft office with a lot of well paying jobs. It's something.

Most countries could dream of such leverage over a company like Microsoft.

boxed2• 2 years ago

How do they do that? I mean, practically?

If the open source solution works, where do Microsoft spend money to make it fail?

f_allwein3• 2 years ago

If I remember, there was also an issue around people working in the administration not wanting to get used to new software/ not being able to do some tasks.

3rd32• 2 years ago

The "lesson" does not seem so clear according to the article you have linked:

Schneider claimed that the decision had been political, “not made on the basis of facts”
“We do not see any compelling technical reasons for a change to Windows and Microsoft Office… We solve compatibility and interoperability problems by providing MS Office, mostly virtualised, at workplaces that need to work together with external offices on office documents.”

One point of critique was the difficulty involved with 3rd party programs on the Linux laptops. But with MS Teams, Zoom etc. running in the browser and/or having actual Linux clients these days, this may be much more feasible today.

The opposition claimed the decision to abandon Linux was a purely political one. The mayor who pushed the return to Microsoft, Dieter Reiter (SPD), was a known Microsoft fanboy, but he (of course) denied personal investment in the reversal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

jonesjohnson• 2 years ago

It's a sad story. My spouse is working for the city in some legal department and she was happily using LiMux for years with no big issues. The main problem was that the IT department was understaffed and underpaid...

One reason for their switch might be that Microsoft thought about opening up a big office here. Another reason might have been the study conducted by Accenture [1], who have some close ties to Microsoft...

I also enjoyed reading the interview of former Munich mayor Christian Ude [2]. Apparently, Steve Ballmer was interrupting his ski vacation in Switzerland to visit Ude and personally try to convince him to ditch LiMux.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170219053640/https://www.ris-m...

[2] https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/

[edit: typo]

mschuster912• 2 years ago

It's a sad story. My spouse is working for the city in some legal department and she was happily using LiMux for years with no big issues. The main problem was that the IT department was understaffed and underpaid...

I worked on LiMux in the developer team at the start of my career. HN is a village, lol. And the situation is more complex, and long enough has passed for me to detail out what actually were the problems without revealing anything top secret...

1. most of the desktop hardware was OLD. Like really fucking old. We're talking of systems with 256M of RAM. Anything would send these into swapping. But instead of blaming the finance department for not upgrading the computers, everyone was more than happy to blame LiMux because many people hoped that enough blaming would bring Windows back eventually (as it did...)

2. A lot of the hundreds of sites that the city of Munich has weren't connected to fast fiber, but via 10/10 SDSL (or slower) links. That's enough for Active Directory to work, and most sites had cache servers on-site to make life bearable, but still: everything was SLOW for a lot of users. From what I hear through the grape vines, that has changed at least for everything inside the Mittlerer Ring demarcation as M-net/SWM built out FTTB across the entire area, but some sites more remote still are on crap links.

3. LibreOffice, or rather OpenOffice was shit back then - I was there right when the fork happened. (And from what I hear, it's not gotten much better... developing an office suite actually requires funding which barely anyone wants to provide)

4. Many of the special applications ("Fachverfahren") were only available for Windows. Some (e.g. SAP) were available as Java apps (with all the problems JVM has, particularly being a memory hog), a few were available as Linux applications but usually in rpm format and not deb which made every update a PITA with alien (LiMux was Ubuntu based), but the utter majority were Windows-only. Some could be made to work with WINE, but some (particularly those interfacing with proprietary hardware such as specially hardened printers) still required a few Windows workstations here and there.

5. We were fucking understaffed. Like 4 FTEs working on packaging and development, but a whole externally sourced test department (that was, to be fair, really needed to catch regressions, and there were a lot of them). But each and every single one of my colleagues were absolute experts and a joy to work with and learn from. Without them, the situation would have been much worse.

6. Political interference. Not just from the city government and its bullshit, but especially from the entrenched "micro fiefdoms" in the administration. No one wanted to cede control to us or the central IT@M organization that was being formed when I was there, instead they all wanted their own decentralized teams (dIKA). Some wanted to opt out of LiMux entirely, and had good reasons for that (chiefly, their applications not running on LiMux).

7. Dieter fucking Reiter, the successor of Christian Ude as mayor after the 2014 elections, as well as the Social Democrat-Conservative government that came into power with him. Ude, for all he turned wrong after he left office, was a staunch protector of LiMux, and we all knew what would come once he left, and so it inevitably happened. And that's just one thing in the long list of reasons to despise Reiter.

Zhyl• 2 years ago

A lot can happen in 20 years.

1970-01-012• 2 years ago

I predict it will yet fail again. Desktop Linux maintains it's bad reputation very well, and 20 years is just enough time for everyone to forget the details. Unless they have an insane user to IT ratio (perhaps 6:1), the adoption pain points will soon be rediscovered and overwhelm the project.

jraph2• 2 years ago

Do you have actual elements? Actual pain points? The details you are mentioning?

zaik• 2 years ago

Why do you think they stopped using Linux in Munich? I'm sorry, but it feels like you didn't read the article you're responding to at all.

ktzar• 2 years ago

Interestingly, it might not be a cost saving decision, but the money needed for the initial setup and ongoing support ending in local companies' and worker's pockets.

pjmlp2• 2 years ago

The irony of this change, is this isn't Munich any longer, many of those services might run on Azure, depend of FOSS projects that are directly or indirectly paid by Microsoft, thus they won't care as much as in the past, see sore state of Windows versus Azure.

icemelt8• 2 years ago

Genuine question, is there any other professional field in the world where people work for free like how Software Engineers work in open source?

fhd2• 2 years ago

People working on open source don't necessarily do it for free, I know tons who are sponsored by their company.

That aside, at least in Germany, there is a considerable amount of volunteers, e.g. in social work.

d0gsg0w00f• 2 years ago

Politics. People want to influence their world and volunteer for local seats. Then they have to figure out how to not be corrupted by the power.

Hamuko4• 2 years ago

Volunteer firefighters.

Hendrikto2• 2 years ago

At least in Germany, they are not professionals working unpaid. They are just volunteers with other jobs. Not really comparable.

willyt• 2 years ago

In Britain they are paid as well. They get a yearly retainer of ~£6k for being on 5 min standby and are also paid per call out.

dikei2• 2 years ago

To be fair, there are not many professions that a single individual can make so much impact as Software Engineering.

People say 10x Software Engineer, rarely 10x Electrical Engineer.

moooo993• 2 years ago

I would argue most volunteer firefighters and other social volunteers have more net-positive impact than the vast majority software engineers.

Avicebron• 2 years ago

That's not how people use 10x (which I think is a silly article of marketing at best or a pretend metric people like to claim as some sort of totem of achievement), usually it means someone 10x more productive(???) than a supposed 1x software engineer.

In that case if we applied the same make believe as we do with software, then sure a 10x electrical could exist, just think of what you think an avg electrical engineer does and 10x it, boom.

Hendrikto2• 2 years ago

Lawyers often do pro bono work.

NeoTar• 2 years ago

A few examples:

- Doctors/Nurses working at free-clincs,

- Legal professionals will sometimes offer their services for free to needy individuals (I don't mean no-win-no-fee, but more writing a letter to a landlord on a tenant's behalf)

- Many people in the accountancy profession will offer their services to local groups/societies as treasurers or to do annual accounts, (indeed the whole boards of such groups are often unpaid, but may be less of a profession),

- Often at least some members of a board-of-directors for a charity will be volunteers,

As a more out-of-left field example, I recently met a really quite famous academic volunteering as a tour-guide at a historical house.

seabass-labrax• 2 years ago

Legal professionals

Pro bono legal work, which is unpaid, is actually a requirement for practising lawyers in some jurisdictions. New York is one such example.

Often at least some members of a board-of-directors for a charity will be volunteers

Depending on how you define the terms, all of the directors will be volunteers.

The most common structure for charities is a board of trustees/directors between around 5 and 10 members, who are all unpaid and part-time. The board is led by the Chair(man, woman) of the Board, who is otherwise just an ordinary board member. The meetings are facilitated by the Chief Executive, who is not a board member but a full-time, paid employee of the charity.

Underneath the Chief Executive are other full-time paid staff who are supposed to follow the leadership of the Chief Executive, and who often don't get to attend the board meetings. This group may be any size between zero and thousands of individuals! Confusingly, some organisations call certain people in the middle-management of this team 'directors'.

To conclude:

Board: unpaid - '(Non-executive) Directors', 'Trustees' or 'Councillors'.

Staff: paid, usually full-time - includes 'Executives', '(Executive) Directors' and possibly many other non-management roles.

Some charities' boards get so large they become more like the parliaments of liberal democracies - Speakers, votes, elections.

That's only the most conventional structure - I'd be happy to elaborate on the edge cases too! :)

morkalork• 2 years ago

I had a language teacher that before working professionally spent many months as a volunteer teaching free classes for immigrants and refugees. The way he made it sound was that nobody got hired without doing that free work.

phkahler• 2 years ago

> Genuine question, is there any other professional field in the world where people work for free like how Software Engineers work in open source?

Woodworking, restoring old cars, building airplanes. These are all things that people do for themselves at their own cost. The difference is that software has a marginal cost of zero, so they hand it out to everyone and collaborate to make it better.

sureMan• 2 years ago

Off course, vets volunteering at animal shelters, same for MD's, medics and nurses at shelters, lawyers doing pro bono work, etc

izacus• 2 years ago

Huge huge majority of open source (especially famous one) is developed by people that are paid to do so by corporations. So it's a misleading premise.

non-chalad2• 2 years ago

Collaborative writing (1), movie making (2), terrorist hunting (3), and volunteer forum moderation (4), are all things. Fanfiction (5) is also written for free.

All of these have been, in the past, variyng degrees of professional.

1. https://www.makeuseof.com/collaborative-fiction-sites-improv...

2. Iron Sky (2012), Moon (2009), Norwegian Ninja (2010) all involved free collaboration, to varying degrees.

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OR6epSP_Xlw

4. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3491102.3517628

5. http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M...

joshxyz• 2 years ago

pro bono aka volunteer work that hones their skills

andrewstuart• 2 years ago

This ship sailed 20 years ago.

Who is still fighting this ancient crusade?

Pay the small fee, use the Microsoft software, live life. There’s much better battles to fight than the office software one.

wasmitnetzen• 2 years ago

The entire IT landscape has changed tremendously in the last 20 years with that cloud-first approach. This is a different fight.

Moldoteck2• 2 years ago

the fee will no longer be that small considering microsoft's intention to charge a lot for extended windows support, it's not like the price is constant

yourusername2• 2 years ago

Only if you stay on a outdated version. If you're a company/government you have a M365 subscription that includes the latest windows and you're replacing your computers every 5-7 years so Win11 not supporting some computers from 2017 might cost you 1 year of support for a small part of your total fleet.

self_awareness• 2 years ago

Much better battles according to who?

dguest• 2 years ago

Remember to thank the OSS developers for the bargaining chip.

EduardoBautista2• 2 years ago

Why should local governments use taxpayers’ money to buy proprietary, closed software from a single vendor?

I don't want to be a pessimist, but working with non-traditional tools is going to cost the taxpayers more money when important documents are not formatted correctly or the software behaves differently than the proprietary alternatives.

Linux is successful on the server because it has huge corporate backing. Linux has not been successful on the desktop because it has low corporate backing.

The cost of Microsoft Office is comparable to the cost of keeping their workplace stocked with coffee throughout the year.

josefx3• 2 years ago

but working with non-traditional tools is going to cost the taxpayers more money when important documents are not formatted correctly or the software behaves differently than the proprietary alternatives.

That is already a given with Microsofts own tools, office365 is a crippled mess.

The cost of Microsoft Office is comparable to the cost of keeping their workplace stocked with coffee throughout the year.

Which is also something many companies don't pay for.

tiahura2• 2 years ago

office365 is a crippled mess.

Strong “I have no idea what I’m talking about” vibe here.

tetris11• 2 years ago

Linux was successful before corporate backing from just a handful of volunteers. If it was a failing product, corporations wouldn't have chosen it to develop on. It has been greatly enhanced by corporate contributions, but it would have gotten there without them too, albeit much slower.

I do agree though that MS products will likely play hard and fast with the compatibility game in order to exhaust local government workers from using FOSS

EduardoBautista2• 2 years ago

Linux started receiving corporate backing within a few years of it being released. Red Hat played a huge role in providing support and someone to turn to when something went wrong.

but it would have gotten there without them too, albeit much slower

No, it wouldn't have. There is no way that a bunch of volunteers in their spare time could achieve the same results, what took many full-time employees and contributions from the largest and most powerful corporations in the world.

Moldoteck2• 2 years ago

if all DE will switch to libreoffice, they'll use a single format, so shouldn't be such a big problem. The problem may arise when communicating with other countries (maybe?)

guappa4• 2 years ago

If germany switches the other countries will follow, at the very least the offices that have to interact with them.

helloimhonk• 2 years ago

Germany can afford to fund libreoffice development which will benefit the taxpayer by providing good free alternatives to microsoft products.

I also dont think any tax payer is concerned about the cost of a document being formatted differently.

prmoustache8• 2 years ago

And I don't buy the argument that a document not being formated correctly is costly. People mostly don't care and when real administrative stuff needs to be shared it is done via pdf forms where the output is controlled.

Havoc4• 2 years ago

Some initial growing pains seem worthwhile though

rchaud5• 2 years ago

Why bail out the US auto companies in 2008? Japanese cars had better gas mileage, it would be a win-win for the taxpayer, right?

The need for sovereignty in these areas of national strategic significance is going to override concerns about UX or a learning curve. Most LibreOffice apps are similar to Office anyway, and the Open Document Format it uses is standardized in ISO 2600.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument

hackerlight• 2 years ago

going to cost the taxpayers more money

It's an investment in a public good, which is one of the roles of governments. Sort of like how the German taxpayer helped kick start the solar industry decades ago.

groestl2• 2 years ago

Yepp. The only money that might "cost" something, to a nation state, is money that leaves it.

croes4• 2 years ago

Only if you exclude the attack vector of linked MS products.

How many malware attacks are based on some kind of Office exploit?

estebank2• 2 years ago

National governments have more considerations that purely saving tax payers' money, because such savings can be short sighted. Saving money on munitions during a war effort, for example. Would you be as eager to have your courtry's military equipment built and purchased from an adversarial super-power? This is exactly the same thing.

dubcanada3• 2 years ago

I don't want to be a pessimist, but working with non-traditional tools is going to cost the taxpayers more money when important documents are not formatted correctly or the software behaves differently than the proprietary alternatives.

That is a bit short sighted, if we didn't work with non-traditional tools the whole computer/internet wouldn't exist and we'd still be writing stuff down.

averageRoyalty• 2 years ago

The governments job is to work for and improve society. They should not ever be profit driven or penny pinching.

CRConrad26• 2 years ago

I don't want to be a pessimist, but working with non-traditional tools is going to cost the taxpayers more money when important documents are not formatted correctly or the software behaves differently than the proprietary alternatives.

Comes in handy for The Dominant Vendor, who can claim that "formatted correctly" is defined as the way their software formats stuff.

So I can understand Microsoft championning that definition, but why do you?

nottorp• 2 years ago

Again?

nokeya• 2 years ago

China started the process of switching from x86 to own architecture (loong-something if I recall correctly). Where Microsoft is essentially not present. I think they use Microsoft products a lot like any other governments. So we might see a big switch to libreoffice soon

pquki4• 2 years ago

LoongArch, I believe

Havoc4• 2 years ago

China gov is already on a mainly Linux stack

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kylin_(operating_system)

Unsure what office tools they use though

larodi• 2 years ago

Chinese started WPS Office (called Kingsoft before) in 1989. Since end of 90s it is state favored and in 2011 received major grand. My wild guess is that they have much more incentive to use this rather than some broken open source Java thingie which is generally much slower than WPS.

This package is 36 years old and very often overlooked by analysts dunno why. At time of writing there isn’t a single mention of this in the comments… very weird?!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WPS_Office

TheCleric• 2 years ago

Even North Korea has their own linux distro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS

poulpy123• 2 years ago

I feel like I'm reading this headline every 5 or 10 years

_ink_• 2 years ago

Great. Now employ a team of 10 or so full time engineers and assign them to contribute to it.

rchaud5• 2 years ago

We have no influence on the operating processes of such [proprietary] solutions and the handling of data, including a possible outflow of data to third countries.

All countries should have a strategy to fork open source software and implement it for this reason. They should also share their contributions with the wider Linux community as well, although with the recent xz scandal, pull requests from nation states may be looked at with suspicion.

isodev3• 2 years ago

Nice! I think in general, public services should not have to depend on for-profit organisations for their operations. Especially when such are tax-funded.

ChicagoDave7• 2 years ago

I’d quit my job if I was forced to a Linux desktop and non office365 tools. The loss of productivity in this change is going to be massively disruptive.

It’s not going to go as smoothly as they think it will. I highly doubt their pilot program sniffed out all the complexities.

prmoustache8• 2 years ago

I haven't seen a particular productivity boost anywhere from regular office + sharepoint and office365.

I also haven't noted a productivity difference between sharepoint (which office 365 really is) and other content management platforms.

Ironically the only place where office 365 offered a boost is in the linux world really. You don't even need a local suite office to open msoffice documents.

ChicagoDave7• 2 years ago

Most non-technical people have a pattern of work. They know how to do their job because it’s been repeated over years. This change will alter many of those patterns.

Even the simplest things like text editor or using a command line will be disruptive.

The support staff is going to be overwhelmed.

RalfWausE• 2 years ago

If this would be the case: Thank you for creating a job opportunity for more open minded people ;-)

ChicagoDave7• 2 years ago

I have nothing against Linux or libreoffice. I just think forcing thousands of workers to drastically alter their work environment is going to be traumatic and I’ll lay odds that in 12 months they switch back or to a hybrid model.

weinzierl3• 2 years ago

As much as I congratulate them for moving away from Microsoft Office as much I feel this is a step in the wrong direction. We need to move our administration away from the paper centric workflows of a world that is long gone for most people.

jillesvangurp• 2 years ago

Exactly. Rubber Stamps belong in a museum. Along with Fax machines. And the people still insisting on using those for "security reasons". Common practice in Germany is to receive an email with a pdf, print it, sign it (or stamp) it, and then put it in the post. This both stupid and slow.

German bureaucracy is still paper driven. Having lived in other countries with more or less full digital access to all the stuff Germans still do with paper forms or in person, I know the difference. It's slow, tedious, expensive, error prone, etc.

Any paper forms should move online. The whole ritual of printing them, filling them in with a pen, and then having people manually copy information back into some ancient database is just completely backwards. People should sign stuff digitally. This is not only possible but common practice in most of the countries bordering Germany.

weinzierl3• 2 years ago

Past week I travelled to London by train. I tried to book this trip a couple of months in advance from Deutsche Bahn website, but only got obscure error messages when finalizing the booking(*).

So I tried the french SNCF app and the booking was done in a couple of minutes, all tickets conveniently in the app - expect for the German leg of the travel. SNCF sent me a Deutsche Bahn paper ticket via snail mail.

(*) Tried for about a week, on different computers, my mobile, from another account. Sent a complaint, received an email answer that said they could not help me, but I could send my email to another address - except the other address was the very address I sent my complaint in the first place. Went to Deutsche Bahn office eventually, train I wanted was supposedly booked out, which I know wasn't true because booked it later via SNCF. They reluctantly tried to find me an alternative, but apparently they had to go through all the combinations manually. It took forever and wasn't successful either.

pshirshov• 2 years ago

What, again?

Ygg2• 2 years ago

Why is this constantly happening and nothing comes out of it? I've been reading same headline for past 20 years, I thought even if it was a single town, most of Germany would be running Libre/Open Office by now.

Also OnlyOffice is a much better candidate, it's very usable and OSS as well.

CalRobert4• 2 years ago

My wife just started a new job in the Netherlands and I was super excited to hear that her office uses Ubuntu and LibreOffice for all their PC's. She wasn't interviewing for a tech job but apparently her being reasonably familiar with both was helpful at her interview (all those years of Raspberry Pis around the house paid off!)

Is this normal? It certainly would be an outlier back in the US.

diggan• 2 years ago

Don't know specifically about Europe-wide or Netherlands specific, but it's not unheard of in various European countries.

As an example, the city government of Barcelona started to migrate things away from proprietary systems back in 2017. First applications and later the OS itself. Not sure what the progress of that is though. Old article about it: https://elpais.com/ccaa/2017/12/01/catalunya/1512145439_1325...

Similar moves been done in various agencies and entities in France and Germany as well.

fbn79• 2 years ago

Another article about migration to linux after 2019 https://computerhoy.com/noticias/software/barcelona-cambiara... and a Gemini sumup https://g.co/gemini/share/74fe50828fa1

ramon156• 2 years ago

This is definitely new for me as a dutch person, would you care to say which company? Seems like a cool company

CalRobert4• 2 years ago

Sure, https://svi.nl. They do pretty interesting work!

swarnie• 2 years ago

If a similar announcement came from my government i'd just assume one of their mates had set up an open source consultancy business and it'd all be abandoned once enough money had been siphoned off.

Stranger438• 2 years ago

Normal no but it's in the 2-3% range so not completely unthinkable and usually supported well enough by the core organisations that an company must interact with to be entirely feasible.

a2800276• 2 years ago

It's an outlier in Germany as well. The municipal government in Munich tried to migrate to OSS around ~2004, but had to roll back after a couple of years. Most municipalities and government agencies would _like_ to utilize more OSS, but don't really have any concrete idea of how to proceed.

f1refly• 2 years ago

This was probably completely, utterly unrelated to the migration of the german Microsoft HQ to Munich at that time and there was no corruption involved at all.

dubcanada3• 2 years ago

If you don't mind me asking, what type of job is it?

CalRobert4• 2 years ago

She's not a developer but the company makes software used to process microscopy images - Huygens Deconvolution, I think is the term.

prmoustache8• 2 years ago

I think most of the french gendarmerie has been using openoffice then libreoffice + thunderbird for 2 decades already. Initially on windows that have progressively replaced with linux over the years.

I've read 4 years ago that out of 85k desktop computers, only 8% where running windows 10, the rest was running ubuntu LTS.

I would say that being a branch of the french army, migration was easier.

zelphirkalt4• 2 years ago

Do you know, if that company offers remote jobs for developers? And what company is that?

CalRobert4• 2 years ago

All in-office I'm afraid.

Archelaos• 2 years ago

Some clarification and background.

The headline might be somewhat misleading if you do not read the article. It is not the federal state of Germany that is starting to switch to LibreOffice, but one of the member states of the federation: Schleswig-Holstein.

Shifting to LibreOffice is only one component of the the state's strategy towards a digitally sovereign IT workplace. You can read more about the other elements of this strategy here: https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/themen/... (in German).

What is very interesting is the political background: Schleswig-Holstein is governed by a coalition of the Converservative party (CDU) and the Greens. In past decades it had been the Greens who where among the most driving forces for the adaption of open-source software and open standards in the public sphere, while the Conservativs primarily sided with big business. Now the latter seems to change gradually. Interesting times ...

moolcool• 2 years ago

Open source is great, but LibreOffice is a nightmare to use when you want to any actual work. I feel for the German bureaucrats.

mglz• 2 years ago

What issues for example?

bzzzt2• 2 years ago

Did they fix the unusable slow rendering on retina Macs yet? Couldn't even normally scroll through a blank document last time I tried...

lucumo• 2 years ago

I'm not sure if this still current, but a few years ago I switched from LibreOffice to MS Office because Calc was unbearably slow. I wasn't doing anything crazy, but also not trivial: 6 or 7 sheets, with a bunch of formulas with never more than about 500 cells filled (10 columns, 50 lines), and on most sheets a lot less.

Excel blazes through it. I feel it was a very good decision, even though I'm a miser.

Avamander• 2 years ago

No fractional scrolling. No tolerable (color) templates for graphs.

underlipton• 2 years ago

I once had a bug that wiped a handful of documents. Spent hours writing them, opened them a few months later and they were blank. In some cases, it replaces all of the characters with #s. It's something to do with the autosave feature, I believe.

pigpang• 2 years ago

I have the opposite issue - if I want to work on a document or sheet, I open it in LibreOffice, because it is intuitive to use for me. I use office rarely, so I have no time to memorize how to use MS Office properly, while LibreOffice can be used out of box.

ensocode• 2 years ago

Sure there was this sad Munich thing with Microsoft but still I think this is very positive news!

schleck82• 2 years ago

Since it's linked at the bottom, I find it really funny how different the German states' websites are in quality.

There is good ones like

https://www.schleswig-holstein.de

https://www.baden-wuerttemberg.de

https://hessen.de

And then there is sites like this

https://www.sachsen-anhalt.de

https://www.sachsen.de

kome• 2 years ago

A bit dated graphically, but I wouldn't say low quality... a graphic designer worked on the first three - the last two are the creation of a "webmaster".

tietjens2• 2 years ago

Mixed feelings on this, but can we please appreciate the irony that this is happening just days after XZ Utils.

etiennebausson2• 2 years ago

To be fair, xz didn't hit, xz flopped. The issue was detected before it could do much/any damage.

As far as I'm concerned it's a point in favor of OSS, rather than against it. How many such attacks in closed-source programs goes undetected?

tietjens2• 2 years ago

My point was regarding German appetite for risk. Not trying to make a point against OSS.

oaiey• 2 years ago

30k multiplied by an M365 license... If they would use these funds to pay some developers for Libre office... That would be awesome.

openrisk2• 2 years ago

A question mark before open source productivity tools find mass adoption is their ability to integrate ML/AI tools.

The current hype notwithstanding, it is likely that the next generation productivity suite (from spreadsheets to document editors etc) will support important algorithmically augmented workflows and non-technical users will expect them to be available. Libreoffice and friends must have a forward looking narrative to remain relevant.

Proprietary cloud based solutions are already rolling in this direction but will always face the extra hurdles that sensitive data are accessible by third parties and essential functionality for business continuity relies on external actors.

But, so far at least, neither libreoffice (nor the linux desktop for that matter) seem to be particularly keen on moving to that next phase. Even while cutting edge open source machine learning and even competend LLM models are getting available in record time, the integration story is still non-existent.

The pendulum of client/server balance and thin versus thick clients is always swinging. With mobile and cloud it seems to have reached an extremum. Who knows where it lands next, maybe the "AI PC" that some hardware vendors already pitch will become a thing.

CRConrad26• 2 years ago

A question mark before open source productivity tools find mass adoption is their ability to integrate ML/AI tools.

No, the question is how long it will take before the world admits that this "AI" emperor is naked.

The current hype notwithstanding,

Whaddayamean "notwithstanding"? The hype can't be notwithstanding, since hype is all it is.

openrisk2• 2 years ago

This is insular attitude that will not serve well the open source desktop (and libreoffice in particular). Reasons to be annoyed by the "AI" emperor certainly abound, but one might get too distracted by distasteful mass hysteria phenomena and miss important developments and trends that are here to stay.

The point is that there is an entire universe of popular and very useful data science tools and models (built around Python, R etc.) of which the current AI/ML/LLM's algorithms are just a tiny and rather extreme use case. At some point libreoffice must move beyond VBA if it wants to remain relevant.

maxclark• 2 years ago

And in 2 years they'll move back

zelphirkalt4• 2 years ago

Less of my tax money into the hands of companies that do comply with EU law, ergo criminals, great! I hope they have some solution in mind for cooperatively working on documents. That seems to be a big hurdle. Maybe some Nextcloud thing, that outputs ODT and only for locally working using LO? Or does LO offer collaborative features now?

majoe• 2 years ago

There is Collabora Office [0], which is built on LibreOffice. It also has a Nextcloud integration.

[0] https://www.collaboraoffice.com/

mbs159• 2 years ago

Someone is salty as hell, chill bro. Also, calling Microsoft a company that complies with EU law is kind of funny. I guess they must be constantly fined due to some prejudice?

CRConrad26• 2 years ago

Thart was a pretty obvious typo for "don't"; if they did, that wouldn't lead to the conclusion "ergo, criminals".

xyst2• 2 years ago

The licensing costs associated with MS products is stupid high. In analyzing the budget for a county, across all departments the line item for MS was ~$322K for just a 3 month span (o365??).

It was the top line item for the quarter, beating out health insurance line related line items.

jhickok2• 2 years ago

Seems unlikely that an M365 license that tops our around 50 dollars per month would be more expensive than health insurance.

tiahura2• 2 years ago

Tops out at with Teams and AI. I believe office 365 + exchange is $20.

xyst2• 2 years ago

Probably includes windows OS licenses in addition to azure add one. Not just email and productivity.

2d8a875f-39a2-4• 2 years ago

Cue supply chain attack planning starting at APTs around the world.

tombert2• 2 years ago

I haven't really used a WYSIWYG word processor in almost a decade (I like Pandoc), so these are old memories, but I remember feeling like the interface to OpenOffice (before it was split into LibreOffice) was more intuitive than MS Word 2007 and beyond. I feel like they doubled down on 90's-era MS Word-style interface, which I personally have just found to be extremely intuitive and easy to work with.

That said, the equation editor for LibreOffice and OpenOffice utterly sucks. This bizarre, quasi-TeX, quais-WYSIWYG interface is extremely unintuitive and hard to work with. The equations themselves generally render fine, but back when I used OpenOffice on Windows I purchased a copy of MathType and would OLE equations in. This didn't work on Linux, which is why I stopped using LibreOffice.

kevingadd• 2 years ago

The good news is that most state workers probably don't need advanced features like an equation editor, so hopefully this transition won't be super painful. Seems like it would be rough on academics though.

tombert2• 2 years ago

It's the main reason my dad (who isn't an academic but does work on R&D in the aerospace industry) won't touch LibreOffice. He's constantly bothering people to see if he can use one of their Office licenses because he hates the LibreOffice equation editor.

My handwriting is completely illegible, even to myself most of the time, so ever since I was a teenager I would type out all my homework, including math homework, so I've developed pretty strong opinions on math formatting. I've gotten good enough with TeX that I don't really have anything I can't easily do, but my dad has, for reasons kind of unknown to me, has had a strong aversion to learning LaTeX, despite the fact that I have offered dozens of times to teach him, so he just sticks with MS Office.

instagib• 2 years ago

Libre office excel replacement doesn’t handle vba well and many programs break.

Idk how many macros they are utilizing with vba but would find out quickly switching to libre.

Then there is Microsoft project which has no libre office clone. Those are just two examples and I’m sure there are more nuanced ones.

I get it, Microsoft is slowly getting away from local copies but this is the same news every contract cycle of going to Linux or whatever bullshit they say they will do but IT knows it will turn into a tire fire.

outcoldman• 2 years ago

Russia had the same story when about 15 years ago they tried to move their postal service away from Microsoft. They spent a lot of money to teach personal, and I believe it was a disaster at the end. Microsoft just gave them a discount later and they stayed on Microsoft products.

B2B is expensive, but so many companies just don’t understand how much money they will have to spend on education and support. Not sure what is the story with LibreOffice, if they are getting it with support or not.

nogajun• 2 years ago

LibreOffice may be useful for German, but not for Asian languages. This is because it was designed without regard to the typographical rules of the Asian-speaking world.

You could say that TDF is "committed to Asian languages". But text is meaningless unless it can be used according to typographic rules, not just to display characters. They do not understand that.

And the problem is that the user interface is stuck in the 2000s. They don't understand that the Ribbon UI has been around for 17 years and generations have changed.

They say, "There's the Tabbed UI," but the Tabbed UI is nothing like the Ribbon UI. They're in denial and they don't want to get out of the 2000s.

CRConrad26• 2 years ago

They don't understand that the Ribbon UI has been around for 17 years and generations have changed.

The bubonic plague has been around for hundreds of years, so it must be great, right?

welzel• 2 years ago

To get some context on this, you have to look into the local administration of munich in bavaria. They messed up the switch to OpenOffice on the desktop by not supporting all use-cases and then it seems Microsoft used the opportunity to reverse the change by use some "convincing".

Anyhow, it would be extremely simple for all of Europe to role out OpenSource: just ban the transfer of critical user data to the US. Microsoft Windows is technically a gigantic NSA backdoor, therefore installing it on a government PC should be considered treason. So, maybe we should start to put politicians on trial for treason and see how quickly MS gets kicked out of Europe...

mfiro• 2 years ago

That's a great news but does not surprise me. In the University where I studied in Germany, almost all Library computers had Ubuntu (and also LibreOffice). The Windows machines were limited to use only 2 hours a day and they were almost always occupied, so I had to start learning linux. Years later and I work half of time at my current job as Linux admin.

Aerbil313• 2 years ago

This is the best thing to happen to Linux desktop, ever. Linux has dominated the server OS market since a long time. This is likely be the butterfly’s wing, the trigger to make Linux desktop break into consumer market. Libreoffice will likely get much more investment after this, likely triggering a cascade of investments to the desktop Linux ecosystem.

CRConrad26• 2 years ago

This is the best thing to happen to Linux desktop, ever.

That's what we all said about Munich in 2003, too.

So, I'm hopeful, but not exactly holding my breath.

neycoda• 2 years ago

Maybe this will help spurn some necessary and long-overdue problem fixes with LibreOffice, which have gone ignored after being reported seemingly because just not enough people are making a stink about them. I've tried to get Microsoft Office workers to switch but they won't because of these things. If only the LibreOffice devs would take these problems and inadequacies more seriously. Please I hope the German workers report problems and make suggestions and stick to them to improve the product so we have a good free or non-profit office suite to compete with the billionaire companies.

German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

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