Let’s hope they put the money they save into the projects
I wonder if this is related to https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/. This as it shouldn’t be about saving cost. It should be about being sovereign.
Haaa! It feels good to hear. I hope that theyll support free software financially.
MS will erect another campus and things will go back to “normal”. Hopefully this will last at this time…
Good documentary about MS hold over German government: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duaYLW7LQvg
So the Germany has been moving back and forth between Microsoft and Linux / open-source.
When Munich decided to ditch many of its Windows installations in favor of Linux in 2003, it was considered a groundbreaking moment for open source software – it was proof that Linux could be used for large-scale government work. However, it looks like that dream didn’t quite pan out as expected. The German city has cleared a plan to put Windows 10 on roughly 29,000 city council PCs starting in 2020. There will also be a pilot where Munich runs Office 2016 in virtual machines. The plan was prompted by gripes about both the complexity of the current setup and compatibility headaches.
Do you know what this smells like? Corruption and consulting companies with friends in the govt looking for ways to profit.
What else can be more profitable for a consulting company than shifting the entire IT of a city or a country between two largely incompatible solutions? :)
IIRC the last time this made big headlines they tried to roll their own distro and it went very poorly longterm. The TL;DR version was they so thoroughly took the hardest route and made questionable choices that it was almost sure to fail, and then MS swooped in with some great offers and that was that. (This is entirely my dusty recollection of articles I read about it at the time, FWIW.)
I don’t know whether it was malicious compliance because the folks doing the change didn’t actually want to do it or what, but that effort was as doomed as Firefly was when Fox aired it out of order and with a constantly shifting schedule.
Hopefully they make some sensible choices this time around (at a minimum not trying to create a custom distro) and it goes better. It would be great to see this become a cascade effect.
they so thoroughly took the hardest route and made questionable choices that it was almost sure to fail
Typical government move going full malicious compliance while allowing “a few selected friends” from consulting companies to make a ton of money. They could’ve just picked Debian and rolled with it. Let’s face it, nobody develops desktop applications anymore most of the govt work is already done on custom built web platforms, any OS that can run a browser is good enough to address around 90% of the govt daily work.
Meanwhile China is creating their own distro that will be successful for sure because they’ve plans to move the public sector and whatever private they influence to the thing.
No.
Things were very different “back then.” Linux was less friendly at the time. And non-Microsoft products still had noticeable gaps. Web browser office suites didn’t exist.
The parts I remember reading were just that it took a long time for workers to get used to the system. Back then, home computers were uncommon for the average person. And what computer experience the average person did have was noticeably different from Linux.
I did not see articles about tech issues such as viruses or data leaks or configuration issues. Please show any if you have them.
Doesn’t Germany do this every so many years to get a better Microsoft deal?
bavaria… we are different.
Well, guy who actually lives there (Schleswig-Holstein) here. Be precise in what’s written in tfa. What it laments about is that one (single) work place is about to be installed and that subsequent steps are about to follow.
I don’t want to sound too pessimistic here. The fact, that this topic is on the high level agenda shows that it has strong supporters - for the moment.
But weighing in past decades’ province goverment’s spendings in large scale software projects and peoples’ fear of everything even marginally IT, I’m very reluctant to see the big move here. Opposition against changes to my windows is simply unfathomable strong.
Nevertheless - and I mean that - it’s a good development.
The last time I tried it, which is now a few years ago, LibreOffice Calc was substantially slower than Excell for larger spreadsheets. Like a difference between night and day, it was no acceptable substitute if productivity was a concern, which it usually is.
Imo a big swoop change like this, which is done for ideological reasons, but without practical considerations, is doomed to fail and leave a lasting bad impression in peoples’ minds. Imo it would have been far better to only drop windows 10/11 for a familiar looking Linux distro, while continuing to use Microsoft Office.
Software freedom is about being in control of your computing. We can’t verify what proprietary software from a foreign company is doing on a government computer.
Public money public code is about citizens getting back the code we paid for. When a proprietary company improves software to get paid then they keep that advantage to themselves. LibreOffice is a collaborative project, everyone gains from it being improved by our money.
These aught to be valid concerns as much as productivity: to the degree it affects people. It cannot be dissmssed as being idelogical.
Those are ideological reasons though and me calling them idealogical does not mean that I dismiss them as valid reasons. Idealogy in itself is not a bad thing and it should certainly have a part in decision making.
Where we differ in opinion is in which should take priority: I’m of the opinion that practicality should trump ideology (in this case), while you find the idealogical reasons more important.
I think we should aim for what is ideal and then take into consideration the constraints of what we can do. If it’s not plausible enough to go for what is ideal then aim to make that more likely while doing whatever is the next best thing. We risk being stuck on a peak of possible good if we refuse to go down to eventually go up higher.
I only use LibreOffice but don’t need it much. I can’t comment on how practical it is, or isn’t, for use in a government. If there’s another free software option then we aught to consider that. Else spend money to maje in good enough in the most important use cases.
Are you working on ods formats? Anyways… We need more people using LO so we’ll have more developers and rhen comes a point in which LO surpasses everything else. Meanwhile, if we stick to proprietary software,we would be stuck in a vicious loop. We need to break trough and sometimes inthat transition there are some concessions to make. If we manage to make it aa a big collective of people,the transition process will be shorter.
I’m not using it anymore, I just tested it to see if I could propose it as a substitute. In my testing I tried both open and ms formats: I started with old excel files which didn’t work well, so then I tried open format files that were build up from a clean slate state, with the data imported from CSV files. After that didn’t perform satisfactory either, I turned to the internet. After searching for the major issue that I encountered (slow in a large sheet), I came to the conclusion that calc could not be a full substitute for excell, so I never proposed it and we’re still using ms office to this day.
I’m just going to copypaste some other people’s thoughts with which I agree, saving me a bit of time:
*"If you work at a large company for a while you’ll encounter a class of user that Calc doesn’t really address. They’re like super-specialists. They often have a deep knowledge of Excel, but are otherwise completely computer illiterate. They also work with large datasets and specific models. Calc isn’t a replacement for them. Not just on a feature level, but on an accessibility level.
Look for Excel resources. Classes, books, articles, howtos, everywhere. Do the same for Calc and you’ll struggle a lot more. There is stuff there, but it just isn’t nearly as professional and rich. There is no great way to transition Excel users to Calc users and have them still be as productive.
In the Linux world, when we get those style of work-loads we generally put aside Calc / Excel as a tool and begin looking at programming languages (e.g., Python, Matlab). I feel like this somewhat handicaps our ability to reach those users.
for basic use though, it’s perfectly acceptable. I just wouldn’t consider it a poweruser tool, and those power users are what make Office a multibillion dollar product for MS."*
*"Sadly, it’s just not there in book.
The only time I try to use LOCALC is when I have a few hundreds/thousands of rows of formatted values to sort into a simple graph and performance is just abysmal.
I just tried again earlier this day and though most daily features are there for your regular user, all my “casual” uses of it ended up underlining the severe performance problems.
Maybe my uses are far more corner case than I believe…"*
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/9yjwyf/is_libreoffice_calc_truly_a_worthy_replacement/
Wow. i dont know. Ive never used calc nor excel for things that big. For that Ive used python or php/mysql. I use spreadsheets a lot, even complex ones, and calc always work for me. Anyways, you are right in regarda to the lack of support/books. Of course. Same happens with a lot of things. They are not mainstream (yet) because they are projects that havent had the money or power corporations like microsoft has had for lobbies and marketing. So we can struggle a little on the transition (some very brave pioneers have already paved the way for us, so its not that hard anymore) and hope we are contributing to a libre/free future in which digital technology helps build a better and fairer society for all. And then, they’ll become mainstream and we’ll have more books, support and communities than we ever dreamed of before.
If an Excel sheet is that big, it should be replaced with a proper database, which most likely would run on Linux. I think you’re right, though, about the lack of planning around the practicalities.
In structural engineering (bridge design etc), we use quite complicated spreadsheets for calculations; a database wouldn’t be the right tool for that job. We use excel because everyone knows how to use it and it’s easy to print to PDF and see the inputs and outputs and any graphical summaries you have added. Using a spreadsheet makes it easy to check and easy to adapt/change when you want to do a slightly different calculation next time.
I’ve tried building spreadsheets of similar complexity in libreoffice and it’s true they are very slow in comparison and more prone to crashing.
Libreoffice works well for some tasks and I enjoy using it at home but honestly if I tried to use it at work it would cut my productivity significantly. I’m probably using it more intensively than most people though.
I agree that spreadsheet use in engineering is one of the most complicated use cases, but I submit for your consideration another very complicated use case: laboratory software ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_information_management_system ) LIMS do what Excel can but with the added benefits of being more controlled, secure, user friendly and faster because they’re built upon the back of a modern database. In my experience with engineer built worksheets, the engineer that built them is typically the only one who knows how to use them. This is job security for that engineer, but isn’t scaleable for others’ use. In the lab software, a scientist builds the methods, and lab technicians use those methods over and over again daily. Each step of each use of the method is recorded with the inputs, the results, who performed it and exactly when. The workflows are built-in and the calculations are comparable to those used in engineering.
Interesting, I think it’s different for structural engineering because you’re doing calculations in accordance with a code of practice and the spreadsheet needs to be adapted to tweak the inputs and outputs of a standard formula and apply it slightly differently for different bridges / structural arrangements. I’ve written loads of spreadsheets that have been used and adapted by other people in my company, I honestly don’t think they are that difficult to understand (or people wouldn’t have been able to build on them and adapt them).
I can see that lab software is quite different, especially if you have very well defined procedures and you are repeating exactly the same test again and again with the same inputs and outputs.
Using the right tool in an office setting isn’t something that’s typically done. Unless that tool is a spreadsheet of course. A spreadsheet is always the right tool.
If they put as much money into these foss projects as they where giving microsoft before, maybe Libreoffice will become halfway decent.
I use Libreoffice and it’s fine for a non-power user, but it sure has some rough edges
It has some rough edges to be sure. I’ve found myself fighting with it quite a bit. But it’s usable.
I’m just glad there is more incentive for [organization] to help patch the issues.
While I’m all for OSS, I’m also objective enough to know where it’s not a good idea. And I think this is one of them. They have commercial one available in their own country called softmaker, which comes with support which is really important for a business or organization. I’ve been using it for many years because the OSS where just not right for me. Also liked WPS more but Linux dev was slow, but now I found my match
LibreOffice does “develop and maintain a certification system for professionals of various kinds who deliver and sell services around LibreOffice.”
… told them 20 years ago already. Well then, finally …
