A German state is ditching Windows and Microsoft Office for Linux and LibreOffice on the 30,000 PCs it uses for local government functions

The idea that a state government is unnecessarily at the mercy of any corporation is hard to comprehend. Especially, as in this case, a foreign corporation.

Open source shouldn't only be the standard for governments. It should be the minimum requirement.

Good, we need to stop supporting products that try to strong arm you into a perpetual subscription.

Let me tell you a story about proprietary software:

The German police force have a contract with a software firm that wrote their program to file and archive emergency calls. Basically just a form that goes to a database. Now, one day, an update got pushed. The problem with that update was that the hotkey for quitting out of the current form (q) now also fired when inside an editing field. The software firm did not acknowledge that as a problem and it took months of complaints to fix and it cost the taxpayer around 300,000€ in "maintenance fees".

This isn't going to happen.

This headline comes up every year that it's time for the government to negotiate contracts with Microsoft. Once they get the best price they think they can, they will accept it and issue a news release that "we're staying in Windows after all".

It's lame, but it's what is going to happen.

This is the sexiest thing Germany has done since that German couple that drives the Porsche in Super Troopers.

Good!!! I hope other governments follow.

Good. Now, you want to make a bigger impact? Do the schools.

I genuinely hate AI art

Unrelated to the question but on the picture:

The AI nicely drew a german city but ... put the naziflag on the ships Rather than the current german flag.

Wasn't it Munich who did that a few years back, only to backtrack sometime later?

I love this, but having used ms office extensively for work, we all know it has many more features. Libreoffice isn't a drop in replacement, but maybe with the increased user base it can become one.

Switching to an open-source project is easy, but the concern is more about the context in which they are used and how long they will persist in using these. It might be more convenient for the government to initially try Linux for some pilot projects that require less human intervention. This is because I’m not sure how familiar civil servants are with Linux and LibreOffice. On the other hand, open-source projects don’t provide after-sales services and may have technical or compatibility issues. It requires time for them to get accustomed to them.

I wonder what they will choose for their base. I was surprised LiMux was based off Debian since Suse is headquartered in Luxembourg City. I personally would welcome a large organization choosing Suse products as we need more competition for RHEL (which would be a huge boon in productivity since we won't need like 3 projects to spend a decent amount of time repackaging RHEL).

Boom. Listen up NHS England.

Oh hey, I'm from Schleswig-Holstein! That's neat! I mean libre office looks like shit (they probably never saw a UX designer and high DPI scaling has been broken since like forever) but at least its not Microsoft. And if its functionally the same, why not? So yeah, good news!

Good. This makes them less vulnerable to the malware that Windows innately is.

Hey, can you hear that? That's the sound of hundreds of IT support workers silently crying out at the thought of having to explain a whole new OS and new office software to some boomer.

Ich verwende übrigens Arch.

Based

Ad I said yesterday when this was posted. They tried this about 15 years ago, reverted to Windows after a few years.

I wish them all the luck in the world with this, truly. But I'm not sure a government has the drive, management, and flexibility to pull this off successfully.

If we want to see Linux compete with Windows for the desktop, it will need to start at the opposite end of the spectrum: small environments where the need for specialized apps is minimal, IT is a smaller group, flexibility is much higher, end users are a smaller group (from a training perspective) and reduced cost realizations are more apparent and impactful.

We may be seeing the beginning of this with VMWare's new, exorbitant licensing costs causing a push to other solutions such as Proxmox/TrueNAS for virtualization/virtualization backup in the SMB.

And if we really want to see a sea change, we need to get Linux as a desktop in education. But that would require settling on a single shell, and generally a single distribution (or at a minimum ensure there's a consistent set of tools in the OS).

Seems like an "Education Build" would be a great idea. But, again, who's going to back it, and which Linux distro gets the nod?

I saw this 10yrs ago about how some government body of Germany was not a fan of MS Suite at all! Great news overall.

Thanks

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LibreOffice is perfectly fine for your Dear Princess Celestia letters (which 99 percent of Word users do is write simple letters), but once you start doing more advanced formatting (such as tables and text boxes and other embeddings), LibreO really doesn't like it. And good luck if you have to convert such a Word document.

deja vu...

I like the Math program as it has LaTeX compatibility, but if we don't start adopting this worldwide it might become a nagging problem for the next quarter century.

Anyone tried out the Russian military's distro?

Maybe soon a unified CSV handling might be possible.

Does LibreOffice finally have ribbon or does it still look like MS Office 2003? You can hate on Microsoft all your want (and I'd gladly join you in most cases) and I get the privacy concerns but the Office suite is, after all those decades, still unmatched (well maybe except Outlook).

Good lord, they are in for a world of hurt.