Schleswig-Holstein, Germany’s most northern state, is starting its switch from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, and is planning to move from Windows to Linux on the 30,000 PCs it uses for local government functions.
Concerns over data security are also front and center in the Minister-President’s statement, especially data that may make its way to other countries. Back in 2021, when the transition plans were first being drawn up, the hardware requirements for Windows 11 were also mentioned as a reason to move away from Microsoft.
Saunders noted that “the reasons for switching to Linux and LibreOffice are different today. Back when LiMux started, it was mostly seen as a way to save money. Now the focus is far more on data protection, privacy and security. Consider that the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) recently found that the European Commission’s use of Microsoft 365 breaches data protection law for EU institutions and bodies.”
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.
I remember some city in Germany actually doing it some years back and then eventually giving up and switching back.
googles
It’s a little unclear exactly what software was and wasn’t switched, but sounds like it’s Munich, and now they’re back on LibreOffice again.
By 2006, the city had started a concerted effort to move away from Microsoft products and onto Linux. Fast forward to 2013 and 80% of all workstations in the government and related organizations were running LiMux. However, Microsoft’s Windows and Office services were still used.
As we reported back in 2017, the government made a controversial decision to abandon open source and return to Windows.
A newly elected government in Munich, Germany has said it will aim to use open source solutions in its offices. In doing so, the government is moving away from Windows and Microsoft Office despite committing to the products several years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
LiMux was a project launched by the city of Munich in 2004 in order to replace the software on its desktop computers, migrating from Microsoft Windows to free software based on Linux.[citation needed] By 2012, the city had migrated 12,600 of its 15,500 desktops to LiMux. In November 2017 Munich City Council resolved to reverse the migration and return to Microsoft Windows-based software by 2020.[1][2][3] In May 2020, it was reported that the newly elected politicians in Munich, while not going back to the original plan of migrating to LiMux wholesale, will prefer Free Software for future endeavours.[4]
EDIT: I guess I should have just read the other comment responding to the parent, which mentioned Munich.
Amd just after Munich announced it will go back to Windows, Microsoft decided to move its German central to Munich. What a coincidence.
Munich did exactly that in 2017, so let’s see how far Sleswig-Holstein is willing to go, hopefully they won’t be falling for Microsofts sweet talk.
The reason Munich switched back to Windows, when users were just fine working with Limux, was a corrupt politician who ordered the return to windows, probably pocketing a hefty bribe in the process.
Source?
https://www.zdnet.de/88202452/stadt-muenchen-erwaegt-abkehr-von-linux/
The article from 2014 explains how this was mostly a political quarrel, with a former administration transitioning away from Microsoft (which as a US corporation has no business in any government administration of another country), and the conservatives pushing (under a “social democrat” mayor, admittedly) to go back to MS against technological advice.
Im Stadtrat hingegen steht den Berichten zufolge eine fraktionsübergreifende Mehrheit hinter LiMux. Bettina Messinger, Sprecherin der SPD-Fraktion für Personal, Verwaltung und IT, sagte Heise Online, dass man keine neue Haltung zu dem Thema habe. Sie bezeichnete die Umstellung auf Linux als „mutige Entscheidung“. Kritische Stimmen und Beschwerden seien im EDV-Bereich nichts Ungewöhnliches. Man müsse LiMux und das Umfeld nun stetig verbessern und nutzerfreundlicher gestalten. Unter anderem sei dafür mehr IT-Personal in der Verwaltung nötig.
Auch die CSU-Fraktion unterstützt LiMux weiter. Deren IT-Experte Otto Seidl nannte Schmidts Kritik „eine sachfremde Einzelmeinung eines Juristen“. Die Grünen warnen Heise zufolge vor einem „teuren Schildbürgerstreich“, sollte die Stadt zu Microsoft zurückkehren. Demnach wollen die Abgeordneten in einer Ausschusssitzung klären, woher die Beschwerden stammen.
In other words: the “manyfold complaints” were an “ad populum” argument without sources and were most likely made up.
!remindme 1 fiscal quarter
Maybe soon a unified CSV handling might be possible.
I can confidently say that CSV support is one of those problems that even the brightest computer scientists will be pondering for the decades to come.
Supporting CSVs sounds like an easy problem, but it’s not. It’s like a whole different complexity type. Time complexity, space complexity, and now, the dreaded subclass between spec complexity and organisational complexity.
You can’t just make the users agree which delimiter to use and how quotes are supposed to work. That’s nearly impossible. No no no.
Commas are too common, we should go with semicolons. And
\nand UTF-8 by default. And a header that defines changes from defaults, plus metadata such as data logger model and settings. These are some significant quality-of-life improvements but I’d guess it will take another file extension before that happens.At that point why not use TSV?
I just don’t like that CSV exists as a format and has no standards currently. If you remove commas from CSV then you’re taking the C out of CSV.
SCSV (semicolon separated values) at least sounds like an upgrade to CSV. Or maybe just use something that is flexible but is standard like JSON?
Yeah, SCSV would work, with a .ssv file extension for FAT compatibility.
JSON is overkill, tabular data is often recorded by 8-bit devices. Yes, you can use a dishwasher to cook salmon, but building a dishwasher is difficult and it can break in many more places. Each piece of salmon also needs to be carefully wrapped.
Thanks
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.
I am not aware that libreoffice math is compatible with latex. How do you enable it?
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).
while it does have a ribbon, the exclusive ribbon while discarding the menu is the main reason why Microsoft Office is fucked up beyond repair.
Ribbon is one of the best inventions Microsoft ever came up with and I will die on this hill. I’m old enough to remember very well the suffering when I was trying to find something in the classic menus or among the billion equal sized icons scattered across multiple toolbars in old MS Office versions. When Office 2007 came out, everything was suddenly so much easier to find, often with less clicks. I don’t see any reason why I’d need the old style menu in addition to ribbon.
There was something faster and more reliable: keyboard shortcuts.
The ribbon is for people who use the mouse for stuff that is much faster to do with a keyboard.
You can’t possibly have every feature on a keyboard shortcut, even just all those various formatting features in Word for example where you often have to choose something from a list of options. And even if you somehow did manage to have a shortcut for everything, you’d still only remember those you use frequently enough.
Not to mention, I’m pretty sure most of those shortcuts from 2003 still work today.
It has a ribbon. I’d say its on par with Office 2016.
Boom. Listen up NHS England.
Ich verwende übrigens Arch.
*Gewölbe
*Bogen
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?
Debian Edu has existed for over a decade, originally as a Norwegian distro called Skolelinux (“school Linux”). I’m not sure how they differ from regular Debian at this point, but a big part of the original project was high quality translations.
Wasn’t there also something like Edubuntu?
It’s done before in Munich. It can work.
“Linux could have the desktop now”
And yet doesn’t.
Again, why do enterprises prefer to pay tens of millions per year in licensing rather than deploy Linux as a desktop?
You think these places don’t have hundreds or thousands of IT folks with Linux expertise?
Yeah but they switched back to Windows in 2017 for no reason. :( some Bad rumors say it had to do with Microsoft building its headquater in munich 2016. But no one knows if the decision to build it in munich is indeed related to the switch back to. Windows.
If we want to see Linux compete with Windows for the desktop
Linux could have the Desktop now. You could throw a lightly massaged Mint install down on nearly anyone’s desk and they’d be fine.
However Linux is an Operating System, yeah yeah kernel I know, and vanishingly few people actually give a shit about the OS, what they care about is the application set and that’s where FOSS, not Linux, completely falls apart.
Linux on the desktop for 30,000 Government PC’s? No problem. Removing Microsoft Office from those 30,000 Government PCs? Major problem!
…small environments where the need for specialized apps is minimal…
Nearly everyone uses MSO and even Google hasn’t been able to successfully work around this after plowing untold billions and a decade of effort into G-Suite…only to have it widely viewed as an inferior product. When you get to “specialized apps” territory it gets even worse since outside of STEM they’re almost all entirely written for Windows. You literally can’t get away because the software isn’t there to do it.
…IT is a smaller group…
Smaller group means that there’s less, or even NO, resources to find, maintain, and train people for “alternate” applications. It’s vastly less expensive to simply use the applications that users are already familiar with and that everyone else in their industry is using.
…reduced cost realizations are more apparent and impactful…
The “reduced cost realizations” only come from not buying licenses, which can be impactful, but that expense gets quickly overwhelmed by lost productivity, increased training cost, and higher support burden.
Yes SOME organizations are able to make it work but those orgs are usually staffed with highly technical people and they’ve got leadership willing to bleed money while everything gets sorted out. Those two conditions don’t describe very many businesses and they are certainly not found in Governments.
Linux the OS works just fine but that’s not the hurdle. The hurdle is the applications. To quote a famous sweaty guy on a stage one time this fight is about “Developers, Developers, Developers!”.
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!
Writer and Calc look almost identical to ms word and excel on my Debian 12 system… Congratulations by the way, you should be proud of your state!
As someone using LibreOffice at home and MS Office at work (both daily): nope, unfortunately, Calc is pretty shit compared to Excel. It’s enough for my personal needs but I wouldn’t want to rely on it professionally.
Good to know, maybe it’s just the port then and their website (shudders) has been a year or so since I tried it. Yeah, I think it’s a good move and if it convinces other States even better.
Yeah, check it out. I’m not a power user of spreadsheets, so I can’t address what the previous commenter said about functionality but the UI looks good on mine and my girlfriend’s systems. She’s been using Calc to run her catering business for over a year without any complaints, so I would feel good about recommending it.
Eh I don’t think it’s that bad and with the dark theme and breeze icons it looks amazing
If you have to tweak it to make it good, it’s bad.
If you go by that logic, most things in FOSS would be considered bad, which is not true.
Well, most things are bad from UX perspective, it’s just that people who use FOSS are used to that.
That’s why only enthusiasts usually use FOSS.
Before you start throwing around the five or so exceptions that exist, I’m well aware, but it’s just that - exceptions.
Damn windows and Mac are dog water then
Both work out of the box really well. Sure, Windows will break inevitably, but it’s usually few months before it does. Office looks really good. And that’s all that matters.
You don’t have to convince me, by the way, I’ve been using Linux for 15 years. But I’ve been in IT pretty much all of my adult life.
Until developers make stuff really good looking out of the box, FOSS will be still the ugly thing no one except IT people want to use.
This is the sexiest thing Germany has done since that German couple that drives the Porsche in Super Troopers.
I love this, but having ms office has many more features. Libreoffice isn’t a droo in replacement, but maybe with the increased user base it can become one.
It really depends on the needs.
When my entire company (10k employees) switched to LibreOffice, it was almost fine. There was like 50 ppl who were frustrated at breaking changes. But many adapted and it was a pretty clean transition.
As for LibreCalc, fuck that. What a nightmare. Employees resorted to creating Google accounts to use Google Sheets instead. We still don’t have a solution, and if one particular director gets his way, that whole department might switch back to Windows just for Excel.
Meanwhile another german city (munich) is going back to MS
but maybe with the increased user base it can become one.
You think the state will contribute? I highly doubt that. At best it will be gov specific functionalities.
You’d need a massive increase in tech support. Likely more than you’d spend on ms in the first place. Seems a political gambit or a political gaff.
Well, Munich decided to switch back around the time Microsoft was negotiating about building their Germany HQ there. There have been allegations of backroom dealings, but I dunno if there’s ever been anything proven. There is a very big, very shiny building with a sign that says Microsoft near where I lived when I was there, though.
Though I also read some articles about them partially going back to FOSS, so who knows what they’ll do in the end.
Good lord, they are in for a world of hurt.
I saw this 10yrs ago about how some government body of Germany was not a fan of MS Suite at all! Great news overall.
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.
That’s a blatant lie. LibreOffice Writer works better than M$ Word for every single purpose and application.
Malarkey. It does give with tables and boxes. I’ve been digitizing my home be brew ttrpg system slowly over the last few years, using libreoffice. Zero issues, zero difficulty.
And I’ve now written three novels, a novella, and many short stories with it. The native epub output isn’t perfect, but it does fine for alpha/beta reading. And that’s the only flaw it has for prose.
I’ve converted older word documents in the process of the ttrpg formatting, btw, with no issues.
The word processing part is all I really use, so I can’t say much about anything else in the suite, but librewriter is fully capable.
This is disingenuous and misleading.
Yes compatibility with Word with complex formatting is problematic, but is that really libreoffice or is it Ms office?
For documents drafted in LibreOffice complex formatting is rock solid. It’s patently false to say its just generally inferior to Word in this regard.
Yeah it is always funny when people shit on non-MS office suites for not being 100% comaltible with MS Office, when it is Microsoft who doesn’t stick to the international standards.
How can they be international standards if they don’t include Microsoft? Doesn’t Microsoft and all its employees count as part of this global international world? See, Microsoft is the victim here.
You might want to look into what standardization means.
Start here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Organization_for_Standardization
And here more on our specific case: https://www.iso.org/standard/66363.html
Imo companies who hinder or harm standardization (Microsoft and Apple are the leaders here) are literally among the worst things on this earth.
I do lots of advanced formatting in LibreOffice and it works a LOT better than Microsoft Office ever has, mostly because the functionality is consistently found in the same dialogues across versions. Also, references are not permanently broken like those in documents submitted by my windows using colleagues.
Does Word like advanced formatting? I’ve found LaTeX easier to use for typesetting, and I don’t like LaTeX.
Wait a second lemme just quickly program my letter
You don’t compose your letter in word either… Nor do most people need “advance” formating for letter. I doubt you are formating floating subfigures, aligning equations, and organizing citations for every email.
Based
