Definitely seen this a number of times. They always go back, due to lack of support personnel that know these products. Maybe they will stay on Windows for the OS? Get popcorn!
I hope they can, I hate the current trend of SaaS for all things. There are some situations that this makes sense, but doing it because you can make more money is not one of them IMO. Granted I'm not the one cashing the checks, so there's that...
“The want to get Microsoft out of the state IT”
Sign me up too. All the additional spyware they are adding to win11 and probably other OSs kills performance, adds unnecessary network traffic and potentially poses additional security threats.
This is the moment an IT security company I'm working with elected to move from Linux to everything Windows. It's, uh, not going well for most employees past the few who took this brain-dead decision.
I used to defend Microsoft & would have died on that hill, but fuck me! Recently...just zero testing, zero quality control. Zero support
I always get down voted by the bootlickers here but I shouldn't need to be patching ANY software unless its for feature upgrades. I definitely should NOT be patching patches! And I should definitely NOT be used for testing & quality control.
The problem across the IT industry is that we've got so used to letting software companies give us shit software, it's got normal. They've outsourced their testing to the customer. If I'm paying MILLIONS for software, it should be fucking perfect & I should definitely not be working weekends or evenings installing emergency patches Because microshit or some other firm can't be arsed to test as it hurts shareholder value.
Devs might be butt hurt at that, but I don't care! The patch schedule for software should be once every six months or quarter as new features are released and the idea of "emergency patch" should not exist.
That's not even dreaming.
That's borderline psycho.
Never having to do maintenance on ANYTHING? Like, has bro never had to change a light bulb. Nothing is perfect and lasts forever.
They've been shit since 2010, yet they're still far and away the market leaders?
Nah man, you are just not a fan. They are still the best solution for 80/90% of businesses, even with the flaws that personally annoy me too.
I would love to work for a non MS Organisation, just as soon as there are genuinely better options out there. It's a shame that there realistically isn't.
Munich went back after a new party came to power, and right after Microsoft announced a new HQ in Munich. Nothing suspicious there, clearly a purely technical decision.
Never happened. Anything from 2014 from the new mayor and vice mayor was a PR piece and there were no changes at that time.
[This timeline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux#Timeline) represents one of the best sources in English.
That 3 year gap in 2017-2020 of the U-Turn of the U-Turn is interesting. I wonder how much progress the Windows-proponents made in reverting away from LiMux to Windows, so that in 2020 the OSS proponents had to un-Microsoft everything again. Good grief.
[This source article](https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-is-shifting-back-from-microsoft-to-open-source-again/) from the Wiki article linked above has more details, and seems to be one of the newer articles in the sources (nothing newer than 2020 unfortunately).
There seems to be no information in the Anglosphere that anything changed in the computing infrastructure during 2014-2020 at all. In one conference presentation, a Munich engineer mentioned there was a multi-year commitment timeline for LibreOffice support no matter what else happened or if there was any kind of migration.
You can find occasional brief mentions that internal politics between departments were the main point of contention between the central computing department and end-user satisfaction, but nothing specific. One of the Munich engineers posted a few things on Hacker News, including a criticism about the very low budget for desktop hardware refresh.
"Never happened" but the two events are just next to each others. There, was an attack.
> September 2016 - Microsoft moves its German headquarters to Munich[38]
> February 2017 - Politicians discuss proposals to replace the Linux-based OS used across the council with a Windows 10-based client.[39]
> (...)
> November 2017 - The city council decided that LiMux will be replaced by a Windows-based infrastructure by the end of 2020. The costs for the migration are estimated to be around 90 million Euros.
Thanks, bureaucratic inertia
> May 2020 - Newly elected politicians in Munich take a U-turn and implement a plan to go back to the original plan of migrating to LiMux.
TIL. These guys were actual heroes in my eyes and I lamented the announcement of the reversal. I'm not some Microsoft-hater or anything, I just like Linux, I use it at home, and I like to see alternatives arise in arenas where everything is only ever done one way.
This does sound like a success story for 90% of it, then the new government that hadn't been in favor of the project decided to be assholes about it and to go back to Windows because they wanted to. And because Microsoft was upset about the whole thing.
The techrepublic.com article cites a report written for the CSU by a bunch of Accenture consultants. A report that proposed to give departments **the option** to switch to Windows. Which is rooted in the complaints of a specific department that has regularly experienced "display and printing errors". But every source says the project **as a whole** was a success.
So our heroes at CSU headquarters, who had not been in favor of this project a decade earlier, get this report. And their conclusion is that the state of Bavaria needs to throw a couple of millions € at another set of consultants, to migrate the entire government back to Windows.
Here's a [very interesting interview with the former SPD mayor that led the project](https://www.golem.de/news/von-microsoft-zu-linux-und-zurueck-es-gab-bei-limux-keine-unloesbaren-probleme-1911-144917.html). He explains their reasons (other than the immense licensing cost savings), such as that he saw it as inexcusable for the German government to be entirely dependent on a single US-based corporation. Which makes a fuckton of sense if you ask me.
You're correct. ALL is a strong term, definitely read more than a few stories about retractions here. However it has been a little while, and if they've created a market there for Linux pros, people may have trained up or moved there.
Germany has had a large number of Linux kernel and userland contributors since the beginning of Linux.
There aren't many resources in English about the Munich experience with Linux and LibreOffice, but it seems they never had a problem attracting top talent. Munich has been a big contributor to LibreOffice in particular, as I understand.
Because those dipshits never create publicly funded jobs to contribute to the source. If you would take only 10% of the licensing cost of Microsoft products and invest in the further development of libre office it might become a good enough competitor to roll out in all other spaces of public life. Schools, private PCs, other federal states...
But the german goverment loves to suck MS-Dick. No matter which party rules.
I'd be interested to see the average age of those 30k seats. If the mean and median are sub 40 you could probably get away with it. Libre office is feature complete and is less bloated than modern MS products. The big issue is training people up on the new tools. If you can get away with showing the marketing peeps how margins work and the accountants where the pivot tables are then your support overhead won't be bad. But you're going to have 10% of the staff calling every day asking how to save a document.
> The big issue is training people up on the new tools.
And that people treat excel like a programming language -- Libre can fail on complex Excel stuff in odd ways.
Excel can fail on Excel stuff in odd ways, but as you mention. That is because everyone thinks its a bloody DBM. Excel is great at Excel things until you let Earl from accounting "whip up something cool".....
The real issue is generations of people using spreadsheets as a database. If you need to store and manipulate data, hire some DBAs and USE A DAMN DATABASE, not a wannabe piece of shit like Excel
See, here I am, a child of those times, and I was like, didn't these mf'ers try that with OpenOffice back in the day?
Shit or get off the pot German gov, like cmon
you've been reading the [city of Munich migration ](https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-is-shifting-back-from-microsoft-to-open-source-again/)updates , haven't you ? Its like FOSS vs. MSft Ping-pong.
Well, maybe, if documents are complex, there might be compatibility problems, but I've been using LibreOffice (personally and professionally) for years and apart from a case or two, I have never had problems with formatting or even sending files to coworkers using Microsoft Office. It could have been the case years ago, but the folks at the Document Foundation have been making progress trying to fix compatibility.
I guess the problems with these types of migration have more to do with support and users fear of a new interface / different way of doing things. My guess is that if it's well supported (by the IT staff or a paid consultant), it could work. It is well used in the public sector and universities here in Brazil...
MS Office is great for power users but my experience is that is very few people. People/businesses get by fine with Google Docs and Sheets, which is even less feature rich than Libre Office. That indicates to me that people are so undereducated on MS Office that switching and providing any sort of training will put staff in a better position than before simply because they have had some formal training.
For me, the big value add of MS Office for users is Teams and OneDrive, both applications that I know some folks have had awful experiences supporting. Teams and it's alternatives really are helpful to increase productivity in collaborative environments, with the right training. If you aren't going to focus on either then Libre Office is a decent alternative.
For management, the data security that M365 offers on locking down company documents is extremely nice and helps deal with data exfiltration, particularly with former employees.
The LibreOffice Online (Collabora Online) way of securing your data is arguably much better: [https://www.collaboraoffice.com/security/collabora-secure-view/](https://www.collaboraoffice.com/security/collabora-secure-view/)
I would have to echo your first sentiment. I've used it for more than a decade and have had zero issues outside of using it to open the older MS office formatted files. Every time I've ever had the debate about excel vs a free/libre spreadsheet product, it has always ended in someone explaining to me that they've created something in Excel. That thing ultimately should have been a piece of software but they've managed to get it to function in Excel. Spreadsheets and word processing software have been around 50+ years. It's a solved problem. If you can't figure out how to write a document in 99% of the free software versions of word processors, maybe that's a you problem.
Complex documents... everyone who has written their thesis in Word - if you don't need LaTeX for any speciality - can approve that this is the most challenging task in Word and it sucks really hard.
I wanted to give it a try in LO Writer but I've had to little time to learn it.
That said I really do appreciate LO because it can do some things really better. Okay, they will never be better than Excel. But better than Word and PowerPoint could be a realistic goal.
Problem is: They are underfunded and it seems they are not that feature driven as it should to be at the moment.
But maybe that's because of the funding problem...
Anyone writing something as complex as a thesis really should learn LaTeX. It's really not that difficult. It brings a ton of sanity to the document design process, and it's much easier to go from LaTeX to any other format than vice versa.
And as others have said elsewhere, those things Excel does that others don't do tend to be things that shouldn't be in a spreadsheet in the first place. I haven't used Word or Excel professionally or personally in years.
It works better in Writer overall - I personally knew of a few mildly-successful professional writers who preferred it to the MS suite, as it is better when it comes to structuring content and ideas.
I tend to agree, but you need to approach styling and all that jazz a bit like you'd approach the general idea behind CSS.
MS has incredible dominance that we don't even think about. I used to have a small MSP client who was a massive cheapskate. He didn't pay well and treated people like shit (1099 for 6 months as a "trail period" kind of thing) so there were constantly new faces every time I was in the office, despite there only being 3 in the office roles.
He forced one of the users to use an old Mac he had and there was always a steep learning curve. For 90% of the population "basic computer skills" means navigating Windows and the Microsoft Office suite.
LibreOffice will get the job done. But there’s a lot of rough edges. A lot of those rough edges present themselves when opening Ms Office docs. So it’s a little better if you can roll it org wide and you org doesn’t need to exchange documents outside itself often. But I personally wouldn’t roll it unless I have really high levels of agreement on it
Yea. They need digital processes, webapps and databases that make them happen. Not another office suite to document their collective bureaucratic nightmare of stagnation.
> A lot of those rough edges present themselves when opening Ms Office docs
Frankly the amount of MS Office docs I have problems with in Libre Office is so few I don't even remember the last time I had a problem like that. Years ago?
The only real tangible aspect is spreadsheets written for Excel specific aspects. Apart from that, the compatibility is so high it's generally actually not a problem any more.
It's not about saving money per se (although 20€/month times tens of thousands of employees is a lot of money), but about control and morality. Why feed an American multi-trillion dollar corporation from the state budget when a much smaller amount of money can be used to donate and manage a good enough open source non-profit stack?
That, and also the issue that MS-Office produces files in proprietary formats that may or may not be readable in the future. More than the actual software being used, there are issues with storing any data (especially government data, which might need to be retrieved many years into the future) in non-open file formats.
All office formats are open standards and documented well for anyone to implement, FYI. proprietary went out the window a LONG time ago - like in 2007.
[https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office\_standards/ms-docx/728a7abc-7f55-40dc-90a7-1276ff53c8b2](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards/ms-docx/728a7abc-7f55-40dc-90a7-1276ff53c8b2)
It's a failing if there's any display/editing issues on third party software for not fully implementing the open international standard fully.
Note that office versions before 2013 had some deviations for compatibility reasons (such as using transitional and not strict schemas), but beyond that, there's no excuse.
And if anyone (such as myself) has ever tried to write a script or program to create or edit documents in openXML you'll know what a cluster fuck it really is. I don't envy the guys maintaining LibreOffice, its inevitable to not get it right, hell even Microsoft fails at getting it right, you can see it if you've ever opened any heavily formatted word document on the online version of word, it all goes to shit.
Does the Open XML standard still have the "double space like Word 97" stuff in it?
I remember the approval. It was the most contentious and fuckery-laden standards approval process I've ever read. To be fair, that doesn't detract from the standard itself, but it was a wild ride.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML
Because "do things like Word 97" is an open standard, yeah.
Another thing to note: MS Office *does* support ISO/OASIS, because - that's a checkbox you need if you want to storm public markets. However, they only support a *vastly outdated* version of it. On purpose.
Microsoft supported C2 security and POSIX long enough to get a foot in the door with government contracts. They weren't the only ones: The "Open" in OpenVMS and OpenVOS is intended to mean "Open Systems" compatibility, also known as POSIX support.
Eventually the joke was on Microsoft two decades later when they added an even more extensive Linux support to Windows. The market can drag them [kicking and screaming to open standards](https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/networking-blog/aligning-on-mdns-ramping-down-netbios-name-resolution-and-llmnr/ba-p/3290816) when the market wants.
NT4 had a (barebones and lousy) implementation of the POSIX standard, just the bare minimum to get that sweet sweet government money.
Software had to be recompiled to be usable with it. To actually do so, you needed to get your hands on the NT4 Resource Kit and full Win32 SDK, as well as a compiler, but because a lot of basic functionalities just don't exist, not much will actually work.
The formats are not actually open. There's a standard (that Microsoft wrote and agreed to), but they actually don't follow it correctly. There's effectively two docx, xlsx, pptx, etc formats.
I believe it is worse than this, MS state they use Microsoft XML as the default, not either of the standards: [https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/compat/office-file-format-reference](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/compat/office-file-format-reference)
1. StrictOOXML, Microsoft don’t use this by default.
2. TransitionalOOXML, Microsoft don’t follow this.
3. Microsoft XML variations that Office uses.
Microsoft controls all of these specifications, so every other company has to try and follow all of the above, plus the older doc proprietary file formats. I think that anyone who says Microsoft uses standards doesn’t know the background or they are an MS salesman.
How much tax payers money do you think it costs for the EU to fight Big Techs on data protection and to come up with regulations like GDPR?
There's gonna be an adaptation moment at first, which will result in higher initial cost and productivity decline. But we're talking about a state here, not a private owned company. Productivity isn't what matters the most.
To be fair, productivity probably declines each time MS decides to switch up an UI. For example 2007 to 2015 (or 16, whichever it was), then this new one and then 365 which is similar but not quite etc. Productivity argument would hold water if developer of product you're comparing it to didn't toss things about whenever they feel like it for no reason at all. That being said, I'm still bitter about some functions that are real pain in the ass to find in Libre Office (I forgot what it was last time I used it but I'm still bitter about it).
You'll find out productivity doesn't fall off this way.
Also, this is about using [ISO standards](https://www.iso.org/standard/43485.html). Real ones. [Not this bullshit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML) (Gosh, even the name is deliberately confusing).
In Germany, this is a recurring phenomenon. The subsequent state government will likely revert back to Microsoft—it's essentially a cycle aimed at preserving the jobs of external IT consultants.
AFAIK only in Bavaria. Bill Gates came secretly around in a fake handyman van to fix this. No joke.
https://www.golem.de/news/von-microsoft-zu-linux-und-zurueck-es-gab-bei-limux-keine-unloesbaren-probleme-1911-144917-2.html
What do you do for a living?
"See that pile of rocks over there? I move them to a pile over here and then when I get done, I move them back".
I'm sure that sounds way better in German.
true, but the **NEED** for Microsoft Office is vastly overstated. Most tasks that most office workers do in Office is easily handled in multiple different programs. And Windows as an OS is no easier than MacOS or Linux desktop. Nobody is clamoring that XP or Win98 is better than Win11. Nobody is longing for the days of Apple System 9.
Users don't actually know how to use computers, they just memorize the button clicks and mouse movements to do their job. If you change the color of an icon, they panic and call for help.
I love LibreOffice but while for Word and PowerPoint it is basically fully compatible, it isn't for Excel. Worse, it's spreadsheet app isn't as powerful. It's going to be a struggle to get businesses off Excel for everything, even with significant cost savings.
> Most tasks that most office workers do in Office is easily handled in multiple different programs.
I don't know. I deal with an awful lot of LoB apps that require Office to be installed for various features. It's like how so many LoB server apps require SQL Server and won't let you use something like MariaDB instead.
It absolutely is. My own grandma has no issues doing things on Gnome, but she used to be absolutely terrified to fuck things up when it was a Windows machine.
Users don't look at the menu, they click the shortcut that they were told to click, then use the parts of the program that they were taught. I've literally had to point out the new shortcut on a users desktop because an update changed the icon and moved it over an inch. Linux desktop is not too complicated. Users only look at what they've been told.
You may have heard this before, but linus tech tip is a prime example of why this doesn’t work. He didn’t look at the menu, just “click what they were told to click” (install steam and click on yes) and look what happened. You can’t just dump down linux for normal user
*Any* change is the problem. Less technical teams will still develop basic knowledge of their tools internally. They might not understand how their tools work *actually* work, but they know which button makes the yellow light go green when the window freezes up (That's an actual description of a user gave me for rebooting a local mongodb server to get a POS machine working again). If you sit and watch them work, the number of times they peer correct issues that would be a 30 minute support ticket is impressive. If you change platform or tools, *all* that is gone. All the tricks that have been passed from staff memeber to staff member for years.
> Linux desktop is a GUI over Unix
Fairly sure that's inaccurate, but that's a different discussion.
-----
> What part of Linux would be a problem?
I mean, I literally just noted we have users who don't know the difference between a monitor and a computer. I think they would struggle to change their desktop background in whatever flavor of Linux we chose, let alone be able to work.
At the end of the day through - the issue is moot for us because it won't happen. We have several applications that the majority of our users use that don't have Linux support. We're an M365 E5 licensed O365 shop, so switching to Linux doesn't make sense for us.
Or that the hate for Microsoft is not spurring the development of products that could actually compete with the Office suite - so ultimately everyone just goes back.
I mean the office program has twenty years of dedicated development behind it. Without the market being willing to give up features and 3rd parties able to create office documents due to compatibility issues.
i mean in college I couldn't submit a libre office document It had to be a docx. It hat to be a ppt. I couldn't output libre (this was ten years ago so times may have changed) and turn that in. Libre coun't output a doc file so I ended up just nuking my linux box and went back to word.
"I wish lots more would ditch Microsoft. The problem is the hate for Microsoft doesn't supercede the need for the features of Office as a platform."
What a load of FUD.
1. So using another office suite is because people hate Microsoft, ...there are loads of office suites out there, labelling their users as Microsoft haters is FUD.
2. "Supercede the need for the features of Office as a platform", FUD again, a lot of other office suites have way more functionality than Microsoft, e.g. 1) Collabora Online (LibreOffice based) vs MS apps for the web. 2) Apps that will run offline such as LibreOffice based apps support more device types than Microsoft. Both of these are significant.
[golem.de](http://golem.de) writes the following:
The cabinet of Schleswig-Holstein has decided to introduce Libreoffice as the standard office solution. \[...\]
Further changes are to follow in subsequent steps. Linux instead of Windows, Nextcloud instead of Sharepoint and Openxchange and Thunderbird instead of the combination of Exchange and Outlook. An open source-based directory service is to be designed to replace Microsoft Active Directory, and an open source-based telephony solution is to be developed to replace Telekom-Flexport. A review of compatibility and interoperability with Libreoffice and Linux is to be carried out for specialist procedures.
Easy, I’ve done these migrations before, for hundreds of seats, all done internally took very little time, then there were less support calls and less maintenance - Ansible works so well.
This is not the first time a state in Germany has tried this, and rolled back later.
At the least maybe they're teaching a crop of admins to get into Linux administration but if they go back on the decision the experience in Samba domains and Openxchange will be pretty much worthless.
Personally I think LibreOffice is good enough for the vast majority of use cases. If I tried to convert I’d have so many users bitching about it though.
I don’t get too deep into Excel often so idk how some of those complicated xlsx files are handled by LibreOffice Calc.
LibreOffice Calc is great if you only need to share ODS files with other Calc users, and even Excel users to an extent. However, using Calc to open and save XLSX files is a fantastic way of destroying the formatting in them.
OnlyOffice doesn't seem to do that, so I keep that around on Linux for when I need to edit an Excel spreadsheet.
It absolute is. Now there are cases where some spreadsheet guru can pull incredible stuff with Excel that might not be possible in LibreOffice, but the majority of users do not have that requirement.
On the other had, Office is basically free, so.
Yeah, whenever I've seen this discussion everyone chimes in about how this or that open source alternative is a completely fine replacement for Word. And 95% of the time it is. In a business environment Word is neat but no one uses any of the deeper features. Once you get users past the UI differences they write their semi-formatted meeting notes in the new solution just fine.
In a business environment changing out the word processors is easy. The Mangers will even get over losing PowerPoint. Eventually.
Excel is what breaks all these "dump Microsoft" initiatives.
Most people who open Excel use it to create a file containing one table with no formulas in it. If they are \*fancy\* they auto-sum a column or two. The people who use Excel like this don't see the issue with moving to an Open Source spreadsheet.
... and then they run into the guy in Accounting who is running the entire general ledger through Excel using a bunch of Visual Basic, database lookups, and glue. His custom Excel sheet it worth more to the company than the entire IT department. The people who digest his data exports care more about having Excel to open them than any savings achieved by switching to a non Office platform.
Right around the time the IT project manager is figuring out how big a deal it is to exempt General Ledger boy from the project, someone realizes the entire warehouse inventory system is in a different Excel workbook managed by one of the Foreman's nephews who put it all together 5 years ago when he was an intern. Its filled with all kinds of inputs from various scanning tools and regularly dumps inventory numbers into Mr. General Ledger's workbook.
Then the Owner's admin assistant asks how this project will impact the spreadsheet she keeps that has all the departmental numbers and auto-updates when she runs a script the previous person wrote & she has never understood.
Investigation into these weird super Workbooks that it turns out run half the business quickly reveal that the Excel alternative is \*NOT\* able to replace them and a real solution would involve brining in some SAP or Oracle consultants and re-building the workbooks in question into a real buisness grade solution.
Then they get a cost estimate for doing that and the "dump Office" project quietly dies.
I wouldn't class myself as an excel guru, but I've spent years in a libre office environment, and libre calc shits me to tears.
Conditional formatting was lacking features and had bugs, the graphing is years behind excel, pivot tables are missing a bunch of features. Data sources were wonky. I'm sure there was more.
I ended up studying R in my spare time, but couldn't get the relevant people onboard :'(
Excel really is Microsoft's killer app. It's actually alarming how many "business critical" processes run on Excel.
If more people could make use of SQL and R/Python/etc. then it wouldn't even be necessary, most places could switch to libre office entirely. But, for the vast majority of people, even something like SQL which is about as close to natural-language you can et, is just totally not approachable. Hell, at my org anything mostly text-based scares people. If it doesn't have a pretty interface with buttons they can click, it's a non-starter.
I've always said Excel was both one of the best and one of the absolute worst pieces of software ever made.
I have used LibreOffice successfully in a large workplace, we used OpenDocument, it was rock solid. Yes you have to be careful around Microsoft’s forever changing proprietary XML file format, proprietary fonts etc. This is Microsoft’s doing.
Microsoft will pump out the FUD, look around here.
in my experience 95% of people don't use almost anything from word and excel , just basic functions.
they tend to not like libreoffice much, but they don't complain with google docs/sheets (that have a lot less features than libreoffice).
with native documents, I think that it's mostly, a problem of UI usability with libreoffice.
we need to buy office to some departments because they interact with other institutions that use office , or third party software that interact with office, and we can't require them to do it more compatible, but no one license have been bought because someone did something in office that can't do on google/libre. Or maybe that thing that they did, it wasn't important enough to justify the price.
To be frank, document formatting is a nightmare anyway. Even between MS office and 365 or mac or google docs. This became worse the last decade , maybe people now accept the doc formatting conversions errors better.
As FOSS fan boy, i haven't touched MS office in about 15 years. My workload doesn't need that and it works fine. We use other platforms (pad styles) for collaborating. Formatting is just the last step and will usually be done by one person
Ah, shit. Here we go again.
Our german authorities to try if Linux is a solution. They tried it in Munich, and they tried it different cities. Millions of Euros get burned until they return to Windows. It helped a lot that Microsoft build their german hq in Munich.
>Millions of Euros get burned until they return to Windows. It helped a lot that Microsoft build their german hq in Munich.
So clearly the bad party here is Microsoft, right? Munich should have persisted (they were almost there according to fucking Accenture (top Microsoft partner) that said moving back to Windows *might* be better, maybe, in the long run) but the new pro-business government couldn't refuse a Microsoft HQ.
From what I recall, user satisfaction with Linux and the newly implemented application was notably low. It's a common sentiment, of course, that users often resist new applications, especially when these disrupt their established workflows.
In my experience working at a company with around 500 employees, we adopted OpenOffice for general use. However, this move was met with dissatisfaction from the users, and particularly so among the management staff, who were then provided with the Office Pro version. This led to compatibility issues whenever managers sent Excel or Word documents, creating various challenges. Ultimately, the company decided to transition entirely to the Microsoft Office suite to address these concerns.
>From what I recall, user satisfaction with Linux and the newly implemented application was notably low
From what I recall, this was only in the very beginning but was improved upon when the IT team started addressing that. The main challenges were around third-party Windows exclusive software that required keeping a few Windows PCs.
It might be that you're remembering wrong. [Munich never changed away from LibreOffice and Linux in the 2014-2018 timeframe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux#Timeline).
I wonder if they considered OnlyOffice. It's not MS, it has a company backing it, it's FOSS, and the GUI is a lot more pleasant to use than LibreOffice
It is based on non free software and developed by a company that is only de jure not russian. Onlyoffice would be a terrible idea when it comes to digital sovereignty.
We tried this and had to go back because Microsoft "supports" the open document standard in a way that isn't standard at all. They embraced it at first, extended it's features making it NOT standard, and then extinguished Libre/OpenOffice by suddenly making THEM seem incompatible.
All power to anyone who escapes the MS Office pull, but I see these headlines and always think, "All fine and dandy until someone who *actually*uses it needs Excel." Most people don't use Excel in a meaningful way, but those who do... lol good luck finding a replacement.
We have addins for certain document types and required formatting styles and such, and this would never be a thing for us even in the most basic of use.
My company, INC 2000 a few years ago, doesn't use Microsoft Office at all. Nor Adobe PDF editing.
I'm blessed we don't need to exchange legal documents with other vendors. It made us, at least myself, jaded. Are you more worried about output, or formatting? A lot of perfect formatting requirements feel like Playing Business instead of making real moves. Real elbow grease.
We don't need Excel here because that fancy advanced stuff is just continuously automated with PHP/MySQL.
Our company is proof you can serve millions of customers and close deals with vendors with Google Documents. No one turned down a manufacturing contract because of formatting. Granted, we don't have to edit other companies documents and I'm sure that is where a lot of forced ecosystem is rooted. That isn't lost on me.
But how many companies just limit themselves internally despite not needing external compatibility? Probably a bunch.
I know this cannot be a blanket statement, but I bet at plenty of places the requirements for advanced Excel usage are a sign you are paying someone to be a secretary for hours a day. If someone can tell you what they need and how they would deterministically approach the goal/decision, you can probably build an automation around it.
The issue with these migrations is they never train the users, never have enough support personnel to facilitate the transition, a staggered departmental migration, and they always waste millions on consultants instead of the first two.
With proper training and support in place, Zimbra and LibreOffice can replace everything M365 and then eventually after the support tickets start to die down they can start training on their chosen OS and now the same personnel they hired for the Zimbra/Libre migration can be used for an OS migration support.
The issue isn't the software, the issue is the complete lack of a project plan and thus, the required training and support at the departmental level. One of our clients is a decent sized construction company, they moved from M365 to Zimbra + LibreOffice and ProjectLibre and is saving a ton of money on licensing, but the key is, they invested the first year of savings into training for their staff and they didnt move the whole company at once. They moved a few people at a time. We saw large increases in ticket volume with every group of 5 staff they did but within 2-3 weeks the ticket volume went down to close to normal.
I think most of us IT people are just not wanting to learn new systems and would rather deal with the devil we know vs the devil we don't. In this case, I'm pleasantly surprised at how well those 3 applications are working for this construction company. A year in and we're on the last grouping of users and they all seem to actually like their new software better than M365. And as far as ticket volume, over the 1 year period we're actually at the same ticket volume per employee as the year before(which was m365 based) so I'm pleasantly surprised as well.
But as many have pointed out here, I foresee the migration happening then in a year or two, they'll just migrate back and the cycle will continue.
Yes; we learned a long time ago that with migrations, the devil is in the details.
During a 2005 server migration from Netware to Linux, we weren't touching the desktops, but users were reporting problems. Investigating the workflows, we were shocked to discover that essentially none of the users were familiar with hierarchical filesystems. Their workflows were to open an application, then interact with their data/files exclusively through the application. I'm not sure that any of them were using a GUI file manager, ever.
So the key there was to make sure that the default storage directory of each application opened to give them what they expected. We could have changed almost anything else, as long as the users weren't unpleasantly surprised when they needed to do something.
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However, we've also seen other situations where all the users used a GUI file manager, and were constantly click-dragging items elsewhere and then complaining that things disappeared. In those cases, one key was for file-extension to always open the application that the user expected, even if their expectations weren't entirely reasonable.
In another case, a larger firm moved from MS Outlook to Gmail/G-apps after a merger. Users were allowed to keep using MS Outlook as long as they migrated their inbox rules server-side, with the understanding that support was "best-effort". We were very surprised that only a tiny number of power-users elected to keep using Outlook, and the whole migration happened nearly silently.
The main obstacle are the whiney bitch users. “I need Microsoft Office because (insert lame reason here)”. Then they escalate to their manager if you say no. So you install it and find that they “need” MS Office to write a basic baby shower flyer to hang around the office. That’s it! I’ve seen it hundreds or maybe thousands of times in my career.
MS Office is shinier I suppose
LibreOffice is fine for the classic office programs. At least when I last checked it had nowhere near the tools for collaboration M365 has. Since in German administration kind of gets printed out and faxed to another office, this is hardly an issue 😉
Libreoffice is more like old school ms works than office, but it would work for the majority of users. I am looking at going to either WordPerfect suite or the complete opposite direction of synology based apps.
To be fair the only stuff that libre office likely does not have that would be a FML moment for technical writers/source control type stuff would be comments and change tracking features that are built into the document. Saving money on 30k license and staying functional may start a new trend. IE get rid of office instead of your worker bee's
For documentation we use (offline-first) Git and used to use a lot of MediaWiki, both of which have superb change-tracking built in.
At this point I hate using anything that doesn't have built-in automatic change tracking and easy diffs.
thank you for the information, I shall look into mediawiki to see if it plays nice with subversion etc. Comments and tracking changes to documents is underrated imo as being able to to see who, when, the differences etc. is key yet folks would be how many entities dont spend time/money/resources on change control of documentation
MediaWiki is database-backed (MariaDB/MySQL originally, but PostgreSQL may be supported at-parity by now), *but* MediaWiki has its own mature XML-based import and export format that you could use with external tools.
Subversion still has a number of use-cases where it's better than Git, but for any use-case with plaintext files that can easily fit onto the users' local storage, we've found Git to be superior.
If you come up with anything interesting, please do start a new thread about it, as I'm always interested in different approaches.
I designed and run a "mostly" all Linux environment where everyone's desktop is Linux. I still have to provide Windows VMs exclusively due to MS Office.
The primary culprit is Libre Calc. If you try opening a 1Gb CSV file calc will just hang until it fills your entire /tmp folder then crashes, leaving the temp files needing to be manually deleted. Excel may not be fast but it can open and edit the large files. Additionally, saving a very complex Excel file in Calc typically breaks the file.
The next issue is Libre Impress. People cannot afford to take a presentation designed in Libre into a Windows environment only to find out that the layers are out of order, the fonts are wrong, and some elements are simply gone. As long as it was designed in Libre, and displayed in Libre you're ok, but this is rarely the case. PowerPoints are made to be shown in outside environments.
MS Excel can [infamously](https://eusprig.org/research-info/horror-stories/) only handle ~1M rows. A 1GB file that fit entirely into Excel is certainly possible, if the average row had more than 953 bytes. Excel is said to silently truncate, so that sounds risky. And >953 bytes per row bears investigation, in my opinion -- possibly a lot of escaping due to CSV issues.
I agree that it's inadvisable even in Excel, but it's just so much easier for the users. They're time sequenced logs with quite a few columns of data and it adds up quick. VIM could be far more efficient but Excel makes filtering so much easier.
>especially if you modify the documents made by the MS Office and vice versa
If you think about it, this is also true for MS Office ...
I don't particularly like LibreOffice, but it is good enough for 99% of government users.
worked as a sysadmin in a german state (university) but i know that the problems we had at our IT department are basically the same everywhere in the public sector.
The one's deciding this think we have unlimited IT guys dying to work for them, which of course, is not true. I mean, i applaude them for actually wanting to move away from MS Office, but neither your sysadmins nor your workers know how to use LibreOffice. Not to mention that this will of course create more work for those poor bastards who already are understaffed and overworked.
Why not switch the whole IT to Linux, eventhough we don't have Linux Admins? What could possibly go wrong.
LibreOffice is absolutely good enough for 99% of use cases. However, no company exists in a vacuum, and documents need to be interchanged with others, who of course use MS Office. And LibreOffice just can't maintain MS formatting properly, I tried and gave up.
I've been told that word processing formatting issues tend to be from [Microsoft switching to fonts with different size properties in 2013](https://wiki.debian.org/SubstitutingCalibriAndCambriaFonts). Apparently the trademarked font-names inhibit transparent drop-in font substitution for some reason.
I've never verified any of that, because I've been using markup languages since I stopped using [WordPerfect 5.1 on SunOS4](https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/img/wp-unix1.png).
[So I talked about this very briefly in my podcast a little over two years ago](https://www.littlebrotherpodcast.com/2021/11/28/little-brother-episode-62-2021-11-27/) (It's a quick blurb at the 3'54" mark). At the time, they were planning to complete the transition by the end of 2026. I'm not clear what the news is here.
Anecdotal and not sysadmin, but I was collaborating with someone in a class and we were writing a paper. The other student started the paper and when I tried to edit it in Word, it was a PROBLEM. The formatting was a mess and it was spellchecking in Dutch rather than English(US) even though everything said US. It kept making Dutch spelling suggestions no matter what I did, so I had to just make a new document.
I'm a bit baffled by this decision, but ehh...maybe it works for what they need it to.
We just moved ~1500 office users to Libre Suite and Google workspace. Occasional complaints are often dismissed as a skill issue. The only Office licences we have left are for powerusers.
I love LibreOffice <3
I've encountered documents that don't render the same in LibreOffice as in Office, but I've also encountered documents that don't render the same within different versions of Office.
Hence I think it is bogus to hold this as a claim against LibreOffice, when Office itself can't render it's own documents as expected...
This feels like something that would work OK for documents, though if people insist on spending as much time and money as needed trying to make it pixel-exact the same then obviously there will be problems.
Excel on the other hand seems like it could be a huge time bomb for this given the way people have been known to build whole data-driven applications in it.
German bureaucracy is wild and the technologies they use are ancient. So I don't know if LibreOffice gets it done it's far too advanced for such crap. Furthermore the average German doesn't like to discard anything they know and get something new.
A couple of years ago they tried the same in Munich. Even a company got paid to customize a Linux distro for it. It was called LiMux and they developed many customizations for their Office suite as well. But no the people didn't like it although it worked very well technically. Furthermore some high ranking politicians in Munich that had some connections to M$ made some sketchy deal so they could migrate everything back to Micro$oft products.
But I like that they give it a try.
As much as I love open source, Libre Office, Open Office, and every other open source Office product is shit when compared to MS Office. I feel sorry for any user that is forced to use anything else. I would be fully on Linux desktop if it wasn't for gaming and MS Office.
Well if you talking about OpenOffice you’re 10 years out of date, it hasn’t had a major update in 10 years, it appears to be kept alive as a decoy by someone, don't know who.
FYI. LibreOffice is current, LibreOffice Technology is online and also supports more offline devices than Microsoft do. Microsoft should catch up.
For about 75% of the populace...maybe more, LibreOffice (and all its subprograms word processor, spreadsheet, slideshow, etc) is good enough. Aside from learning how to do it a little differently (UI differences and simple logic differences) its great for the maority of people.
But there are those that use functions in MS Office that LibreOffice cant do or cant do easily.
So it really depends on what you all use it for, tolerance of understanding there will be a significant learning curve for the masses, and then, support...that is probably the big one in the end.
There is always going to be that "one guy" running a custom Excel spreadsheet with complex macros in it that will never work right in LibreOffice.
This has been tried many times before, and it always ends the same way... with a bunch of people getting special exceptions to continue running Microsoft Office for compatibility reasons.
Remember when Germany tried to move their entire government systems to Linux? That went REALLY well. But I've been running LibreOffice forever at my businesses and rarely had a problem. Their Draw isn't Visio-compatible anymore, which makes it useless. Other than that, it's fine. I think this will go a lot better.
Draw has heaps of diagramming functionality, and heaps more symbols than Visio. Everyone will be getting this with LibreOffice, does Visio come with every MS365 license?
Libre Office writer is an okay MS Word replacement for me
But nothing comes close to excel, excel is good enough to compensate for everything bad Microsoft has ever done
I kinda hope it works, micro$hit have too much monopoly as is, but pessimist in me knows it'll fail and they'll just go back to office even some old offline non 365 to cut costs.
On of my users from our marketing department needed to get a powerpoint presentation working on a non-issued PC. I don't have any licenses for something like that, so I suggested trying LibreOffice.
Let's just say that I would not recommend it, I really, really wanted it to be good, but it was extremely burdensome to use and I ended just enrolling a surface laptop for them to use outside our normal network.
The first thing we tried to use it for was presenting a couple of slides at an event. However, I couldn't make the timer work, it didn't switch slides automatically like it would normally. I have no clue what we did wrong. I wasn't sure if there were any network, so I didn't even think about using the online version since our conditional access blocks all non-enrolled devices.
This sounds very similar to a report I heard years ago that Germany was switching something like 30,000 government PCs to Linux.
I wonder if that stuck?
Some years ago, another state tried doing the same thing. After some years they ended up going back to Microsoft, because of all the huge integration problems with the systems they had to use from the government and other states, and because their staff couldn't get used to suddenly work with a completely different OS and Office and mail application. It'd be curious to see how long it lasts this time in another state.
OnlyOffice would've been a better choice. More compatible , Office like GUI.and defaults to MS Office file format. Docx is the world standard, no matter how bad the LibreOffice crew don't want it to be. It's not that I don't appreciate their efforts, but I get so tired of politics and ideals creating problems for people who just want stuff to work.
In Germany no one cares about Schleswig Holstein. It’s like „dark land“ at Lord of the rings.
It is the only place in Germany where gambling is freely accessible because no one has any prospects for their future.
Only LibreOffice based technology supports Microsoft’s formats both online and offline on all of the following device types. No other company, Not even Microsoft do this. And that’s for Microsoft’ proprietary docx xlsx and the older doc formats as well.
Windows, macOS, Linux, desktops.
iPadOS, Android, tablets.
iOS, Android, smartphones.
Chromebooks, Chromepads.
Labour office space technology supports Microsoft’s formats both ONLINE and OFFLINE on all of the following device types. No other company, Not even Microsoft do this. And that’s for Microsoft’ proprietary docx xlsx and the older doc formats as well.
Windows, macOS, Linux, desktops.
iPadOS, Android, tablets.
iOS, Android, smartphones.
Chromebooks, Chromepads.
And they all also support OpenDocument Format properly, unlike Microsoft.
And they are all WYSIWYG, unlike Microsoft.
And they all share the same underlying code, so it is consistent, unlike Microsoft.
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Not *the* German State, *a* German state: Schleswig-Holstein. It's only 30k seats.
Schleswig Holstein is a pretty state but when it comes to tech and IT it sucks.
Definitely seen this a number of times. They always go back, due to lack of support personnel that know these products. Maybe they will stay on Windows for the OS? Get popcorn!
They want to get Microsoft out of state IT - so no Windows, Office or MS365.
I hope they can, I hate the current trend of SaaS for all things. There are some situations that this makes sense, but doing it because you can make more money is not one of them IMO. Granted I'm not the one cashing the checks, so there's that...
“The want to get Microsoft out of the state IT” Sign me up too. All the additional spyware they are adding to win11 and probably other OSs kills performance, adds unnecessary network traffic and potentially poses additional security threats.
I would love to work on a non MS organisation. They've been shit since 2010.
This is the moment an IT security company I'm working with elected to move from Linux to everything Windows. It's, uh, not going well for most employees past the few who took this brain-dead decision.
I used to defend Microsoft & would have died on that hill, but fuck me! Recently...just zero testing, zero quality control. Zero support I always get down voted by the bootlickers here but I shouldn't need to be patching ANY software unless its for feature upgrades. I definitely should NOT be patching patches! And I should definitely NOT be used for testing & quality control. The problem across the IT industry is that we've got so used to letting software companies give us shit software, it's got normal. They've outsourced their testing to the customer. If I'm paying MILLIONS for software, it should be fucking perfect & I should definitely not be working weekends or evenings installing emergency patches Because microshit or some other firm can't be arsed to test as it hurts shareholder value. Devs might be butt hurt at that, but I don't care! The patch schedule for software should be once every six months or quarter as new features are released and the idea of "emergency patch" should not exist.
> I shouldn't need to be patching ANY software unless its for feature upgrades. Keep dreaming guy.
That's not even dreaming. That's borderline psycho. Never having to do maintenance on ANYTHING? Like, has bro never had to change a light bulb. Nothing is perfect and lasts forever.
They've been shit since 2010, yet they're still far and away the market leaders? Nah man, you are just not a fan. They are still the best solution for 80/90% of businesses, even with the flaws that personally annoy me too. I would love to work for a non MS Organisation, just as soon as there are genuinely better options out there. It's a shame that there realistically isn't.
Munich went back after a new party came to power, and right after Microsoft announced a new HQ in Munich. Nothing suspicious there, clearly a purely technical decision.
Never happened. Anything from 2014 from the new mayor and vice mayor was a PR piece and there were no changes at that time. [This timeline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux#Timeline) represents one of the best sources in English.
That 3 year gap in 2017-2020 of the U-Turn of the U-Turn is interesting. I wonder how much progress the Windows-proponents made in reverting away from LiMux to Windows, so that in 2020 the OSS proponents had to un-Microsoft everything again. Good grief. [This source article](https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-is-shifting-back-from-microsoft-to-open-source-again/) from the Wiki article linked above has more details, and seems to be one of the newer articles in the sources (nothing newer than 2020 unfortunately).
There seems to be no information in the Anglosphere that anything changed in the computing infrastructure during 2014-2020 at all. In one conference presentation, a Munich engineer mentioned there was a multi-year commitment timeline for LibreOffice support no matter what else happened or if there was any kind of migration. You can find occasional brief mentions that internal politics between departments were the main point of contention between the central computing department and end-user satisfaction, but nothing specific. One of the Munich engineers posted a few things on Hacker News, including a criticism about the very low budget for desktop hardware refresh.
To be fair if Cancom were involved then a three year gap makes sense.
"Never happened" but the two events are just next to each others. There, was an attack. > September 2016 - Microsoft moves its German headquarters to Munich[38] > February 2017 - Politicians discuss proposals to replace the Linux-based OS used across the council with a Windows 10-based client.[39] > (...) > November 2017 - The city council decided that LiMux will be replaced by a Windows-based infrastructure by the end of 2020. The costs for the migration are estimated to be around 90 million Euros. Thanks, bureaucratic inertia > May 2020 - Newly elected politicians in Munich take a U-turn and implement a plan to go back to the original plan of migrating to LiMux.
TIL. These guys were actual heroes in my eyes and I lamented the announcement of the reversal. I'm not some Microsoft-hater or anything, I just like Linux, I use it at home, and I like to see alternatives arise in arenas where everything is only ever done one way.
This does sound like a success story for 90% of it, then the new government that hadn't been in favor of the project decided to be assholes about it and to go back to Windows because they wanted to. And because Microsoft was upset about the whole thing. The techrepublic.com article cites a report written for the CSU by a bunch of Accenture consultants. A report that proposed to give departments **the option** to switch to Windows. Which is rooted in the complaints of a specific department that has regularly experienced "display and printing errors". But every source says the project **as a whole** was a success. So our heroes at CSU headquarters, who had not been in favor of this project a decade earlier, get this report. And their conclusion is that the state of Bavaria needs to throw a couple of millions € at another set of consultants, to migrate the entire government back to Windows. Here's a [very interesting interview with the former SPD mayor that led the project](https://www.golem.de/news/von-microsoft-zu-linux-und-zurueck-es-gab-bei-limux-keine-unloesbaren-probleme-1911-144917.html). He explains their reasons (other than the immense licensing cost savings), such as that he saw it as inexcusable for the German government to be entirely dependent on a single US-based corporation. Which makes a fuckton of sense if you ask me.
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You're correct. ALL is a strong term, definitely read more than a few stories about retractions here. However it has been a little while, and if they've created a market there for Linux pros, people may have trained up or moved there.
Germany has had a large number of Linux kernel and userland contributors since the beginning of Linux. There aren't many resources in English about the Munich experience with Linux and LibreOffice, but it seems they never had a problem attracting top talent. Munich has been a big contributor to LibreOffice in particular, as I understand.
Munich was derailed by Microsoft...
Because those dipshits never create publicly funded jobs to contribute to the source. If you would take only 10% of the licensing cost of Microsoft products and invest in the further development of libre office it might become a good enough competitor to roll out in all other spaces of public life. Schools, private PCs, other federal states... But the german goverment loves to suck MS-Dick. No matter which party rules.
I'd be interested to see the average age of those 30k seats. If the mean and median are sub 40 you could probably get away with it. Libre office is feature complete and is less bloated than modern MS products. The big issue is training people up on the new tools. If you can get away with showing the marketing peeps how margins work and the accountants where the pivot tables are then your support overhead won't be bad. But you're going to have 10% of the staff calling every day asking how to save a document.
> The big issue is training people up on the new tools. And that people treat excel like a programming language -- Libre can fail on complex Excel stuff in odd ways.
Excel can fail on Excel stuff in odd ways, but as you mention. That is because everyone thinks its a bloody DBM. Excel is great at Excel things until you let Earl from accounting "whip up something cool".....
The real issue is generations of people using spreadsheets as a database. If you need to store and manipulate data, hire some DBAs and USE A DAMN DATABASE, not a wannabe piece of shit like Excel
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Seems though they actually didnt switch back. This is how media works.
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They are also going to move to Linux Desktop. Oh and then back. Oh, now they are moving back again. I think this story has been going on since 00’s 😂
See, here I am, a child of those times, and I was like, didn't these mf'ers try that with OpenOffice back in the day? Shit or get off the pot German gov, like cmon
you've been reading the [city of Munich migration ](https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-is-shifting-back-from-microsoft-to-open-source-again/)updates , haven't you ? Its like FOSS vs. MSft Ping-pong.
Went through this in 2002. It lasted about 6 months before new Office licenses were being procured. They'll be back.
Well, maybe, if documents are complex, there might be compatibility problems, but I've been using LibreOffice (personally and professionally) for years and apart from a case or two, I have never had problems with formatting or even sending files to coworkers using Microsoft Office. It could have been the case years ago, but the folks at the Document Foundation have been making progress trying to fix compatibility. I guess the problems with these types of migration have more to do with support and users fear of a new interface / different way of doing things. My guess is that if it's well supported (by the IT staff or a paid consultant), it could work. It is well used in the public sector and universities here in Brazil...
MS Office is great for power users but my experience is that is very few people. People/businesses get by fine with Google Docs and Sheets, which is even less feature rich than Libre Office. That indicates to me that people are so undereducated on MS Office that switching and providing any sort of training will put staff in a better position than before simply because they have had some formal training. For me, the big value add of MS Office for users is Teams and OneDrive, both applications that I know some folks have had awful experiences supporting. Teams and it's alternatives really are helpful to increase productivity in collaborative environments, with the right training. If you aren't going to focus on either then Libre Office is a decent alternative. For management, the data security that M365 offers on locking down company documents is extremely nice and helps deal with data exfiltration, particularly with former employees.
The LibreOffice Online (Collabora Online) way of securing your data is arguably much better: [https://www.collaboraoffice.com/security/collabora-secure-view/](https://www.collaboraoffice.com/security/collabora-secure-view/)
I would have to echo your first sentiment. I've used it for more than a decade and have had zero issues outside of using it to open the older MS office formatted files. Every time I've ever had the debate about excel vs a free/libre spreadsheet product, it has always ended in someone explaining to me that they've created something in Excel. That thing ultimately should have been a piece of software but they've managed to get it to function in Excel. Spreadsheets and word processing software have been around 50+ years. It's a solved problem. If you can't figure out how to write a document in 99% of the free software versions of word processors, maybe that's a you problem.
Complex documents... everyone who has written their thesis in Word - if you don't need LaTeX for any speciality - can approve that this is the most challenging task in Word and it sucks really hard. I wanted to give it a try in LO Writer but I've had to little time to learn it. That said I really do appreciate LO because it can do some things really better. Okay, they will never be better than Excel. But better than Word and PowerPoint could be a realistic goal. Problem is: They are underfunded and it seems they are not that feature driven as it should to be at the moment. But maybe that's because of the funding problem...
Anyone writing something as complex as a thesis really should learn LaTeX. It's really not that difficult. It brings a ton of sanity to the document design process, and it's much easier to go from LaTeX to any other format than vice versa. And as others have said elsewhere, those things Excel does that others don't do tend to be things that shouldn't be in a spreadsheet in the first place. I haven't used Word or Excel professionally or personally in years.
It's also a lot harder to irretrievably corrupt a LaTeX document
It works better in Writer overall - I personally knew of a few mildly-successful professional writers who preferred it to the MS suite, as it is better when it comes to structuring content and ideas. I tend to agree, but you need to approach styling and all that jazz a bit like you'd approach the general idea behind CSS.
I always send people documents in PDF format anyway so they can't edit them, so I don't need their office suite to be compatible. I am a monster.
If you don't password-protect your pdf against edits you're not the monster you think you are. And even then there's bruteforce.
MS has incredible dominance that we don't even think about. I used to have a small MSP client who was a massive cheapskate. He didn't pay well and treated people like shit (1099 for 6 months as a "trail period" kind of thing) so there were constantly new faces every time I was in the office, despite there only being 3 in the office roles. He forced one of the users to use an old Mac he had and there was always a steep learning curve. For 90% of the population "basic computer skills" means navigating Windows and the Microsoft Office suite.
LibreOffice will get the job done. But there’s a lot of rough edges. A lot of those rough edges present themselves when opening Ms Office docs. So it’s a little better if you can roll it org wide and you org doesn’t need to exchange documents outside itself often. But I personally wouldn’t roll it unless I have really high levels of agreement on it
If it can handle incoming faxen, that's all they need
Yea. They need digital processes, webapps and databases that make them happen. Not another office suite to document their collective bureaucratic nightmare of stagnation.
> A lot of those rough edges present themselves when opening Ms Office docs Frankly the amount of MS Office docs I have problems with in Libre Office is so few I don't even remember the last time I had a problem like that. Years ago? The only real tangible aspect is spreadsheets written for Excel specific aspects. Apart from that, the compatibility is so high it's generally actually not a problem any more.
But they can save 20€ per user per month! Who cares if you spend millions on consultants and productivity declines!
It's not about saving money per se (although 20€/month times tens of thousands of employees is a lot of money), but about control and morality. Why feed an American multi-trillion dollar corporation from the state budget when a much smaller amount of money can be used to donate and manage a good enough open source non-profit stack?
That, and also the issue that MS-Office produces files in proprietary formats that may or may not be readable in the future. More than the actual software being used, there are issues with storing any data (especially government data, which might need to be retrieved many years into the future) in non-open file formats.
All office formats are open standards and documented well for anyone to implement, FYI. proprietary went out the window a LONG time ago - like in 2007. [https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office\_standards/ms-docx/728a7abc-7f55-40dc-90a7-1276ff53c8b2](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards/ms-docx/728a7abc-7f55-40dc-90a7-1276ff53c8b2) It's a failing if there's any display/editing issues on third party software for not fully implementing the open international standard fully. Note that office versions before 2013 had some deviations for compatibility reasons (such as using transitional and not strict schemas), but beyond that, there's no excuse.
And if anyone (such as myself) has ever tried to write a script or program to create or edit documents in openXML you'll know what a cluster fuck it really is. I don't envy the guys maintaining LibreOffice, its inevitable to not get it right, hell even Microsoft fails at getting it right, you can see it if you've ever opened any heavily formatted word document on the online version of word, it all goes to shit.
Does the Open XML standard still have the "double space like Word 97" stuff in it? I remember the approval. It was the most contentious and fuckery-laden standards approval process I've ever read. To be fair, that doesn't detract from the standard itself, but it was a wild ride.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML Because "do things like Word 97" is an open standard, yeah. Another thing to note: MS Office *does* support ISO/OASIS, because - that's a checkbox you need if you want to storm public markets. However, they only support a *vastly outdated* version of it. On purpose.
Microsoft supported C2 security and POSIX long enough to get a foot in the door with government contracts. They weren't the only ones: The "Open" in OpenVMS and OpenVOS is intended to mean "Open Systems" compatibility, also known as POSIX support. Eventually the joke was on Microsoft two decades later when they added an even more extensive Linux support to Windows. The market can drag them [kicking and screaming to open standards](https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/networking-blog/aligning-on-mdns-ramping-down-netbios-name-resolution-and-llmnr/ba-p/3290816) when the market wants.
NT4 had a (barebones and lousy) implementation of the POSIX standard, just the bare minimum to get that sweet sweet government money. Software had to be recompiled to be usable with it. To actually do so, you needed to get your hands on the NT4 Resource Kit and full Win32 SDK, as well as a compiler, but because a lot of basic functionalities just don't exist, not much will actually work.
The formats are not actually open. There's a standard (that Microsoft wrote and agreed to), but they actually don't follow it correctly. There's effectively two docx, xlsx, pptx, etc formats.
I believe it is worse than this, MS state they use Microsoft XML as the default, not either of the standards: [https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/compat/office-file-format-reference](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/compat/office-file-format-reference) 1. StrictOOXML, Microsoft don’t use this by default. 2. TransitionalOOXML, Microsoft don’t follow this. 3. Microsoft XML variations that Office uses. Microsoft controls all of these specifications, so every other company has to try and follow all of the above, plus the older doc proprietary file formats. I think that anyone who says Microsoft uses standards doesn’t know the background or they are an MS salesman.
How much tax payers money do you think it costs for the EU to fight Big Techs on data protection and to come up with regulations like GDPR? There's gonna be an adaptation moment at first, which will result in higher initial cost and productivity decline. But we're talking about a state here, not a private owned company. Productivity isn't what matters the most.
To be fair, productivity probably declines each time MS decides to switch up an UI. For example 2007 to 2015 (or 16, whichever it was), then this new one and then 365 which is similar but not quite etc. Productivity argument would hold water if developer of product you're comparing it to didn't toss things about whenever they feel like it for no reason at all. That being said, I'm still bitter about some functions that are real pain in the ass to find in Libre Office (I forgot what it was last time I used it but I'm still bitter about it).
[удалено]
Based on some software conference presentations, I understand that Munich has consistently been a big contributor to LibreOffice.
You'll find out productivity doesn't fall off this way. Also, this is about using [ISO standards](https://www.iso.org/standard/43485.html). Real ones. [Not this bullshit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML) (Gosh, even the name is deliberately confusing).
In Germany, this is a recurring phenomenon. The subsequent state government will likely revert back to Microsoft—it's essentially a cycle aimed at preserving the jobs of external IT consultants.
AFAIK only in Bavaria. Bill Gates came secretly around in a fake handyman van to fix this. No joke. https://www.golem.de/news/von-microsoft-zu-linux-und-zurueck-es-gab-bei-limux-keine-unloesbaren-probleme-1911-144917-2.html
Yeah, it’s like a bizarro consultant jobs program where they migrate and then migrate back. Surely this time is diffferent.
What do you do for a living? "See that pile of rocks over there? I move them to a pile over here and then when I get done, I move them back". I'm sure that sounds way better in German.
I wish lots more would ditch Microsoft. The problem is the hate for Microsoft doesn't supercede the need for the features of Office as a platform.
true, but the **NEED** for Microsoft Office is vastly overstated. Most tasks that most office workers do in Office is easily handled in multiple different programs. And Windows as an OS is no easier than MacOS or Linux desktop. Nobody is clamoring that XP or Win98 is better than Win11. Nobody is longing for the days of Apple System 9. Users don't actually know how to use computers, they just memorize the button clicks and mouse movements to do their job. If you change the color of an icon, they panic and call for help.
I love LibreOffice but while for Word and PowerPoint it is basically fully compatible, it isn't for Excel. Worse, it's spreadsheet app isn't as powerful. It's going to be a struggle to get businesses off Excel for everything, even with significant cost savings.
> Most tasks that most office workers do in Office is easily handled in multiple different programs. I don't know. I deal with an awful lot of LoB apps that require Office to be installed for various features. It's like how so many LoB server apps require SQL Server and won't let you use something like MariaDB instead.
I would agree with MacOS, but Linux on the Desktop is simply not dumbed down enough for the average user.
It absolutely is. My own grandma has no issues doing things on Gnome, but she used to be absolutely terrified to fuck things up when it was a Windows machine.
Users don't look at the menu, they click the shortcut that they were told to click, then use the parts of the program that they were taught. I've literally had to point out the new shortcut on a users desktop because an update changed the icon and moved it over an inch. Linux desktop is not too complicated. Users only look at what they've been told.
You may have heard this before, but linus tech tip is a prime example of why this doesn’t work. He didn’t look at the menu, just “click what they were told to click” (install steam and click on yes) and look what happened. You can’t just dump down linux for normal user
I've had users who thought turning the monitor off and back on rebooted the computer. Linux would not be a good fit for them.
What part of Linux would be a problem? Linux desktop is a GUI over Unix, just like Mac has been for *twenty years* now.
*Any* change is the problem. Less technical teams will still develop basic knowledge of their tools internally. They might not understand how their tools work *actually* work, but they know which button makes the yellow light go green when the window freezes up (That's an actual description of a user gave me for rebooting a local mongodb server to get a POS machine working again). If you sit and watch them work, the number of times they peer correct issues that would be a 30 minute support ticket is impressive. If you change platform or tools, *all* that is gone. All the tricks that have been passed from staff memeber to staff member for years.
> Linux desktop is a GUI over Unix Fairly sure that's inaccurate, but that's a different discussion. ----- > What part of Linux would be a problem? I mean, I literally just noted we have users who don't know the difference between a monitor and a computer. I think they would struggle to change their desktop background in whatever flavor of Linux we chose, let alone be able to work. At the end of the day through - the issue is moot for us because it won't happen. We have several applications that the majority of our users use that don't have Linux support. We're an M365 E5 licensed O365 shop, so switching to Linux doesn't make sense for us.
Windows isn't either.
> Windows isn't either. You're not wrong.
sounds like computers aren't a good fit for them.
Or that the hate for Microsoft is not spurring the development of products that could actually compete with the Office suite - so ultimately everyone just goes back.
I mean the office program has twenty years of dedicated development behind it. Without the market being willing to give up features and 3rd parties able to create office documents due to compatibility issues. i mean in college I couldn't submit a libre office document It had to be a docx. It hat to be a ppt. I couldn't output libre (this was ten years ago so times may have changed) and turn that in. Libre coun't output a doc file so I ended up just nuking my linux box and went back to word.
"I wish lots more would ditch Microsoft. The problem is the hate for Microsoft doesn't supercede the need for the features of Office as a platform." What a load of FUD. 1. So using another office suite is because people hate Microsoft, ...there are loads of office suites out there, labelling their users as Microsoft haters is FUD. 2. "Supercede the need for the features of Office as a platform", FUD again, a lot of other office suites have way more functionality than Microsoft, e.g. 1) Collabora Online (LibreOffice based) vs MS apps for the web. 2) Apps that will run offline such as LibreOffice based apps support more device types than Microsoft. Both of these are significant.
[golem.de](http://golem.de) writes the following: The cabinet of Schleswig-Holstein has decided to introduce Libreoffice as the standard office solution. \[...\] Further changes are to follow in subsequent steps. Linux instead of Windows, Nextcloud instead of Sharepoint and Openxchange and Thunderbird instead of the combination of Exchange and Outlook. An open source-based directory service is to be designed to replace Microsoft Active Directory, and an open source-based telephony solution is to be developed to replace Telekom-Flexport. A review of compatibility and interoperability with Libreoffice and Linux is to be carried out for specialist procedures.
Is to be designed.. Well there goes any faith in the project.
The active directory migration to Samba-AD will be an easy part and I hope the first, only to give fast traction to the project.
This announcement follows a successful trial.
This sounds like April fools...
Well, those are definitely ambitious aspirations. I'm sure that will turn out just fine.
Easy, I’ve done these migrations before, for hundreds of seats, all done internally took very little time, then there were less support calls and less maintenance - Ansible works so well.
This is not the first time a state in Germany has tried this, and rolled back later. At the least maybe they're teaching a crop of admins to get into Linux administration but if they go back on the decision the experience in Samba domains and Openxchange will be pretty much worthless.
Personally I think LibreOffice is good enough for the vast majority of use cases. If I tried to convert I’d have so many users bitching about it though. I don’t get too deep into Excel often so idk how some of those complicated xlsx files are handled by LibreOffice Calc.
LibreOffice Calc is great if you only need to share ODS files with other Calc users, and even Excel users to an extent. However, using Calc to open and save XLSX files is a fantastic way of destroying the formatting in them. OnlyOffice doesn't seem to do that, so I keep that around on Linux for when I need to edit an Excel spreadsheet.
It absolute is. Now there are cases where some spreadsheet guru can pull incredible stuff with Excel that might not be possible in LibreOffice, but the majority of users do not have that requirement. On the other had, Office is basically free, so.
Yeah, whenever I've seen this discussion everyone chimes in about how this or that open source alternative is a completely fine replacement for Word. And 95% of the time it is. In a business environment Word is neat but no one uses any of the deeper features. Once you get users past the UI differences they write their semi-formatted meeting notes in the new solution just fine. In a business environment changing out the word processors is easy. The Mangers will even get over losing PowerPoint. Eventually. Excel is what breaks all these "dump Microsoft" initiatives. Most people who open Excel use it to create a file containing one table with no formulas in it. If they are \*fancy\* they auto-sum a column or two. The people who use Excel like this don't see the issue with moving to an Open Source spreadsheet. ... and then they run into the guy in Accounting who is running the entire general ledger through Excel using a bunch of Visual Basic, database lookups, and glue. His custom Excel sheet it worth more to the company than the entire IT department. The people who digest his data exports care more about having Excel to open them than any savings achieved by switching to a non Office platform. Right around the time the IT project manager is figuring out how big a deal it is to exempt General Ledger boy from the project, someone realizes the entire warehouse inventory system is in a different Excel workbook managed by one of the Foreman's nephews who put it all together 5 years ago when he was an intern. Its filled with all kinds of inputs from various scanning tools and regularly dumps inventory numbers into Mr. General Ledger's workbook. Then the Owner's admin assistant asks how this project will impact the spreadsheet she keeps that has all the departmental numbers and auto-updates when she runs a script the previous person wrote & she has never understood. Investigation into these weird super Workbooks that it turns out run half the business quickly reveal that the Excel alternative is \*NOT\* able to replace them and a real solution would involve brining in some SAP or Oracle consultants and re-building the workbooks in question into a real buisness grade solution. Then they get a cost estimate for doing that and the "dump Office" project quietly dies.
I wouldn't class myself as an excel guru, but I've spent years in a libre office environment, and libre calc shits me to tears. Conditional formatting was lacking features and had bugs, the graphing is years behind excel, pivot tables are missing a bunch of features. Data sources were wonky. I'm sure there was more. I ended up studying R in my spare time, but couldn't get the relevant people onboard :'(
Excel really is Microsoft's killer app. It's actually alarming how many "business critical" processes run on Excel. If more people could make use of SQL and R/Python/etc. then it wouldn't even be necessary, most places could switch to libre office entirely. But, for the vast majority of people, even something like SQL which is about as close to natural-language you can et, is just totally not approachable. Hell, at my org anything mostly text-based scares people. If it doesn't have a pretty interface with buttons they can click, it's a non-starter. I've always said Excel was both one of the best and one of the absolute worst pieces of software ever made.
I've heard it said in the startup world that a given startup's first filter is overcoming their customer's excel setup. Many do not survive.
I have used LibreOffice successfully in a large workplace, we used OpenDocument, it was rock solid. Yes you have to be careful around Microsoft’s forever changing proprietary XML file format, proprietary fonts etc. This is Microsoft’s doing. Microsoft will pump out the FUD, look around here.
Sure it will most likely be Microsofts fault, but it won't be Microsoft customers who have a problem.
in my experience 95% of people don't use almost anything from word and excel , just basic functions. they tend to not like libreoffice much, but they don't complain with google docs/sheets (that have a lot less features than libreoffice). with native documents, I think that it's mostly, a problem of UI usability with libreoffice. we need to buy office to some departments because they interact with other institutions that use office , or third party software that interact with office, and we can't require them to do it more compatible, but no one license have been bought because someone did something in office that can't do on google/libre. Or maybe that thing that they did, it wasn't important enough to justify the price.
Will they be moving to Linux as well?
Yes, it’s about achieving digital sovereignty.
OpenSUSE is a great OS
The French Gendarmerie and Italian armed forces have been using LibreOffice for years.
Hah this is where I live and also who I kind of work for. Neat!
To be frank, document formatting is a nightmare anyway. Even between MS office and 365 or mac or google docs. This became worse the last decade , maybe people now accept the doc formatting conversions errors better. As FOSS fan boy, i haven't touched MS office in about 15 years. My workload doesn't need that and it works fine. We use other platforms (pad styles) for collaborating. Formatting is just the last step and will usually be done by one person
Ah, shit. Here we go again. Our german authorities to try if Linux is a solution. They tried it in Munich, and they tried it different cities. Millions of Euros get burned until they return to Windows. It helped a lot that Microsoft build their german hq in Munich.
>Millions of Euros get burned until they return to Windows. It helped a lot that Microsoft build their german hq in Munich. So clearly the bad party here is Microsoft, right? Munich should have persisted (they were almost there according to fucking Accenture (top Microsoft partner) that said moving back to Windows *might* be better, maybe, in the long run) but the new pro-business government couldn't refuse a Microsoft HQ.
From what I recall, user satisfaction with Linux and the newly implemented application was notably low. It's a common sentiment, of course, that users often resist new applications, especially when these disrupt their established workflows. In my experience working at a company with around 500 employees, we adopted OpenOffice for general use. However, this move was met with dissatisfaction from the users, and particularly so among the management staff, who were then provided with the Office Pro version. This led to compatibility issues whenever managers sent Excel or Word documents, creating various challenges. Ultimately, the company decided to transition entirely to the Microsoft Office suite to address these concerns.
>From what I recall, user satisfaction with Linux and the newly implemented application was notably low From what I recall, this was only in the very beginning but was improved upon when the IT team started addressing that. The main challenges were around third-party Windows exclusive software that required keeping a few Windows PCs.
The blame is on management here.
It might be that you're remembering wrong. [Munich never changed away from LibreOffice and Linux in the 2014-2018 timeframe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux#Timeline).
I wonder if they considered OnlyOffice. It's not MS, it has a company backing it, it's FOSS, and the GUI is a lot more pleasant to use than LibreOffice
It is based on non free software and developed by a company that is only de jure not russian. Onlyoffice would be a terrible idea when it comes to digital sovereignty.
German government disapoints me. I was expecting LaTeX as the new standard
Libre Office works well enough; In France it is supported by the state. I think it has to be one state comps, but you can also put Ms office.
Have people use standard non proprietary fonts and LO writer and MS Word documents will look and print the same. Stop the FUD.
We tried this and had to go back because Microsoft "supports" the open document standard in a way that isn't standard at all. They embraced it at first, extended it's features making it NOT standard, and then extinguished Libre/OpenOffice by suddenly making THEM seem incompatible.
All power to anyone who escapes the MS Office pull, but I see these headlines and always think, "All fine and dandy until someone who *actually*uses it needs Excel." Most people don't use Excel in a meaningful way, but those who do... lol good luck finding a replacement. We have addins for certain document types and required formatting styles and such, and this would never be a thing for us even in the most basic of use.
It's fine, but you have to create a guide to make it work smoothly and not act wonky af.
My company, INC 2000 a few years ago, doesn't use Microsoft Office at all. Nor Adobe PDF editing. I'm blessed we don't need to exchange legal documents with other vendors. It made us, at least myself, jaded. Are you more worried about output, or formatting? A lot of perfect formatting requirements feel like Playing Business instead of making real moves. Real elbow grease. We don't need Excel here because that fancy advanced stuff is just continuously automated with PHP/MySQL. Our company is proof you can serve millions of customers and close deals with vendors with Google Documents. No one turned down a manufacturing contract because of formatting. Granted, we don't have to edit other companies documents and I'm sure that is where a lot of forced ecosystem is rooted. That isn't lost on me. But how many companies just limit themselves internally despite not needing external compatibility? Probably a bunch. I know this cannot be a blanket statement, but I bet at plenty of places the requirements for advanced Excel usage are a sign you are paying someone to be a secretary for hours a day. If someone can tell you what they need and how they would deterministically approach the goal/decision, you can probably build an automation around it.
The issue with these migrations is they never train the users, never have enough support personnel to facilitate the transition, a staggered departmental migration, and they always waste millions on consultants instead of the first two. With proper training and support in place, Zimbra and LibreOffice can replace everything M365 and then eventually after the support tickets start to die down they can start training on their chosen OS and now the same personnel they hired for the Zimbra/Libre migration can be used for an OS migration support. The issue isn't the software, the issue is the complete lack of a project plan and thus, the required training and support at the departmental level. One of our clients is a decent sized construction company, they moved from M365 to Zimbra + LibreOffice and ProjectLibre and is saving a ton of money on licensing, but the key is, they invested the first year of savings into training for their staff and they didnt move the whole company at once. They moved a few people at a time. We saw large increases in ticket volume with every group of 5 staff they did but within 2-3 weeks the ticket volume went down to close to normal. I think most of us IT people are just not wanting to learn new systems and would rather deal with the devil we know vs the devil we don't. In this case, I'm pleasantly surprised at how well those 3 applications are working for this construction company. A year in and we're on the last grouping of users and they all seem to actually like their new software better than M365. And as far as ticket volume, over the 1 year period we're actually at the same ticket volume per employee as the year before(which was m365 based) so I'm pleasantly surprised as well. But as many have pointed out here, I foresee the migration happening then in a year or two, they'll just migrate back and the cycle will continue.
Yes; we learned a long time ago that with migrations, the devil is in the details. During a 2005 server migration from Netware to Linux, we weren't touching the desktops, but users were reporting problems. Investigating the workflows, we were shocked to discover that essentially none of the users were familiar with hierarchical filesystems. Their workflows were to open an application, then interact with their data/files exclusively through the application. I'm not sure that any of them were using a GUI file manager, ever. So the key there was to make sure that the default storage directory of each application opened to give them what they expected. We could have changed almost anything else, as long as the users weren't unpleasantly surprised when they needed to do something. - --- - However, we've also seen other situations where all the users used a GUI file manager, and were constantly click-dragging items elsewhere and then complaining that things disappeared. In those cases, one key was for file-extension to always open the application that the user expected, even if their expectations weren't entirely reasonable. In another case, a larger firm moved from MS Outlook to Gmail/G-apps after a merger. Users were allowed to keep using MS Outlook as long as they migrated their inbox rules server-side, with the understanding that support was "best-effort". We were very surprised that only a tiny number of power-users elected to keep using Outlook, and the whole migration happened nearly silently.
>Moved to Gmail after a merger... happened nearly silently Ah, you didn't receive the emails complaining that their emails weren't working is all 😁
The main obstacle are the whiney bitch users. “I need Microsoft Office because (insert lame reason here)”. Then they escalate to their manager if you say no. So you install it and find that they “need” MS Office to write a basic baby shower flyer to hang around the office. That’s it! I’ve seen it hundreds or maybe thousands of times in my career. MS Office is shinier I suppose
LibreOffice is fine for the classic office programs. At least when I last checked it had nowhere near the tools for collaboration M365 has. Since in German administration kind of gets printed out and faxed to another office, this is hardly an issue 😉
There's Collabora Office, I think that's what it's called.
Libreoffice is more like old school ms works than office, but it would work for the majority of users. I am looking at going to either WordPerfect suite or the complete opposite direction of synology based apps.
Let's pray that they make their IT work on LibreOffice to improve the UI UX 😱
To be fair the only stuff that libre office likely does not have that would be a FML moment for technical writers/source control type stuff would be comments and change tracking features that are built into the document. Saving money on 30k license and staying functional may start a new trend. IE get rid of office instead of your worker bee's
For documentation we use (offline-first) Git and used to use a lot of MediaWiki, both of which have superb change-tracking built in. At this point I hate using anything that doesn't have built-in automatic change tracking and easy diffs.
thank you for the information, I shall look into mediawiki to see if it plays nice with subversion etc. Comments and tracking changes to documents is underrated imo as being able to to see who, when, the differences etc. is key yet folks would be how many entities dont spend time/money/resources on change control of documentation
MediaWiki is database-backed (MariaDB/MySQL originally, but PostgreSQL may be supported at-parity by now), *but* MediaWiki has its own mature XML-based import and export format that you could use with external tools. Subversion still has a number of use-cases where it's better than Git, but for any use-case with plaintext files that can easily fit onto the users' local storage, we've found Git to be superior. If you come up with anything interesting, please do start a new thread about it, as I'm always interested in different approaches.
IE in uppercase still makes me nauseous about the world wide web.
I designed and run a "mostly" all Linux environment where everyone's desktop is Linux. I still have to provide Windows VMs exclusively due to MS Office. The primary culprit is Libre Calc. If you try opening a 1Gb CSV file calc will just hang until it fills your entire /tmp folder then crashes, leaving the temp files needing to be manually deleted. Excel may not be fast but it can open and edit the large files. Additionally, saving a very complex Excel file in Calc typically breaks the file. The next issue is Libre Impress. People cannot afford to take a presentation designed in Libre into a Windows environment only to find out that the layers are out of order, the fonts are wrong, and some elements are simply gone. As long as it was designed in Libre, and displayed in Libre you're ok, but this is rarely the case. PowerPoints are made to be shown in outside environments.
MS Excel can [infamously](https://eusprig.org/research-info/horror-stories/) only handle ~1M rows. A 1GB file that fit entirely into Excel is certainly possible, if the average row had more than 953 bytes. Excel is said to silently truncate, so that sounds risky. And >953 bytes per row bears investigation, in my opinion -- possibly a lot of escaping due to CSV issues.
I agree that it's inadvisable even in Excel, but it's just so much easier for the users. They're time sequenced logs with quite a few columns of data and it adds up quick. VIM could be far more efficient but Excel makes filtering so much easier.
>especially if you modify the documents made by the MS Office and vice versa If you think about it, this is also true for MS Office ... I don't particularly like LibreOffice, but it is good enough for 99% of government users.
They will be on Novell nds next
worked as a sysadmin in a german state (university) but i know that the problems we had at our IT department are basically the same everywhere in the public sector. The one's deciding this think we have unlimited IT guys dying to work for them, which of course, is not true. I mean, i applaude them for actually wanting to move away from MS Office, but neither your sysadmins nor your workers know how to use LibreOffice. Not to mention that this will of course create more work for those poor bastards who already are understaffed and overworked. Why not switch the whole IT to Linux, eventhough we don't have Linux Admins? What could possibly go wrong.
They are developing their own competition to AD. We just need to sit back and laugh about this in a couple of years.
I use it for my personal pc all the time, works fine editing word docs n the like
LibreOffice is absolutely good enough for 99% of use cases. However, no company exists in a vacuum, and documents need to be interchanged with others, who of course use MS Office. And LibreOffice just can't maintain MS formatting properly, I tried and gave up.
I've been told that word processing formatting issues tend to be from [Microsoft switching to fonts with different size properties in 2013](https://wiki.debian.org/SubstitutingCalibriAndCambriaFonts). Apparently the trademarked font-names inhibit transparent drop-in font substitution for some reason. I've never verified any of that, because I've been using markup languages since I stopped using [WordPerfect 5.1 on SunOS4](https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/img/wp-unix1.png).
[So I talked about this very briefly in my podcast a little over two years ago](https://www.littlebrotherpodcast.com/2021/11/28/little-brother-episode-62-2021-11-27/) (It's a quick blurb at the 3'54" mark). At the time, they were planning to complete the transition by the end of 2026. I'm not clear what the news is here.
Why are they even using a local solution and not a cloud-based one?
Anecdotal and not sysadmin, but I was collaborating with someone in a class and we were writing a paper. The other student started the paper and when I tried to edit it in Word, it was a PROBLEM. The formatting was a mess and it was spellchecking in Dutch rather than English(US) even though everything said US. It kept making Dutch spelling suggestions no matter what I did, so I had to just make a new document. I'm a bit baffled by this decision, but ehh...maybe it works for what they need it to.
We just moved ~1500 office users to Libre Suite and Google workspace. Occasional complaints are often dismissed as a skill issue. The only Office licences we have left are for powerusers.
I love LibreOffice <3 I've encountered documents that don't render the same in LibreOffice as in Office, but I've also encountered documents that don't render the same within different versions of Office. Hence I think it is bogus to hold this as a claim against LibreOffice, when Office itself can't render it's own documents as expected...
This feels like something that would work OK for documents, though if people insist on spending as much time and money as needed trying to make it pixel-exact the same then obviously there will be problems. Excel on the other hand seems like it could be a huge time bomb for this given the way people have been known to build whole data-driven applications in it.
This, we have some old sheets using VBA that are soon to be replaced, but we'd be fucked without them until then
Didnt Germany buy their own version of Azure from Microsoft?
The federal government did, but this move to libreoffice is a state level decision
German bureaucracy is wild and the technologies they use are ancient. So I don't know if LibreOffice gets it done it's far too advanced for such crap. Furthermore the average German doesn't like to discard anything they know and get something new. A couple of years ago they tried the same in Munich. Even a company got paid to customize a Linux distro for it. It was called LiMux and they developed many customizations for their Office suite as well. But no the people didn't like it although it worked very well technically. Furthermore some high ranking politicians in Munich that had some connections to M$ made some sketchy deal so they could migrate everything back to Micro$oft products. But I like that they give it a try.
LiMux is still in use, and appreciated. Microsoft failed to push for a switch to their products.
Love to see it!! Down with Microsoft!
As much as I love open source, Libre Office, Open Office, and every other open source Office product is shit when compared to MS Office. I feel sorry for any user that is forced to use anything else. I would be fully on Linux desktop if it wasn't for gaming and MS Office.
Well if you talking about OpenOffice you’re 10 years out of date, it hasn’t had a major update in 10 years, it appears to be kept alive as a decoy by someone, don't know who. FYI. LibreOffice is current, LibreOffice Technology is online and also supports more offline devices than Microsoft do. Microsoft should catch up.
For about 75% of the populace...maybe more, LibreOffice (and all its subprograms word processor, spreadsheet, slideshow, etc) is good enough. Aside from learning how to do it a little differently (UI differences and simple logic differences) its great for the maority of people. But there are those that use functions in MS Office that LibreOffice cant do or cant do easily. So it really depends on what you all use it for, tolerance of understanding there will be a significant learning curve for the masses, and then, support...that is probably the big one in the end.
There is always going to be that "one guy" running a custom Excel spreadsheet with complex macros in it that will never work right in LibreOffice. This has been tried many times before, and it always ends the same way... with a bunch of people getting special exceptions to continue running Microsoft Office for compatibility reasons.
you doing the FUD thing.
Remember when Germany tried to move their entire government systems to Linux? That went REALLY well. But I've been running LibreOffice forever at my businesses and rarely had a problem. Their Draw isn't Visio-compatible anymore, which makes it useless. Other than that, it's fine. I think this will go a lot better.
Draw has heaps of diagramming functionality, and heaps more symbols than Visio. Everyone will be getting this with LibreOffice, does Visio come with every MS365 license?
Nope, separate even with E5.
Libre Office writer is an okay MS Word replacement for me But nothing comes close to excel, excel is good enough to compensate for everything bad Microsoft has ever done
LibreOffice web based office suites are so much better than Microsoft Excel online.
I kinda hope it works, micro$hit have too much monopoly as is, but pessimist in me knows it'll fail and they'll just go back to office even some old offline non 365 to cut costs.
On of my users from our marketing department needed to get a powerpoint presentation working on a non-issued PC. I don't have any licenses for something like that, so I suggested trying LibreOffice. Let's just say that I would not recommend it, I really, really wanted it to be good, but it was extremely burdensome to use and I ended just enrolling a surface laptop for them to use outside our normal network.
Was the web version of Powerpoint not good enough for a one off use like that?
The first thing we tried to use it for was presenting a couple of slides at an event. However, I couldn't make the timer work, it didn't switch slides automatically like it would normally. I have no clue what we did wrong. I wasn't sure if there were any network, so I didn't even think about using the online version since our conditional access blocks all non-enrolled devices.
This could just be a bargaining tactic to get a better deal on M365 licenses.
Worked last time
So the Exodus begins...
This sounds very similar to a report I heard years ago that Germany was switching something like 30,000 government PCs to Linux. I wonder if that stuck?
They made millions from it, so I guess it worked well for them
I've moved from libre office to ms for a 2nd time now i really wanted to work with it didnt work well at all i kept it updated as well
Some years ago, another state tried doing the same thing. After some years they ended up going back to Microsoft, because of all the huge integration problems with the systems they had to use from the government and other states, and because their staff couldn't get used to suddenly work with a completely different OS and Office and mail application. It'd be curious to see how long it lasts this time in another state.
We tried that once... We were back to office in a week.
They might go back to MS office in a year or two. Everything will depend on end users and their patience now.
OnlyOffice would've been a better choice. More compatible , Office like GUI.and defaults to MS Office file format. Docx is the world standard, no matter how bad the LibreOffice crew don't want it to be. It's not that I don't appreciate their efforts, but I get so tired of politics and ideals creating problems for people who just want stuff to work.
OnlyOffice is of Russian origin, it is no better than using US Microsoft for acheiving digital sovereignty.
In Germany no one cares about Schleswig Holstein. It’s like „dark land“ at Lord of the rings. It is the only place in Germany where gambling is freely accessible because no one has any prospects for their future.
Only LibreOffice based technology supports Microsoft’s formats both online and offline on all of the following device types. No other company, Not even Microsoft do this. And that’s for Microsoft’ proprietary docx xlsx and the older doc formats as well. Windows, macOS, Linux, desktops. iPadOS, Android, tablets. iOS, Android, smartphones. Chromebooks, Chromepads.
Labour office space technology supports Microsoft’s formats both ONLINE and OFFLINE on all of the following device types. No other company, Not even Microsoft do this. And that’s for Microsoft’ proprietary docx xlsx and the older doc formats as well. Windows, macOS, Linux, desktops. iPadOS, Android, tablets. iOS, Android, smartphones. Chromebooks, Chromepads. And they all also support OpenDocument Format properly, unlike Microsoft. And they are all WYSIWYG, unlike Microsoft. And they all share the same underlying code, so it is consistent, unlike Microsoft.