German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

The germans have been tinkering with policies mandating non-cloud dependent products for a while wondering if this is a start of it actually getting implemented on a large scale or if the delay attempts will remain successful elsewhere across the region.<p>If this is a start of an actual migration away from cloud dependence, it&#x27;s a matter of time before windows(which is as cloud dependent as office those days for enterprise management features) itself is targeted, and the entire federation of germany changing from ms office formats to odf in practice could set some interesting balls in motions.<p>But as we have seen this before where a product is started and then sabotaged or delayed by lobbying and inertia from people who dont want to change how theyve always done things, it could be another one-off that dont set a trend.

The will likely be using Phoenix: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dataport.de&#x2F;about-phoenix&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dataport.de&#x2F;about-phoenix&#x2F;</a><p>The German government developed a fully free and open source solution that is quite similar (consisting of Nextcloud, jitsi, Collabora etc.) and can be deployed using Kubernetes: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.opencode.de&#x2F;bmi&#x2F;opendesk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.opencode.de&#x2F;bmi&#x2F;opendesk</a>

My wife just started a new job in the Netherlands and I was super excited to hear that her office uses Ubuntu and LibreOffice for all their PC&#x27;s. She wasn&#x27;t interviewing for a tech job but apparently her being reasonably familiar with both was helpful at her interview (all those years of Raspberry Pis around the house paid off!)<p>Is this normal? It certainly would be an outlier back in the US.

&gt; Why should local governments use taxpayers’ money to buy proprietary, closed software from a single vendor?<p>I don&#x27;t want to be a pessimist, but working with non-traditional tools is going to cost the taxpayers more money when important documents are not formatted correctly or the software behaves differently than the proprietary alternatives.<p>Linux is successful on the server because it has huge corporate backing. Linux has not been successful on the desktop because it has low corporate backing.<p>The cost of Microsoft Office is comparable to the cost of keeping their workplace stocked with coffee throughout the year.

Did not work well in Munich, my hometown, in 2004. Hope the lessons have been learned. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itsfoss.com&#x2F;munich-linux-failure&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itsfoss.com&#x2F;munich-linux-failure&#x2F;</a>

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

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

I haven&#x27;t really used a WYSIWYG word processor in almost a decade (I like Pandoc), so these are old memories, but I remember feeling like the interface to OpenOffice (before it was split into LibreOffice) was more intuitive than MS Word 2007 and beyond. I feel like they doubled down on 90&#x27;s-era MS Word-style interface, which I personally have just found to be extremely intuitive and easy to work with.<p>That said, the equation editor for LibreOffice and OpenOffice utterly sucks. This bizarre, quasi-TeX, quais-WYSIWYG interface is extremely unintuitive and hard to work with. The equations themselves generally render fine, but back when I used OpenOffice on Windows I purchased a copy of MathType and would OLE equations in. This didn&#x27;t work on Linux, which is why I stopped using LibreOffice.

LibreOffice may be useful for German, but not for Asian languages. This is because it was designed without regard to the typographical rules of the Asian-speaking world.<p>You could say that TDF is &quot;committed to Asian languages&quot;. But text is meaningless unless it can be used according to typographic rules, not just to display characters. They do not understand that.<p>And the problem is that the user interface is stuck in the 2000s. They don&#x27;t understand that the Ribbon UI has been around for 17 years and generations have changed.<p>They say, &quot;There&#x27;s the Tabbed UI,&quot; but the Tabbed UI is nothing like the Ribbon UI. They&#x27;re in denial and they don&#x27;t want to get out of the 2000s.

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

Interestingly, it might not be a cost saving decision, but the money needed for the initial setup and ongoing support ending in local companies&#x27; and worker&#x27;s pockets.

&gt; We have no influence on the operating processes of such [proprietary] solutions and the handling of data, including a possible outflow of data to third countries.<p>All countries should have a strategy to fork open source software and implement it for this reason. They should also share their contributions with the wider Linux community as well, although with the recent xz scandal, pull requests from nation states may be looked at with suspicion.

They already did that before until Microsoft offered them new conditions and they went back to MS.<p>So take all those &quot;digital sovereignity&quot; with a grain of salt. It usually means: &quot;We want you to lower your fees&quot;.

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

The irony of this change, is this isn&#x27;t Munich any longer, many of those services might run on Azure, depend of FOSS projects that are directly or indirectly paid by Microsoft, thus they won&#x27;t care as much as in the past, see sore state of Windows versus Azure.

To get some context on this, you have to look into the local administration of munich in bavaria. They messed up the switch to OpenOffice on the desktop by not supporting all use-cases and then it seems Microsoft used the opportunity to reverse the change by use some &quot;convincing&quot;.<p>Anyhow, it would be extremely simple for all of Europe to role out OpenSource: just ban the transfer of critical user data to the US. Microsoft Windows is technically a gigantic NSA backdoor, therefore installing it on a government PC should be considered treason. So, maybe we should start to put politicians on trial for treason and see how quickly MS gets kicked out of Europe...

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

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

Since it&#x27;s linked at the bottom, I find it really funny how different the German states&#x27; websites are in quality.<p>There is good ones like<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.schleswig-holstein.de" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.schleswig-holstein.de</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.baden-wuerttemberg.de" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.baden-wuerttemberg.de</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hessen.de" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hessen.de</a><p>And then there is sites like this<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sachsen-anhalt.de" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sachsen-anhalt.de</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sachsen.de" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sachsen.de</a>

Some clarification and background.<p>The headline might be somewhat misleading if you do not read the article. It is not the federal state of Germany that is starting to switch to LibreOffice, but one of the member states of the federation: Schleswig-Holstein.<p>Shifting to LibreOffice is only one component of the the state&#x27;s strategy towards a digitally sovereign IT workplace. You can read more about the other elements of this strategy here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.schleswig-holstein.de&#x2F;DE&#x2F;landesregierung&#x2F;themen&#x2F;digitalisierung&#x2F;linux-plus1&#x2F;Projekt&#x2F;projekt_node.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.schleswig-holstein.de&#x2F;DE&#x2F;landesregierung&#x2F;themen&#x2F;...</a> (in German).<p>What is very interesting is the political background: Schleswig-Holstein is governed by a coalition of the Converservative party (CDU) and the Greens. In past decades it had been the Greens who where among the most driving forces for the adaption of open-source software and open standards in the public sphere, while the Conservativs primarily sided with big business. Now the latter seems to change gradually. Interesting times ...

That&#x27;s a great news but does not surprise me. In the University where I studied in Germany, almost all Library computers had Ubuntu (and also LibreOffice). The Windows machines were limited to use only 2 hours a day and they were almost always occupied, so I had to start learning linux. Years later and I work half of time at my current job as Linux admin.

Why is this constantly happening and nothing comes out of it? I&#x27;ve been reading same headline for past 20 years, I thought even if it was a single town, most of Germany would be running Libre&#x2F;Open Office by now.<p>Also OnlyOffice is a much better candidate, it&#x27;s very usable and OSS as well.

The licensing costs associated with MS products is stupid high. In analyzing the budget for a county, across all departments the line item for MS was ~$322K for just a 3 month span (o365??).<p>It was the top line item for the quarter, beating out health insurance line related line items.

Russia had the same story when about 15 years ago they tried to move their postal service away from Microsoft. They spent a lot of money to teach personal, and I believe it was a disaster at the end. Microsoft just gave them a discount later and they stayed on Microsoft products.<p>B2B is expensive, but so many companies just don’t understand how much money they will have to spend on education and support. Not sure what is the story with LibreOffice, if they are getting it with support or not.

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

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

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

Maybe this will help spurn some necessary and long-overdue problem fixes with LibreOffice, which have gone ignored after being reported seemingly because just not enough people are making a stink about them. I&#x27;ve tried to get Microsoft Office workers to switch but they won&#x27;t because of these things. If only the LibreOffice devs would take these problems and inadequacies more seriously. Please I hope the German workers report problems and make suggestions and stick to them to improve the product so we have a good free or non-profit office suite to compete with the billionaire companies.

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

I feel like I&#x27;m reading this headline every 5 or 10 years

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

And in 2 years they&#x27;ll move back

Libre office excel replacement doesn’t handle vba well and many programs break.<p>Idk how many macros they are utilizing with vba but would find out quickly switching to libre.<p>Then there is Microsoft project which has no libre office clone. Those are just two examples and I’m sure there are more nuanced ones.<p>I get it, Microsoft is slowly getting away from local copies but this is the same news every contract cycle of going to Linux or whatever bullshit they say they will do but IT knows it will turn into a tire fire.

Cool<p>Hopefully they will move 30,000 wonkdows PC&#x27;s to linux once Microsoft imposes the £61 annual extended security updates fee.<p>let me open my terminal and start up python:<p>30000*61 1830000<p>£1,830,000 for the first year extended security updates and will double in consequitive years. A tad greedy! for a few old rotten wonkdows 10 machines.<p>They first collected our data for free, then had the audacity to charge us for it too.<p>Roll on linux<p>Dare I use the word Enshittification?

What, again?

Again?

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

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

I’d quit my job if I was forced to a Linux desktop and non office365 tools. The loss of productivity in this change is going to be massively disruptive.<p>It’s not going to go as smoothly as they think it will. I highly doubt their pilot program sniffed out all the complexities.

This ship sailed 20 years ago.<p>Who is still fighting this ancient crusade?<p>Pay the small fee, use the Microsoft software, live life. There’s <i>much</i> better battles to fight than the office software one.

A question mark before open source productivity tools find mass adoption is their ability to integrate ML&#x2F;AI tools.<p>The current hype notwithstanding, it is likely that the next generation productivity suite (from spreadsheets to document editors etc) will support important algorithmically augmented workflows and non-technical users will expect them to be available. Libreoffice and friends must have a forward looking narrative to remain relevant.<p>Proprietary cloud based solutions are already rolling in this direction but will always face the extra hurdles that sensitive data are accessible by third parties and essential functionality for business continuity relies on external actors.<p>But, so far at least, neither libreoffice (nor the linux desktop for that matter) seem to be particularly keen on moving to that next phase. Even while cutting edge open source machine learning and even competend LLM models are getting available in record time, the integration story is still non-existent.<p>The pendulum of client&#x2F;server balance and thin versus thick clients is always swinging. With mobile and cloud it seems to have reached an extremum. Who knows where it lands next, maybe the &quot;AI PC&quot; that some hardware vendors already pitch will become a thing.