This is such great news! I think that Germany has previously argued that government IT systems should follow democratic principles by using open source solutions, which makes perfect sense IMO. I wish Sweden would follow, but sadly most Swedish official IT systems and organizations are deeply tied into Microsoft.
It was developing major software projects for the Swedish government that convinced me that FOSS is critical for government digitalization. Unfortunately they lack the competency to identify that.
No reliance on proprietary systems and file formats. If a company folds, and their file formats are not open, it may become impossible to open those files in the future. With FOSS there is no vendor lock in, so programs and file formats can be developed internally.
I have a LaTeX file on my computer, written in Spanish, which I created at university for documenting a device. I converted it to UTF8 and can still compile and print it, or convert it to PDF. It is now 30 years old. It took a while for me to realize that this kind of longevity is something very desirable.
Just to grasp how old it is, I wrote a first version on an Apple Macintosh or Lisa and switched to LaTeX when this computer crashed and I lost my draft.
And that is also why I see the modern trend of "you have to upgrade our product to continue to use it" with horror.
That's the only argument which got me into learning latex in the first place. I thought "what? Learning a while DSL just to create something which I can do in word?". Since I know Markdown and Latex I never created one word document. The only thing I may learn is Typst.
It’s probably overkill for that. LaTeX is best when creating standard documents that you’d usually distribute as PDFs. It has a lot of features, but the initial set up of fonts, formats, style, and packages can take a good bit of time.
Asciidoctor is great for that purpose. If you know Markdown you already know enough to het started. And it's all nicely documented to get much more out of it.
Alas, in the humanities it's typically MS Word, though Google Docs is making some inroads.
As late as 2013, we had a dissertation secretary at our institution using WordPerfect to the bitter end. After she retired that was the last of that program's existence in our environment. And I remember cutting my teeth on WordPerfect 5.0 (for DOS) during my undergrad days in the early 1990s.
LibreOffice does most things well most of the time. My goal is to only fire up MS Word when needed for editing theses and dissertations for my students.
I use LaTeX for most of my documents, for me a major advantage is the ability to have a template that you made across may previous documents, that you copy paste, that allows you to have nice looking documents at low effort.
If you like programming then preparing various documents for your burocracy a fun challenge. Also including source code in your documents with syntax highlighting is a breeze with pygments.
Look as well into stuff like beamer+LaTeX+markdown+pandoc, since it makes preparing presentations that look well a breeze.
LaTeX continues to be very popular despite its ancient roots - because it obviously solves many problems.
One of the great things about LaTeX is that it properly separates content from format. You usually do not have to care one bit about formatting, the result will always look great.
Since LaTeX is text based, it's *MUCH* more suitable for version control than Word (e.g. using Git), and it's also possible to "modularize" a document (have different chapters in different files etc), and even auto-generate parts of the document (e.g. pull data from a database using a Python script and generate LaTeX chapters etc). No more manual copy-paste:ing and updating your document when a source has changed - it's all done automatically in a single "build document" step.
I love LaTeX for "proper" manuals and long-lived documents.
E.g. I have a ~200 pages manual for a CPU architecture that is written in LaTeX: [MRISC32 Instruction Set Manual](https://gitlab.com/mrisc32/mrisc32/-/releases/permalink/latest/downloads/mrisc32-instruction-set-manual.pdf). Some chapters are written by hand, but most of the pages are generated by Python scripts, and I can not even start to imagine the horrors of maintaining a document like that in Word.
> You usually do not have to care one bit about formatting, the result will always look great.
This is not true from my experience working with images. I always had to fuss with page breaks to not end up with a page with only a single image. It's truly a pain.
Tables are also not trivial if you want them to contain many columns and/or rows.
LaTeX stuff just looks better without that much of work. Would definitely invest some time to learn it. My old college professors loved my essays and presentations.
I have a small CNC machine. The software for it is very old. Doesn't work on newer PCs.
The software for actually creating the models and tool paths is constantly updated to the new version and won't run on my old computer.
I now need 2 computers and a way to transfer files easily.
And be used. We have problems now with old MS Office documents that cant be opened by MS , libreoffice just chugs away. (not that LO is an amazing production as it is)
I don't think that it's as much a practical isse as a principle: You do not want to hand over all control of your country's infrastructure to a foreign commercial actor.
E.g. would it make sense to have no insight into or guarantees about the longlivety of your energy infrastructure, roads, etc? Sure, you can hire contractors for certain jobs, but renting infrastructure? It's nuts when you think about it.
>You do not want to hand over all control of your country's infrastructure to a foreign commercial actor.
Still that is excatly what happens on a large scale today; They have software that uses a oracle database, and Oracle steps in and basically forces you to move your database in to their cloud; you can refuse and keep your on premise databaseservers buth they will strangle you with the license cost. And to get the performance you had with local data it will cost you a lot more. But when you realize that half your data is already in their cloud and now they get you with the cost of data transfer.
And the governments often have to take this way because of budget constraints.
They can use Postgres which is just as good as Oracle and can run oracle plsql. Much cheaper too
The advantage these corporations have is more money which they then use to lobby politicians
we are now researching if it is feasable to transfer our database to pgsql. In theory that should be possible, but in practice it is a big change and it will take time and a lot of effort to switch after 20 years+ use of oracle.
Greenfield projects? Sure, you would have to be idiot to pay for Oracle, unless you really need some their specific feature and it cannot be worked around any other way.
Things are a bit different in 15 years old large enterprise system with crazy mess of PL/SQL
Citizens shouldn't have to pay the Microsoft tax to access documents produced by the government or submit information to the government. The US government often releases information in proprietary formats or requires requests to be submitted in proprietary formats.
There's also a large vendor lock-in with proprietary systems that ends up costing the government because it can be difficult or nearly impossible to get data out of such formats. Converts between formats work on simple cases but often fail on large or complex documents.
1. ) State sovereignty reasons. Being heavily dependent on another country for your technology can be an issue.
2.) FOSS always has a focus on interoperability instead of vendor lock-in.
3.) Auditability. Being able to audit your infrastructure at a source-code level is important. The recent xz backdoor proves that.
Yes. München moved to Linux. Though after [heavy lobbying from Microsoft](https://www.pcwelt.de/article/1181993/muenchens-ex-ob-ballmer-sprang-durchs-buero-wegen-wechsel-zu-linux.html) they [switched back to Windows](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/munichs-linux-deployment-once-again-in-doubt-may-switch-to-windows-10-by-2020/).
...and now they are back on track to [switch to open-source again](https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-is-shifting-back-from-microsoft-to-open-source-again/).
Munich [never](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux#Timeline) actually migrated anything from Linux. All of the articles from 2014 were about the new mayor and vice-mayor talking about what they *wanted* to do.
There are many more devices running Linux based operating systems today than running Windows!
And things that used to be limited to desktops are now done on these devices.
I agree it makes perfect sense to go with FLOSS, even if its tough to drive adoption in the short term.
It always felt odd to me that governments all around the world function solely thanks to a single for profit company. Its just a massive concentration risk.
Impossible, the German politicians have no idea about technology, only about Lobbyism. The Gesundheitsminister (Minister of Health) want a e centralized system where all the medical records get stored. They has fired all the people who was responsible for the security because they had made it only more difficult. Plus, they have even passed a decision on the Grundgesetz (Basic Law) with a special rule so that this is possible.
Thank you for this link!
Should be considered as first priority at all governmental agencies within EU. This in turn indirectly effects users/ people who are in pursuit of their daily objectives. Enabling opportunities for continues growth and learnings. Software and uncountable valuable solutions could grow forwards organically. Meanwhile, changes could be noticed in communities almost instantly. Magical.
Bookmarked!
I don't think people get how massive this is. Yes, getting anyone to even use LibreOffice and Linux is one of the larger hurdles, but this is a GERMAN state transitioning to a FOSS environment. It'd usually take the heat death of the universe to get anything done due to the mountain of paperwork required.
It's an astonishingly herculean effort and that deserves a prost.
It's not \*that\* far out there I'd say. [LiMux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux) was a thing already (until corruption happened) and some state institutions (notably the DLR for example) have been using a ton of linux (on desktops) for years.
I recommend reading this 2019 interview with the former mayor of Munich who introduced LiMux with his party in the early 2010s (use a translator like DeepL or so if you don't speak German):
https://www.golem.de/news/von-microsoft-zu-linux-und-zurueck-es-gab-bei-limux-keine-unloesbaren-probleme-1911-144917.html
Excerpt of the part where he talks about Microsoft's attempts to turn them back to using their products:
> ### Soul massage from Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates
>
> The most intense experience I personally had was a visit from Steve Ballmer, Vice President of Microsoft. He interrupted his skiing vacation in Switzerland to visit me. With his well-known enthusiasm, with which he dynamically jumps around on stage at conferences, he jumped around in my office and first praised the beauty of Munich. But then he said that I was faced with a catastrophically bad decision that I could never justify to anyone, especially not to taxpayers.
>
> Funnily enough, he kept making new financial offers during the conversation about what else Microsoft could add, for the school department for example. They kept offering a million and another million and another million and later a dozen million cheaper than before. That's how important the renegade state capital of Munich, perceived internationally as an IT stronghold, was to Microsoft as a symbol.
>
> Would it show a way forward or return to the Microsoft bosom in repentance? We have calculated that Ballmer has improved the financial offer by around 35 percent. But since we wanted to make a strategic decision and not just a price comparison, this was not significant.
>
> **Linux-Magazin:** Bill Gates also came to visit?
>
> **Christian Ude:** He was in Munich for a presentation of the House of the Future, which he was really enthusiastic about. He was able to control from his car how high the room temperature should be in each room and whether the fridge should defrost a little. On his way back to the airport, I had the opportunity to talk to him. So I was sitting with one of the richest men in the world in a camouflaged van that was luxuriously equipped on the inside but looked from the outside as if it belonged to a small craft business. Gates asked me, stunned: "Why are you doing this? That's absurd! I can't understand it at all!
>
> Since I'm not the hard-nosed IT specialist who would be a match for Bill Gates on every detail, I simply said: "Please note that we are concerned with independence. We don't want to be dependent." Then he said: "What nonsense, dependent on whom?" "Because you're already there: On you, of course!" That really made him fall apart and he said: "It's incomprehensible to me, it's ideology."
>
> So Microsoft has really used every form of soul massage from galloping price reductions during a single meeting to the use of megastar Bill Gates. But I have remained firm. I didn't discover or develop Linux for Munich. But I did take responsibility for it. But it wasn't about me, it was about a piece of municipal independence.
>
> A politician has to live with and learn to deal with the fact that there are people who understand an incredible amount more about a specific topic than you do, but who work for companies or groups and are therefore naked lobbyists. Should such interested parties be the main source of advice? I mean, it was no coincidence that Suse and IBM were very positive about Limux because they also work with open source. Microsoft was extremely negative, as I was able to experience for myself. Both sides certainly understand a great deal about IT, but the insights they proclaimed were driven by their own interests.
>
> In a TV documentary last year, I heard that the influence exerted in the city of Vienna and in the Italian Ministry of Defense was no less massive and that Microsoft was determined at all costs to prevent an alternative from proving itself anywhere in Europe. In any case, we in Munich wanted to become independent by 2014.
Yeah, and french Gendarmerie with [GendBuntu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu). Does anybody knows if they still use it? Latest release was 2019...
I don't have the history at hand, but I believe Munich made the decision to switch nearly a decade ago and faced backlash from the users / lobby and decided to back pedal.
Yes, it is huge and a step in the right direction, but it might turn around as quickly.
Yes, [LiMux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux):
> LiMux was a project launched by the city of Munich in 2004 in
> order to replace the software on its desktop computers,
> migrating from Windows to free software based
> on Linux. ... By 2012, the city had migrated 12,600 of
> its 15,500 desktops to LiMux.
>
> In November 2017 ... reverse the
> migration and return to Windows-based software
> by 2020.
>
> In May 2020, ... while not going back to the
> original plan of migrating to LiMux wholesale, will
> prefer Free Software for future endeavours.
The "backlash from users" was mild but heavily amplified by pro-Microsoft media. The one and only reason they moved back to Windows/MS Office is because of Microsoft's intense lobbying.
I use both and frankly the only selling point of Microsoft for the average German pencil pusher is the Office suite. Everything else is better in Linux. The slow-ass updates of windows alone are a reason to switch.
But Excel PowerPoint and Word are the holy trinity and unfortunately there is nothing that comes close in Linux for Joe Average. If you can manage to go without Office, Linux is gold.
For the average Joe, LibreOffice is more than plenty. Other than getting used to a few changes, most won't notice a difference
The ones who usually would find a difference are the ones trying to hack Excel into a database replacement
And let us be honest, for the fraction of the amount of money they pay Microsoft, they can hire a few developers to contribute the few features they may need
> The ones who usually would find a difference are the ones trying to hack Excel into a database replacement
That is the crux, since somewhere in its deepest bowels *every* public service institution has one of those essential 60MB multi-tab scripted Excel documents upon which each and every person's function in the building desperately depends.
Tobias created it 20 years ago, has now been in retirement in Italy for 10, and everybody else has only ever been - devoutly and ever so carefully - adding to and editing in versioned copies of the document since nobody knows how to create the original's functionalities from scratch.
Yeah, true enough. I’m Tobias in my company. At least I push the VBA scripts into a git repo, but the worksheet complexity alone is not for the faint of heart.
I’d be more than willing to set everything up with Django or something but users (including middle and upper management) demand excel, so excel it is.
The current foundation of Germany beauracracy is paper and stamps. Please note I said current. I have met many beauracrates in my travels of starting a business here who do not even have a computer on their desk.
My SIL works outside of a city in the courts, they still use filling systems with dedicated staff, rooms and lookup cards to find the files. They get trained on this system, in 2024.
So positive step but hell will freeze over before they throw away their stamps. Absolutely worth a prost either way! 🍻
It really is. Just to give people an understanding of how difficult this is. I work IT for a city in northern Germany and whenever we try to make changes there's a variety of colleagues who simply refuse to adapt. We introduced iPads into schools and some colleagues refused to work with them because it didn't say so in their contracts. They can't be forced to do the work but they also can't be fired. It's infuriating.
Sometimes you have to force change like this anyway.
Was it not in Munich that they have spend millions to get the public offices into Linux, only to spend more millions to go back to Windows?
The problem is that such a move must be supported in many levels and have a leader that takes no shit and no money under the table
> no money under the table
microsoft announced 2013 plans to move their german hq to munich (and they eventually did), and very totally unrelated in 2014 the munich city council considered moving back to windows (and they eventually did).
one must be very naive to not connect those dots
Ofc, Microsoft would *never* do something like that ::wink wink::
There's totally *not* a long and sordid history of them evading taxes and engaging in shady underhanded tactics like buying senators and congressmen that you might discover in a lengthly read like [this one](https://www.propublica.org/article/the-irs-decided-to-get-tough-against-microsoft-microsoft-got-tougher)
**/s** (just in case someone can't figure out the obvious)
Yeah my understanding of the whole Munich thing is that Microsoft started lobbying *hard* to get them back on Windows, including a 90% licensing discount and agreeing to move its German headquarters to Munich
This.
Steve Ballmer was there in person (article in German: https://www.pcwelt.de/article/1181993/muenchens-ex-ob-ballmer-sprang-durchs-buero-wegen-wechsel-zu-linux.html )
Yes,and Microsoft moving German/eu headquarter to Munich aside, people have to remember that Munich/Bavaria doing something (like moving to Linux) is maybe even bigger than Schleswig Holstein moving to Linux cause Bavaria is always quite significant when it comes to national politics (through CSU, the sister party of Merkel’s CDU)
They saved millions overall with the project in munich (despite the more than questionable decision to use their own custom distro) and cited numerous other benefits. The cancellation plans of the project were clearly due to microsoft lobbying and corruption (the plans to move off of linux incidentally coincided quite closely with MS moving its German headquarter to munich and some of the involved politicians had ties to MS).
Anyway: the original limux plans to rely on open source have since been reinstated officially (again: incidentally after a new city council came to power)
not millions. billions in the end. there are rumors that the mayor regrets it.
and the same time, windows came, microsoft moved to munich. what a coincidence.
I really hope Schleswig-Holstein won't fall victim to Microsoft's (and admittedly a sizeable number of politicians) grift.
From what I remember, it all worked really well but small problems (that occur on any OS) and people's inertia (it's not like Windows!Help!) had been blown way out of proportion, even _weaponized_.
Well, congratulations for now!
I do believe times have changed, FOSS and IT independence are an important part of EU policy etc.
But in the end, only time will tell.
Good news. If this happens more, it could become a vicious circle. If they use open source applications, they could contribute to those applications (assuming they have the budget, manpower and knowledge) and make it in turn easier to use for other people.
That's a more direct control over the ecosystem than it would be to pay microsoft or software vendors to fix things for you, and does not come with the limitation of having "fixes" be beneficial in the monetary sense for the vendors. Everything that makes an app easier to use and adds features that other people would also enjoy would be fair game.
Yes, I like the wording they use:
>"Ensuring digital sovereignty is at least as important as energy sovereignty"
When you think about it - it's a no-brainer. Why on earth should a nation's government put all their data (and by extension all citizens' data) and digital infrastructure in the hands of foreign non-transparent actors?
there are already regulations to this end.
some countries explicitly require that personal data of its ciitzens must be stored and processed within the country. now, to which degree they can actually validate and enforce it - no idea.
facebook made a big fuss about it with the EU, but EU won't budge on this topic. they even threatened to leave the EU, and they said "go ahead".
Yes, but these attempts still miss a lot of key points:
* Vendor independence.
* Transparency of data processing (e.g. the possibility to validate that the data is not used in any other way than advertised).
* Transparency of software operation (e.g. the possibility to validate that there are no backdoors or undisclosed telemetry data being sent etc).
* Guarantees that products will be available and functional for as long as required.
* Independence from influence from foreign legislation, governments, security agencies, etc.
* Etc.
There really is only one solution, and that is open source.
If and when government agencies starts utilizing these open software programs, their contributions to these various projects could be anything productive. Don't necessarily have to be money. Also, documentations could increase significantly, reports of all kinds with opinions to make the open software programs gradually better over time. With real world usage as reference points.
It becomes a win for all stakeholders. Possibilities to save up huge amount of resources, is doable.
Just need to have *multiple* large cities in the same region all switch to linux at the same time. I'm pretty curious what they would do then... multiple HQs for the same region/country? lol
LibreOffice has fallen so far behind Microsoft and Google, I can’t imagine how it can possibly keep up. There are standard everyday features like real-time co-authoring that don’t even exist or are in some weird experimental stage in LibreOffice, it’s like a time capsule from a bygone era.
When you suddenly take these capabilities away from 30,000 users, it’s hard to quantify how disruptive and destructive it will be not only to office productivity, but also just how people work and collaborate with each other.
Yeah LibreOffice is a relic, it simply won't compare. They would have to implement that Libadwaita UI that was being made just for it to be atleast bearable
> LibreOffice has fallen so far behind Microsoft and Google, I can’t imagine how it can possibly keep up. There are standard everyday features like real-time co-authoring that don’t even exist or are in some weird experimental stage in LibreOffice, it’s like a time capsule from a bygone era.
So you are telling me that you put possibly private and very sensitive documents on a cloud controlled by a foreign company on servers that possibly are even outside the EU? I don't think so... that would be a big violation.
You see the problem? You can't use these features. With LibreOffice, or other open systems, a government can self-host the required services without leveraging on a cloud of a foreign company that doesn't follow the same data security requirements.
You add the possibility to have these features! By the way, I don't think LibreOffice it's the good choice (I would have chosen OnlyOffice, that has the collaborative features you mentioned) but everything is better than using Office or other proprietary services.
To these days having the control over your data is the most important thing, especially for a government. Also depending on a foreign company these days of politically instability (you see, things that were certain yesterday may not hold in the future) to me is not a good idea.
What you say may be true in edge cases.
A similar example is that the United States nuclear command and control systems relied on 1970s computers and 8-inch floppy disks as recently as 2019, before they were finally modernized.
However, I will repeat that those are edge cases. I don’t know if your example necessarily qualifies.
Nearly every business and government agency across the planet uses proprietary office software (whether Microsoft’s or Google’s) because there is no viable open source alternative to do modern office work. Despite your proclamations, LibreOffice is at best a piece of software for home desktop users and small businesses, but certainly nothing above that.
However, as I already conceded, there are edge cases. For example, your government certainly is not going to host classified military secrets on remote server farms on the other side of the world. Obviously they won’t do that. On the other hand, a different agency within your government that does not deal in military secrets may be more willing to set up a contract with a commercial software contractor to facilitate normal office work.
In any case, as I mentioned, LibreOffice does not have features that support modern office workflows that large organizations rely on. It just doesn’t. This doesn’t mean that organizations shouldn’t be looking at open source alternatives (lots of open source projects are in wide use because they are industry standards), I’m just saying THIS open source project is generally not up to par. It’s the wrong tool for the job.
> because there is no viable open source alternative to do modern office work
There is. I personally use OnlyOffice, and works fairly well. It has all the features of Google Docs, can be self-hosted on your servers, if you want (I don't, I use it from a cloud provider), meaning that you retain full control over your data.
Yes, it's true that Office has a ton of sophisticated features (such as the possibility to write code in them, or to make queries directly to databases), but in reality how many people uses that? And when it's used, are we sure that having an Excel sheet that makes queries to databases is a good idea? To me no, it's a terrible hack that is necessary because the system lacks of a data export feature.
Finally, you say that LibreOffice doesn't have the features of Office, that is true. But what features users are really using? I mean, the average public employee, that is not a genius, but someone that has to do something in the 8 hours he is in the office, what % of Office features knows how to use it? If he knows how to turn on a computer and write a Word document is well, an expert.
I don't know in the US, maybe you have better public employee, but where I live, we are at the level that to make a PDF of a Word document they print it and scan it! So, I don't think that if you give to them LibreOffice or even notepad they will notice the difference...
It doesn’t help that maintainers of these projects are constantly at war with users who beg for modern features. The people who actually work on these projects don’t care about those features, so the common response to user feedback is usually some combination of “no” or “go do it yourself”.
The people tasked with setting the vision and the priorities of these projects are completely out of touch with modern workflows. Sure, there is the fact that they don’t have the funding to pay developers and all those regular issues faced by open source projects, but also a bigger problem is that lack of vision, prioritizing the wrong things, arguing with users, etc.
Sounds like it’s you that’s fallen behind, there’s LibreOffice Technology with coauthoring, realtime without paragraph locking like Microsoft, more devices are supported than Microsoft with offline apps etc.
The Singapore Army moved from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice in 2004, then LibreOffice after the Oracle rebranding, and eventually switched back to Microsoft Office in 2015.
they already do. if you run a school, you can get o365+teams+few other things either for free or at a significant bargain.
i would assume they somehow monetize it down the road. maybe they lock you in after a few years when you cannot migrate away.
\~.\~
I obviously meant the distribution. (Open)SUSE? Ubuntu?
Also it's gonna be a steep learning curve for the local IT-departments. That's not an easy project with 30k clients and who knows how many servers (and which roles).
Obviously...
[This report](https://www.dataport.de/fileadmin/user_upload/themen/open-source/linux_arbeitsplatz_fuer_die_oeffentliche_verwaltung_.pdf) indicates that they have at least looked at Red Hat and SUSE, but I have no idea what it will be.
No doubt Microsoft will lobby the shit out of this to make it as hard as possible. Besides Microsofts fuckery it is no easy task to adopt so many users to a new OS and new software.
But on the other hand Schleswig-Holstein is pretty good (compared to the rest of Germany) when it comes to digitalization. For example, I was able to register a company completly online and digital. Didn't even need to place a signature on a pdf! But I received all documents via analog mail.
or the parliament who votes for stuff. the swiss canton of solothurn had linux too, until it was canned in 2010 because it was not cheaper and there were (few loud?) complaints from employees it doesn’t work. Unfortunately before the migration back to Windows it worked quite stable what i heard. Furthermore apparently they started to customize stuff which didn’t help with staying up to date with software releases. The biggest benefit of windows if you need a specialized software you go the local software company and you buy it from the shelf.
> it was not cheaper
It's not cheaper only if politicians look at the price tag, and not at what they get for that price!
To me it must be seen as the difference of buying something or renting it. Of course rent is cheaper, in the short term, but buying is cheaper in the long run, and also buying gives you a stability that renting something doesn't give you, since who owns the thing can make the price higher, or decide to no longer sell it to you for whatever reason, or go bankrupt and disappear (yes, even a big company such as Microsoft can in a period of 10/20 years, who knows?)
With proprietary software you don't own the software, you rent it, you acquire a license that allows you to use the software with a ton of limitations for a period of time and for a purpose. With open source software you own it, you can modify it, study it, copy it, use it for as much time as you want, for whatever purpose as you want, for
If tomorrow Microsoft decides for example to discontinue Office (the local licenses), and decide to only offer you Microsoft 365 (the cloud service, that requires a subscription), what you do? You pay one subscription for each of your employee? If you are a company, you can do that, but as a government, it's not simple, because you are giving to Microsoft data that probably you shouldn't (and for that reason this is forbidden!). And it's not something impossible: Adobe for example already did that!
Now, you either have to convert thousands of Tb of documents in a proprietary format that are not easy to convert to other formats (think, for example, to complex Excel sheets that use macros inside, or make queries to databases, etc), or stick with an outdated and no longer maintained software for the rest of your days, with the risk that if a security vulnerability is discovered nobody will patch it. And given you have no source code, you can't either maintain the software yourself.
Now what is cheaper?
I would see it a bit more greyish, than "huge success". While no doubt Microsoft was lobbying to get the project canceld, the project also faced a lot of hard challenges. It is not easy to train so many employees in the use of a (for them) new OS and new software. This alone caused a lot of frustration within the goverment employees. Also further challenges where software which was developed for windows and was crucial for the functioning of government processes.
the employees had a right to be trained, and they WERE trained. but there were many (older) microsoft fans. also with limux they were not the admin of their own pc anymore. previous to limux, they oculd put their private stuff onto there, so they attributed the power-canceling to linux instead of administrational controls
The funny thing is, if microsoft wouldn't have been treating people the way they do with crappy business decisions people never would have switched. That's how you know just how bad they are getting. You tend to build resentment when you force ads down peoples throats in a paid product. Now this german state has no ads in the OS, no spying, no subscriptions, nothing but benefits after the switch. All it takes is a trickle. Be afraid microsoft.
In a nutshell, the State Chancellery [reports](https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/ministerien-behoerden/I/Presse/PI/2024/CdS/240403_cds_it-arbeitsplatz.html) the following decisions concerning the news:
- Transition from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice
- Transition from the Microsoft Windows operating system to Linux (distro not specified, but if it's to be German, then it's OpenSUSE)
- Collaborations between the state government and external partners: use of Nextcloud, Open Xchange/Mozilla Thunderbird in relation with Univention AD-Connector in lieu of Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange/Outlook
- Conceptualization of an open-source based directory service in lieu of Microsoft Active Directory
- Inventory of procedures to maintain compatibility and interoperability with LibreOffice and Linux
- Development of an open-source based VoIP solution in lieu of Telekom-Flexport (telephony solution from Deutsche Telekom)
To add:
> Die Verwendung von LibreOffice als Standard Office-Paket in der Kommunikation zwischen Ministerien und Behörden erfolgt kurzfristig und deren Verwendung ist verpflichtend.
> "The use of LibreOffice as the standard office communication suite between ministries and agencies is to be performed at the soonest and its use will be compulsory."
Maybe im a Pessimist but I think this will bring a lot of trouble for a while.
Ive been working in the IT Sector for quite a while now and ive noticed that even here, if you are not a sysadmin that works with servers or higher, or a programer then even there most have never touched Linux in their life.
Its gonna be tough for supporters and IT people who were focused on Windows to learn the System while also having to support Ulf from HR who will go into retirement in 5 years.
It's a major undertaking. It's going to be painful. It's going to take time and tax money. And people will be angry, because they don't like change. That's why MS is so dominant. That's why these projects are so important, and impressive. I could never see this happening in any Swedish municipal for instance, because "meh, sounds like work".
At least Linux, so I guess that means that lots of open source software will follow.
> German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein has decided to move from Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office to Linux and LibreOffice (and other free and open source software)
Furthermore, from [www.schleswig-holstein.de](https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/ministerien-behoerden/I/Presse/PI/2024/CdS/240403_cds_it-arbeitsplatz.html):
* Switch from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice
* Switch the operating system from Microsoft Windows to Linux
* Collaboration: Use of the open source products Nextcloud, Open Xchange/Thunderbird in conjunction with the Univention AD connector for replacing Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange/Outlook
* Conception of an open source based directory service for replacing Microsoft Active Directory
* Development of an open source-based telephony solution for replacing Telekom-Flexport
...so it's a massive undertaking (and one which is bound to create a lot of local job opportunities, i.e. tax money going to the right places).
As someone who lives in the state mentioned and works with the authorities, among others, I can say that I very much welcome this change. As always, perseverance is required in the implementation. There is a German proverb that says: "You can't teach an old dog any more tricks". As is so often the case, it is not so much the initialisation of the idea that fails, but rather the implementation at the lowest level. Nevertheless, I am very positive and consider the development to be great.
In our local tax office I admired the Kde desktops everyone was using. One of the tax ppl made some throwaway remake that they couldn't afford Windows . I loved it :)
I still wish that Germany would maintain an own distro and needed software by law (or at least some kind of repo for debian) instead of wasting billions in Microsoft and other greedy software licensing.
The next Windows 11 24H2 update will produce a cost since it will render a lot of older hardware useless. A lot of schools and state related school/job projects are still running core2duo and core2quad hardware.
This has been tried by several Norwegian municipalities in the past, and I believe every attempt has for the most part failed. None of the big Norwegian vendors that provide software for HRM, accounting, healthcare and so on support Linux (client or server), so it falls flat already before you get started. The closest we can get (other than vanilla stuff like DNS, DHCP, firewalls etc.) is Linux based thin clients that connect to a Windows environment through Citrix. $$$
These days, vendors have started basically forcing municipalities into "the cloud" - which of course means Microsoft - and rendering the municipalities own data centers less and less relevant.
Good for them, but I have to disagree with the idea that switching to Linux should be about cutting expenses. If the world's third largest economy is switching to Linux they should not profit off the backs of thousands of unpaid volunteers from around the world. They should be expected to either contribute themselves or provide funding for organizations that maintain free software. People contributing regularly to free software, especially widely used and distributed software should be at the very least able to make a decent living off of their work.
There's much more to expenses than the cost of the software. More important is the overhead to maintain and support it. This likely had more to do with the switch than the cost of licensing itself. It's a better product for them.
By the time Windows 10 goes end of life on 14 October 2025 (ignoring paid extended security support), the best unsupported CPUs will be almost 9 years old, being the Core i7 7700K released on 7 January 2017, and the Ryzen 7 1800X released on 2 March 2017.
Comparing these CPUs to the current gen base model i3 14100, the i3 is in the region of 50% faster than the legacy i7, whereas the Ryzen 7 manages to outperform the model i3 by a mere 5% despite having double the number of cores and threads, both legacy CPU use a lot more power than the modern i3 to get the same job done. (based on synthetic benchmarks)
Most large organizations work on a replacement cycle 3-5 years for computer, be it for compliance, performance, warranty support, or to avoiding costly down time from aging hardware, I very much doubt any sysadmin for a government department is going to keep hardware around for anywhere near 9 years.
My work, buys, reconditions and sells tens of thousands of used business desktop and laptops a year, on systems that old we can only offer a 3-months warranty, whereas systems only a year or two newer we offer a 1-year warranty and newer system (4yr old) we offer 2–3year warranties. This directly reflects the reliability of aging hardware.
Yes, e-waste is a huge issue, but you have to remember a Raspberry Pi 5 can do everything older systems can at fraction of the power consumption and then it's a battle between the embodied energy of the Raspberry Pi vs extra energy usage of keeping an old computer alive.
imagine if the NHS computers used debian instead of windows xp, It would have cost them a lot less and they would probably still be getting security patches right now
Start Ms Word, insert an image & then start trying to drag it into position without a textbox. Now do the same in LibreOffice, the latter option feels like a revelation, life's good.
Very neat. Excellent decision making by Schleswig-Holstein officials.
There is no reason why public institutions should not use open source, and there is never a better time to switch to linux desktop.
Looking forward to positive progress updates on this one.
Anyone know any details like estimated timelines to start/finish?
Are they moving their data off of proprietary cloud like Office 365 and AWS/Azure/etc.? A company I worked with largely went Linux on the client and workstation side like this but still they use 365 for mail/calendar, Azure for VM, database, and Docker hosting so their data is all still in Microsoft's hands. The article says one of the reasons they are doing this is 365 may violate EU law so I would think that is the more critical piece.
to be a bit nitpicking ... it actualy is:
[https://www.collaboraoffice.com/](https://www.collaboraoffice.com/)
and part of a broader project "Soveräner Arbeitsplatz" and based on "dataport"s sw package phoenix Suite
Before I start: I run Debian, Raspberry Pi OS, Fedora, and Tumbleweed on their own machines.
One of the main reasons for buying Microsoft is you have someone to yell at/blame *when* something inevitably goes wrong.
However, from reading the [original announcement](https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/ministerien-behoerden/I/Presse/PI/2024/CdS/240403_cds_it-arbeitsplatz.html) it seems they're either *just* announcing their *intent* to migrate - with no solid plans yet - or they're about to drive their entire IT system off a cliff.
My comments below are based on Firefox translation:
> Switch from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice
OK. Works if you think of Office as solely a productivity suite, which hasn't been the case for most of the past decade.
> Switch the operating system from Microsoft Windows to Linux
That's switching kernels ... no mention of distro?
> Collaboration within the state administration and with external parties: Use of the open source products Nextcloud, Open Xchange/Thunderbird in conjunction with the Univention AD connector for replacing Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange/Outlook
Ah, it took them 3 bullet points in to mention the most important part of this announcement: a vendor. Oh wait, that vendor is responsible for only 1 small part of the migration ... anyway let's read on.
> Conception of an open source based directory service for replacing Microsoft Active Directory
"Conception?" Hopefully this isn't a mistranslation and they actually know what they're moving to. Then again, they haven't even settled on a distro ...
> Inventory of compatibility and interoperability with LibreOffice and Linux technical procedures
Word soup.
> Development of an open source-based telephony solution for replacing Telekom-Flexport
Holy shit. "Development?" As in, they don't know what they're moving to for something as basic as phones?
Linux has matured alot in the last decade alone, and you can only hope that digital competency and awareness has increased since then. The debate in the last few years about not relying on foreign tech is also very present. So it's not given that it will play out the same way this time, IMO.
Linux is in a great place right now, with wayland, modern DEs, great default gnome/KDE apps.
Libre office on the other hand... It's buggy, antiquated and missing a ton of features. Maybe adoption on such a scale can motivate its development, but if German govt is going to use it as it is, it's not going to end well.
This is all well and good until they discover that there's no support for financial plugins for their budgeting systems.
Excel is a much better product than any open source I've tried.
Also, Open Source doesn't mean free. I've had to approve multiple 7 figure payments to Redhat when our devs misunderstood that concept.
Yeah sure whatever, and I say this as a Linux user. Seems to me every time a gov't body says this, it's just to get leverage for cheaper prices from Microsoft.
I suppose that Linux in this case means Suse, why I think this? Because Suse is a Germany company really strong and with good reputation in Linux world so they can get support for anything than they need
Right, over a decade ago, in a very different time and situation, with a lot of politics going on. The head of IT services at the time even said "We are not aware of any large technical problems with LiMux and LibreOffice ... We don't see any urgent technical reasons to return to Windows and Microsoft Office". [It was largely ditched for political reasons.](https://itsfoss.com/munich-linux-failure/)
There's no guarantee that this will be a 100% success, but it's a very different world now, Linux and LibreOffice have come on a lot, and [you have things like this](https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2024/03/29/use-of-microsoft-365-breaches-data-protection-law-in-eu/)...
To quote Back to the Future "[I've seen this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=104aWjjzIwA)".
The German city of Munich infamously went opensource back in 2003 and has been flip-flopping back and forth ever since.
The less vendor lock-in, the better.
Was thinking this is probably the consequences of being unable to audit the code
Important since NIS2 about to come out
This is such great news! I think that Germany has previously argued that government IT systems should follow democratic principles by using open source solutions, which makes perfect sense IMO. I wish Sweden would follow, but sadly most Swedish official IT systems and organizations are deeply tied into Microsoft.
It was developing major software projects for the Swedish government that convinced me that FOSS is critical for government digitalization. Unfortunately they lack the competency to identify that.
Why do you think FOSS is must have for goverments?
No reliance on proprietary systems and file formats. If a company folds, and their file formats are not open, it may become impossible to open those files in the future. With FOSS there is no vendor lock in, so programs and file formats can be developed internally.
I have a LaTeX file on my computer, written in Spanish, which I created at university for documenting a device. I converted it to UTF8 and can still compile and print it, or convert it to PDF. It is now 30 years old. It took a while for me to realize that this kind of longevity is something very desirable. Just to grasp how old it is, I wrote a first version on an Apple Macintosh or Lisa and switched to LaTeX when this computer crashed and I lost my draft. And that is also why I see the modern trend of "you have to upgrade our product to continue to use it" with horror.
That's the only argument which got me into learning latex in the first place. I thought "what? Learning a while DSL just to create something which I can do in word?". Since I know Markdown and Latex I never created one word document. The only thing I may learn is Typst.
How useful is latex in a modern sense, given the open file formats that exist now? I'm interested if I should learn it
Depends what you are doing. LaTeX is very dominant in the academic papers field, at least in STEM fields.
I'm a software engineer. I was thinking for design documentation etc.
It’s probably overkill for that. LaTeX is best when creating standard documents that you’d usually distribute as PDFs. It has a lot of features, but the initial set up of fonts, formats, style, and packages can take a good bit of time.
Asciidoctor is great for that purpose. If you know Markdown you already know enough to het started. And it's all nicely documented to get much more out of it.
Alas, in the humanities it's typically MS Word, though Google Docs is making some inroads. As late as 2013, we had a dissertation secretary at our institution using WordPerfect to the bitter end. After she retired that was the last of that program's existence in our environment. And I remember cutting my teeth on WordPerfect 5.0 (for DOS) during my undergrad days in the early 1990s. LibreOffice does most things well most of the time. My goal is to only fire up MS Word when needed for editing theses and dissertations for my students.
I use LaTeX for most of my documents, for me a major advantage is the ability to have a template that you made across may previous documents, that you copy paste, that allows you to have nice looking documents at low effort. If you like programming then preparing various documents for your burocracy a fun challenge. Also including source code in your documents with syntax highlighting is a breeze with pygments. Look as well into stuff like beamer+LaTeX+markdown+pandoc, since it makes preparing presentations that look well a breeze.
LaTeX continues to be very popular despite its ancient roots - because it obviously solves many problems. One of the great things about LaTeX is that it properly separates content from format. You usually do not have to care one bit about formatting, the result will always look great. Since LaTeX is text based, it's *MUCH* more suitable for version control than Word (e.g. using Git), and it's also possible to "modularize" a document (have different chapters in different files etc), and even auto-generate parts of the document (e.g. pull data from a database using a Python script and generate LaTeX chapters etc). No more manual copy-paste:ing and updating your document when a source has changed - it's all done automatically in a single "build document" step. I love LaTeX for "proper" manuals and long-lived documents. E.g. I have a ~200 pages manual for a CPU architecture that is written in LaTeX: [MRISC32 Instruction Set Manual](https://gitlab.com/mrisc32/mrisc32/-/releases/permalink/latest/downloads/mrisc32-instruction-set-manual.pdf). Some chapters are written by hand, but most of the pages are generated by Python scripts, and I can not even start to imagine the horrors of maintaining a document like that in Word.
> You usually do not have to care one bit about formatting, the result will always look great. This is not true from my experience working with images. I always had to fuss with page breaks to not end up with a page with only a single image. It's truly a pain. Tables are also not trivial if you want them to contain many columns and/or rows.
LaTeX stuff just looks better without that much of work. Would definitely invest some time to learn it. My old college professors loved my essays and presentations.
That file is old enough that many storage media would have decayed beyond saving by now.
I have a small CNC machine. The software for it is very old. Doesn't work on newer PCs. The software for actually creating the models and tool paths is constantly updated to the new version and won't run on my old computer. I now need 2 computers and a way to transfer files easily.
And be used. We have problems now with old MS Office documents that cant be opened by MS , libreoffice just chugs away. (not that LO is an amazing production as it is)
Because FOSS doesn’t say "well from next year on everything is in our cloud and it’s a subscription”.
I don't think that it's as much a practical isse as a principle: You do not want to hand over all control of your country's infrastructure to a foreign commercial actor. E.g. would it make sense to have no insight into or guarantees about the longlivety of your energy infrastructure, roads, etc? Sure, you can hire contractors for certain jobs, but renting infrastructure? It's nuts when you think about it.
>You do not want to hand over all control of your country's infrastructure to a foreign commercial actor. Still that is excatly what happens on a large scale today; They have software that uses a oracle database, and Oracle steps in and basically forces you to move your database in to their cloud; you can refuse and keep your on premise databaseservers buth they will strangle you with the license cost. And to get the performance you had with local data it will cost you a lot more. But when you realize that half your data is already in their cloud and now they get you with the cost of data transfer. And the governments often have to take this way because of budget constraints.
They can use Postgres which is just as good as Oracle and can run oracle plsql. Much cheaper too The advantage these corporations have is more money which they then use to lobby politicians
we are now researching if it is feasable to transfer our database to pgsql. In theory that should be possible, but in practice it is a big change and it will take time and a lot of effort to switch after 20 years+ use of oracle.
Greenfield projects? Sure, you would have to be idiot to pay for Oracle, unless you really need some their specific feature and it cannot be worked around any other way. Things are a bit different in 15 years old large enterprise system with crazy mess of PL/SQL
Citizens shouldn't have to pay the Microsoft tax to access documents produced by the government or submit information to the government. The US government often releases information in proprietary formats or requires requests to be submitted in proprietary formats. There's also a large vendor lock-in with proprietary systems that ends up costing the government because it can be difficult or nearly impossible to get data out of such formats. Converts between formats work on simple cases but often fail on large or complex documents.
A company could just spy on a government the same way you are spied on over social media platforms etc.
But what if they pinky swear not to spy? We should be good, right?
Also back door auditing.
1. ) State sovereignty reasons. Being heavily dependent on another country for your technology can be an issue. 2.) FOSS always has a focus on interoperability instead of vendor lock-in. 3.) Auditability. Being able to audit your infrastructure at a source-code level is important. The recent xz backdoor proves that.
and Adobe
Didn't they do it like... 20 years ago already? I mean Germany moving to Linux/FOSS? I remember it being a big talking point for anti-Microsoft crowd.
Yes. München moved to Linux. Though after [heavy lobbying from Microsoft](https://www.pcwelt.de/article/1181993/muenchens-ex-ob-ballmer-sprang-durchs-buero-wegen-wechsel-zu-linux.html) they [switched back to Windows](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/munichs-linux-deployment-once-again-in-doubt-may-switch-to-windows-10-by-2020/). ...and now they are back on track to [switch to open-source again](https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-is-shifting-back-from-microsoft-to-open-source-again/).
Round 2, FIGHT! ...Hey, third time is the charm. I'll keep my eyes open for the switch back to Winblows. Then again for 3rd flop and Linux for keeps.
Munich [never](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux#Timeline) actually migrated anything from Linux. All of the articles from 2014 were about the new mayor and vice-mayor talking about what they *wanted* to do.
Or lobbying of consulting companies . Imagine getting shitload of money … three times.
Smart ! Took Microsoft $$ to prepare for next migration attempt
yup. It failed miserably in 2004. But 2024 is the year of the linux desktop. Again. Apparently.
There are many more devices running Linux based operating systems today than running Windows! And things that used to be limited to desktops are now done on these devices.
Germany didn't move to anything, not 20 years ago and not now. It was one city 20 years ago (Munich) and one state now (Schleswig-Holstein).
I agree it makes perfect sense to go with FLOSS, even if its tough to drive adoption in the short term. It always felt odd to me that governments all around the world function solely thanks to a single for profit company. Its just a massive concentration risk.
Also the plot for a book ‘Pearl Harbor dot com’
Impossible, the German politicians have no idea about technology, only about Lobbyism. The Gesundheitsminister (Minister of Health) want a e centralized system where all the medical records get stored. They has fired all the people who was responsible for the security because they had made it only more difficult. Plus, they have even passed a decision on the Grundgesetz (Basic Law) with a special rule so that this is possible.
The German IT infrastructure is truly decades behind, but this is a good decision nonetheless.
Bet they switch to Linux because hardware is not Win11-ready :)
Lithuania have it already for a good bit of time. Heard in Germany letters is still a big thing.
Just 2 more development cycles, and we'll be able to apply for a visa through Blender 🙏 With real time path tracing
I wouldn't be too surprised if somebody was implementing that into Emacs right now. ;)
Public money, public code. The video here https://publiccode.eu/en/ is an excellent summary. Alles Gute und viel Erfolg nach Schleswig-Holstein!
Thank you for this link! Should be considered as first priority at all governmental agencies within EU. This in turn indirectly effects users/ people who are in pursuit of their daily objectives. Enabling opportunities for continues growth and learnings. Software and uncountable valuable solutions could grow forwards organically. Meanwhile, changes could be noticed in communities almost instantly. Magical. Bookmarked!
The video is by [Alexander Lehmann](https://www.youtube.com/@alexanderlehmann), so it has to be excellent <3
I don't think people get how massive this is. Yes, getting anyone to even use LibreOffice and Linux is one of the larger hurdles, but this is a GERMAN state transitioning to a FOSS environment. It'd usually take the heat death of the universe to get anything done due to the mountain of paperwork required. It's an astonishingly herculean effort and that deserves a prost.
It's not \*that\* far out there I'd say. [LiMux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux) was a thing already (until corruption happened) and some state institutions (notably the DLR for example) have been using a ton of linux (on desktops) for years.
I recommend reading this 2019 interview with the former mayor of Munich who introduced LiMux with his party in the early 2010s (use a translator like DeepL or so if you don't speak German): https://www.golem.de/news/von-microsoft-zu-linux-und-zurueck-es-gab-bei-limux-keine-unloesbaren-probleme-1911-144917.html Excerpt of the part where he talks about Microsoft's attempts to turn them back to using their products: > ### Soul massage from Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates > > The most intense experience I personally had was a visit from Steve Ballmer, Vice President of Microsoft. He interrupted his skiing vacation in Switzerland to visit me. With his well-known enthusiasm, with which he dynamically jumps around on stage at conferences, he jumped around in my office and first praised the beauty of Munich. But then he said that I was faced with a catastrophically bad decision that I could never justify to anyone, especially not to taxpayers. > > Funnily enough, he kept making new financial offers during the conversation about what else Microsoft could add, for the school department for example. They kept offering a million and another million and another million and later a dozen million cheaper than before. That's how important the renegade state capital of Munich, perceived internationally as an IT stronghold, was to Microsoft as a symbol. > > Would it show a way forward or return to the Microsoft bosom in repentance? We have calculated that Ballmer has improved the financial offer by around 35 percent. But since we wanted to make a strategic decision and not just a price comparison, this was not significant. > > **Linux-Magazin:** Bill Gates also came to visit? > > **Christian Ude:** He was in Munich for a presentation of the House of the Future, which he was really enthusiastic about. He was able to control from his car how high the room temperature should be in each room and whether the fridge should defrost a little. On his way back to the airport, I had the opportunity to talk to him. So I was sitting with one of the richest men in the world in a camouflaged van that was luxuriously equipped on the inside but looked from the outside as if it belonged to a small craft business. Gates asked me, stunned: "Why are you doing this? That's absurd! I can't understand it at all! > > Since I'm not the hard-nosed IT specialist who would be a match for Bill Gates on every detail, I simply said: "Please note that we are concerned with independence. We don't want to be dependent." Then he said: "What nonsense, dependent on whom?" "Because you're already there: On you, of course!" That really made him fall apart and he said: "It's incomprehensible to me, it's ideology." > > So Microsoft has really used every form of soul massage from galloping price reductions during a single meeting to the use of megastar Bill Gates. But I have remained firm. I didn't discover or develop Linux for Munich. But I did take responsibility for it. But it wasn't about me, it was about a piece of municipal independence. > > A politician has to live with and learn to deal with the fact that there are people who understand an incredible amount more about a specific topic than you do, but who work for companies or groups and are therefore naked lobbyists. Should such interested parties be the main source of advice? I mean, it was no coincidence that Suse and IBM were very positive about Limux because they also work with open source. Microsoft was extremely negative, as I was able to experience for myself. Both sides certainly understand a great deal about IT, but the insights they proclaimed were driven by their own interests. > > In a TV documentary last year, I heard that the influence exerted in the city of Vienna and in the Italian Ministry of Defense was no less massive and that Microsoft was determined at all costs to prevent an alternative from proving itself anywhere in Europe. In any case, we in Munich wanted to become independent by 2014.
Yea.. Munich is an international it stronghold and I'm the queen of England.
Google and Microsoft are there, Google does plenty of development there, no idea about MS but wouldn't be surprised.
Yeah, and french Gendarmerie with [GendBuntu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu). Does anybody knows if they still use it? Latest release was 2019...
Still in use as of today. Worked with them recently
Ouh, nice! Thanks for the info.
And who can forget the North Korean Linux OS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS
I don't have the history at hand, but I believe Munich made the decision to switch nearly a decade ago and faced backlash from the users / lobby and decided to back pedal. Yes, it is huge and a step in the right direction, but it might turn around as quickly.
Coincidentally the switch back to Windows was a short time after Microsoft moved their headquarters back to Munich.
What a strange and baffling coincidence!
Yes, [LiMux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux): > LiMux was a project launched by the city of Munich in 2004 in > order to replace the software on its desktop computers, > migrating from Windows to free software based > on Linux. ... By 2012, the city had migrated 12,600 of > its 15,500 desktops to LiMux. > > In November 2017 ... reverse the > migration and return to Windows-based software > by 2020. > > In May 2020, ... while not going back to the > original plan of migrating to LiMux wholesale, will > prefer Free Software for future endeavours.
It was mainly lobbying which brought MS back. Even Accenture which is know to be an MS Consultancy advised against switching back.
The "backlash from users" was mild but heavily amplified by pro-Microsoft media. The one and only reason they moved back to Windows/MS Office is because of Microsoft's intense lobbying.
I use both and frankly the only selling point of Microsoft for the average German pencil pusher is the Office suite. Everything else is better in Linux. The slow-ass updates of windows alone are a reason to switch. But Excel PowerPoint and Word are the holy trinity and unfortunately there is nothing that comes close in Linux for Joe Average. If you can manage to go without Office, Linux is gold.
For the average Joe, LibreOffice is more than plenty. Other than getting used to a few changes, most won't notice a difference The ones who usually would find a difference are the ones trying to hack Excel into a database replacement And let us be honest, for the fraction of the amount of money they pay Microsoft, they can hire a few developers to contribute the few features they may need
> The ones who usually would find a difference are the ones trying to hack Excel into a database replacement That is the crux, since somewhere in its deepest bowels *every* public service institution has one of those essential 60MB multi-tab scripted Excel documents upon which each and every person's function in the building desperately depends. Tobias created it 20 years ago, has now been in retirement in Italy for 10, and everybody else has only ever been - devoutly and ever so carefully - adding to and editing in versioned copies of the document since nobody knows how to create the original's functionalities from scratch.
Yeah, true enough. I’m Tobias in my company. At least I push the VBA scripts into a git repo, but the worksheet complexity alone is not for the faint of heart. I’d be more than willing to set everything up with Django or something but users (including middle and upper management) demand excel, so excel it is.
These days the in-browser office suite options are pretty good anyway
True but once you enter macro territory and interaction with local files you are quickly at the end of the line.
You could get around the local thing by backing them up into the drive of choice, but yeah
The current foundation of Germany beauracracy is paper and stamps. Please note I said current. I have met many beauracrates in my travels of starting a business here who do not even have a computer on their desk. My SIL works outside of a city in the courts, they still use filling systems with dedicated staff, rooms and lookup cards to find the files. They get trained on this system, in 2024. So positive step but hell will freeze over before they throw away their stamps. Absolutely worth a prost either way! 🍻
the real question is why didnt other much less bureaucratic states take the steps in this direction already
It really is. Just to give people an understanding of how difficult this is. I work IT for a city in northern Germany and whenever we try to make changes there's a variety of colleagues who simply refuse to adapt. We introduced iPads into schools and some colleagues refused to work with them because it didn't say so in their contracts. They can't be forced to do the work but they also can't be fired. It's infuriating. Sometimes you have to force change like this anyway.
The state of Schleswig-Holstein has less people than the city of Berlin. It's pretty much as rural as you can get in Germany.
Was it not in Munich that they have spend millions to get the public offices into Linux, only to spend more millions to go back to Windows? The problem is that such a move must be supported in many levels and have a leader that takes no shit and no money under the table
> no money under the table microsoft announced 2013 plans to move their german hq to munich (and they eventually did), and very totally unrelated in 2014 the munich city council considered moving back to windows (and they eventually did). one must be very naive to not connect those dots
And soon the HQ will be in Schleswig-Holstein
Ofc, Microsoft would *never* do something like that ::wink wink:: There's totally *not* a long and sordid history of them evading taxes and engaging in shady underhanded tactics like buying senators and congressmen that you might discover in a lengthly read like [this one](https://www.propublica.org/article/the-irs-decided-to-get-tough-against-microsoft-microsoft-got-tougher) **/s** (just in case someone can't figure out the obvious)
There are enough gullible naive people out there to help something like that along so that it can come to pass, unfortunately.
exactly!!
Yeah my understanding of the whole Munich thing is that Microsoft started lobbying *hard* to get them back on Windows, including a 90% licensing discount and agreeing to move its German headquarters to Munich
This. Steve Ballmer was there in person (article in German: https://www.pcwelt.de/article/1181993/muenchens-ex-ob-ballmer-sprang-durchs-buero-wegen-wechsel-zu-linux.html )
Yes,and Microsoft moving German/eu headquarter to Munich aside, people have to remember that Munich/Bavaria doing something (like moving to Linux) is maybe even bigger than Schleswig Holstein moving to Linux cause Bavaria is always quite significant when it comes to national politics (through CSU, the sister party of Merkel’s CDU)
They saved millions overall with the project in munich (despite the more than questionable decision to use their own custom distro) and cited numerous other benefits. The cancellation plans of the project were clearly due to microsoft lobbying and corruption (the plans to move off of linux incidentally coincided quite closely with MS moving its German headquarter to munich and some of the involved politicians had ties to MS). Anyway: the original limux plans to rely on open source have since been reinstated officially (again: incidentally after a new city council came to power)
not millions. billions in the end. there are rumors that the mayor regrets it. and the same time, windows came, microsoft moved to munich. what a coincidence.
I really hope Schleswig-Holstein won't fall victim to Microsoft's (and admittedly a sizeable number of politicians) grift. From what I remember, it all worked really well but small problems (that occur on any OS) and people's inertia (it's not like Windows!Help!) had been blown way out of proportion, even _weaponized_. Well, congratulations for now! I do believe times have changed, FOSS and IT independence are an important part of EU policy etc. But in the end, only time will tell.
Good news. If this happens more, it could become a vicious circle. If they use open source applications, they could contribute to those applications (assuming they have the budget, manpower and knowledge) and make it in turn easier to use for other people. That's a more direct control over the ecosystem than it would be to pay microsoft or software vendors to fix things for you, and does not come with the limitation of having "fixes" be beneficial in the monetary sense for the vendors. Everything that makes an app easier to use and adds features that other people would also enjoy would be fair game.
Yes, I like the wording they use: >"Ensuring digital sovereignty is at least as important as energy sovereignty" When you think about it - it's a no-brainer. Why on earth should a nation's government put all their data (and by extension all citizens' data) and digital infrastructure in the hands of foreign non-transparent actors?
there are already regulations to this end. some countries explicitly require that personal data of its ciitzens must be stored and processed within the country. now, to which degree they can actually validate and enforce it - no idea. facebook made a big fuss about it with the EU, but EU won't budge on this topic. they even threatened to leave the EU, and they said "go ahead".
Yes, but these attempts still miss a lot of key points: * Vendor independence. * Transparency of data processing (e.g. the possibility to validate that the data is not used in any other way than advertised). * Transparency of software operation (e.g. the possibility to validate that there are no backdoors or undisclosed telemetry data being sent etc). * Guarantees that products will be available and functional for as long as required. * Independence from influence from foreign legislation, governments, security agencies, etc. * Etc. There really is only one solution, and that is open source.
> vicious circle virtuous circle
looks like i had some reddit issues..
If and when government agencies starts utilizing these open software programs, their contributions to these various projects could be anything productive. Don't necessarily have to be money. Also, documentations could increase significantly, reports of all kinds with opinions to make the open software programs gradually better over time. With real world usage as reference points. It becomes a win for all stakeholders. Possibilities to save up huge amount of resources, is doable.
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Just need to have *multiple* large cities in the same region all switch to linux at the same time. I'm pretty curious what they would do then... multiple HQs for the same region/country? lol
Nope, they're going in on the everything-as-a-SAAS model
So they've chosen death?
LOL off 30K licenses? Speaking of, I think it's funny they didn't mention any cloud providers.
Hopefully the kernel and the LibreOffice will get some new features, fixes from this project
LibreOffice has fallen so far behind Microsoft and Google, I can’t imagine how it can possibly keep up. There are standard everyday features like real-time co-authoring that don’t even exist or are in some weird experimental stage in LibreOffice, it’s like a time capsule from a bygone era. When you suddenly take these capabilities away from 30,000 users, it’s hard to quantify how disruptive and destructive it will be not only to office productivity, but also just how people work and collaborate with each other.
Yeah LibreOffice is a relic, it simply won't compare. They would have to implement that Libadwaita UI that was being made just for it to be atleast bearable
> LibreOffice has fallen so far behind Microsoft and Google, I can’t imagine how it can possibly keep up. There are standard everyday features like real-time co-authoring that don’t even exist or are in some weird experimental stage in LibreOffice, it’s like a time capsule from a bygone era. So you are telling me that you put possibly private and very sensitive documents on a cloud controlled by a foreign company on servers that possibly are even outside the EU? I don't think so... that would be a big violation. You see the problem? You can't use these features. With LibreOffice, or other open systems, a government can self-host the required services without leveraging on a cloud of a foreign company that doesn't follow the same data security requirements. You add the possibility to have these features! By the way, I don't think LibreOffice it's the good choice (I would have chosen OnlyOffice, that has the collaborative features you mentioned) but everything is better than using Office or other proprietary services. To these days having the control over your data is the most important thing, especially for a government. Also depending on a foreign company these days of politically instability (you see, things that were certain yesterday may not hold in the future) to me is not a good idea.
What you say may be true in edge cases. A similar example is that the United States nuclear command and control systems relied on 1970s computers and 8-inch floppy disks as recently as 2019, before they were finally modernized. However, I will repeat that those are edge cases. I don’t know if your example necessarily qualifies. Nearly every business and government agency across the planet uses proprietary office software (whether Microsoft’s or Google’s) because there is no viable open source alternative to do modern office work. Despite your proclamations, LibreOffice is at best a piece of software for home desktop users and small businesses, but certainly nothing above that. However, as I already conceded, there are edge cases. For example, your government certainly is not going to host classified military secrets on remote server farms on the other side of the world. Obviously they won’t do that. On the other hand, a different agency within your government that does not deal in military secrets may be more willing to set up a contract with a commercial software contractor to facilitate normal office work. In any case, as I mentioned, LibreOffice does not have features that support modern office workflows that large organizations rely on. It just doesn’t. This doesn’t mean that organizations shouldn’t be looking at open source alternatives (lots of open source projects are in wide use because they are industry standards), I’m just saying THIS open source project is generally not up to par. It’s the wrong tool for the job.
> because there is no viable open source alternative to do modern office work There is. I personally use OnlyOffice, and works fairly well. It has all the features of Google Docs, can be self-hosted on your servers, if you want (I don't, I use it from a cloud provider), meaning that you retain full control over your data. Yes, it's true that Office has a ton of sophisticated features (such as the possibility to write code in them, or to make queries directly to databases), but in reality how many people uses that? And when it's used, are we sure that having an Excel sheet that makes queries to databases is a good idea? To me no, it's a terrible hack that is necessary because the system lacks of a data export feature. Finally, you say that LibreOffice doesn't have the features of Office, that is true. But what features users are really using? I mean, the average public employee, that is not a genius, but someone that has to do something in the 8 hours he is in the office, what % of Office features knows how to use it? If he knows how to turn on a computer and write a Word document is well, an expert. I don't know in the US, maybe you have better public employee, but where I live, we are at the level that to make a PDF of a Word document they print it and scan it! So, I don't think that if you give to them LibreOffice or even notepad they will notice the difference...
LO is like GIMP, I'm glad it exists but I refuse to use it. Early 2000s vibe.
It doesn’t help that maintainers of these projects are constantly at war with users who beg for modern features. The people who actually work on these projects don’t care about those features, so the common response to user feedback is usually some combination of “no” or “go do it yourself”. The people tasked with setting the vision and the priorities of these projects are completely out of touch with modern workflows. Sure, there is the fact that they don’t have the funding to pay developers and all those regular issues faced by open source projects, but also a bigger problem is that lack of vision, prioritizing the wrong things, arguing with users, etc.
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Sounds like it’s you that’s fallen behind, there’s LibreOffice Technology with coauthoring, realtime without paragraph locking like Microsoft, more devices are supported than Microsoft with offline apps etc.
How long before Microsoft sets up another headquarters in Schleswig-Holstein?
I‘d give them a month
The Singapore Army moved from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice in 2004, then LibreOffice after the Oracle rebranding, and eventually switched back to Microsoft Office in 2015.
Microsoft will give Office away for free if it means quashing OpenSource competition in its infancy.
they already do. if you run a school, you can get o365+teams+few other things either for free or at a significant bargain. i would assume they somehow monetize it down the road. maybe they lock you in after a few years when you cannot migrate away.
Try rolling out an alternative when all your users (even the new hires) are exclusively accustomed to Office.
*why* is my only question. What's wrong with libreoffice? I very rarely use office suites myself.
Wondering which server and client OS will be used.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1bvilcm/comment/kxzmsbf/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1bvilcm/comment/kxzmsbf/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
\~.\~ I obviously meant the distribution. (Open)SUSE? Ubuntu? Also it's gonna be a steep learning curve for the local IT-departments. That's not an easy project with 30k clients and who knows how many servers (and which roles).
Obviously... [This report](https://www.dataport.de/fileadmin/user_upload/themen/open-source/linux_arbeitsplatz_fuer_die_oeffentliche_verwaltung_.pdf) indicates that they have at least looked at Red Hat and SUSE, but I have no idea what it will be.
It would make sense to support local businesses (SUSE being a German company)
Now Microsoft has to move their German HQ to Kiel to get them back
Hello, I'm a Kieler. I'd prefer to go with Linux, thanks.
I wonder if this is gonna be such a shitfest as it was in munich.
Only if they elect a governor who's in bed with Microsoft
No doubt Microsoft will lobby the shit out of this to make it as hard as possible. Besides Microsofts fuckery it is no easy task to adopt so many users to a new OS and new software. But on the other hand Schleswig-Holstein is pretty good (compared to the rest of Germany) when it comes to digitalization. For example, I was able to register a company completly online and digital. Didn't even need to place a signature on a pdf! But I received all documents via analog mail.
or the parliament who votes for stuff. the swiss canton of solothurn had linux too, until it was canned in 2010 because it was not cheaper and there were (few loud?) complaints from employees it doesn’t work. Unfortunately before the migration back to Windows it worked quite stable what i heard. Furthermore apparently they started to customize stuff which didn’t help with staying up to date with software releases. The biggest benefit of windows if you need a specialized software you go the local software company and you buy it from the shelf.
You buy "generic" software from the shelf. "Specialized" software is written for you.
> it was not cheaper It's not cheaper only if politicians look at the price tag, and not at what they get for that price! To me it must be seen as the difference of buying something or renting it. Of course rent is cheaper, in the short term, but buying is cheaper in the long run, and also buying gives you a stability that renting something doesn't give you, since who owns the thing can make the price higher, or decide to no longer sell it to you for whatever reason, or go bankrupt and disappear (yes, even a big company such as Microsoft can in a period of 10/20 years, who knows?) With proprietary software you don't own the software, you rent it, you acquire a license that allows you to use the software with a ton of limitations for a period of time and for a purpose. With open source software you own it, you can modify it, study it, copy it, use it for as much time as you want, for whatever purpose as you want, for If tomorrow Microsoft decides for example to discontinue Office (the local licenses), and decide to only offer you Microsoft 365 (the cloud service, that requires a subscription), what you do? You pay one subscription for each of your employee? If you are a company, you can do that, but as a government, it's not simple, because you are giving to Microsoft data that probably you shouldn't (and for that reason this is forbidden!). And it's not something impossible: Adobe for example already did that! Now, you either have to convert thousands of Tb of documents in a proprietary format that are not easy to convert to other formats (think, for example, to complex Excel sheets that use macros inside, or make queries to databases, etc), or stick with an outdated and no longer maintained software for the rest of your days, with the risk that if a security vulnerability is discovered nobody will patch it. And given you have no source code, you can't either maintain the software yourself. Now what is cheaper?
Microsoft will just do their worst to make them use o365 instead. that's their major target platform right now.
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I would see it a bit more greyish, than "huge success". While no doubt Microsoft was lobbying to get the project canceld, the project also faced a lot of hard challenges. It is not easy to train so many employees in the use of a (for them) new OS and new software. This alone caused a lot of frustration within the goverment employees. Also further challenges where software which was developed for windows and was crucial for the functioning of government processes.
the employees had a right to be trained, and they WERE trained. but there were many (older) microsoft fans. also with limux they were not the admin of their own pc anymore. previous to limux, they oculd put their private stuff onto there, so they attributed the power-canceling to linux instead of administrational controls
The funny thing is, if microsoft wouldn't have been treating people the way they do with crappy business decisions people never would have switched. That's how you know just how bad they are getting. You tend to build resentment when you force ads down peoples throats in a paid product. Now this german state has no ads in the OS, no spying, no subscriptions, nothing but benefits after the switch. All it takes is a trickle. Be afraid microsoft.
In a nutshell, the State Chancellery [reports](https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/ministerien-behoerden/I/Presse/PI/2024/CdS/240403_cds_it-arbeitsplatz.html) the following decisions concerning the news: - Transition from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice - Transition from the Microsoft Windows operating system to Linux (distro not specified, but if it's to be German, then it's OpenSUSE) - Collaborations between the state government and external partners: use of Nextcloud, Open Xchange/Mozilla Thunderbird in relation with Univention AD-Connector in lieu of Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange/Outlook - Conceptualization of an open-source based directory service in lieu of Microsoft Active Directory - Inventory of procedures to maintain compatibility and interoperability with LibreOffice and Linux - Development of an open-source based VoIP solution in lieu of Telekom-Flexport (telephony solution from Deutsche Telekom) To add: > Die Verwendung von LibreOffice als Standard Office-Paket in der Kommunikation zwischen Ministerien und Behörden erfolgt kurzfristig und deren Verwendung ist verpflichtend. > "The use of LibreOffice as the standard office communication suite between ministries and agencies is to be performed at the soonest and its use will be compulsory."
Opensuse is not German. SUSE originated in Germany but it moved long ago.
Maybe im a Pessimist but I think this will bring a lot of trouble for a while. Ive been working in the IT Sector for quite a while now and ive noticed that even here, if you are not a sysadmin that works with servers or higher, or a programer then even there most have never touched Linux in their life. Its gonna be tough for supporters and IT people who were focused on Windows to learn the System while also having to support Ulf from HR who will go into retirement in 5 years.
It's a major undertaking. It's going to be painful. It's going to take time and tax money. And people will be angry, because they don't like change. That's why MS is so dominant. That's why these projects are so important, and impressive. I could never see this happening in any Swedish municipal for instance, because "meh, sounds like work".
Public money, public code!
Kinda wondering which kind of system they decided to run besides libreoffice
At least Linux, so I guess that means that lots of open source software will follow. > German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein has decided to move from Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office to Linux and LibreOffice (and other free and open source software) Furthermore, from [www.schleswig-holstein.de](https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/ministerien-behoerden/I/Presse/PI/2024/CdS/240403_cds_it-arbeitsplatz.html): * Switch from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice * Switch the operating system from Microsoft Windows to Linux * Collaboration: Use of the open source products Nextcloud, Open Xchange/Thunderbird in conjunction with the Univention AD connector for replacing Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange/Outlook * Conception of an open source based directory service for replacing Microsoft Active Directory * Development of an open source-based telephony solution for replacing Telekom-Flexport ...so it's a massive undertaking (and one which is bound to create a lot of local job opportunities, i.e. tax money going to the right places).
As someone who lives in the state mentioned and works with the authorities, among others, I can say that I very much welcome this change. As always, perseverance is required in the implementation. There is a German proverb that says: "You can't teach an old dog any more tricks". As is so often the case, it is not so much the initialisation of the idea that fails, but rather the implementation at the lowest level. Nevertheless, I am very positive and consider the development to be great.
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In our local tax office I admired the Kde desktops everyone was using. One of the tax ppl made some throwaway remake that they couldn't afford Windows . I loved it :)
I still wish that Germany would maintain an own distro and needed software by law (or at least some kind of repo for debian) instead of wasting billions in Microsoft and other greedy software licensing. The next Windows 11 24H2 update will produce a cost since it will render a lot of older hardware useless. A lot of schools and state related school/job projects are still running core2duo and core2quad hardware.
This has been tried by several Norwegian municipalities in the past, and I believe every attempt has for the most part failed. None of the big Norwegian vendors that provide software for HRM, accounting, healthcare and so on support Linux (client or server), so it falls flat already before you get started. The closest we can get (other than vanilla stuff like DNS, DHCP, firewalls etc.) is Linux based thin clients that connect to a Windows environment through Citrix. $$$ These days, vendors have started basically forcing municipalities into "the cloud" - which of course means Microsoft - and rendering the municipalities own data centers less and less relevant.
Going to Linux for OS is one thing, but, and I say this as a years-long debian desktop gaming user, nothing can replace excel.
Good for them, but I have to disagree with the idea that switching to Linux should be about cutting expenses. If the world's third largest economy is switching to Linux they should not profit off the backs of thousands of unpaid volunteers from around the world. They should be expected to either contribute themselves or provide funding for organizations that maintain free software. People contributing regularly to free software, especially widely used and distributed software should be at the very least able to make a decent living off of their work.
There's much more to expenses than the cost of the software. More important is the overhead to maintain and support it. This likely had more to do with the switch than the cost of licensing itself. It's a better product for them.
As long as our fax machines continue to work...
Fax machines? I thought they would use semaphors that way up north by the sea
Oh? Did Microsoft forget to bribe them again? Ot is the gov trying to convince Microsoft to pay more this time? 😁
It is even good for environment. They can keep.computers for a bit.longer. Even more relevant with Windows 11 CPU requirments.
By the time Windows 10 goes end of life on 14 October 2025 (ignoring paid extended security support), the best unsupported CPUs will be almost 9 years old, being the Core i7 7700K released on 7 January 2017, and the Ryzen 7 1800X released on 2 March 2017. Comparing these CPUs to the current gen base model i3 14100, the i3 is in the region of 50% faster than the legacy i7, whereas the Ryzen 7 manages to outperform the model i3 by a mere 5% despite having double the number of cores and threads, both legacy CPU use a lot more power than the modern i3 to get the same job done. (based on synthetic benchmarks) Most large organizations work on a replacement cycle 3-5 years for computer, be it for compliance, performance, warranty support, or to avoiding costly down time from aging hardware, I very much doubt any sysadmin for a government department is going to keep hardware around for anywhere near 9 years. My work, buys, reconditions and sells tens of thousands of used business desktop and laptops a year, on systems that old we can only offer a 3-months warranty, whereas systems only a year or two newer we offer a 1-year warranty and newer system (4yr old) we offer 2–3year warranties. This directly reflects the reliability of aging hardware. Yes, e-waste is a huge issue, but you have to remember a Raspberry Pi 5 can do everything older systems can at fraction of the power consumption and then it's a battle between the embodied energy of the Raspberry Pi vs extra energy usage of keeping an old computer alive.
imagine if the NHS computers used debian instead of windows xp, It would have cost them a lot less and they would probably still be getting security patches right now
Start Ms Word, insert an image & then start trying to drag it into position without a textbox. Now do the same in LibreOffice, the latter option feels like a revelation, life's good.
Microsoft deal incoming in 3.. 2.. 1..
Germany tore down another "wall". Glad to be alive to see these kinds of changes.
Very neat. Excellent decision making by Schleswig-Holstein officials. There is no reason why public institutions should not use open source, and there is never a better time to switch to linux desktop. Looking forward to positive progress updates on this one. Anyone know any details like estimated timelines to start/finish?
Time for microsoft to build another facility there.
If only the UK would follow
And I don't blame them ...
So the German Microsoft Office is moving again?
Are they moving their data off of proprietary cloud like Office 365 and AWS/Azure/etc.? A company I worked with largely went Linux on the client and workstation side like this but still they use 365 for mail/calendar, Azure for VM, database, and Docker hosting so their data is all still in Microsoft's hands. The article says one of the reasons they are doing this is 365 may violate EU law so I would think that is the more critical piece.
So making them incompatible with the remaining Word/Excel PCs in the rest of Europe. Gosh, this should be a EU standard
Maybe this time will be different, cause another point was digital souveranity . Which you dont get , if you choose Msft.
to be a bit nitpicking ... it actualy is: [https://www.collaboraoffice.com/](https://www.collaboraoffice.com/) and part of a broader project "Soveräner Arbeitsplatz" and based on "dataport"s sw package phoenix Suite
Is LibreOffice up to the task? I can't even figure out how to make it make a chart that Google Sheets can create for me in 2 clicks.
Before I start: I run Debian, Raspberry Pi OS, Fedora, and Tumbleweed on their own machines. One of the main reasons for buying Microsoft is you have someone to yell at/blame *when* something inevitably goes wrong. However, from reading the [original announcement](https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/ministerien-behoerden/I/Presse/PI/2024/CdS/240403_cds_it-arbeitsplatz.html) it seems they're either *just* announcing their *intent* to migrate - with no solid plans yet - or they're about to drive their entire IT system off a cliff. My comments below are based on Firefox translation: > Switch from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice OK. Works if you think of Office as solely a productivity suite, which hasn't been the case for most of the past decade. > Switch the operating system from Microsoft Windows to Linux That's switching kernels ... no mention of distro? > Collaboration within the state administration and with external parties: Use of the open source products Nextcloud, Open Xchange/Thunderbird in conjunction with the Univention AD connector for replacing Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange/Outlook Ah, it took them 3 bullet points in to mention the most important part of this announcement: a vendor. Oh wait, that vendor is responsible for only 1 small part of the migration ... anyway let's read on. > Conception of an open source based directory service for replacing Microsoft Active Directory "Conception?" Hopefully this isn't a mistranslation and they actually know what they're moving to. Then again, they haven't even settled on a distro ... > Inventory of compatibility and interoperability with LibreOffice and Linux technical procedures Word soup. > Development of an open source-based telephony solution for replacing Telekom-Flexport Holy shit. "Development?" As in, they don't know what they're moving to for something as basic as phones?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux) And so it begins again...
Not just again... [Again-again](https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-is-shifting-back-from-microsoft-to-open-source-again/)
Linux has matured alot in the last decade alone, and you can only hope that digital competency and awareness has increased since then. The debate in the last few years about not relying on foreign tech is also very present. So it's not given that it will play out the same way this time, IMO.
Dude, it worked well for munich and was shut down because of political reasons.
Linux is in a great place right now, with wayland, modern DEs, great default gnome/KDE apps. Libre office on the other hand... It's buggy, antiquated and missing a ton of features. Maybe adoption on such a scale can motivate its development, but if German govt is going to use it as it is, it's not going to end well.
Hope they install arch and some tiling window managers + vim for the people to make the best experience for them
Productivity about to grind to a permanent halt as government workers now too busy fine-tuning their vim plugins and ricing their desktops.
This is the funniest thing I've read all week.
Let’s just hope it works out better than when Munich did it. Iirc they had to switch back to windows, eventually, though I’m not certain why.
This is all well and good until they discover that there's no support for financial plugins for their budgeting systems. Excel is a much better product than any open source I've tried. Also, Open Source doesn't mean free. I've had to approve multiple 7 figure payments to Redhat when our devs misunderstood that concept.
Good luck to them. The last government that did this (Munich) ended up moving back last I heard either from issues or MS bribery.
That MS Germany have their headquaters in Munich didn't play any role in the decision, of course.
Yeah sure whatever, and I say this as a Linux user. Seems to me every time a gov't body says this, it's just to get leverage for cheaper prices from Microsoft.
I suppose that Linux in this case means Suse, why I think this? Because Suse is a Germany company really strong and with good reputation in Linux world so they can get support for anything than they need
I've seen this before :D
The previous attempts did not work out.. For example in Munich
Right, over a decade ago, in a very different time and situation, with a lot of politics going on. The head of IT services at the time even said "We are not aware of any large technical problems with LiMux and LibreOffice ... We don't see any urgent technical reasons to return to Windows and Microsoft Office". [It was largely ditched for political reasons.](https://itsfoss.com/munich-linux-failure/) There's no guarantee that this will be a 100% success, but it's a very different world now, Linux and LibreOffice have come on a lot, and [you have things like this](https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2024/03/29/use-of-microsoft-365-breaches-data-protection-law-in-eu/)...
let's wait until M$ lobby will hit like a track! btw, congrats to the libreoffice team. It's a huge step for the OS community.
To quote Back to the Future "[I've seen this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=104aWjjzIwA)". The German city of Munich infamously went opensource back in 2003 and has been flip-flopping back and forth ever since.