public services of an entire german state switches from Microsoft to open source (Libreoffice, Linux, Nextcloud, Thunderbird)
they will save 188,000 € on Microsoft license fees per year
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Comments252https://euro-stack.com/blog/2025/3/schleswig-holstein-open-source-digital-sovereigntyOpen linkView original on lemmy.blahaj.zone
Fingers crossed that this will be an indisputable success. 🤞
Allegedly a similar project in Munich went really really well, but was shut down when the right wing came into power.
For some reason the right wing of Munich doesn't like freedom. 🙄
Well there is never enough money for the workers that they need for open source but there is always more than enough money for companies and their consultants ✌️😎
...and when M$ moved their headquarters into the city of Munich, making some nice impact on the city treasury.
They had already moved it, so Munich didn't have to switch back for that.
But yes I bet it was a factor as in corruption.
Munich racist shitheads (a.k.a. CSU) absolutely do love that sweet "freedom money" a.k.a. bribes though. Corrupt fuckers...
Since 1948 Mayors of Munich were members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Just one exception, Erich Kiesl (CSU) 1978-1984.
While I don't necessarily disagree, wasn't it mostly less bad than the rural areas all around?
Microsoft supports genocide which also makes them attractive to fascists.
The German Microsoft headquarters are in Munich.
I thought this was the bribe?
Can you imagine the moaning?
This is the sort of adoption we need to bring Linux into the mainstream
This and software companies openly supporting Linux. For example, if Adobe and AutoCAD among others would build some tars then you could see it.
Ironically, Game Engines are ahead of the curve on this. You could build Unreal Engine from the github page on Linux for many years now and we also have Godot and Blender. I think several PCB design and also architecture tools already exist on Linux as well, so there is definitely room for a lot of industries and businesses to shift away from Windows as long as they can find a competent tech guy to maintain everything with minimal downtime.
Blender got ported to Linux in 1998, to Windows in 1999. The modal interface and key command language is no accident, it literally is a 3d vi.
Linux is generally strong when it comes to 3d graphics workstations, it inherited IRIX' market share, plenty of artists around, especially in the film industry, who'd go on a strike if you took away dragging windows with alt+LMB. Graphics, that is, CAD is dominated by Windows as CAD started out as 2d sketch software which ran on cheap DOS machines.
Houdini is also Unix-native and Blender's only surviving competitor (considered by features, not industry inertia), Maya started out as cross-platform IRIX+Windows.
Microsoft blocking email access to the ICJ director may be the best thing to happen for Linux adoption since the SteamDeck. Now every Microsoft lobbyst can be asked what would happen is the US government order Microsoft to block them out of their infrastructure.
It's gonna be a rough few months for the IT department
Actually being able to troubleshoot things yourself instead of waiting for a reply from Microsoft support is a godsend.
Assuming the IT staff isn't comprised of a bunch of junior techs that only know the Microsoft suite and not the actual inner workings of how email and Linux works.
Conveniently, this could be a path to competence for those juniors in the long term.
You a glass half full type person, huh? Honestly, I admire that attitude. I hope you can keep that.
you're a "wish you all the best" type person huh? I hope you can keep that
I hope so. I would have loved the opportunity to be in that position, and if I was still working as a sys admin, I'd still live it.
"competency" in IT is more about your skills with the tools your company is using. My current company only has one super minor server running Linux so even if someone so advanced with Linux they make Richard Stallman look like a M$ shill wouldnt be a competent engineer in my infrastructure.
I do get what you're saying though and I wish more things would move to Linux in general. It's much nicer to manage.
Or way worse, what you said but senior techs.
Microsoft has been at this long enough that there is an army of old guys whose only - but extremely specialized - skillset is navigating arcane GUIs for group policies and AD administration. But drop them in a bash terminal and they're like a fish dropped on a tennis court.
Modern MS infra administration is far from "navigating arcane GUIs": it's all about PowerShell, IaC, automation etc.
Yeah now it's all about navigating obscure web pages that mysteriously change every few months haha
true
Ew. I didn't think of it that way, but your right. Hopefully the seniors are tech smart and not just MS smart.
I feel like most of the items aren't going to be real troubleshooting.
It's been a good bit since I worked the support desk, but even with generic microsoft updates, most of the 'questions' were basically the worst users finding a way to say 'It used to be this and I want it to be this way, hold my hand for an hour while telling me its not this way anymore until I get tired and then complain to someone else'.
Yeah, but that already happens every time Microsoft does a major version "upgrade".
And imagine how much more handholding it'll require when you fundamentally change everything about their computer lmao
Imagine them switching to Linux and suddenly shit works
Lol, I was thinking the same thing. "plug it in, OK, done". No drivers and none of that shit.
Just wait for Microsoft to start astroturfing the initiative.
Embrace, extend, extinguish will accelerate.
What makes you think FOSS cannot use the same strat ?
Mostly because the FOSS community doesn't have a single point of leadership that is maniacally focused on becoming a total monopoly.
And that's a good thing
Yeah but we can aspire for FOSS to take over the world right ?
Didn't the Trump admin suspend enforcement of foreign anti-bribery laws? Microsoft just has to write a check to the right person to kill this.
Breaking anti-bribery laws of a country is illegal, no matter whether they are enforced in some other country or not. Of course Microsoft can break the law and then keep paying large fines until they decide to no longer break the law.
Let's hope it sticks when Microsoft backs up the money truck.
It would be nice to see the European governments start a genuine effort on funding open source development, and start laying the foundation for a migration to their own Linux distro. Microsoft isn't trustworthy. Hell, most American big tech is untrustworthy. Moving your government offices to an in house developed OS is going to be paramount for their security in the future.
I hate it so much that Whatsapp made itself a social media
from what i know Germany already does this
Germany has done this multiple times before. Microsoft has historically swept in with some sweetheart deal to lure them back.
Hopefully it sticks this time.
Hard to catch fish if you see the fish as dumb idiots, for some reason the fish don't seem to respond well to it idk.
The German IT fish keep coming back for the bait - never bothering to avoid the hook.
I switched to Thunderbird about a year and a half ago.
Last week I had to help a coworker with their Outlook and holy shit is it so much worse than when I dropped it. There is so much AI garbage in every little thing and bad design getting in the way of just sending and receiving emails.
Same thing for the other office products
It's horrendous. Can't even explain how bad it is now.
Yup. I switched to linux on my home computer and now the more time I spend with it, the more I pity my work computer for the cancer it has to deal with.
I have an Outlook account from when I decided to use it specifically to receive and interact with clients as a freelance artist.
My freelance gig didn't launch, so I kinda forgot about it. This week I remembered that account and logged on... Only to find the most disgusting interface a user has ever seen! There are (almost) no shortcuts, not a gram of intuitiveness to be found...
Horrible horrible platform
LibreOffice is a great alternative for 99% of people, but there is that 1% of people who is gonna be disappointment. This is a great step though.
Same goes for any software.
I don't understand why people act like Windows is the holy grail of computing.
It sucks, it barely works for 90% of users, and the rest will use anything else.
Just as Linux will work for 98% of people, and those last ones are due to handful of evil companies.
The problem is education. People know how to use Windows/Microsoft products, and are too lazy to learn anything else. Saying "that other thing sucks" is easier than admitting "Idk how to use that other thing, and I'm too lazy to learn", especially in a corporate environment where you can't climb ladders by acknowledging your own shortcomings.
Get LibreOffice/Nextcloud/etc into schools, and the problem will be solved in a single generation.
People 'know' how to use Microsoft products. I'm a data guy and might spend less than a day a week in word, PowerPoint, excel. Most of the time I spend in them is checking other people's work. I'm still called on to help people with such tasks as switching from footnotes to endnotes, moving files in SharePoint, fixing formatting. My general knowledge of navigating the UI and googling fixes is better than what people 'know'.
People bitch and moan every time MS Office apps are updated, too; I can't count the number of times I've heard coworkers complain. TBF though, I refuse to hit the "Try the new Outlook" toggle on my work laptop - I tried it once and it was worse in every way.
I'm glad the only MS products I use at this point are work-issued.
Hey it's getting better! They recently worked hard for months to add the very niche and almost never used feature of adding a shared mailbox's folder to your favourites! I mean, with features like that you should expect the dev time to be long.
Actually this was a huge update. Shared mailboxes are extensively used at any company I've been at so being able to just open a shared mailbox without having to dig through 93744847 folders or opening another mailbox is a great addition.
In October they are forcing everyone to new outlook too! I can't wait to have a shittier interface with less functionality!
For me the trouble has always been interactions with other people. It's way better than 10 years ago. Just LibreOffices ribbon interface looks so much better today than 5 years ago. File compatibility is just going to be a continued growing pain until LibreOffice hits a major marketshare
ODF master race?
I.wouldn't be so sure, the world runs on M$ spreadsheets and their shenanigans.
Yes I am aware, I see some of the most advanced spreadsheets considering I work as accountant, but a lot of the sheets people make can be replaced with better stuff or are just very basis entries which Libreoffice can do fine.
Missing the formatted as tables is probably it's biggest issue
The only thing preventing me from full adoption in it is the lack of being able to convert to table like in excel. I've moved to it for my word processing. But I can't shake excel because I use that feature almost every time I use the program.
After that i just need to find replacements for OneNote and OneDrive and I'll finally be free.
You can do that in LibreOffice. Its just a few more clicks than in Excel. Its such a common feature they should really make it clearer. I think the feature is "Database Ranges"
Each time I tried to decipher the answer from argumentative forum posts and vague descriptions I didn't find anything equivalent. I can take a look again, don't think that was the name of things I tried before.
Replace OneDrive with a NAS. You can roll your own with something like OpenMediaVault.
Replace OneNote with Obsidian. It’s not FOSS, but it’s free and cross platform.
If I could afford a NAS I would have done so by now. But I can't afford the drives. Most other hosted solutions either don't offer the capacity I am after, or lack other features that I want from a cloud storage.
I didn't like using Obsidian and I'm not going to learn markdown so it's out. I'm looking at notesnook, but it's still not quite what I am after. But might be as close as I get.
I haven’t heard of notesnook. I’ll need to check that out.
I don’t love Obsidian, it’s just the best free app I’ve come across so far.
It's really close to OneNote so far and has an acceptable self hosting option. The import function seems good compared to other apps I've tried
I just checked it out and at first it looked perfect… then I started noticing local features like exports, notebook counts, etc that were paywalled behind a subscription. For an app that is “open source” that really rubs me the wrong way. I may look through the source code later. I have a feeling they’ve tied those features arbitrarily to web services to drive subscriptions, which would be really creepy… though not as creepy as if the code exists locally and is paywalled. sigh
If you self host, all features are free.
Obsidian is not a great replacement for OneNote. I tried switching but there's a bunch of things like sharing pages (and no, emailing documents doesn't count), easy syncing between all platforms (Syncthing doesn't work at all on iOS and was kinda finicky on other things, and git is just not a valid option), it doesn't do super well when embedding images or PDFs, doesn't have the same advanced hand writing stuff, and probably some other things that I'm forgetting.
OneNote is basically the only thing besides email that I can't find a good self hosted alternative. And I've been looking trust me. Obsidian is great if all you need is note taking on a desktop, but that's about where it ends. Or if you want to pay for the subscription and cloud storage, I would imagine it'd work fine.
I just switched to Linux and got a new win11 laptop for my wife.
Had to install a old HP Laser MFC (going to switch to brother when I run out of toner).
It just worked on Linux mint. Auto installed. Printing and scanning.
On win10 worked automatically. Printing and scanning.
On Win 11 it installed with a generic driver and printed fine but not scanning. Had to get the win10 driver from the site... WTH.
My Brother printer worked way better on W11 then W10, but I disliked W10 more than I dislike W11 at least at the start
Going from win7 to win10 is definitely more harsh than from win10 to win11
I use powerpoint all the time. Impress is very far behind in terms of usability and basic functionality. But I'm hopeful it will get better as adoption increases.
188K doesnt sound much
Some localities in Germany have been incorporating Linux into their systems for 20+ years.
That may explain why the financial benefits seem low.
Certainly not this one: 6 EUR/user/year doesn't cover even Windows
Depends on your relationship with Microsoft.
50 cents per user per month doesn't make any sense: I think for MS it might be cheaper to give products for free than to process these payments
Note that that number (180000) is per year, not per month
I'm guessing it's a really small state with not much IT going on.
As for cheaper to give for free: ABSOLUTELY. But, with free then they don't have their sales guys in there talking with them, they don't have the state "acknowledging the debt" and the legitimacy of their right to charge for their software.
In the 1990s M$ let the world pirate DOS and Windows with wild abandon, they were just happy that people were using their stuff and not others'. After the world was good and hooked, shortly after we all survived Y2K, they started turning the screws - requiring license keys for full functionality, getting serious about demanding payment.
Bill Gates net worth was "only" $30B before they got serious about charging for their software, today I see it's over $200B even after all of Melinda's philanthropy.
A small organization will have higher software license prices per user than a large one.
Also true, and at this kind of rate we can assume the state is doing most of its own IT self-support without a lot of M$ hand-holding.
It actually does now. Your M365 license also includes a windows license.
The cheapest M365 I see is 8 USD/month, not per year
Maybe you responded to the wrong person? I didn't talk about price but yeah M365 is paid monthly. Mostly, you can get annual licenses with a bit of a discount.
But an exchange online license is only $4/month ;)
Mate, are you sure you don't confuse per year and per month numbers? Those 180000 is per YEAR (for 30000 users)
Mate, are you sure you didnt confuse my comment with someone else's? I didn't put any numbers in my comment at all, I was just being cheeky and pointing out that M365 licenses come with a Windows license as well. Or at least business basic and above.
I am not German, and I don't know what licenses or how many accounts the German government has. That is irrelevant to my comment.
A cost worth cutting nonetheless
I think the big money is in support contracts.
Small state.
I can't see a reason why Linux distro wouldn't be enough for 99% of office machines. Unless deployment is really that much better and easier with Windows and MS Office. And whatever proprietary apps they use that need running on certain OS.
Those proprietary apps are the really big factor. A lot of stuff is run from a browser these days, but some systems are just too expensive to replace.
Things are slowly starting to get better in a lot of the fields I interface with.
Payroll and accounting software? Many great browser-based offerings. Unfortunately that also means the backend is running in the developer's servers, but these applications were generally proprietary to begin with.
EMR company I've done a lot of work with (used to be an engineer there), has essentially halted progress on their Windows-only native client (and it was DEEPLY entrenched in Windows) and is now browser based, retaining 99% of functionality. This one always connected to a proprietary backend anyway.
Own a VW, Audi, Seat, Škoda, Bentley or Lamborghini (depending on model year for some of those)? The popular 3rd party diagnostic software for those, called VCDS, now has a mobile variant if you buy the wireless dongle instead of the cable - it runs a server in the dongle itself that you connect to via wifi, and it displays the sofware as a website. Of course it's available for non-mobile browsers too.
Common theme among all of these is that none need to do heavy data processing on the client - though nowadays that is also solvable using WASM.
I mean, at my work we mostly have operating apps that just run inside browser anyway. Our mail clients also run in browser. Only some internal apps are something specially that feels like JAVA designed or something that should run on Linux as well. We could easily use some Linux distro and with KDE or Cinnamon/MATE/XFCE it would be roughly similar to Windows 11. Most people have no clue what version we have, they just know it's Windows. You could just tell them it's special new version of Windows for companies and they'd just eventually adapt to it not knowing it's not really Windows at all.
The advantage Windows has is Intune for device management.
The disadvantage is having to use Intune.
Linux is just much easier to script an install an manage using any of the IaC tools you might already be using for your servers. Yes, you can manage Windows with the same tools but it just isn't as reliable in my experience.
The best thing about R is that it was made by statisticians. The worst thing about R is that it was made by statisticians.
This is my biggest thing. How come nobody really has any MDM or MEM for Linux? One that actually offers everything that Intune does.
Hell i even use AD (Yes Microsoft Active Directory) on my Linux servers because it actually works
There are several CM tools already available. Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt, etc. Just pick one.
I've tried all of them but none of them are quite as fully featured as the M365 platform. That's really where they get you. It offers MDM, MEM, email, account control, file shares, antivirus, patch scanning, group policy, and countless other things all under one platform.
None of those are really a whole ecosystem.
Windows + office + account and identity management all come with Ms 365 business in the first tier past family. For about $15 or $16 a month you can use InTune to set up logins and select enrollment with MFA as well a provision computers and management with InTune including Boyd self enrollment for laptops, Android, and Apple. All your files get rbac, backup, and recovery from day 1. You can, and I would recommend strongly against this, even manage your osx devices from InTune.
It's very slick and there is a reason business use it. This thread is somewhat delusional on how easy it is to manage and how terrible office 365 is.
UntilI can log a user on and have all their stuff automatically sync or download on Linux. Microsoft can have office computers. But please, please let Linux take over gaming.
It's not.
The problem is that one percent that does need Windows.
Unicorns suck in IT. It's a small number of systems that take a disproportionate amount of admin overhead.
So IT leadership has to decide if they support a separate OS for a small percentage of users, or one OS that works for everyone (Windows).
Those boxes will be unicorns no matter what, though, also, they're not necessarily part of the general IT infrastructure. Someone in catastrophe defence might be running fluid simulations using some god awful expensive windows-only software but chances are they can manage their own box, and if not, the ministry will still have IT staff who can deal with that kind of thing.
IT absolutely does still have to manage those things though. At my company we have all sorts of obscure boxes controlling things like diagnostic readers and CNC machines. Things that the mechanics/engineers [imo] should be able to manage, its still on us.
Plus they usually still want those things to access the internet (because they require it) or access to file shares (to get gcode files and whatever) which is firmly an IT task
I mean... my condolences and/or yay you get to be a honorary machinist?
In staging, i made a batch script to run the shortcuts on desktop we had to run to check if setup was successful. But i couldn't just run the command of the shortcut but had to run the shortcut itself, because that made a difference.
In short: no.
If the trend continues then maybe the hacker community will start focusing on Linux. Can you imagine "I don't need a virus scanner, I use Windows, the under dog OS"
The hacker community it's very focused on Linux since most servers in the world run it. The fly by night script kiddies and botnet creators definitely prefer end user systems though.
This right here. Linux security is so good that the easiest way to break in is via Phishing someone with a windows laptop.
The old jibe was that Windows users are so gullible that they're just easier to phish.
Yeah exactly. Nobody actually "hacks" anymore. They just send Pam in accounting a funny email
The easiest hacks use social engineering. Much more social to exploit in the end-user arena.
Please become a thing. Having viruses custom tailored for your OS means you've made it.
I don't wanna "make it". I just want fast, secure, private computing.
Agreed. However, more users (personal, institutional or business) equals more devs focused on the OS.
We need enough, not more. The concept of "more" and "surplus" got us into this capitalist dystopia. I know this isn't the point you're making. I'm just making a separate point that I thought of reading yours. :)
And that's fine. I agree. Becoming consumist hoarders is what got us to where we're at. Or rather, what allowed companies and institutions to take us here.
Same, I'm largely being facetious. But viruses come with success, and success also means more software and hardware compatibility. I think that's worth a periodic scan every so often and some slightly inconvenient security systems in place.
There already are. I barely missed a linux virus from a hijacked python package what... two years ago?
Linux desktops are quite non-homogenous though, so their vectors/nature is kinda different.
Sure, and they have been for decades. They're still not that common though.
What Python package almost got you?
I wonder if I've been hit but just haven't noticed because I tend to run things in containers.
Pytorch Nightly: https://pytorch.org/blog/compromised-nightly-dependency/
https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/04/pypi_pytorch_dependency_attack/
Funnily enough I can't even post what it does without the Lemmy comment filter zapping me, but it tried to scrape accounts and passwords.
Was pretty scary from my perspective. I missed it by a week. PyPi is a mess, and it makes me wonder how much isn't caught.
That is scary. But it does require using a custom repository, so hopefully few were hit.
We use poetry, enough which allows specifying additional package repos and it looks like we'd be susceptible to the same attack, but for our internal package index. Looks like I have something to fix this week, thanks for the link!
You say that like it's not already focused on. The majority of Internet infrastructure runs on Linux.
But the vast majority of viruses focus on end users.
I sometimes wonder what if everyone who spends money on licensing fees instead takes the same amount of money and puts it into FOSS. Imagine what we could achieve? Likely the money would be used more efficiently because they could donate it to non-profit companies which don't need to pay tax.
Just remember, the license fees mostly don't go into development, or maintenance, or security, or any of that, they mostly pay for "sales" which includes a strong component of end customer support. When you divert "all that money" into FOSS, FOSS development and maintenance might be lucky to get 20%, the other 80% will be spend training and employing tech support.
There are companies which offer training and support to FOSS. Companies could also pay those companies.
Yes, RedHat has been doing this for decades.
Thing is: RedHat probably can't price match M$ in a bidding war, probably not even close.
And there could be insight into whether the money is actually used for developing the relevant application.
https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/msft/dividend-history
I don't see how this gives any insight into how your subscription price is being used for products relevant to you.
Your subscription price is the source of those dividends. It pays the shareholders, it pays the sales staff's commissions, it pays for management, it pays for executive salaries and bonuses, it pays for legal counsel, it pays for political lobbying. Your subscription price is working hard, for the company, not for you.
Ahhh 😅😂
Would love to see further movements towards foss software in many other governments
Moreeeee MOREEEE preach it
LETS GOOOOO
This is great! I hope it succeeds, and shows others that it is possible.
it is just step 1
we will get rid of all closed source shit.
weak bavarians failed after successfull transistion to "LiMux" (their linux fork) they got bribed with 8k M$ jobs in munich.
but not the state of schleswig-holstein! we will prevail.
All I know about Bavaria is that their sheep seldom wear spectacles. Do sheep wear spectacles more often in Schleswig-Holstein?
Holy fuck, that's the clearest sign for war prepararion ive seen from Europe yet, they don't want the US in their computers.
This has been planned for quite some time, so not really.
Also, other states insist on using Palantir so there's that...
I have seen this happen before, for a while, then somehow M$ convinced them to switch back.
Yeah, I think this happens somewhere in Germany every few years. MS then makes a concerted effort to woo some politicians back, and a few years later we have news that a city or state is moving back to MS. Yes, it is good that cities / states are trying Linux and challenging MS, but there is soo much more to any of this than technical superiority or licensing fees.
188K dollars or euros, is basically the cost to put one warm sales body in the territory, to keep the hooks in acknowledging that they should be paid for their software.
To me, it's about digital sovereignty, and the states should stand on their own two feet and know how their own computers work, not just rely on a foreign company.
In other news: the German military partners with Google to provide the software for their new cloud service...
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Bundeswehr-relies-on-Google-Cloud-10397526.html
A small part of Germany, but maybe
Hopefully it sets an example and path for others to follow.
Don't worry. They'll get a big discount on licenses and swap right back again.
At that scale it starts to be about the cost of support, and if M$ will hold their hands for the installation, configuration and maintenance, at some point that costs the state more to provide for Linux than the M$ licenses... Of course, when they lean so heavily on M$ for keeping their systems running, the temptation for abuse becomes strong...
If I were "head of state" I would insist on development of homegrown talent to at least maintain the systems, hopefully configure and even build them too, not as a matter of money, but as a matter of security, independence, etc. I would try to pull back before reaching the point of developing locally used systems that aren't used elsewhere, that's not good long term, but if you develop the local talent to run the things, and they naturally build some of their own things, encourage that to be shared with the larger world in addition to leveraging the best shared (locally vetted, secure) tools from elsewhere.
I dunno, free's still a lot cheaper, once it's setup, it'll be so much more flexible, it'll hardly be worth going back.
Ain't no such thing as free.
Okay.
When it's just you, on your own PC, and you don't value your time, it's free.
Just from the license fees here, we're talking what, roughly 2000 employees?
At that scale, you're going to be paying for support. Whether through a third party, or employing enough people to fix all the things that can go wrong. And not everyone in IT knows enough about Linux to fix broken boxes.
I once recommended Linux for our customer servers, to be installed hundreds of miles away. And what I found was that employees who knew Linux (and specifically how to fix it when it fucks up) were more expensive than the trained monkeys we sent out to fix things, who at least knew how to copy data off it and reinstall Windows/slap a new drive in it, and that issues were my fault for recommending it. It was also easier to talk customers through some settings in Windows if it falls off the network somehow, than it was to deal with getting them to type things into a command line.
And that's before you even consider servers and where your stuff all goes. With MS it goes into "the cloud", and you don't need to worry too much about anything other than paying for it. With your own hardware, you very much need to worry because if you don't, then one day it won't be there any more.
Im not dumb guy, i was just talking in ..ah idc
I think you may have the thread confused.
So what's the right distro to prepare for a Russian invasion?
I admire the plan, but I doubt the public sector is going to completely acclimate to Linux. The average age of an employee in the public sector is something like 40+.
You might get lucky and get them to use one new program like LibreOffice, but there's no way you're going to completely revamp every desktop PC to Linux. I work in this field, and while everyone has been nice and friendly, they (and the entire system around them) are also hugely resistant to digital change. If they ever make the move to a Linux Desktop environment, the IT support will go through hell.
I know what you are saying, but it is not so bad: First of all, most things people are doing at work is not really related to the OS underneath. So if you are responsible for creating passports, you are using the special government program for passport creation. If you are a policeman, you are using the special police software to do your policework. Yeah, you need additional training, but in the best case your usual software keeps working. Most people are not really interacting with the OS during their work day.
(and let's be honest: Microsofts totally insane UI changes are also requiring lots of training. If you are used to just click on some specific buttons that somebody told you to click on, you're totally lost in Microsofts crazy wonderland of ridiculous UI changes )
Plus government computers are always old as shit so Linux should install nice and easy, give em mint for that windows like UI.
Cross platform app development has been a viable and very available choice for 20+ years now.
Organizations which are developing their specialty applications locked in to a specific OS.... get what they deserve.
Look im an IT guy, and enforcing 2FA for all accounts at our company directly caused at least 2 people to quit at my company.
People are enormously resistant to change. It doesn't even matter if it actually impacts their job or anything, they will freak out and complain.
Hell 2 weeks ago I added a 3rd AP to one of our offices and just the act of moving the APs around caused enough of a disturbance that HR heard about it. And that was me giving them better internet! There wasn't even any downtime! I just moved the things that sit on the ceiling and nobody notices!
Thereby measurably improving the workforce.
Somebody noticed.
Eh, I don't know. I've worked developing software for the administration and their computer use is just the applications (web or native) they had built to perform their tasks. The OS is very irrelevant to them, some orgs even had shortcuts to these native programs put in their intranet, back in the days of java applets.
There used to be skins for KDE that made it look and feel 1:1 like Windows XP, I don't know if these things still exist. If yes, there you have it: Just make the system behave like Windows and they won't notice a difference. They only have to use Office, Mail and print files anyways. Most other tools they use are browser-based and will feel the same way
Yep still exist.
The names have changed. I literally had that conversation with "an engineer" 20 years ago wherein he concluded "I don't know, if I have to learn new names for most of the programs I use (Word, Photoshop, maybe two others) I don't think I want to use that other OS." I had to support his position, if you can't retrain to click on "Libre Office Writer" instead of "Office Word", then a move to Linux isn't for you.
Except most people just click a link on their desktop that goes to a thing they have a completely different name for anyways. If you don't tell them anything (or just say it's a new version of Windows) they likely won't notice the actual differences, just complain about missing a specific icon for something without being able to correctly name what it is
Icons look different, etc. People are ridiculously inflexible.
Yet they are fine with using Windows 11, which looks completely different to Windows 7 or XP. They complained in the beginning just as much but then they were fine with it. People get used to change, they just hate it in the beginning.
When they have no choice...
I thought IT support was already in perpetual hell?
For the last 10+ years "the desktop" has been over 90% the browser, and the Chrome, Firefox, Edge user experiences are pretty similar to start with. Chrome on Linux vs Chrome on Windows is virtually indistinguishable.
I gave my wife a Dell laptop new from the factory with Ubuntu on it about 3 years ago. The printer support in Windows was already bad, and yes it's a bit worse in Linux, otherwise she just complains less and has fewer screaming fits of frustration.
I also work for the state and it's pretty discouraging how MS has us by the balls on everything. Every application we use is written in VB.net or Visual C# which also depend on running on a Windows server. Switching to Linux would be a nightmare and cost millions for no real gain. Maybe we could run SQL Server on Linux but I'm sure that even that has some gotchas that the state would not want to deal with.
That sounds like a ridiculously lowballed amount. Also, working with open source tools should increase productivity and decrease brainrot among workers in the public sector. Using Microshit kills brain cells. Not even joking, I actually think it makes users fucking dumb.
No idea where that number is from but at the start it's just going to be getting rid of MS Office and Exchange, switch to FLOSS telephony, not getting rid of Windows. Licensing costs for 30k seats are certainly higher but you have to offset that with not getting any support from MS any more. Dataport will need a couple of in-house developers to resolve issues and work with upstream. Actual development, not tier 1 support and translating administrative instructions into templates.
Also for the state it's not really about the money, but sovereignty. 188k are also peanuts in 18bn worth of state budget, that's yearly maintenance for what 30km of state roads. Given that we currently don't have any potholes we can afford it.
As to brainrot: Not really applicable. These are managed workplaces and not much will change on the end-user side.
Ah, okay - if Windows remains, they are not nearly exploiting the cost saving potential. That explains the low number.
I love software development, I hope they have such people as well. In terms of maintenance though, my (reasonably comolex) software is nearly maintenance free and much easier to operate. I believe that can be true for all custom developments, generic solutions are more complex by their nature of having more functions than needed in any specific use case.
Dataport is kinda hit and miss when it comes to developing. It was created by taking the small IT departments of different ministries, agencies, etc, of multiple states, and putting them all under a common roof. They did that because they realised that standard state administration structures and IT weren't really compatible but on the flipside, they also funded a whole new organisation with people accustomed to those very structures, and as dataport is still a public law corporation the internal administration -- think payroll and everything -- will still be done by career state bureaucrats.
It's a different kind of dysfunction than you see in the private sector but dysfunction nonetheless. OTOH working directly with FLOSS upstream will help: It's not that (sufficiently large) FLOSS projects don't have their own bureaucracy, and the bureaucrats that be on dataport's side will respect that.
Regarding maintenance: Aside from hardware upgrades because they make sense (power consumption) or you want new features (latest addition: Graphics tablets to allow citizens to sign stuff without having to print things), there's a constant churn in software requirements as new orders come in on what to do and how to do it. Just because you wrote perfect software doesn't mean that parliament stops passing laws.
As far as usability is concerned: Dataport will also have to train people, and they actually have the funds to do usability studies and such. Much will also depend on the different agencies they're working for, can't fix an agency's workflows for them, and that goes beyond mere IT. I guess a public-law consultancy does make sense but having a ministry for administrative affairs reeks of Sir Humphrey. I guess you could hide it by making it a subsidiary of the court of auditors.
There are some striking studies about how use of LLMs impacts cognition. You're not wrong.
Sadly I took my claim from observation of the real world. And I wasn't even talking about machine learning systems yet. Some teenagers and young adults nowadays are already walking zombies hooked to tiktok.
I am a walking zombie hooked to Lemmy!
Y'all are delusional.
Office is fantastic and better than goggle as well any foss alternative.
Is This Anal?
Close but no cigar!
Here, you dropped an /s
No. For $16 a month you get Windows + O365 + InTune + EntreID. That includes role based access to admin portals, as well as for SharePoint+ one drive. You get per object audit and logging access to protect IP, you can remotely disable and wipe stolen devices if needed.
None of that can be replicated in one product, the reality it's 10 or so subsystems that need to be maintained. It's labor intensive. Does it make sense for some companies or governments with scale to switch away? ABSOLUTELY!
Is this thread filled with a bunch of people that vastly underrate capabilities and ease of use because of a hatred of Microsoft and what they represent and an unwillingness to look at how the users and businesses actually feel and make decisions? ABSOLUTELY!
I think management and MSP experience in this thread is nil and I think probably nobody in here has ever actually worked at a directors level.
Trust me I have used Windows long enough to know what I am talking about. It has zero features that can't be replaced with an overall net positive. People who defend modern Microsoft products just suffer from Stockholm or Dunning Kruger syndrome
And I'm sure it'll work be run 24/7 with no downtime and a support desk along with a fleet of junior devs and admins working for the low low price of 35k s year right?
I'm sure it'll support everything we need for CMMC, most, iso, a gdpr right? No need to put key cloak in front of 40 apps to show horn in proper rbac and audit accounts. Again for $16 a month right?
You're a windws user, not even administering accounts or hardware. Your lack of experience is showing and your doubling down on "I've used Windows so I know" reeks of shit you see of non experts talking out of their ass.
Unless you've been in a leadership role and done a yearly budget, you have no clue. Adults with experience are talking here and you're just spiteful lolol
I agree with everything you said but it's "Entra", not "EntreID"
I hate microsoft as much as the next guy but their office suite is best in class. Its far better funded which makes it so surprising that the other suites arent to far behind. I think with proper funding other suites can get to a point where it makes sense to switch to them.
Is it? Almost every time I use it I end up hitting a bug or missing feature. Just last week I was trying to get Word in Office365 to keep some lines together. I followed the instructions from Microsoft's help and it didn't work. Last month I was trying to get "slide M of N" on the bottom of PowerPoint in Office365, but apparently getting the N is just not supported.
LibreOffice almost always works for me, far more often than Microsoft Office.
Look if you're struggling with ms office in this day and age idk what to tell ya. You might be cooked.
It's really not though. Most of what you can do with Office can be done with other tools, you just have to learn how to use them.
In libre office I can't get copilot to turn my entire report to slop in 2 clicks.
Drives me crazy. Rather than talking about how MS got here and how to fix it you get this screeching.
Same reason Linux desktop will never be mainstream unless valve keeps pumping billions into the shit regular the users need and want.
Yeah thats what I was trying to add with my reply. Ms is only better because its had 1000x the funding. But even with that funding its not 1000x better its only slightly better. This is a perfect time to fund alternatives and take away Microsofts monopoly.
We're on the same page. Sorry if I came off aggressive. These threads typically become immediate shit shows the second you bring up non favorable Linux points.
Lie to me once Microsoft shame on you, lie to me twice shame on me.
That is such a crazy amount of money on license fees, especially when you consider that there are mostly free alternatives. I am always choosing foss options as I build my small business.
Right now, I am using onedrive, and Microsoft for my business email. Which I think comes out to like $5 a month.
My understanding is that for reliable email, you need to host with microsoft or google otherwise you are more likely to get sorted into junk mail. If that is incorrect, please let me know.
I agree with your assessment of e-mail... you either rent under a big provider or you spend countless hours playing whack-a-mole with whitelist-blacklist keepers. The big providers do this too, but they're so big it's not a major slice of their operation.
License fees pay for development, sales, support, and profit. When you go open source you can skip the sales and profit, but you have to pick up a bit of development and ALL the support, which is considerable during times of big changes, like migration to a new desktop.
I don't know. I never had a problems with a smaller mail provider.
These days it's really about managing SPF and DKIM records. But I usually tell people just "use an email provider". It doesn't have to be a big one or anything, just someone else because email is an enormous headache and it's just frankly not worth it.
Even if you set up all of your records correctly, every other email provider is going to look into the reputation of your email server and a lot of them will still filter your stuff into junk mail because its 99% of people running their own email server are using it to serve junk mail.
Define smaller.
I gave up running mail through my own domain hosted by a "smaller" provider (Canadian hosting company with less than 1M clients) because I was constantly having delivery issues because somebody somewhere on an adjacent subnet got blacklisted for SPAM, or worse.
I would guess a few thousand users.
That might be borderline - probably easiest (and most cost efficient) to work through a big provider (M$, Google, etc) to let them solve the problems for you, for a small fee, rather than tasking 0.1 FTEs on constantly whacking the moles.
I don't know why it should be easier. I pay this provider and I get a working email account without problems.
If your provider is working for you, then all is good. I suspect they either A) have hundreds of thousands or more e-mail users in total, or B) they work through one of the big providers for you.
If your provider only serves 20,000 or fewer e-mail clients, the costs for them to independently play white-list, black-list, whack-a-mole, pleading to keep their legitimate users' e-mail working smoothly would be prohibitive - upwards of $10 per year per e-mail account just for the employee(s) tasked with negotiating (and solving) those issues behind the scenes for their users (including you), not to mention policing their users to prevent them from abusing the e-mail system.
It's basically a problem of prejudice - if any e-mail account remotely linkable to yours by any metric mis-behaves, some admin somewhere will block it along with anything remotely associated with it - including your e-mail service. Then it's up to you, or your organization, or your organization's service provider, to track down the offended party and somehow negotiate with them to restore the blocked services for the innocent users.
The domain name doesn't matter at all. The really important thing is the IP of your MTA (the server sending mails). Eg. if it was previously used to send spam you need to get a new one from your server provider, as it will be blocked everywhere. Also the server configuration needs to be good. Use dkim, dmark, spf, mta-sts, etc.
Kinda lame, but at the same time I get it.
So, I guess I’m sticking with OneDrive and Microsoft email.
I eventually migrated all my e-mail to gmail, because I don't feel any satisfaction or value out of "beating the system" to make my personal domain work as an e-mail address.
It isn't or the op posted the wrong number: 6 EUR/user/year is nothing for organizations
Good on them. Those are all solid choices.
I prefer Evolution over Thunderbird, personally. But to be fair, there aren’t any mail clients for Linux that I would say I genuinely like. I’m always open to suggestions, though.
I'm not seeing nextcloud mentioned in the article. If they are moving to nextcloud, I wish them the best. It's great for my personal use, but from my experience it's lacking in what I would expect in a work environment. With a government entity coming to use them, it would be fantastic to see some improvements on them because they're almost there.
I expect Germany itself will R&D on some Nextcloud plugins and tools. They'll likely use a specialized fork that they maintain.
Best I can give you is dataport looking for nextcloud admins, it's also listed as a component of dPhoenixSuite.
🤔 I wonder if they'll hire an American who barely dabbles in self hosting and doesn't speak 28.35 grams of German. Or would it be 29.6 mL?
Modulo everything, you need to have been a resident for at least five years to have any chance of getting security clearance. Also it would be "not a shredlet".
An interesting fact about Europe is they've long disobeyed their own procurement laws to choose Microsoft software, whether its corruption or what I've got no idea, I assume so though.
I think it's simple pragmatism. It will cost them, money and lost productivity, retraining all their computer users.
Regardless of the technical aspects, just the bitching and moaning of the workforce alone is enough to push the decision makers to take their chances with enforcers of the procurement laws instead.
I'm more surprised that a city in Germany didn't switch to Linux a decade or more ago.
Late to the party is still showing up, good for them.
Too busy faxing each other. Germany is Luddite Land, by choice.
Source: moved here 7 years ago. Germans are a weird bunch. Change is not welcome in just about any form.
Nice to see them adopt the open source apps, though. They can probably get some screaming deals on some US Robotics 56k modems on eBay Local.
🤪😘
I think they have already switched and went back at some point?
I think that's Munich
LiMux
Nope. Some other state that tried.
There in that place where closed systems are frowned upon, Install Linux, Problem Solved.
Good, amazing but I'm not a linux fanboy who will feel giddy for this. My friends would definitely press me over this. But yeah I'm happy
Ofc its Schleswig-Holstein. The only sane state with sane politicians
I think this has been tried before.
Yup. And MS had to bribe the city of Munich with moving their German HQ there to make them switch back.
It would be nice to redirect a part of that money to support the development of used software. Thunderbird for example is constantly at risk of being shut down.
That's 188k euro that can be used to improve the quality of open source software.
Good, good, but I guess it is only a plan to negotiate for lower prices.
But if they actually deliver without going back... 😍
I think the Netherlands did this a couple of years ago?
Unfortunately nextcloud sucks
So use some of that money saved to pay some nextcloud developers to improve it.
They need to refactor architecture. But all they do is stupid hub, communication that noone use.
They need to move to swoole and hyperf but they are not showing any intention and dumping all the money into crap.
I was thinking about trying it out on my server. Why does it suck?
I wouldn't say categorically that it sucks.
It is inefficient and requires far too many server resources for what it does. Won't really run on less than 2gb/RAM minimum, with 1-2 users.
Add ONS seem to be all over the place with lots of incompatibilities, some default add ons that just plain don't work.
In my short testing it seems to be a bit unstable.
In my opinion, it suffers from many of the same problems as other projects that started out and we're developed largely by hobbyists like zoneminder, and even home assistant to some extent. Sprawling growth, no strict architecture, little concern for refactoring.
Interesting. What would you recommend as an alternative?
I'm not sure myself, there seems to be better software out there for each individual part of what nextcloud does, but not the whole thing. I've been reading up on open cloud, which is a fork of a rewrite of owncloud, which is what nextcloud is forked from. https://opencloud.eu/en/opencloud-community
I haven't tried it out yet though.
I've been using it for over a decade. I use it to auto upload all my family photos from family phones. I use the calendars to organize. I use Notes on my phone all the time and pick them up my laptop. I use Passwords for all my passwords. I use Contacts to sync my contacts from my phone and Thunderbird. Then I nightly remote backup it to a machine I leave at my parent's. It's great.
Personal/Family use is fine, it's kinda fiddly but so is most selfhosted software.
At an organizational level, that fiddliness spirals into a ton of work, which doesn't really overlap with other IT Duties in the way that troubleshooting OneDrive usually ends up solving problems with the whole Microsoft suite.
In my experience troubleshooting OneDrive issues is usually just restarting the OneDrive application or resyncing SharePoint sites
It's based on legacy share nothing PHP architecture which is extremely inefficient for something like nextcloud