Schleswig-Holstein, Germany’s most northern state, is starting its switch from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, and is planning to move from Windows to Linux on the 30,000 PCs it uses for local government functions.
Concerns over data security are also front and center in the Minister-President’s statement, especially data that may make its way to other countries. Back in 2021, when the transition plans were first being drawn up, the hardware requirements for Windows 11 were also mentioned as a reason to move away from Microsoft.
Saunders noted that “the reasons for switching to Linux and LibreOffice are different today. Back when LiMux started, it was mostly seen as a way to save money. Now the focus is far more on data protection, privacy and security. Consider that the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) recently found that the European Commission’s use of Microsoft 365 breaches data protection law for EU institutions and bodies.”
The idea that a state government is unnecessarily at the mercy of any corporation is hard to comprehend. Especially, as in this case, a foreign corporation.
Open source shouldn’t only be the standard for governments. It should be the minimum requirement.
IMO it should be further than that.
Open source software is, more often than not, used as digital infrastructure.
Governments around the world should absolutely be investing in open source software and actively contributing to it.
They do. https://code.mil/
Let me tell you a story about proprietary software:
The German police force have a contract with a software firm that wrote their program to file and archive emergency calls. Basically just a form that goes to a database. Now, one day, an update got pushed. The problem with that update was that the hotkey for quitting out of the current form (q) now also fired when inside an editing field. The software firm did not acknowledge that as a problem and it took months of complaints to fix and it cost the taxpayer around 300,000€ in “maintenance fees”.
This isn’t going to happen.
This headline comes up every year that it’s time for the government to negotiate contracts with Microsoft. Once they get the best price they think they can, they will accept it and issue a news release that “we’re staying in Windows after all”.
It’s lame, but it’s what is going to happen.
Munich did exactly that in 2017, so let’s see how far Sleswig-Holstein is willing to go, hopefully they won’t be falling for Microsofts sweet talk.
The reason Munich switched back to Windows, when users were just fine working with Limux, was a corrupt politician who ordered the return to windows, probably pocketing a hefty bribe in the process.
Source?
https://www.zdnet.de/88202452/stadt-muenchen-erwaegt-abkehr-von-linux/
The article from 2014 explains how this was mostly a political quarrel, with a former administration transitioning away from Microsoft (which as a US corporation has no business in any government administration of another country), and the conservatives pushing (under a “social democrat” mayor, admittedly) to go back to MS against technological advice.
Im Stadtrat hingegen steht den Berichten zufolge eine fraktionsübergreifende Mehrheit hinter LiMux. Bettina Messinger, Sprecherin der SPD-Fraktion für Personal, Verwaltung und IT, sagte Heise Online, dass man keine neue Haltung zu dem Thema habe. Sie bezeichnete die Umstellung auf Linux als „mutige Entscheidung“. Kritische Stimmen und Beschwerden seien im EDV-Bereich nichts Ungewöhnliches. Man müsse LiMux und das Umfeld nun stetig verbessern und nutzerfreundlicher gestalten. Unter anderem sei dafür mehr IT-Personal in der Verwaltung nötig.
Auch die CSU-Fraktion unterstützt LiMux weiter. Deren IT-Experte Otto Seidl nannte Schmidts Kritik „eine sachfremde Einzelmeinung eines Juristen“. Die Grünen warnen Heise zufolge vor einem „teuren Schildbürgerstreich“, sollte die Stadt zu Microsoft zurückkehren. Demnach wollen die Abgeordneten in einer Ausschusssitzung klären, woher die Beschwerden stammen.
In other words: the “manyfold complaints” were an “ad populum” argument without sources and were most likely made up.
!remindme 1 fiscal quarter
This is the sexiest thing Germany has done since that German couple that drives the Porsche in Super Troopers.
Good!!! I hope other governments follow.
Good. Now, you want to make a bigger impact? Do the schools.
This might actually happen in Germany
I genuinely hate AI art
Right? The rash of AI images used in journalism is genuinely troubling. It seems like at least 50% of news article thumbnails I see are AI these days.
And, like…are those penguins in the back cheering with human arms? Is that an orca jumping out of the water? What the fuck is going on.
Damn I didn’t even notice. Guess I don’t really look at the pictures.
It’s the most sophisticated thing about the whole article, unfortunately.
I love this, but having used ms office extensively for work, we all know it has many more features. Libreoffice isn’t a drop in replacement, but maybe with the increased user base it can become one.
It really depends on the needs.
When my entire company (10k employees) switched to LibreOffice, it was almost fine. There was like 50 ppl who were frustrated at breaking changes. But many adapted and it was a pretty clean transition.
As for LibreCalc, fuck that. What a nightmare. Employees resorted to creating Google accounts to use Google Sheets instead. We still don’t have a solution, and if one particular director gets his way, that whole department might switch back to Windows just for Excel.
Meanwhile another german city (munich) is going back to MS
but maybe with the increased user base it can become one.
You think the state will contribute? I highly doubt that. At best it will be gov specific functionalities.
You’d need a massive increase in tech support. Likely more than you’d spend on ms in the first place. Seems a political gambit or a political gaff.
Wasn’t it Munich who did that a few years back, only to backtrack sometime later?
I fully expect this to get backtracked almost immediately. From my experience most government employees can barely handle a browser upgrade with a UI change, and they will 100% throw a collective fit if their Word and/or Outlook goes away.
It’s not just office, SH and many other parts of the German government have been slowly replacing the entire O365 suite with OpenDesk, which is an open source product based on Matrix, Jitsi, LibreOffice, and a few other tools.
The goal is to have a fully integrated solution for calender, chat, calls, documents, cloud storage, etc.
My employer is developing parts of that solution and we recently switched our internal communication over to it, and tbh, it’s working really well.
Now is the perfect point in time to do it, with the GDPR ruling regarding O365 and Microsoft fumbling the migration between old teams and new teams.
Which is good, since M$ Office is still one of (if not the) biggest security holes in all of software due to its macros and how no one uses them securely.
Also also doing things the OS way will lead to less changes in the long run since Microsoft can and will change their layouts as they please, but a well maintained FOSS-fork can stay one way indefinitely.
You are right. But what epic dunces.
Employer could pass the savings onto the staff with a payrise though.
“Staff who learn to use these new Linux applications will receive a bonus/payrise. Staff who do not will go to corner and wear the special hat”
I think trying to sell a switch to opensource as a saving is wrong on two counts…
Firstly it just sets the platform up for hatred. “We know you guys like expensive wine at the Christmas party, but this year we decided to get cheap-but-still-ok wine! Yaay, go team!”.
Secondly, any savings should be poured straight back into training and support. Users should be able to ask dumb questions like “how do I create a new word document” and get a more or less instant response.
Eh, it’s civil servants. They’ll be sent to training, if it turns out they can’t be trained they’ll have choice between quitting or working where their qualifications suffice. Have them walk dikes to find rabbit burrows if need be.
I wonder what they will choose for their base. I was surprised LiMux was based off Debian since Suse is headquartered in Luxembourg City. I personally would welcome a large organization choosing Suse products as we need more competition for RHEL (which would be a huge boon in productivity since we won’t need like 3 projects to spend a decent amount of time repackaging RHEL).
According to an old interview, pretty much whatever: They’re saying “five big distributions are suitable”.
They’re starting the switch with apps, not the OS. From a technical POV it’d be nice to see NixOS as it’s devops / managed deployment heaven. It also happens to be European and, just like Debian, it’s a community distro.
For a project of this size, doubly and triply if it gets even more states as users, it absolutely does make sense to have your own release channel, have a team working on nothing but pushing patches (security and otherwise) onto an LTS branch and upstream as well as integration testing for the precise desktop you’re shipping to users: The states are paying them to support a desktop, not an OS to run whatever on.
Nix does have an interesting package manager.
The states are paying them to support a desktop, not an OS to run whatever on.
Don’t they need money to fund both aspects? Is there any support to lean on someone goes with Nix?
A lot of governments in the US pretty much go through Microsoft for simplicity. There’s a lot of software obtained from a single vendor. I suppose that’s why rhel is so popular.
Dataport is big enough (5200 employees) to support that kind of thing themselves, and they precisely are the single vendor for the participating states (it’s an inter-state public corporation). More than twice the employees Suse has, quarter the size of RedHat.
Good to know. I did not realize that this team was this large. I hope it works out.
Switching to an open-source project is easy, but the concern is more about the context in which they are used and how long they will persist in using these. It might be more convenient for the government to initially try Linux for some pilot projects that require less human intervention. This is because I’m not sure how familiar civil servants are with Linux and LibreOffice. On the other hand, open-source projects don’t provide after-sales services and may have technical or compatibility issues. It requires time for them to get accustomed to them.
According to the article,
- They are also migrating backend infrastructure such as emails servers etc.
- They already have Linux migration experience in some German states as well as the current proposer.
- Companies such as RedHat, Canonical and OpenSuse do offer enterprise level support. So open source software doesn’t have “after sales” support is a myth.
- They say that the goal of the migration is privacy and security, no necessarily cost driven. They may very well be prepared to pay a premium for enterprise level support.
- They have already identified compatibilities issues in their previous project. They got them because they mixed Windows and Linux, the article says. That’s why they migrate everything to Linux this time.
Your clarification helps me understand their swtiching. Thanks 👍
I wish my country would also stop subsidising M$ and transition to Linux as well.
It is all about private “dinners”.
They’ve thought about that too, and see training as vital where others before them have failed. Also OS and programs will look somewhat similar to what users are used to, from what I can recall.
Producing documents or e-mails can’t be that functionally different, right? Many don’t need much more than that. However, I could see integration of third-party software as a challenge, but one that in most cases could be easily overcome.
Producing documents or e-mails can’t be that functionally different, right?
If you do complicated stuff in docx and then try open it in something like Libre the formatting will be interpreted differently.
Source: I partly create forms for templats in Libre/OpenOffice at work.
Yeah for the simple stuff LibreOffice will be just fine but for anything complex like mail merges and such it’s probably going to require a lot of work re-doing things.
When someone uses a text editor like LibreOffice, whenever someone mentions complex tasks, I’d imagine writing a thesis, a series of books, a big ass report or the like. Mail merges sound like something another app should do…
Yeah LibreOffice will do things like mail merges, but I mean it will probably require relearning the process. It will be different than the process they used with MS Office.
If you just porting over simple things like letters and simple documents you should be able to move back and forth between MS Office and LibreOffice with few changes.
Boom. Listen up NHS England.
Hey, can you hear that? That’s the sound of hundreds of IT support workers silently crying out at the thought of having to explain a whole new OS and new office software to some boomer.
Doubt it. Most users are point-and-droolers with no understanding nor desire to learn the base concepts behind the interfaces they’re using. No IT worker has ever successfully explained a technical concept to an (l)user in the history of ever. By now we’re smart enough not to try.
These people learn how to use computers at their jobs by rote, not by comprehension, and to them one word processor, spreadsheet, or browser is much the same as any other once they learn where all the buttons are that make it do what they want, and their interest in any of it stops precisely at that point and no further. There will be some grumbling about “the new system is so much worse than the old system,” but that very same grumbling always happens whenever the “system” changes, regardless of whether or not the new one or the old one was actually the worse of the two.
Furthermore, these days I guarantee you the majority of the work they do is entirely within a browser via some ghastly intranet site which will not look or behave any differently on Linux vs. Windows vs. Mac vs. a Chromebook vs. a graphing calculator, etc.
I am one of the sysadmins that will have to deal with the Fallout of this. I dont worry to much about the desktop side of things, Users can offen adapt well enough to clicking a different icon to do the same task. What worries me is moving away from Exchange and Microsoft AD, these systems include a lot of features we take for granted and will likely be missed.
Some helpful links:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kerberos
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Active_Directory_integration
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Samba/Active_Directory_domain_controller
Suggest you run a small virtual lab to get your head around things.
It is doable, and there are articles out there about sysadmins running it with great success in a mixed environment.
Good luck, admin 👍🏻
I hired an accountant to do my taxes this year and her company had just switched to Libre Office and she, a boomer, could t figure out how to open a fucking CSV with it. She kept complaining about it just being a string of numbers and letters.
I resorted to providing her with PDFs instead.
Wait? Don’t you just double click?
Unless they are opening it in text editor?!
No fucking clue
I think it is fine if everything they used to do have a replacement, my wife has been using my laptop running silverblue for personal laptop, doing homework and everything, until she want to use affinity photos or forced to use docx.
That being said, docx is invented specifically sabotage of open document standard and cross compatibility, but I installed onlyoffice for her, and everything is fine now. And if she spent as much time in GIMP and dark table, she should be as happy as in affinity photo, since she doesn’t use that many features anyway.
Same happened with her father in law, he was trying to do some business work, I give him the silverblue laptop, and opened only office. He can work just as normal, after I told him how to use the super key in gnome.
Most office worker, and students only uses very limited functionality of some software, if all of which has a decently intuitive replacement, I think they will be happy.
Ich verwende übrigens Arch.
*Gewölbe
*Bogen
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