Following a successful pilot project, the northern 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) on the 30,000 PCs used in the local government. As reported on the homepage of the Minister-President: Independent, sustainable, secure: Schleswig-Holstein will […]
I think reducing their reasons to ideological is not fair. They stand to save a lot of money, reduce the risk of leaking data (to MS or hackers), and will have the ability to fork/add their own features.
While I am not familiar enough with Calc or Excel to comment on the speed, I imagine having an entire government using it could get the ball rolling on optimizations.
They’re also just doing office drone shit, probably on mint or something, probably with each one only using like four programs, three of them in libreoffice and one a web browser.
Downloads folder. Documents folder. The USB drive I just plugged in.
IT staff will need to be trained, mostly. That’s much more feasible.
The money that will be saved is peanuts compared to the cost of the workers. Loss of productivity through the implementation of bad tools can be very costly. The various Microsoft Office programs also offer the possibility to add bespoke features. Microsoft Office does not leak data unless you chose to let it do so, at least in the eu.
Optimizations that might happen once a program with unacceptable performance is in a production environment, are generally optimizations that never happen. I’ve never seen a program make such a turnaround, it’s wishful thinking without a basis in reality.
This thing really is set up for failure. I’m not against organisations moving away from products from large monopolistic companies, rather the opposite, I’m very much in favor. But if the move is done in such a way that it’s bound to fail and then cement itself into people’s mind as a bad thing, then it has accomplished the opposite of what it has set out to do. Right now Linux is ready for widespread adoption in environments where productivity matters, but in my experience libre office is not.
I think reducing their reasons to ideological is not fair. They stand to save a lot of money, reduce the risk of leaking data (to MS or hackers), and will have the ability to fork/add their own features.
While I am not familiar enough with Calc or Excel to comment on the speed, I imagine having an entire government using it could get the ball rolling on optimizations.
Do they? They’ll now have to start training people to use Linux.
These people aren’t going to be enthusiasts like us. They need to be shown where everything is.
They’re also just doing office drone shit, probably on mint or something, probably with each one only using like four programs, three of them in libreoffice and one a web browser.
Downloads folder. Documents folder. The USB drive I just plugged in.
IT staff will need to be trained, mostly. That’s much more feasible.
The money that will be saved is peanuts compared to the cost of the workers. Loss of productivity through the implementation of bad tools can be very costly. The various Microsoft Office programs also offer the possibility to add bespoke features. Microsoft Office does not leak data unless you chose to let it do so, at least in the eu.
Optimizations that might happen once a program with unacceptable performance is in a production environment, are generally optimizations that never happen. I’ve never seen a program make such a turnaround, it’s wishful thinking without a basis in reality.
This thing really is set up for failure. I’m not against organisations moving away from products from large monopolistic companies, rather the opposite, I’m very much in favor. But if the move is done in such a way that it’s bound to fail and then cement itself into people’s mind as a bad thing, then it has accomplished the opposite of what it has set out to do. Right now Linux is ready for widespread adoption in environments where productivity matters, but in my experience libre office is not.
Every time I see someone say ‘I’m actually really a fan of open source’ it reads like ‘I’m not racist but’.