I'm specifically interested in seeing how the transition from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice goes. My boss has been pondering the possibility of migrating us from Word and Excel to Writer and Calc. My concern, as someone who exclusively uses LibreOffice at home, is those edge-cases where another entity sends us a document that has some weird behavior that might not be properly replicated in LibreOffice. I don't know much about the German government's typical document practices, but I think this will be a good case study on the viability of LibreOffice in a more serious production environment.
this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
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Also, chances are it will eliminate these edge-case-problems for everybody else in the future.
Since they will be able to add these missig functionalities to LibreOffice for everybody else to use too.
Yeah, good luck with that. There's the famous case of Munich (I think it was Munich?) moving their governmental workers from Windows to Linux. After a few years they went back. Unfortunately the average working enduser is still not ready to just use Linux. Especially not if its a Word/Excel/PowerPoint type of job.
Edit: ah, example is in the article.
Yeah, just reading the headline, I was like, didn't this already happen like a decade or so ago?
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In 2021, Jan Philipp Albrecht, then-minister for Energy, Agriculture, the Environment, Nature, and Digitalization of Schleswig-Holstein, discussed interest in moving the state government off of Windows.
This week's announcement also said that the Schleswig-Holstein government will ditch Microsoft Sharepoint and Exchange/Outlook in favor of open source offerings Nextcloud and Open-Xchange, and Mozilla Thunderbird in conjunction with the Univention active directory connector.
Explaining the decision, the Schleswig-Holstein government's announcement named enhanced IT security, cost efficiencies, and collaboration between different systems as its perceived benefits of switching to open source software.
Schrödter also claimed that the move would help with the state's budget by diverting money from licensing fees to "real programming services from our domestic digital economy" that could also create local jobs.
In 2021, Albrecht said the state was reaching its limits with proprietary software contracts because "license fees have continued to rise in recent years," per Google's translation.
In 2013, the LiMux project finished, but high associated costs and user dissatisfaction resulted in Munich announcing in 2017 that it would spend the next three years reverting back to Windows.
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I don't think they said what flavor of Linux in the article.
Maybe SuSE?