Also Microsoft products have become enshitified beyond recognition.
I teach boomers how to use SharePoint. Last week Microsoft updated office.com to be 95% copilot. The only way to find “All Apps” (word, SharePoint, PowerPoint, excel, etc.) is to find the tiny little “apps” button all the way at the bottom of the screen.
Everything else is copilot. Everyone is confused and my job just got 100% harder.
I can’t recall a single MS product that ever was good. Maybe I was late to the party (or quit early, as lots of people seam to like vscode for some reason)
Important notice in this regard is that there is agreement on this among both left and right wing politicians.
So this is NOT something that will change with new administrations in either government or local communities.When this is implemented, I don’t see any way for Microsoft to get that business back!
Edit PS:
It’s not just office, it’s also mail and cloud services.People complain different, government sees increased costs, and then they switch back
IDK if you read the article, but in 5 years cost of licenses paid to Microsoft increased 72%.
Also even if cost increase temporarily, it creates local jobs skills knowhow and tax revenue. Every “dollar” spend benefits the local community! instead of just sending the money to USA.
Servicing with open source and Linux will rapidly become cheaper than Microsoft, because there will be no artificial disruptions caused by Microsoft planned obsolescence or forced updates or whatever crap Microsoft is pushing.I feel like there has to be a push in education for open source success
The majority of Internet infrastructure runs on either something Linux based or something FreeBSD based.
A lot of the tools used are also various flavours of open or semi open source.
I’d say open source already has success. Just not in places where you see consumers using it. Except… Wait a minute, Android is a fork of Linux, and Android is open source too.
I wouldn’t consider Android a fork, the differences at the kernel level aren’t unlike differences you might find on embedded devices. It mainly just has the Google software suite instead of GNU
Also the PS4/5 run on freebsd
But that’s not what is being compared
Yes average people need to learn the open source stack instead of Microsoft.
It used to be most people could just learn some Microsoft thing, and they were almost guaranteed a job. Obviously a lot of people will be unhappy that isn’t the case anymore, and they’ll be annoyed they have to learn something new.But this should have been done 20 years ago when Linux was obviously ready for it, and sensible people have advised it for just as long.
In the old CP/M days we had lots of good software developed locally, but when IBM became dominant, and chose to use MS-Dos, Microsoft was verycleverlydeviously leveraging that to sabotage the competition, and take mostly every main stream market.Trump is kind of a blessing in disguise, because he finally got people to wake up to reality.
Local libraries here and there in Copenhagen have already switched to Manjaro. Haven’t heard anyone complain about it.
Libreoffice for the fucking win!
north germany is doing the same.
anyone remember limux? bill gates attacked german democracy bribing munich to drop limux in favor if windows in exchange for 8000 jobs.
fuck the windows user too though.
The funny thing about that story, and the outset that no one covered after the fact, is that Munich reversed direction again and ultimately did go with Linux and open source stacks.
not really true. so 20(!!!) years later they as the last of the states woke up.
bavaria is pathetic. “LANGSAM” is their word for being backwards and ultra-conservative. i mean Freie Wähler? Aiwanger? What a shit place. And it is just SAD that they just NOW started to civilize. worst of the west.
I don’t see anything contradicting what the other person said.
I’m a Dane and I approve this, massively.
I think if I were any non-US government I’d be very seriously thinking about not using Microsoft software at this time, particularly if it connects to the cloud. And that goes for companies with government contracts, or merely companies who are potential targets of industrial espionage.
That said, LibreOffice needs to tap the EU for funding to broaden its features and also improve the UX because it’s not great tbh. It can be extremely frustrating using LibreOffice after using MS Office, in part because the UI is so different, noisy with esoteric actions, and very unrefined compared to its MS counterpart. That needs funding and to get to the point that somebody can pick up LibreOffice for the first time and not be surprised or stuck by the way it behaves.
When it comes to the UI, I guess it depends on what you’re used to. The LibreOffice UI is a lot more similar to the UI used by MS Office 2003, so I’ve always been pretty comfortable with it. But Microsoft’s “ribbon” UI which debuted back in 2007 is now old enough to vote, so I can see how there are people out there where that’s all they’ve ever used.
Personally, while I’ve learned to deal with it in Word and Outlook, even after all of these years the ribbon still pisses me off every time I have to use Excel.
The ribbon was contentious but most people are familiar with it and it has advantages like taskcentricity and less clutter. LibreOffice has an experimental ribbon that I think should be worked on, mainstreamed and set during installation or in the settings.
UX in other areas should be improved. Lots of little annoyances add up for new users and can break their opinions. It’s not hard to look over the UI and see things which have no business being there, or should only appear in certain contexts, or could be implemented in better ways. I think the project should get some MS Office volunteers into a lab and ask them to do things and observe their problems. I’d have power Word, Excel, Powerpoint users come in and do non-trivial things they normally do and see where they trip up or even if they can do what they need.
Exactly recently downloaded Libre on my PC and it looks dated and busy, plus not their fault but every Office doc I open in a Libre app looks bad, the formatting and fonts are off and every change I make it says it can’t save in the office format and suggests converting the document to ODT format, that alone will scare away casual users who don’t understand what an open format is
Also good and free: Sumatra You can read any pdf.
Libre office drawer you can sign. No need for acrobat or any of that garbage.
Sumatra? I am going to take note of that.
Including adobe acrobat form pdfs?
Lets go Libreoffice. I hope to see more FOSS projects embraced.
Is it because they’re better and free? It’s because they’re better and free. I bet that’s it.
I wonder if it creates more inhouse sysadmin jobs? When you buy a license from M$ you also get tech support. But if you have problems with open source, you gotta go get a computer person
Not necessarily, lots of open source projects offer enterprise support contracts and in house staff could be retrained. Definitely going to be good for training, consulting, and MSPs though
Possibly does. On occasion I read about German cities trying to do similar, but then reverting back to M$.
Most of the issues are around people not wanting to take time to get use to new software (happened at a job where they moved to GSuite) or the FOSS stuff not having a corporation that can be sued for loss of earnings (like crowd strike when they didn’t read only friday). Note that these are not technical issues with FOSS.
Still there is political support to not just use this as an angle to get M$ to lower their pricing.
LETS GOOOOOOO
Anyone else think that this could lead enough pish for IT independence that a company starts selling micro clouds. Jist a bog ole computer that handles a semi local cloud say at a campus scale. Amd we just swing back to mainframes
I just hear that they move to LibreOffice but not to Linux, ateast not right now.
Everyone in tech did this 10 plus years ago.
