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Munich's IT Lead: 'No Compelling Reason' To Switch Back To Windows From Linux (techrepublic.com)
"The man who runs Munich's central IT says there is no practical reason for the city to write off millions of euros and years of work to ditch its Linux-based OS for Windows," reports TechRepublic. Long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino summarizes a German-language article:
Karl-Heinz Schneider, lead of Munich's local system house company IT@M, goes on to claim, "We do not see pressing technical reasons to switch to MS and MS Office... The council [in their recent plans] didn't even follow the analysts' suggestion to stick with using LibreOffice." Furthermore, Schneider stated that "System failures that angered citizens in recent years never were related to the LiMux project, but due to new bureaucratic procedures..." and apparently decisions by unqualified personnel at the administrative level, as Munich's administration itself states.
Windows paid off the right people to switch back.
That said, open source software is great until you have to use it. OpenOffice, GIMP, KiCad...all needlessly convoluted.
Um, it cost that much to switch to Linux? This can't be encouraging to other cities / governments. Exactly how was the money and time spent? Inquiring minds want to know!
...omphaloskepsis often...
Whenever I read stories like this, ie. Windows vs. Linux vs. OSX vs. it seems to always be from the perspective of the implementers or those looking to make a point about whether it can be done. Why not offer choice? Why the constant insistence that users must have the flavour of the day foisted upon them?
There is complexity in running an estate with multiple OS on offer but the truth is, any sysadmins capable of running a *nix infrastructure and operation should find supporting and mainlining other OS estates relatively straightforward.
In my personal life I make good use of all 3 mainstream OS and at work I have a choice which is made available all users too.
And with modern browsers offering productivity suites through web based platforms and file storage and infrastructure delivered via consolidated IaaS / AWS / Azure / Google Compute / NEOther why does anyone even care about the opinions techies have in regards to their own preferences.
Use what's right for you and let the technology work with your choice to ensure interoperability, security and information management. That's where the techies should focus.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
How could they omit software licensing and infrstructure costs in the estimate? That is not a trivial amount of money by a long shot.
Well thank God Munich woke up! Believe it or not, I still like Windows. They do support certain applications that I can't get on Linux. (Its possible that I am simply not good enough yet to get them to work since I'm new at it.) But one thing Windows has to realize.. I - am - the - customer. Not the other way around!! I'm not your slave, and there are other operating systems around. Windows, you are replaceable! If I were you, I'd go back to giving the customer choices, flexibility, and privacy.
Better than Micro$oft Office 365.
Better than Micro$oft Office 365.
By a country mile.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
You do realize that most people don't need to create complex spreadsheets, right? LibreOffice Calc, or even Google Spreadsheets will do just fine, then.
You know what is a real piece of garbage? Notepad.exe
Hieroglyphics died out as a language, yet Microsoft chose it as their interface! LibreOffice is more production, Microsoft might be too stubborn to fix that awful ribbon, but that's how it is.
Not everybody needs complex spreadsheets, but even simple ones can be made a lot better with couple key features from Excel that seem to be missing in Open/Libre Office. The major missing thing is defining tables. It makes things so much easier to work with in Excel and OpenOffice has no equivalent feature.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The major missing thing is defining tables. It makes things so much easier to work with in Excel and OpenOffice has no equivalent feature.
Is there any benefit to that over simply adding another sheet/tab to the spreadsheet, besides making it prettier? That's not useless, but generally speaking if you are approaching the level of complexity where it matters, wouldn't you be better off with a webapp? I don't want to hand a user a spreadsheet they can break, ever, and I'm smart enough to select a different tab and enter some data into it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Just wait until you discover emoji.
Obvious solution: switch to ReactOS. Or, if that seems too time consuming, just install Gentoo.
Business people live and breathe Excel. They know what they are doing.
I've seen plenty of evidence that they don't.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is a glaring example of corruption at work. Microsoft bribes the council into shoveling millions back into Microsoft. I wish I could say something like, "how are these clowns not being thrown out of office?!" However, this is standard operating procedure in corrupt governments around the world.
Yeah, I thought so too, right up until I found an entire department manually calculating and entering results into a spreadsheet.
You might as well have them write it in a notebook.
LibreOffice is actually what I use, because I don't have to use it very often (10 times per year). For that, I don't want to pay for MS Office and I have moved away from piracy as I've gotten older. I probably still have a cracked Office 2007 on a DVD around here somewhere...
Honestly, it's fine as long as you don't have to use it that often, e.g. when someone insists on sending you .doc/.docx files. But I imagine the city of Munich has to use it quite a bit more than I do. If Office-related stuff is a regular part of your job, invest in MS. Frankly, it's one of the few things they do better than everyone else.
I don't see what relevance Notepad.exe has to this conversation.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
Apparantly you are wrong, https://www.google.com.au/sear... leads to https://ask.libreoffice.org/en.... Wow that was really so hard.
Next step in this story should be a in depth investigation of why the new incoming politician pushed so hard on this apparently with zero consultation with his IT staff. Most probable, M$ paid them a bribe (campaign contribution) to push it, so the arse holes at M$ could use if for marketing purposed and the stupendously invasive POS windows anal probe 10, dies a slow grim death.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Usually that job is to _advise_, but not to _undermine_ his bosses. Advising is something you do internally, not publicly.
Look, I get he cares about this. But if his bosses tell him to make sure application or OS get installed, it's his job to make it so - and not to bitch about it in public. If he doesn't like his job, I'm sure there are plenty of other people who will do it without complaints.
MS made a deal with Munich's mayors office to move its german headquarters to Munich. Wonder what the other side of that deal was...
LO may be a better editor.
It's terrible at being compatible with MS Office though, which is sadly the number one must-have feature of an office suite. And only MS Office nails it, and then only within the current version.
LibreOffice is probably better at being compatible with old versions of Office than modern versions of Office though. Many's the time I've seen old Office documents rescued by being loaded into LibreOffice and saved as a more modern format that the current version can understand.
As long as all your target document recipients are either using LibreOffice, or will accept PDF, you're fine. If you have to send your documents to someone who uses MS Office, you can't rely on LibreOffice not to embarrass you horribly - even though it's MS Office screwing up the formats, layouts, footers/headers, etc.
To be fair we can say the same thing about app developers :-)
1. IT Lead originally failed to understand the needs of the users of such system.
2. IT Lead implements alternative to MS software that doesn't meet the needs of the users
3. Users say "this doesn't do what we want, lets go back to how it was"
4. IT Lead blames shift back to MS software on the users; "System fails [were] due to new bureaucratic procedure"
Ie, IT Lead implemented something the users didn't need or want and is blaming the users for that.
It might be an unpopular opinion on a tech site; but people are people and sometimes, tech people get things wrong too. It's very possible the IT lead here just did a bad job.
Learn the features of Excel tables.
That helps, yes.
Business people live and breathe Excel.
Well, some do. Many of them think they do. There's a difference.
They know what they are doing.
Most of them definitely do not know what they are doing, based on 20+ years of experience in a number of companies watching the utter messes most of them produce.
I'm not sure whether MSOOXML compatibility is terribly important, though. I very rarely see .docx files in the wild; pretty much everyone is still using .doc - and LO's Office 97/2003 compatibility is rock solid, at least for the documents I've encountered so far.
The document format where you absolutely must have the proprietary software package would be PDF these days - while you can open most PDFs in any old PDF reader, some places will send you documents as interactive, heavily scripted PDF files that (badly) try to reinvent Excel. Good luck trying to deal with those without an up-to-date version of Adobe Reader.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
If a person lives and breathes spreadsheets and thinks they are the solution for all their business needs then they are completely incompetent.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
The telling phrase there is "And only MS Office nails it, and then only within the current version."
That's a dead giveaway that you don't have a document, you have an artifact of a very specific release (and possibly even very specific maintenance) of a certain software product. Not exactly something you can enjoy through the ages.
Back before soft fonts were the norm, we used to have horrible problems in my office with documents that when passed from one person to another would completely lose their page integrity even though everyone was using the same version of Windows and the same version of Office. Because the typesetting metrics were computed based on what physical fonts were installed in their printers. Soft fonts reduced the problem, since every user could be supplied with the exact same fontset irrespective of their brand, model, and options of printer(s).
If you absolutely, positively must have pixel-accurate page rendition, generate a PDF. That's what they're designed for. If you simply want word-processing rather than page layout, you can make your documents a LOT more portable simply by not using the word-processing program as a dumb typewriter. Don't use the "Return" key to determine vertical spacing or the space bar to determine horizontal spacing. Use tabs and styles. Use the paragraph widow/orphan attributes. Use hard page breaks if you want an absolute location for a page break.
Do this and you'll be amazed at how well most documents will travel to/from Open/Libre Writer and MS-Word. And, for that matter, between different copies of MS-Word.
AFAIK the new major of Munich boasts that he was the one responsible for Microsoft relocating their German HQ from Frankfurt to Munich so this is most definitely political and not technical.
Is there a "word processing mode"?, or "content mode"?
When we hit return twice to space out paragraphs, it's because that's easier and in the mean time the paragraphs are spaced out, like we intend to.
If we're not supposed to do that, so much as it's considered harmful, maybe there should be a GUI mode where you're constrained from doing that. You hit enter and it doesn't let you go down one more line unless you do something "right" like introduce a new paragraph, section, page break etc.
If word processors default to being a typewriter, and the proper way of using it (even since the 90s) is an "advanced" feature that requires going into menus and trying to figure out what the hell a "style" is, while a single manual adjustment breaks it all, then maybe the design of word processors is flawed.
WIH Are you even using Word instead of simply using Windows Notepad?
The whole point of having a word processor over a simple text editor is because it provides a smarter, more powerful way of creating and maintaining formatted documents.
When you want to double-space between paragraphs, you hit Enter twice between each paragraph. And, of course, subject yourself to random format changes when you port the document.
When I want to double-space between paragraphs, I edit the paragraph style and change the spacing there. And immediately, every paragraph in the document gets spaced automatically. The random reformatting is greatly reduced, because intelligent style spacing doesn't count the extra "blank" lines as lines.
Plus I can control spacing to fractions of lines, automatic paragraph numbering doesn't count the blank spaces in the paragraph count (something lawyers wouldn't want to do). And so forth.
Styles are one of the most basic concepts of word processing, whether it's Open/Libre Office or MS-Word or virtually any other product. I think even WordPerfect had them.
If it's too much trouble to learn how to use a program as anything than a blunt instrument, then you probably ought to just use a blunt instrument.
I was describing the common use case for common people, i.e. 90%+ people only use a word processor infrequently to write a curriculum and don't know about the features, that's all. Maybe the Clippy assistant was a good idea but I've never really encountered it.
Anyway blogs, wikis and emails replaced writing word processor document in the 2000s, for common home users. Or the lazier alternative of not writing any documents at all.
In the late 90s/early 00s I might have written letters maybe, but my parents had got an Epson inkjet printer (and eventually another one). It didn't work the one time we needed something important printed. Bad timing of technology. Inkjet printers is garbage technology that doesn't work, with the printer vendor actively fighting you. Black and white laser still cost like a used car back then.
So in my experience, unless you were a professional whose tasks including writing word documents, word processors were never really that important. The general public went from handwritten letters and school homework and essays etc. to Internet stuff. Not everyone had a printer, in my country at least.
Depends on what office environment you are in. Everyone in my company uses office 2013 and up. All our documents come across as docx. I hardly ever see a plan doc, document in the wild any more.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
What's withe the downmods? It's almost like Germans don't have a sense of humour or something.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It is the fucking laziness that people have, brought on by general corporate subliminal brainwashing propaganda!
Open source projects like Linux and LibreOffice do not have heavy-handed, highly engineered social marketing to brainwash folks into their products.
They just have great, solid, supported products built truly By The People, For The People.
Yet, most humans are TOO fucking lazy to engage their brains of their OWN fruition and make the small effort to learn these easy products, andwould rather just keep plodding along with the rest of the (lemmings)!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
And that is how it should be.
Because businesses will come and go (even Microsoft), but the truly innovative and useful things are sustainable.
It is like the monk walking with his teacher, and they see a rabbit being chased by a fox.
The student says "That poor rabbit will get eaten".
The teacher asks "Why do you think so?"
"Because the fox is much faster, stronger, and more cunning".
The teacher says "But the rabbit will elude him".
"Why is that teacher?"
"Because the fox is running for his dinner, but the rabbit is running for his life"
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I'm sure it's more widespread than that. Offices where virtually everything has to be a Word document.
But there's a difference between casually banging out a memo and a formatted document. I can forgive brute-force spacing for the quick-and-dirty stuff. I might even have been guilty of it myself on occasion. It's the words that count there, not so much the appearance.
What I'm railing against are the people who are complaining about the "wrong" word processor ruining their document formatting. These are the people who should know better. They are the "professionals writing word documents". People who are going to be sending copies of those documents to possibly unknown destinations with possibly unknown software versions. Business letters, user manuals, and other archival-worthy documentation.
Back in an earlier century I worked in an office where we shared 2 HP Laserjet printers. One was a LaserJet 2 and one was a LaserJet 3. They had different hardware font sets and it very definitely made a difference in how documents would appear when printed and the users complained to the support person (me). So there was some incentive to make the documents portable even within a relative monoculture.
If you take the time to read the page linked from the parent you will see that excel table functionality is not implemented in Libre Office.
Personally I'm not a fan of using a spreadsheet as a database, but the parent post was rated informative and it is misleading.