they will save 188,000 € on Microsoft license fees per year
I’m more surprised that a city in Germany didn’t switch to Linux a decade or more ago.
Late to the party is still showing up, good for them.
Too busy faxing each other. Germany is Luddite Land, by choice.
Source: moved here 7 years ago. Germans are a weird bunch. Change is not welcome in just about any form.
Nice to see them adopt the open source apps, though. They can probably get some screaming deals on some US Robotics 56k modems on eBay Local.
🤪😘
I think they have already switched and went back at some point?
I think that’s Munich
LiMux
Nope. Some other state that tried.
I think this has been tried before.
Yup. And MS had to bribe the city of Munich with moving their German HQ there to make them switch back.
That’s 188k euro that can be used to improve the quality of open source software.
It would be nice to see the European governments start a genuine effort on funding open source development, and start laying the foundation for a migration to their own Linux distro. Microsoft isn’t trustworthy. Hell, most American big tech is untrustworthy. Moving your government offices to an in house developed OS is going to be paramount for their security in the future.
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I hate it so much that Whatsapp made itself a social media
from what i know Germany already does this
There in that place where closed systems are frowned upon, Install Linux, Problem Solved.
Germany has done this multiple times before. Microsoft has historically swept in with some sweetheart deal to lure them back.
Hopefully it sticks this time.
Hard to catch fish if you see the fish as dumb idiots, for some reason the fish don’t seem to respond well to it idk.
The German IT fish keep coming back for the bait - never bothering to avoid the hook.
Just wait for Microsoft to start astroturfing the initiative.
Embrace, extend, extinguish will accelerate.
What makes you think FOSS cannot use the same strat ?
Mostly because the FOSS community doesn’t have a single point of leadership that is maniacally focused on becoming a total monopoly.
And that’s a good thing
Yeah but we can aspire for FOSS to take over the world right ?
Didn’t the Trump admin suspend enforcement of foreign anti-bribery laws? Microsoft just has to write a check to the right person to kill this.
Breaking anti-bribery laws of a country is illegal, no matter whether they are enforced in some other country or not. Of course Microsoft can break the law and then keep paying large fines until they decide to no longer break the law.
I switched to Thunderbird about a year and a half ago.
Last week I had to help a coworker with their Outlook and holy shit is it so much worse than when I dropped it. There is so much AI garbage in every little thing and bad design getting in the way of just sending and receiving emails.
Same thing for the other office products
It’s horrendous. Can’t even explain how bad it is now.
Yup. I switched to linux on my home computer and now the more time I spend with it, the more I pity my work computer for the cancer it has to deal with.
I have an Outlook account from when I decided to use it specifically to receive and interact with clients as a freelance artist.
My freelance gig didn’t launch, so I kinda forgot about it. This week I remembered that account and logged on… Only to find the most disgusting interface a user has ever seen! There are (almost) no shortcuts, not a gram of intuitiveness to be found…
Horrible horrible platform
This is the sort of adoption we need to bring Linux into the mainstream
This and software companies openly supporting Linux. For example, if Adobe and AutoCAD among others would build some tars then you could see it.
Ironically, Game Engines are ahead of the curve on this. You could build Unreal Engine from the github page on Linux for many years now and we also have Godot and Blender. I think several PCB design and also architecture tools already exist on Linux as well, so there is definitely room for a lot of industries and businesses to shift away from Windows as long as they can find a competent tech guy to maintain everything with minimal downtime.
Blender got ported to Linux in 1998, to Windows in 1999. The modal interface and key command language is no accident, it literally is a 3d vi.
Linux is generally strong when it comes to 3d graphics workstations, it inherited IRIX’ market share, plenty of artists around, especially in the film industry, who’d go on a strike if you took away dragging windows with alt+LMB. Graphics, that is, CAD is dominated by Windows as CAD started out as 2d sketch software which ran on cheap DOS machines.
Houdini is also Unix-native and Blender’s only surviving competitor (considered by features, not industry inertia), Maya started out as cross-platform IRIX+Windows.
I think the Netherlands did this a couple of years ago?
Would love to see further movements towards foss software in many other governments
Moreeeee MOREEEE preach it
That sounds like a ridiculously lowballed amount. Also, working with open source tools should increase productivity and decrease brainrot among workers in the public sector. Using Microshit kills brain cells. Not even joking, I actually think it makes users fucking dumb.
There are some striking studies about how use of LLMs impacts cognition. You’re not wrong.
Sadly I took my claim from observation of the real world. And I wasn’t even talking about machine learning systems yet. Some teenagers and young adults nowadays are already walking zombies hooked to tiktok.
I am a walking zombie hooked to Lemmy!
Y’all are delusional.
Office is fantastic and better than goggle as well any foss alternative.
I hate microsoft as much as the next guy but their office suite is best in class. Its far better funded which makes it so surprising that the other suites arent to far behind. I think with proper funding other suites can get to a point where it makes sense to switch to them.
It’s really not though. Most of what you can do with Office can be done with other tools, you just have to learn how to use them.
In libre office I can’t get copilot to turn my entire report to slop in 2 clicks.
Drives me crazy. Rather than talking about how MS got here and how to fix it you get this screeching.
Same reason Linux desktop will never be mainstream unless valve keeps pumping billions into the shit regular the users need and want.
Yeah thats what I was trying to add with my reply. Ms is only better because its had 1000x the funding. But even with that funding its not 1000x better its only slightly better. This is a perfect time to fund alternatives and take away Microsofts monopoly.
We’re on the same page. Sorry if I came off aggressive. These threads typically become immediate shit shows the second you bring up non favorable Linux points.
Is it? Almost every time I use it I end up hitting a bug or missing feature. Just last week I was trying to get Word in Office365 to keep some lines together. I followed the instructions from Microsoft’s help and it didn’t work. Last month I was trying to get “slide M of N” on the bottom of PowerPoint in Office365, but apparently getting the N is just not supported.
LibreOffice almost always works for me, far more often than Microsoft Office.
Look if you’re struggling with ms office in this day and age idk what to tell ya. You might be cooked.
Here, you dropped an /s
No. For $16 a month you get Windows + O365 + InTune + EntreID. That includes role based access to admin portals, as well as for SharePoint+ one drive. You get per object audit and logging access to protect IP, you can remotely disable and wipe stolen devices if needed.
None of that can be replicated in one product, the reality it’s 10 or so subsystems that need to be maintained. It’s labor intensive. Does it make sense for some companies or governments with scale to switch away? ABSOLUTELY!
Is this thread filled with a bunch of people that vastly underrate capabilities and ease of use because of a hatred of Microsoft and what they represent and an unwillingness to look at how the users and businesses actually feel and make decisions? ABSOLUTELY!
I think management and MSP experience in this thread is nil and I think probably nobody in here has ever actually worked at a directors level.
Trust me I have used Windows long enough to know what I am talking about. It has zero features that can’t be replaced with an overall net positive. People who defend modern Microsoft products just suffer from Stockholm or Dunning Kruger syndrome
And I’m sure it’ll work be run 24/7 with no downtime and a support desk along with a fleet of junior devs and admins working for the low low price of 35k s year right?
I’m sure it’ll support everything we need for CMMC, most, iso, a gdpr right? No need to put key cloak in front of 40 apps to show horn in proper rbac and audit accounts. Again for $16 a month right?
You’re a windws user, not even administering accounts or hardware. Your lack of experience is showing and your doubling down on “I’ve used Windows so I know” reeks of shit you see of non experts talking out of their ass.
Unless you’ve been in a leadership role and done a yearly budget, you have no clue. Adults with experience are talking here and you’re just spiteful lolol
I agree with everything you said but it’s “Entra”, not “EntreID”
Is This Anal?
Close but no cigar!
No idea where that number is from but at the start it’s just going to be getting rid of MS Office and Exchange, switch to FLOSS telephony, not getting rid of Windows. Licensing costs for 30k seats are certainly higher but you have to offset that with not getting any support from MS any more. Dataport will need a couple of in-house developers to resolve issues and work with upstream. Actual development, not tier 1 support and translating administrative instructions into templates.
Also for the state it’s not really about the money, but sovereignty. 188k are also peanuts in 18bn worth of state budget, that’s yearly maintenance for what 30km of state roads. Given that we currently don’t have any potholes we can afford it.
As to brainrot: Not really applicable. These are managed workplaces and not much will change on the end-user side.
Ah, okay - if Windows remains, they are not nearly exploiting the cost saving potential. That explains the low number.
I love software development, I hope they have such people as well. In terms of maintenance though, my (reasonably comolex) software is nearly maintenance free and much easier to operate. I believe that can be true for all custom developments, generic solutions are more complex by their nature of having more functions than needed in any specific use case.
Dataport is kinda hit and miss when it comes to developing. It was created by taking the small IT departments of different ministries, agencies, etc, of multiple states, and putting them all under a common roof. They did that because they realised that standard state administration structures and IT weren’t really compatible but on the flipside, they also funded a whole new organisation with people accustomed to those very structures, and as dataport is still a public law corporation the internal administration – think payroll and everything – will still be done by career state bureaucrats.
It’s a different kind of dysfunction than you see in the private sector but dysfunction nonetheless. OTOH working directly with FLOSS upstream will help: It’s not that (sufficiently large) FLOSS projects don’t have their own bureaucracy, and the bureaucrats that be on dataport’s side will respect that.
Regarding maintenance: Aside from hardware upgrades because they make sense (power consumption) or you want new features (latest addition: Graphics tablets to allow citizens to sign stuff without having to print things), there’s a constant churn in software requirements as new orders come in on what to do and how to do it. Just because you wrote perfect software doesn’t mean that parliament stops passing laws.
As far as usability is concerned: Dataport will also have to train people, and they actually have the funds to do usability studies and such. Much will also depend on the different agencies they’re working for, can’t fix an agency’s workflows for them, and that goes beyond mere IT. I guess a public-law consultancy does make sense but having a ministry for administrative affairs reeks of Sir Humphrey. I guess you could hide it by making it a subsidiary of the court of auditors.
If the trend continues then maybe the hacker community will start focusing on Linux. Can you imagine “I don’t need a virus scanner, I use Windows, the under dog OS”
You say that like it’s not already focused on. The majority of Internet infrastructure runs on Linux.
But the vast majority of viruses focus on end users.
Please become a thing. Having viruses custom tailored for your OS means you’ve made it.
I don’t wanna “make it”. I just want fast, secure, private computing.
Same, I’m largely being facetious. But viruses come with success, and success also means more software and hardware compatibility. I think that’s worth a periodic scan every so often and some slightly inconvenient security systems in place.
Agreed. However, more users (personal, institutional or business) equals more devs focused on the OS.
We need enough, not more. The concept of “more” and “surplus” got us into this capitalist dystopia. I know this isn’t the point you’re making. I’m just making a separate point that I thought of reading yours. :)
And that’s fine. I agree. Becoming consumist hoarders is what got us to where we’re at. Or rather, what allowed companies and institutions to take us here.
There already are. I barely missed a linux virus from a hijacked python package what… two years ago?
Linux desktops are quite non-homogenous though, so their vectors/nature is kinda different.
Sure, and they have been for decades. They’re still not that common though.
What Python package almost got you?
I wonder if I’ve been hit but just haven’t noticed because I tend to run things in containers.
Pytorch Nightly: https://pytorch.org/blog/compromised-nightly-dependency/
https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/04/pypi_pytorch_dependency_attack/
Funnily enough I can’t even post what it does without the Lemmy comment filter zapping me, but it tried to scrape accounts and passwords.
The malicious binary would upload files ranging in size up to 99,999 bytes and send the contents to a specified domain.
Was pretty scary from my perspective. I missed it by a week. PyPi is a mess, and it makes me wonder how much isn’t caught.
That is scary. But it does require using a custom repository, so hopefully few were hit.
We use poetry, enough which allows specifying additional package repos and it looks like we’d be susceptible to the same attack, but for our internal package index. Looks like I have something to fix this week, thanks for the link!
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The hacker community it’s very focused on Linux since most servers in the world run it. The fly by night script kiddies and botnet creators definitely prefer end user systems though.
The easiest hacks use social engineering. Much more social to exploit in the end-user arena.
This right here. Linux security is so good that the easiest way to break in is via Phishing someone with a windows laptop.
The old jibe was that Windows users are so gullible that they’re just easier to phish.
Yeah exactly. Nobody actually “hacks” anymore. They just send Pam in accounting a funny email
I’m not seeing nextcloud mentioned in the article. If they are moving to nextcloud, I wish them the best. It’s great for my personal use, but from my experience it’s lacking in what I would expect in a work environment. With a government entity coming to use them, it would be fantastic to see some improvements on them because they’re almost there.
Best I can give you is dataport looking for nextcloud admins, it’s also listed as a component of dPhoenixSuite.
🤔 I wonder if they’ll hire an American who barely dabbles in self hosting and doesn’t speak 28.35 grams of German. Or would it be 29.6 mL?
Modulo everything, you need to have been a resident for at least five years to have any chance of getting security clearance. Also it would be “not a shredlet”.
I expect Germany itself will R&D on some Nextcloud plugins and tools. They’ll likely use a specialized fork that they maintain.
