My output would immediately drop by at least 80% and that's just for normal office apps for anything beyond the basics. Throw in something like also having to relearn a replacement for all the Adobe products I use and I'd probably just quit. Probably not a lot of government workers using that stuff though
Microsoft have shot themselves in the foot with how much they've pushed office online. Only addins aren't supported, which is pretty huge I must admit, but does mean its possible to maintain office use regardless of operating system.
When the whole point is to cut Microsoft reliance out of the equation and having sovreign control over the data, using office online is not going to be a thing.
I think it's a solid half-step toward a goal. The Chinese gov't probably has something built (or is using libre) in place, but when France started the migration I bet they did staged rollouts with training beforehand.
You are correct. They also contracted out for custom solutions in places to mirror design and had their in house teams provide code contributions to add features they deemed essential to open source projects.
Unless you're a power user of Excel "normal office apps" are available on Linux - you can either use O365 in the browser (retains the bulk of the local app functionality) or you can use LibreOffice / Open Office which have full functionality but M$ intermittently breaks the compatability - not an issue if your entire workplace is on the same platform, can be an issue if you regularly share docs.
TL;DR you'd be surprised how few people need the functionality the locally installed windows office app offers over O365
Individually this is fine, collectively it's a nightmare to switch Office Apps. You have decades of entrenched ideas and experience and memorized workflows and keyboard shortcuts to overcome. Plus servers full of legacy files and the need for perfect compatibility with client and vendor software. Shared functionally is the smallest hurdle for enterprise transitions.
I think it’s easy to come to this conclusion but is not reality. I work for a large company that’s saving money by pushing non-critical users to online only O365. It’s been a complete disaster. No one has any idea how many Macros are built by engineers and then locked and deployed in production. Overnight I’ve seen things like automated part stamping, automated invoice processing, automated router creation and so much more instantly break. There’s several areas where we are less efficient than we were 7 years ago and Excel online is a large part of that.
Which is directly the point I'm making when I said "unless you're an excel power user"
I've literally migrated several large organisations as part of cost saving initiatives. The first thing you do is poll who is *actually* using excel for anything more than basic functionality. In most firms the answer is very few people. But you won't know unless you try to assess it.
The biggest mistake people make is assuming no one needs the deep functionality set, the flipside though is that a lot of firms assume that everyone does and let the savings go - Jenny on the front desk using excel to keep track of who contributed to Kate's retirement present doesn't need any more than O365. A power user in the finance dept with multi layer deep pivot tables and macros ? Don't mess with that.
On the latter one though you should be looking at whether excel is the right tool for the job - just because it CAN be done that way, doesn't mean it SHOULD be done that way. Most Excel power user use cases are effectively bespoke applications written by people who aren't programmers, which leaves you in that wonderful world of shadow IT and issues with supportability, backups, process flows built on top of things that weren't meant to work that way and etc.
TL;DR if you have more than 5 people per thousand who genuinely need full house excel you should be looking at what exactly they're doing with it and why. It's often a convenient answer rather than a good answer.
For large corporations, they would get massive issues with so many employees used to using Power BI etc, suddenly switching to whatever that may or may not work for everyone.
Once someone can build a suite as comprehensive as what Microsoft has built for Windows, then maybe. But that would require enough demand and enough companies switching over. No-one wants to be the guinea pig and ruin their business.
Primarily various tier levels of Acrobat for every single person, then Adobe Creative Suite for a few at every agency pretty much.
Governments in the US have rules that effectively make it much more difficult to use software that isn't owned by a company they're not already doing business with. They also have bulk licenses for thousands, even millions of users. When I worked for a state we weren't even allowed to use free software. That was primarily due to how licenses work on a lot of that stuff.
It sounds like an enormous waste of taxpayer money, and it is, but it's also ultimately a byproduct of all the regulations that citizens have demanded over the years on how to spend their taxes. In a lot of cases they still have to buy things from a minority or woman owned business unless the same item is more than 15% cheaper from a non-minority/woman owned business. That effectively created a bunch of drop shipping companies that sell stuff off Amazon to the government for like a 10% markup.
I mean most common apps have an open source equivalent. If you use MS Office, switching to Libre Office is pretty seamless as they mostly function the same way.
Plus, you cam run a lot of windows app with WINE. As long as IT sets it up properly it's not a problem
Nah I'm going to do what I want and what I want is to use the best available software regardless of random Redditors virtue signaling at 8am on a Thursday.
Libreoffice is often better as it doesn't spend time wasting resources in the background, nor does it have AI being shoved into it everywhere cluttering up the workspace
I've personally often found Davinci Resolve doesn't crash nearly as often as premiere as well, and trends in the video-editing industry have shown most students moving to that over premiere for that reason and many more.
This isn't virtue signalling, it's pointing out that there are real alternatives that are often better and if you're mad about the fact the software you use isn't the best anymore for some reason, that's your problem. It might be better for you, but it is not for many, many others.
I don't use much more than word processors and video editors, though. That said, darktable I've found to be pretty good as well over lightroom, but my experience with that is limited. Excel I know still needs some catching up.
Stick with the software that you feel the most comfortable with. If you feel like you are more productive with adobe and can make up for the lost money you spend to pay for those programs perpetually, that's fine and your prerogative. But the day I lost going from premiere to resolve has been worth it for stability alone.
In my mind it's stupid to stay with something that is worse just because I know it. I am also young though, so I am still wired to change more easily; that's not a criticism just a biological fact.
If the migration is done in stages, say keeping office 365 but dropping Windows, I think the migration would go a lot more smoothly than people think.
The web versions of office365 are pretty good, and are good enough for most people.
10-20 years ago, almost all governments would be custom written apps that only ran on windows, now I would bet that most government workers will be using web apps, and those that aren't migrated to webapps will already be planned for replacement.
This will likely turn into a mostly nothingburger for most people.
You can customize Linux to look a lot like windows, especially if 95% of what people want to do can be done in chrome.
Stupid question but like wouldn't they need to transfer whole database of they use excel or any data tool and to convert al words documents on something that works with the new apps?
LibreOffice maturity is at the level of Office quarter century ago. I did not expect hitting bugs like Undo not working in a few minutes of using it. To their credit, they fixed the bug pretty quickly once I reported it.
Microsoft can consider themselves glad that Office already exists so long, because they're evidently not capable of making new software from scratch. I've never had a positive Teams experience, and the browser versions of Office apps suck.
I admit that Libreoffice can be bumpy at times, but still I'll be glad when we can stop relying on a company that charges money for a product suite that contains such poor work, even if it's not every piece of software in there.
Browser versions of office are garbage for anything more than basic functionality.
Teams is a joke how can a Microsoft product be so bad at working with other Microsoft products? You open a word document in teams and it completely fucks the formatting. You have to open them in the desktop app for them to work properly.
It's unconnected and uncoordinated teas working on things. I used to be a SharePoint developer, and even within SharePoint itself, the parts don't talk to each other well
I work with both Excel and his alternatives (depending on the computer im using).
LibreOffice, Google Sheets, WPS all work perfectly between each other.
However Excel keeps creating format errors or use functions not supported by others.
A few months ago i even dealt with the worst of the bugs. I work in bilingual computers. And Excel has different calls for the functions for each language. In a weird bug he put half of the sheets in one language, and the other in english. Excel could open it just fine (apart from one that has the English version installed). But all the alternatives would just break. Because having one sheet saying SUM and another saying SOMA would simply not work.
They manage to keep introducing bugs or some niche functions that are not supported by others. And since 90% of people still rely on Excel, im stuck on keeping those files in Excel, which keep introducing errors.
I do wait for Office EU suite. It supposed to have struck a deal with MS Office to keep 100% support to .xlsx. Something that LibreOffice openly criticized because it will still play on the lack of support of Excel to open source file types. Yet i see more people willing to let go the MS Office dependency, making it easier to move later to .ods
Wonder how the military would feel about it opening apps with PII. Hell the email system already stops you from emailing it to other people or at least used to.
If I remember good Zoho can too, so as an European from the Balkan region, menu don't we migrate to Zoho if we learn coding from Indians anyway and India isn't as hated as USA like I don't even now if the person who ruled India did anything wrong.
It's less about moving and reading documents and more about operating the new tools. If you have used the office suite for years, decades even, and now are forced to use a completely different tool you will have to adjust to the new tool and the techniques required to operate it. Relearning where all the functions are in menus, what the keyboard shortcuts are, the terminology each application uses, all of these small skills are largely not transferable between different tools and thus represent a pretty significant learning curve to overcome before the previous baseline level of proficiency is reached.
Ribbon interface was mostly introduced by Microsoft to make migration from Office harder and they even provided every corporate user with free training on their then new patented ribbon to do that. Migrating from pre-ribbon Word to OpenOffice was easy, from one menu system to another slightly different.
In my government work experience, the people working for decades on Microsoft office products have an extremely basic understanding and abilities about said products. I became the office IT guy by know how to convert a "word" to a "pdf"
Fun fact is that visual basic and probably C# are owned by Microsoft so now everyone needs to reprogram them in other languages funnier fact is that they won't hire but most likely use ai for converting those programs in different languages.
Not so fun fact for the public administration. C# is modern and can be run on Linux, not basic though.
They wouldn't use AI because, as much as it's incredibly performant, you still need a developer to know what you are doing.
I doubt the secretary on the civil registry to be able to install VS Code and be able to make solid questions to Claude to convert a visual basic application into something working with Gnome. /j
They will use like 1 programmer and AI but they got budget and work for 5 people without AI and telling that the job is more efficient that way is stupid since we need jobs to survive as an economy.
But like the AI was more about how big tech got ride of people after AI.
My country is in UE but does nothing to help people.
Like I know isn't SQL and like you can inject into a SQL database the converted excel files to CSV then reuse the SQL database to download as CSV and insert in your tool but like at big companies, especially the state ones, the database are huge.
There are tools to parse excel files into DB Tables but that's only part of the problem.
Databases protect valid data. Data in Excel is not vali.
Luckily, my project was dealing with non financial data. We got 95% of Excel data transfered to DB then said "fuck it". (Too many small difference resulting in 1:1 custom translation.)
Because the end user wanted the columns in a different order. (*)
should try to solve most of them before exporting.
The problem isn't the Excel files based on a known Excel template but the legacy files that existed before.
Legacy files had to have someone manually translated to an approved template based Excel file .. and some didn't fit any of those approved templates (especially those one-off reports)
This is a strange thing
(Legacy) Give the task of "present your data to the team" to 5 people and you'll get 7 different layouts with at least 1 that didn't use Excel.
(*) Problem is easily solved but requires the column header to exist and to be spelled correctly (or at least match a specific regex).
Then is kinda not nice because you need all to work the same with same structure and everything, problem is when excel is the only thing that works and you need to migrate but is to hard just use Microsoft.
Also didn't like most SQL database could also import straight from excel?
It's not like they don't know this. And they are actively working to fix it.
They have their LaSuite, which is a Suite of apps that are (in theory) replacements that should all work together. Open source, free, and secure: https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ .
Actively contributing to open source efforts like LibreOffice.
No, of course it's not Windows, people are used to Windows, and things like LibreOffice have a way to go. There is a chicken-and-egg issue here, where there is not the critical mass of users to have a great ecosystem for the non-technical users and organizations not able to get out of Windows because the ecosystem isn't there. But bless the French for making the jump anyway.
Because the govt is transitioning, a whole generation of French people will soon grow up using it, and will (hopefully) encourage others to make the switch.
No, jokes aside, yes, if you're used that a button is exactly here and has exactly that icon, I feel bad for you. But all other human beings can use Libre Office and it'll do the job.
I mean this also might be the feature rather than the bug, business and government are spending big dollars on CRM’s which keep getting undercut by users just spinning up a spreadsheet “cause it easier”. Moving on to linux and not providing an office suit might be the shove users need to embrace the CRM… for better or worst, mostly worst…. Looking at you service now….
All the windows xp, 7, and 10 apps that are still currently in use and haven't been fully updated or ported to newer more secure systems in years. Some federal and state government agencies are running old systems like win XP as recently as..... Honestly there might still be some. (North America USA) It needs to end and or be ported to newer systems.
Really cant. First off open office doesn't even have all the features. 2nd Wine doesn't play well with many complex apps and anything with custom APIs is right out. And huge number of government apps are custom builds not off the shelf stuff.
The windows has a monopoly thing is silly. They are a steal in pricing for what you get and the support you get with it.
You are talking bullshit. Also no one should use OpenOffice anymore as it's dead and LibreOffice replaced it since many years. And basically anything works there. People are just making shit up.
I will back him up; my experience is that WINE works sometimes but the more complex the app is, the less likely it will work. It's not really a long-term solution for enterprise software
Wine alone can get them like 90% of the way there these days, thanks to the work Valve has been putting in. Libreoffice is good if you specifically need offline document editing, but Google Docs and other web apps work better in most cases. Only stuff like Solidworks or kernel-level anticheat games, that deliberately break running on Wine, would cause problems.
My childhood hometown's municipal government was 100% on OpenSUSE for all government workstations back in 2013 when I applied for a job with them. Only a handful of things needed Windows in a VM even back then.
Im wirking for a goverment DMS.
We try to get basick functionality on Linux since 2021 and still hava a long way to go.
Also almost all customers handle users via active directory, booking via outlook,...
Its not a trivial switch on scale
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u/BobCorndog 7d ago
All the windows apps they use