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public services of an entire german state switches from Microsoft to open source (Libreoffice, Linux, Nextcloud, Thunderbird) (euro-stack.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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they will save 188,000 € on Microsoft license fees per year

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[–] 43 points 1 year ago (29 children)

LibreOffice is a great alternative for 99% of people, but there is that 1% of people who is gonna be disappointment. This is a great step though.

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  • [–] 27 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Same goes for any software.

    I don't understand why people act like Windows is the holy grail of computing.

    It sucks, it barely works for 90% of users, and the rest will use anything else.

    Just as Linux will work for 98% of people, and those last ones are due to handful of evil companies.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The problem is education. People know how to use Windows/Microsoft products, and are too lazy to learn anything else. Saying "that other thing sucks" is easier than admitting "Idk how to use that other thing, and I'm too lazy to learn", especially in a corporate environment where you can't climb ladders by acknowledging your own shortcomings.

    Get LibreOffice/Nextcloud/etc into schools, and the problem will be solved in a single generation.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    People 'know' how to use Microsoft products. I'm a data guy and might spend less than a day a week in word, PowerPoint, excel. Most of the time I spend in them is checking other people's work. I'm still called on to help people with such tasks as switching from footnotes to endnotes, moving files in SharePoint, fixing formatting. My general knowledge of navigating the UI and googling fixes is better than what people 'know'.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    People bitch and moan every time MS Office apps are updated, too; I can't count the number of times I've heard coworkers complain. TBF though, I refuse to hit the "Try the new Outlook" toggle on my work laptop - I tried it once and it was worse in every way.

    I'm glad the only MS products I use at this point are work-issued.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Hey it's getting better! They recently worked hard for months to add the very niche and almost never used feature of adding a shared mailbox's folder to your favourites! I mean, with features like that you should expect the dev time to be long.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Actually this was a huge update. Shared mailboxes are extensively used at any company I've been at so being able to just open a shared mailbox without having to dig through 93744847 folders or opening another mailbox is a great addition.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    For me the trouble has always been interactions with other people. It's way better than 10 years ago. Just LibreOffices ribbon interface looks so much better today than 5 years ago. File compatibility is just going to be a continued growing pain until LibreOffice hits a major marketshare

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I.wouldn't be so sure, the world runs on M$ spreadsheets and their shenanigans.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Yes I am aware, I see some of the most advanced spreadsheets considering I work as accountant, but a lot of the sheets people make can be replaced with better stuff or are just very basis entries which Libreoffice can do fine.

    Missing the formatted as tables is probably it's biggest issue

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    I just switched to Linux and got a new win11 laptop for my wife.

    Had to install a old HP Laser MFC (going to switch to brother when I run out of toner).

    It just worked on Linux mint. Auto installed. Printing and scanning.
    On win10 worked automatically. Printing and scanning.
    On Win 11 it installed with a generic driver and printed fine but not scanning. Had to get the win10 driver from the site... WTH.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (13 children)

    The only thing preventing me from full adoption in it is the lack of being able to convert to table like in excel. I've moved to it for my word processing. But I can't shake excel because I use that feature almost every time I use the program.

    After that i just need to find replacements for OneNote and OneDrive and I'll finally be free.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    You can do that in LibreOffice. Its just a few more clicks than in Excel. Its such a common feature they should really make it clearer. I think the feature is "Database Ranges"

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Each time I tried to decipher the answer from argumentative forum posts and vague descriptions I didn't find anything equivalent. I can take a look again, don't think that was the name of things I tried before.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (10 children)

    Replace OneDrive with a NAS. You can roll your own with something like OpenMediaVault.

    Replace OneNote with Obsidian. It’s not FOSS, but it’s free and cross platform.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    If I could afford a NAS I would have done so by now. But I can't afford the drives. Most other hosted solutions either don't offer the capacity I am after, or lack other features that I want from a cloud storage.

    I didn't like using Obsidian and I'm not going to learn markdown so it's out. I'm looking at notesnook, but it's still not quite what I am after. But might be as close as I get.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    I haven’t heard of notesnook. I’ll need to check that out.

    I don’t love Obsidian, it’s just the best free app I’ve come across so far.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    It's really close to OneNote so far and has an acceptable self hosting option. The import function seems good compared to other apps I've tried

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (5 children)

    I just checked it out and at first it looked perfect… then I started noticing local features like exports, notebook counts, etc that were paywalled behind a subscription. For an app that is “open source” that really rubs me the wrong way. I may look through the source code later. I have a feeling they’ve tied those features arbitrarily to web services to drive subscriptions, which would be really creepy… though not as creepy as if the code exists locally and is paywalled. sigh

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    If you self host, all features are free.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Aha, I didn’t realize that was an option.

    I see there’s a notesnook-sync-server project. Thanks for pointing that out or I’d have missed it!

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Obsidian is not a great replacement for OneNote. I tried switching but there's a bunch of things like sharing pages (and no, emailing documents doesn't count), easy syncing between all platforms (Syncthing doesn't work at all on iOS and was kinda finicky on other things, and git is just not a valid option), it doesn't do super well when embedding images or PDFs, doesn't have the same advanced hand writing stuff, and probably some other things that I'm forgetting.

    OneNote is basically the only thing besides email that I can't find a good self hosted alternative. And I've been looking trust me. Obsidian is great if all you need is note taking on a desktop, but that's about where it ends. Or if you want to pay for the subscription and cloud storage, I would imagine it'd work fine.

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