Schleswig-Holstein, Germany’s most northern state, is starting its switch from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, and is planning to move from Windows to Linux on the 30,000 PCs it uses for local government functions.
Concerns over data security are also front and center in the Minister-President’s statement, especially data that may make its way to other countries. Back in 2021, when the transition plans were first being drawn up, the hardware requirements for Windows 11 were also mentioned as a reason to move away from Microsoft.
Saunders noted that “the reasons for switching to Linux and LibreOffice are different today. Back when LiMux started, it was mostly seen as a way to save money. Now the focus is far more on data protection, privacy and security. Consider that the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) recently found that the European Commission’s use of Microsoft 365 breaches data protection law for EU institutions and bodies.”
The idea that a state government is unnecessarily at the mercy of any corporation is hard to comprehend. Especially, as in this case, a foreign corporation.
Open source shouldn’t only be the standard for governments. It should be the minimum requirement.
IMO it should be further than that.
Open source software is, more often than not, used as digital infrastructure.
Governments around the world should absolutely be investing in open source software and actively contributing to it.
There is a FSFE campaign that claims all publicly-funded institutions should only use Free Software.
Let me tell you a story about proprietary software:
The German police force have a contract with a software firm that wrote their program to file and archive emergency calls. Basically just a form that goes to a database. Now, one day, an update got pushed. The problem with that update was that the hotkey for quitting out of the current form (q) now also fired when inside an editing field. The software firm did not acknowledge that as a problem and it took months of complaints to fix and it cost the taxpayer around 300,000€ in “maintenance fees”.
As someone who works with government agencies as a software developer: they are absolutely awful.
You’ll get no specification at all, those you do get will change at least three times and every stupid little decision needs at least 20 people from different states, cities or agencies to agree.
Yes, the bug is pretty bad, but I’m also very sure that what you’re describing is not the whole story.
This isn’t going to happen.
This headline comes up every year that it’s time for the government to negotiate contracts with Microsoft. Once they get the best price they think they can, they will accept it and issue a news release that “we’re staying in Windows after all”.
It’s lame, but it’s what is going to happen.
!remindme 1 fiscal quarter
This is the sexiest thing Germany has done since that German couple that drives the Porsche in Super Troopers.
Good. Now, you want to make a bigger impact? Do the schools.
Unrelated to the question but on the picture:
The AI nicely drew a german city but … put the naziflag on the ships Rather than the current german flag.
Or more noticably all the southern hemisphere penguins
I genuinely hate AI art
This one is terrible because it’s like a montage of a penguin colony over a generic historic painting of a port city. Very little creativity and quality control. I’d just combine some actual photo of the Kiel port and penguins jumping out of water. (Not necessarily these two)
What you actually want is a nice picture of either a market place or seafront promenade and a fat and content (as usual) Tux munching a Fischbrötchen
Cool but that would require some cultural awareness, and the reporters cannot be bothered.
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You mean collage? I agree. I think your suggestion would work best if it was also made to look like an obvious collage. If it was accurately photoshopped to look like the penguins were actually there it would look silly.
Right? The rash of AI images used in journalism is genuinely troubling. It seems like at least 50% of news article thumbnails I see are AI these days.
And, like…are those penguins in the back cheering with human arms? Is that an orca jumping out of the water? What the fuck is going on.
Damn I didn’t even notice. Guess I don’t really look at the pictures.
It’s the most sophisticated thing about the whole article, unfortunately.
Wasn’t it Munich who did that a few years back, only to backtrack sometime later?
Yes, it was Munich. And all things considered it worked quite well for a while.
After a while AFAIK the then new mayor called himself a “Microsoft fan” and tried to get Microsoft to build their new German HQ in Munich. So I am pretty sure there is no connection whatsoever between canceling Limux and switching back to Windows and Microsoft building a huge campus in Munich Freimann…
I fully expect this to get backtracked almost immediately. From my experience most government employees can barely handle a browser upgrade with a UI change, and they will 100% throw a collective fit if their Word and/or Outlook goes away.
You are right. But what epic dunces.
Employer could pass the savings onto the staff with a payrise though.
“Staff who learn to use these new Linux applications will receive a bonus/payrise. Staff who do not will go to corner and wear the special hat”
I think trying to sell a switch to opensource as a saving is wrong on two counts…
Firstly it just sets the platform up for hatred. “We know you guys like expensive wine at the Christmas party, but this year we decided to get cheap-but-still-ok wine! Yaay, go team!”.
Secondly, any savings should be poured straight back into training and support. Users should be able to ask dumb questions like “how do I create a new word document” and get a more or less instant response.
Eh, it’s civil servants. They’ll be sent to training, if it turns out they can’t be trained they’ll have choice between quitting or working where their qualifications suffice. Have them walk dikes to find rabbit burrows if need be.
Which is good, since M$ Office is still one of (if not the) biggest security holes in all of software due to its macros and how no one uses them securely.
Also also doing things the OS way will lead to less changes in the long run since Microsoft can and will change their layouts as they please, but a well maintained FOSS-fork can stay one way indefinitely.
Switching to an open-source project is easy, but the concern is more about the context in which they are used and how long they will persist in using these. It might be more convenient for the government to initially try Linux for some pilot projects that require less human intervention. This is because I’m not sure how familiar civil servants are with Linux and LibreOffice. On the other hand, open-source projects don’t provide after-sales services and may have technical or compatibility issues. It requires time for them to get accustomed to them.
According to the article,
- They are also migrating backend infrastructure such as emails servers etc.
- They already have Linux migration experience in some German states as well as the current proposer.
- Companies such as RedHat, Canonical and OpenSuse do offer enterprise level support. So open source software doesn’t have “after sales” support is a myth.
- They say that the goal of the migration is privacy and security, no necessarily cost driven. They may very well be prepared to pay a premium for enterprise level support.
- They have already identified compatibilities issues in their previous project. They got them because they mixed Windows and Linux, the article says. That’s why they migrate everything to Linux this time.
Your clarification helps me understand their swtiching. Thanks 👍
I wish my country would also stop subsidising M$ and transition to Linux as well.
It is all about private “dinners”.
They’ve thought about that too, and see training as vital where others before them have failed. Also OS and programs will look somewhat similar to what users are used to, from what I can recall.
Producing documents or e-mails can’t be that functionally different, right? Many don’t need much more than that. However, I could see integration of third-party software as a challenge, but one that in most cases could be easily overcome.
Yeah for the simple stuff LibreOffice will be just fine but for anything complex like mail merges and such it’s probably going to require a lot of work re-doing things.
When someone uses a text editor like LibreOffice, whenever someone mentions complex tasks, I’d imagine writing a thesis, a series of books, a big ass report or the like. Mail merges sound like something another app should do…
Yeah LibreOffice will do things like mail merges, but I mean it will probably require relearning the process. It will be different than the process they used with MS Office.
If you just porting over simple things like letters and simple documents you should be able to move back and forth between MS Office and LibreOffice with few changes.
I wonder what they will choose for their base. I was surprised LiMux was based off Debian since Suse is headquartered in Luxembourg City. I personally would welcome a large organization choosing Suse products as we need more competition for RHEL (which would be a huge boon in productivity since we won’t need like 3 projects to spend a decent amount of time repackaging RHEL).
According to an old interview, pretty much whatever: They’re saying “five big distributions are suitable”.
They’re starting the switch with apps, not the OS. From a technical POV it’d be nice to see NixOS as it’s devops / managed deployment heaven. It also happens to be European and, just like Debian, it’s a community distro.
For a project of this size, doubly and triply if it gets even more states as users, it absolutely does make sense to have your own release channel, have a team working on nothing but pushing patches (security and otherwise) onto an LTS branch and upstream as well as integration testing for the precise desktop you’re shipping to users: The states are paying them to support a desktop, not an OS to run whatever on.
Nix does have an interesting package manager.
The states are paying them to support a desktop, not an OS to run whatever on.
Don’t they need money to fund both aspects? Is there any support to lean on someone goes with Nix?
A lot of governments in the US pretty much go through Microsoft for simplicity. There’s a lot of software obtained from a single vendor. I suppose that’s why rhel is so popular.
Dataport is big enough (5200 employees) to support that kind of thing themselves, and they precisely are the single vendor for the participating states (it’s an inter-state public corporation). More than twice the employees Suse has, quarter the size of RedHat.
Good to know. I did not realize that this team was this large. I hope it works out.
Redhat and Debian are separate projects, tmk.
I don’t know if you understood my original post, it was too get an alternative to an enterprise distro with vendor paid support. In this regard the alternatives to Debian are more OpenSuse and Rocky, not RHEL (this is not a comparison of quality).
Yeah, the other alternative would be to set up a consultation company that is based around Debian. I guess that is what Dataport is supposed to be then, the support. It’s s different route but still works.
Boom. Listen up NHS England.
Good. This makes them less vulnerable to the malware that Windows innately is.
I wouldn’t say that Windows is malware itself, but rather it wasn’t created with a security-first stance, which we absolutely need for all OSes going forward. I say this as someone who ditched Windows as my DD (“I use Arch, btw”). I left Windows more for their policies and subscription models that are becoming increasingly anti-consumer.
With that said, let’s not pretend that Linux is immune as has been proven in the past week with xz and liblzma being compromised. Yes, it took 3 years to get to the point their long game paid off, but it still happened through a series of credibility social engineering steps by a single person. (Yes I know others were also trying to do exactly this, but only Jia Tan was successful)
(Yes I know others were also trying to do exactly this, but only Jia Tan was successful)
The reason you know is because the target software is FOSS. Care to bet other similar schemes have been successfully pulled off with proprietary software?
There are so many surveillance built into proprietary software, countries like U.S. probably can just ask for any information from Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft.
On the other hand, countries like China and Russia would probably need to compromise these product like Jia Tan did. Except for Apple, because every apple service in China is maintained by a Chinese company with no encryption allowed.
You only know this happened because one dev was benchmarking their system and noticed a 0.5s anomaly in resource usage, and was able to track it down to this. For every one of these that are caught, there are countless more that slip past.
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Of course, there can be malware for open-source systems such as Linux, but it’s generally caught and patched a lot faster.
In the enterprise space, Windows isn’t an issue at all.
This is because enterprise manages security properly - layered, minimum perms to perform a task, etc.
Windows laptops have been tightly locked down since the early 2000’s, including USB ports.
I’ve never seen a virus or malware on a machine in enterprise, and if it were to occur, the most it can damage is the local machine, as network shares are minimal (most data is kept in databases), the shares with write access are limited to small user groups, etc.
Users simply lack permissions to change stuff, so malware lacks it too.
Have you been near some sort of news in the last years? Corporations using windows get hacked regularly and they are far off from having everything in a database somewhere. You have no fucking clue. What you are describing is the dream of corporate security newbies, but no big corporation let alone some state government is anywhere close to that.
They have massive shares, where all the people can read and overwrite everything, they open all attachments directly on their machine and click away all warnings without reading them. (Who needs USB if you can mail malware directly?)
This is hell and in Germany dozens of smaller or bigger government networks were hacked and massive amounts of data encrypted last year alone.
I can from personal experience that there is a huge push to get much more secure in the local government space in the US, including adhering to NIST 800-53, and be audited on it. It’s not foolproof, but it’s a much needed step forward towards preventing big events becoming breaches. But if they are a breach they’ll be lower impact. It’s painful to get there, but I’ve been involved heavily in the conversion in policies and procedures to get there.
Hey, can you hear that? That’s the sound of hundreds of IT support workers silently crying out at the thought of having to explain a whole new OS and new office software to some boomer.
Doubt it. Most users are point-and-droolers with no understanding nor desire to learn the base concepts behind the interfaces they’re using. No IT worker has ever successfully explained a technical concept to an (l)user in the history of ever. By now we’re smart enough not to try.
These people learn how to use computers at their jobs by rote, not by comprehension, and to them one word processor, spreadsheet, or browser is much the same as any other once they learn where all the buttons are that make it do what they want, and their interest in any of it stops precisely at that point and no further. There will be some grumbling about “the new system is so much worse than the old system,” but that very same grumbling always happens whenever the “system” changes, regardless of whether or not the new one or the old one was actually the worse of the two.
Furthermore, these days I guarantee you the majority of the work they do is entirely within a browser via some ghastly intranet site which will not look or behave any differently on Linux vs. Windows vs. Mac vs. a Chromebook vs. a graphing calculator, etc.
I hired an accountant to do my taxes this year and her company had just switched to Libre Office and she, a boomer, could t figure out how to open a fucking CSV with it. She kept complaining about it just being a string of numbers and letters.
I resorted to providing her with PDFs instead.
Wait? Don’t you just double click?
Unless they are opening it in text editor?!
No fucking clue
I think it is fine if everything they used to do have a replacement, my wife has been using my laptop running silverblue for personal laptop, doing homework and everything, until she want to use affinity photos or forced to use docx.
That being said, docx is invented specifically sabotage of open document standard and cross compatibility, but I installed onlyoffice for her, and everything is fine now. And if she spent as much time in GIMP and dark table, she should be as happy as in affinity photo, since she doesn’t use that many features anyway.
Same happened with her father in law, he was trying to do some business work, I give him the silverblue laptop, and opened only office. He can work just as normal, after I told him how to use the super key in gnome.
Most office worker, and students only uses very limited functionality of some software, if all of which has a decently intuitive replacement, I think they will be happy.
Ad I said yesterday when this was posted. They tried this about 15 years ago, reverted to Windows after a few years.
I wish them all the luck in the world with this, truly. But I’m not sure a government has the drive, management, and flexibility to pull this off successfully.
If we want to see Linux compete with Windows for the desktop, it will need to start at the opposite end of the spectrum: small environments where the need for specialized apps is minimal, IT is a smaller group, flexibility is much higher, end users are a smaller group (from a training perspective) and reduced cost realizations are more apparent and impactful.
We may be seeing the beginning of this with VMWare’s new, exorbitant licensing costs causing a push to other solutions such as Proxmox/TrueNAS for virtualization/virtualization backup in the SMB.
And if we really want to see a sea change, we need to get Linux as a desktop in education. But that would require settling on a single shell, and generally a single distribution (or at a minimum ensure there’s a consistent set of tools in the OS).
Seems like an “Education Build” would be a great idea. But, again, who’s going to back it, and which Linux distro gets the nod?
Debian Edu has existed for over a decade, originally as a Norwegian distro called Skolelinux (“school Linux”). I’m not sure how they differ from regular Debian at this point, but a big part of the original project was high quality translations.
It’s done before in Munich. It can work.
Yeah but they switched back to Windows in 2017 for no reason. :( some Bad rumors say it had to do with Microsoft building its headquater in munich 2016. But no one knows if the decision to build it in munich is indeed related to the switch back to. Windows.
“Linux could have the desktop now”
And yet doesn’t.
Again, why do enterprises prefer to pay tens of millions per year in licensing rather than deploy Linux as a desktop?
You think these places don’t have hundreds or thousands of IT folks with Linux expertise?
Blame game, simple.
Proprietary software comes with a price tag (some people think free = bad), a license (which implies some sort of ownership) and a company behind it which you can sue if something hits the fan. Zero responsibility for the licensee.
FOSS, in the other hand, is no strings attached (for the most part, some sw is dual-licensed and/or there are paid services): if it hits the fan, you clean it up.
So proprietary-mentality managers either cough up money for an IT department, which they almost never do, or fork off money to a proprietary company and write it off as an expense and externalize everything, including resposibility.
Based
