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Comment by reacharavindh | Hacker News Reader

It always hits the nerve to hear that a public organization is moving back to MS from FOSS, but I wish this kind of demand(from governments) would lead to a open company that is strictly focused on developing an alternative to Windows desktop. Linux is heavily pulled in the server direction, and we need a company other than RedHAt who can pull Linux ecosystem a bit together to build an opinionated but coherent desktop.

Trying to support all of the email clients, calendar tools and obscure media decoders will never lead us to an usable Linux based Desktop.

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If you consider that every municipality in EU (or world) has similiar problems and the costs for running Microsoft and other commercial software is quite high everywhere I really don't know why the EU doesn't start some public company or organisation and polish the existing open-source tools.

It's probably considered anti-competitive but let's image they scrap 1 billion of their budgets and invest in opensource:

- polish Samba to be a viable Windows Server replacement. Replication, missing Kerberos functionality, Implement ADWS, ADFS - maybe Exchange APIs. Save millions on server costs.

- unfuck LibreOffice, develop a strong foundation to implement typical processes

- polish KDE / Plasma to macOS/Windows usability/stability - rewrite kmail/korganizer with modern usability/ui

Not sure if that's possible but it feels like a lot of things are 60-80% done - maybe taking a leap and fixing the other 60-80% might make a difference.

- have an EU wide service agency that supports municipalities in implementing OSS

- demand opensource software for public money.

- create strong open standards and enforce them by law for public institutions.

maybe it will take 5 to 10 years but everyone should profit.

I agree Linux requires some polish, but have you tried e.g. LibreOffice lately? It's very good.

I have a small deployment of Linux machines running GNOME and the typical office suite applications, including LibreOffice. I'm using NixOS to ensure everything runs extremely controlled versions of software. It's rock solid.

Furthermore, the users are really technologically illiterate. And they like the UI. They have no issues.

I think the big problem is usually that people expect a perfect replacement for MS Office. They try to open DOC (not DOCX files) in LibreOffice. And it's not perfect. It can't be perfect, as it's playing a very hard catch up game on ill-defined file formats.

> I think the big problem is usually that people expect a perfect replacement for MS Office.

Nobody owes it to LibreOffice to use it when a superior alternative exists. DOC support is minutiae - there are certainly people who do use it, but intentionally switching away from the default (DOCX) while Office moans at you about reduced functionality seems like a huge degree of dedication to a file format. Two huge reasons why LibreOffice is currently not good enough for me:

* The UI is functional and tolerable. It's not pleasant to stare at all day. Menus, toolbars and floating windows are fine if you hail from the 90s. Mozilla are a shining example to other OSS projects of what users expect in 2018[1]. Make it work, make it right, make it fast. OSS needs to learn that there is another step: make it beautiful. And they like the UI. Do they love it?

* Advanced integration with Dropbox or what-have-you. Microsoft has Sharepoint. So far as I know, Office is the only thick-client suite to offer collaborative editing on top of file sharing. When you have dozens of users collaborating on a project this stuff is incredibly important. Email is not scalable - your users shouldn't be opening a DOC from an attachment in the first place.

There are 13000 reasons why Lower Saxony is switching away from OSS. Dismissing what the competition offers is dismissing those 13000 reasons and means that a project will never address those reasons.

Good enough is not good enough.

[1]: https://design.firefox.com/photon/welcome.html

If you extrapolate a bit you can see that we can get rid of governments and have private companies run our lives completely.

Public money should be spent on making FOSS better rather than making private companies richer thereby helping them kill FOSS.

FWIW, current releases of LibreOffice 6 can open and edit documents from SharePoint document libraries.

Also, I have not had trouble opening OOXML files (.docx, .xlsx) in LibreOffice.

The main problem with LibreOffice, from my point of view, is that there are many third-party applications that expect MS Office to be installed or use it exclusively for data import/export. For example, Autodesk Inventor can create a bi-directional link to Excel and export the list of parts of a model to Excel; ePlan, too. Our PDM system comes with an Outlook plugin that allows users to upload emails. Our ERP system can export stuff to Excel, but not to LibreOffice. The list goes on and on. For a large number of use cases, LibreOffice is perfectly cromulent as it is. But as long as all those third-party application rely on MS Office, it will remain dominant, regardless of the price or technical merits.

The last 10 percent are a very hard thing to do - a lot of effort goes into these frigging details (one of them is internationalization, like a proper spell checker for libre office that works for many languages and not just English)

Came here to say this. That last 10% of the polish easily takes 40+% of the effort (or more based on the pareto principle).

GUI work in general is a lot of work.

It's an unsubstantiated claim but my impression is that governments are not good at managing companies.

Who gets to decide if it's better to use LibreOffice or OpenOffice? What are the features that are the most important for the office replacement? How is it going to be supported? Is there a line where people can call to complain about the product? Taking all that OSS and packaging it sounds a lot like running a company, especially when multiple "consumers" are involved.

Good questions. Maybe something like a cooperative¹ that is independed of the states? Such a project could probably even be refinanced by users who pay for consulting.

How to organize this in such a way that it will be successfull and efficient? Let's start researching it now.

It's such a shame how European universities and every other part of the state is switching to Microsoft because the on-premise alternatives mostly suck.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative

Why would you want to recreate Windows UI? It's an evolutionary dead-end and everybody is moving off of it. KDE is a dead technology as well, they're still stuck in the WIMP metaphor, whereas Gnome are pushing the envelope with innovative tablet-friendly user-centric story-based UIs that are miles ahead of anything Apple can dream to achieve. We can't move forward by being stuck in the past and an effort to hobble the F/OSS desktop by EU governments should be resisted at all costs.

KDE is a dead technology?

Technically, it uses the latest Qt and CPP world have to offer + QML Declarative UI's and is among the last projects pushing for a community based mobile operating system, designing a touch-based mobile-specific UI.

The only difference is that the desktop metaphor is not being manipulated to become a one-fits-for-all solution.

Instead, a whole new interface is being created for mobiles.

I don't see how coherence is a problem. Windows the platform is pretty incoherent.

The article is light on details, but I think the issue is really in interoperability. When everyone around you runs Windows, you either have to be very good at interoperating with key Windows apps (all parts of Outlook, Word, Excel, Visio, MS Project, etc), or to run Windows, too.

Part of the problem is that many of these things operate on closed data formats, and MS has little incentive to help with interoperbilty. Conversion tools can exist but they are often cumbersome, imperfect, and thus painful for regular use.

This is how an ecosystem lock-in works. BTW it's not specific to Windows; every platform makes it simpler to use this platform's tools, and, because of that, any out-of-platform tools become harder to use in comparison.

True. It's something I didn't write in the original comment, but Office suite is another big reason for Windows being this prevalent. For most non-technical users, MS Office is the only program they know. for such non-tech users, Google docs is the lightweight office you get if you don't have the privilege of running fat Office on your desktop..

Well, technically Linux ecosystem has Open&Libre office. Many times when they show up in news feed, I download and try to use it. But, one thing thing I can always feel - awfully slow/laggy and looks like they are stuck in a decade ago and refuse to change. This makes it uncool for anybody to switch to it from MS office. Perhaps it is great for those obsessive tech users who tinker the heck out of it, but out of the box, it IS inferior in most ways. If anything incentives like these huge government implementations have the potential to start and fund a project that will develop an open & usable alternative to MS Office. One can dream.

> we need a company other than RedHAt

Why not government? FOSS is for free public use like any other public infrastructure. It benefits all so it seems proper for government to fund it.

EDIT: If anyone wants to downvote because they disagree (not that I think that's proper use of the downvote), please at least state your opinion. I want to know.

I totally agree.

I have come to realize that capitalism is a narrow-minded approach towards progress. It does not work in the long run.

Capitalism and democracy are incompatible.

Well, I disagree that capitalism doesn't work, but I can agree that it doesn't always work. Like in many other things, balance is key.

> an opinionated but coherent desktop

Isn't this Ubuntu?

I experimented with Ubuntu by giving a laptop running plain Ubuntu to my retired parents. They are new to computers and their needs are simple. * Video calls - Skype or FaceTime * watch youtube. * Transfer pictures from digital camera to laptop and view them (many times ;-) ) * local newspaper's website * play their local music library * Not confuse them.

But, Ubuntu failed them miserably. They had a hard time using because, their words - "what works one time, doesn't the next time."

When my dad closes the lid, he expects the laptop to go to sleep mode, and again open the lid to wake it, just doesn't work all time, give some kind of messages only a tech person would understand.

Their observation - "text is not sharp". I checked it on their laptop display, Windows is rather sharp and usable while Ubuntu's default font rendering is too soft and they need to squint a bit to read.

internet connectivity - There are so many issues with the default wifi setup on their laptop. Dad gets frustrated if it shows him a dialog box with information he does not understand. So, often times the laptop lies there gathering dust until I or a friend goes to their house to "fix it" - often times just reboot the damn thing.

After this struggle, they bought a Windows laptop.

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