they will save 188,000 € on Microsoft license fees per year
That’s 188k euro that can be used to improve the quality of open source software.
Fingers crossed that this will be an indisputable success. 🤞
Allegedly a similar project in Munich went really really well, but was shut down when the right wing came into power.
For some reason the right wing of Munich doesn’t like freedom. 🙄Well there is never enough money for the workers that they need for open source but there is always more than enough money for companies and their consultants ✌️😎
was shut down when the right wing came into power.
…and when M$ moved their headquarters into the city of Munich, making some nice impact on the city treasury.
They had already moved it, so Munich didn’t have to switch back for that.
But yes I bet it was a factor as in corruption.
Munich racist shitheads (a.k.a. CSU) absolutely do love that sweet “freedom money” a.k.a. bribes though. Corrupt fuckers…
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Since 1948 Mayors of Munich were members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Just one exception, Erich Kiesl (CSU) 1978-1984.
While I don’t necessarily disagree, wasn’t it mostly less bad than the rural areas all around?
Microsoft supports genocide which also makes them attractive to fascists.
The German Microsoft headquarters are in Munich.
I thought this was the bribe?
Can you imagine the moaning?
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.
Microsoft blocking email access to the ICJ director may be the best thing to happen for Linux adoption since the SteamDeck. Now every Microsoft lobbyst can be asked what would happen is the US government order Microsoft to block them out of their infrastructure.
It’s gonna be a rough few months for the IT department
Actually being able to troubleshoot things yourself instead of waiting for a reply from Microsoft support is a godsend.
Assuming the IT staff isn’t comprised of a bunch of junior techs that only know the Microsoft suite and not the actual inner workings of how email and Linux works.
Conveniently, this could be a path to competence for those juniors in the long term.
You a glass half full type person, huh? Honestly, I admire that attitude. I hope you can keep that.
you’re a “wish you all the best” type person huh? I hope you can keep that
I hope so. I would have loved the opportunity to be in that position, and if I was still working as a sys admin, I’d still live it.
“competency” in IT is more about your skills with the tools your company is using. My current company only has one super minor server running Linux so even if someone so advanced with Linux they make Richard Stallman look like a M$ shill wouldnt be a competent engineer in my infrastructure.
I do get what you’re saying though and I wish more things would move to Linux in general. It’s much nicer to manage.
Or way worse, what you said but senior techs.
Microsoft has been at this long enough that there is an army of old guys whose only - but extremely specialized - skillset is navigating arcane GUIs for group policies and AD administration. But drop them in a bash terminal and they’re like a fish dropped on a tennis court.
Modern MS infra administration is far from “navigating arcane GUIs”: it’s all about PowerShell, IaC, automation etc.
Yeah now it’s all about navigating obscure web pages that mysteriously change every few months haha
true
Ew. I didn’t think of it that way, but your right. Hopefully the seniors are tech smart and not just MS smart.
MS smart
I feel like most of the items aren’t going to be real troubleshooting.
It’s been a good bit since I worked the support desk, but even with generic microsoft updates, most of the ‘questions’ were basically the worst users finding a way to say ‘It used to be this and I want it to be this way, hold my hand for an hour while telling me its not this way anymore until I get tired and then complain to someone else’.
'It used to be this and I want it to be this way, hold my hand for an hour while telling me its not this way anymore
Yeah, but that already happens every time Microsoft does a major version “upgrade”.
And imagine how much more handholding it’ll require when you fundamentally change everything about their computer lmao
Imagine them switching to Linux and suddenly shit works
Lol, I was thinking the same thing. “plug it in, OK, done”. No drivers and none of that shit.
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.
Let’s hope it sticks when Microsoft backs up the money truck.
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.
Agree. Fb, Whatsapp, Instagram, Linkedin, Quora, Twitter, Tumblr - I do believe that social networks should be independent and decentralized and not manipulated by one person - thats why Lemmy, Mastodon is the best choice for me
I hate it so much that Whatsapp made itself a social media
from what i know Germany already does this
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.
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
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.
I use powerpoint all the time. Impress is very far behind in terms of usability and basic functionality. But I’m hopeful it will get better as adoption increases.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
In October they are forcing everyone to new outlook too! I can’t wait to have a shittier interface with less functionality!
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
ODF master race?
I.wouldn’t be so sure, the world runs on M$ spreadsheets and their shenanigans.
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
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.My Brother printer worked way better on W11 then W10, but I disliked W10 more than I dislike W11 at least at the start
Going from win7 to win10 is definitely more harsh than from win10 to win11
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.
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”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
If you self host, all features are free.
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.
188K doesnt sound much
Some localities in Germany have been incorporating Linux into their systems for 20+ years.
That may explain why the financial benefits seem low.
Certainly not this one: 6 EUR/user/year doesn’t cover even Windows
Depends on your relationship with Microsoft.
50 cents per user per month doesn’t make any sense: I think for MS it might be cheaper to give products for free than to process these payments
Note that that number (180000) is per year, not per month
I’m guessing it’s a really small state with not much IT going on.
As for cheaper to give for free: ABSOLUTELY. But, with free then they don’t have their sales guys in there talking with them, they don’t have the state “acknowledging the debt” and the legitimacy of their right to charge for their software.
In the 1990s M$ let the world pirate DOS and Windows with wild abandon, they were just happy that people were using their stuff and not others’. After the world was good and hooked, shortly after we all survived Y2K, they started turning the screws - requiring license keys for full functionality, getting serious about demanding payment.
Bill Gates net worth was “only” $30B before they got serious about charging for their software, today I see it’s over $200B even after all of Melinda’s philanthropy.
I’m guessing it’s a really small state with not much IT going on.
A small organization will have higher software license prices per user than a large one.
Also true, and at this kind of rate we can assume the state is doing most of its own IT self-support without a lot of M$ hand-holding.
It actually does now. Your M365 license also includes a windows license.
The cheapest M365 I see is 8 USD/month, not per year
Maybe you responded to the wrong person? I didn’t talk about price but yeah M365 is paid monthly. Mostly, you can get annual licenses with a bit of a discount.
But an exchange online license is only $4/month ;)
Mate, are you sure you don’t confuse per year and per month numbers? Those 180000 is per YEAR (for 30000 users)
Mate, are you sure you didnt confuse my comment with someone else’s? I didn’t put any numbers in my comment at all, I was just being cheeky and pointing out that M365 licenses come with a Windows license as well. Or at least business basic and above.
I am not German, and I don’t know what licenses or how many accounts the German government has. That is irrelevant to my comment.
A cost worth cutting nonetheless
Small state.
I think the big money is in support contracts.
I can’t see a reason why Linux distro wouldn’t be enough for 99% of office machines. Unless deployment is really that much better and easier with Windows and MS Office. And whatever proprietary apps they use that need running on certain OS.
Those proprietary apps are the really big factor. A lot of stuff is run from a browser these days, but some systems are just too expensive to replace.
Things are slowly starting to get better in a lot of the fields I interface with.
Payroll and accounting software? Many great browser-based offerings. Unfortunately that also means the backend is running in the developer’s servers, but these applications were generally proprietary to begin with.
EMR company I’ve done a lot of work with (used to be an engineer there), has essentially halted progress on their Windows-only native client (and it was DEEPLY entrenched in Windows) and is now browser based, retaining 99% of functionality. This one always connected to a proprietary backend anyway.
Own a VW, Audi, Seat, Škoda, Bentley or Lamborghini (depending on model year for some of those)? The popular 3rd party diagnostic software for those, called VCDS, now has a mobile variant if you buy the wireless dongle instead of the cable - it runs a server in the dongle itself that you connect to via wifi, and it displays the sofware as a website. Of course it’s available for non-mobile browsers too.
Common theme among all of these is that none need to do heavy data processing on the client - though nowadays that is also solvable using WASM.
I mean, at my work we mostly have operating apps that just run inside browser anyway. Our mail clients also run in browser. Only some internal apps are something specially that feels like JAVA designed or something that should run on Linux as well. We could easily use some Linux distro and with KDE or Cinnamon/MATE/XFCE it would be roughly similar to Windows 11. Most people have no clue what version we have, they just know it’s Windows. You could just tell them it’s special new version of Windows for companies and they’d just eventually adapt to it not knowing it’s not really Windows at all.
The advantage Windows has is Intune for device management.
The disadvantage is having to use Intune.Linux is just much easier to script an install an manage using any of the IaC tools you might already be using for your servers. Yes, you can manage Windows with the same tools but it just isn’t as reliable in my experience.
The best thing about R is that it was made by statisticians. The worst thing about R is that it was made by statisticians.
This is my biggest thing. How come nobody really has any MDM or MEM for Linux? One that actually offers everything that Intune does.
Hell i even use AD (Yes Microsoft Active Directory) on my Linux servers because it actually works
There are several CM tools already available. Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt, etc. Just pick one.
I’ve tried all of them but none of them are quite as fully featured as the M365 platform. That’s really where they get you. It offers MDM, MEM, email, account control, file shares, antivirus, patch scanning, group policy, and countless other things all under one platform.
None of those are really a whole ecosystem.
Windows + office + account and identity management all come with Ms 365 business in the first tier past family. For about $15 or $16 a month you can use InTune to set up logins and select enrollment with MFA as well a provision computers and management with InTune including Boyd self enrollment for laptops, Android, and Apple. All your files get rbac, backup, and recovery from day 1. You can, and I would recommend strongly against this, even manage your osx devices from InTune.
It’s very slick and there is a reason business use it. This thread is somewhat delusional on how easy it is to manage and how terrible office 365 is.
UntilI can log a user on and have all their stuff automatically sync or download on Linux. Microsoft can have office computers. But please, please let Linux take over gaming.
It’s not.
The problem is that one percent that does need Windows.
Unicorns suck in IT. It’s a small number of systems that take a disproportionate amount of admin overhead.
So IT leadership has to decide if they support a separate OS for a small percentage of users, or one OS that works for everyone (Windows).
Those boxes will be unicorns no matter what, though, also, they’re not necessarily part of the general IT infrastructure. Someone in catastrophe defence might be running fluid simulations using some god awful expensive windows-only software but chances are they can manage their own box, and if not, the ministry will still have IT staff who can deal with that kind of thing.
IT absolutely does still have to manage those things though. At my company we have all sorts of obscure boxes controlling things like diagnostic readers and CNC machines. Things that the mechanics/engineers [imo] should be able to manage, its still on us.
Plus they usually still want those things to access the internet (because they require it) or access to file shares (to get gcode files and whatever) which is firmly an IT task
I mean… my condolences and/or yay you get to be a honorary machinist?
Unless deployment is really that much better and easier
In staging, i made a batch script to run the shortcuts on desktop we had to run to check if setup was successful. But i couldn’t just run the command of the shortcut but had to run the shortcut itself, because that made a difference.
In short: no.
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”
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.
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
The easiest hacks use social engineering. Much more social to exploit in the end-user arena.
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.
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.
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.
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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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.
I sometimes wonder what if everyone who spends money on licensing fees instead takes the same amount of money and puts it into FOSS. Imagine what we could achieve? Likely the money would be used more efficiently because they could donate it to non-profit companies which don’t need to pay tax.
Just remember, the license fees mostly don’t go into development, or maintenance, or security, or any of that, they mostly pay for “sales” which includes a strong component of end customer support. When you divert “all that money” into FOSS, FOSS development and maintenance might be lucky to get 20%, the other 80% will be spend training and employing tech support.
There are companies which offer training and support to FOSS. Companies could also pay those companies.
Yes, RedHat has been doing this for decades.
Thing is: RedHat probably can’t price match M$ in a bidding war, probably not even close.
And there could be insight into whether the money is actually used for developing the relevant application.
I don’t see how this gives any insight into how your subscription price is being used for products relevant to you.
Your subscription price is the source of those dividends. It pays the shareholders, it pays the sales staff’s commissions, it pays for management, it pays for executive salaries and bonuses, it pays for legal counsel, it pays for political lobbying. Your subscription price is working hard, for the company, not for you.
Ahhh 😅😂
