I can remember the same or very similar news from Germany appearing every now and then for over a decade.
This time I almost believe them as there seems to be no alternative to LibreOffice given the changes Microsoft introduced during the recent years - forcing everyone to log-in with their Microsoft account at best, also moving from a classic desktop app to a web app. Conservative users like me and probably German state institutions consider classic desktop apps and web apps distinct tools for different tasks and don't want their desktop to depend on cloud.
It is also worth mentioning that LibreOffice became much better since the time the discussion began.
Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office.
I was helping an elderly relative who works as a translator and hasn’t touched a modern version of word in about 5 years.
They had a new computer and I got an ms office sub for them.
The poor person re-did about 4 hours of their work 3x because they couldn’t find the file MS Word had guaranteed them it had saved, so they had to start from scratch.
It did save it. In their fucking cloud and made it so opaque that the user couldn’t possibly understand wtf was happening. It took me, a tech professional a good 5 minutes to snap out of the dark pattern and realise what was going on.
> Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office.
For knowledge workers who live in these tools, the difference is stark. Even for companies who've standardized on Google Workspace or Apple iWork, advanced users will need Microsoft Office.
So many microcosms with tech. I'm always reminded here on HN how terrible Office is and why we don't just use Google Docs. I hold this same opinion personally. However I go to other communities (I think the last one I remember was some startup subreddit) and GSuite is being mocked and everyone is recommending Office and Teams as the obvious choice for starting your business.
I assume it's just that we prefer the devil we know than the one we don't.
I'm not an Excel jockey but friends who are testify to its power and flexibility.
I use Word a lot and the ease of use still beats gdoc's. For example, the macros and the "customize keyboard" options are great. cmd-l for "next edit," cmd-j for "accept and move on," cmd-; for "reject change." The speed is paramount.
> Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office.
My mom had to buy a copy of MS Office. Her university provided free ms office online, but there were certain features missing from it she needed for her papers. I am remembering wrong, but it was annotations? Citations? I do not remember.
Libreoffice kinda could do it, but I could not find how online, while MS had it properly documented on their website and so many youtubers making videos on MS Office had it listed on their website.
Edit: also found out MS Office can screen record and record her webcam. Very useful for her giving a remote presentation during covid.
There are a ton of very specific pieces of functionality that are built into Microsoft Word that caters to business edge cases. Features that have worked the same way and have not been touched for years for compatability reasons and are not duplicated in other software/services. Word is a bloated mess, but incredibly feature rich.
The popularity of all these paper emulators seems odd to me.
Like, how long after the advent of software will it take before our workflows find their authentic shape? Or was that shape really just a list of flat rectangles all along?
> Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office.
Precisely because some of that "bloat" is useful for others. Off the top of my head, I really dislike that Google Docs doesn't support stuff like creating your own styles to apply in the document. My use case, for example, is having a style for inline code, with a monospaced font and a different colour, which I can do in Word creating a new style and applying it, but can't in GDocs.
> The poor person re-did about 4 hours of their work 3x because they couldn’t find the file MS Word had guaranteed them it had saved, so they had to start from scratch.
It should appear as a recent file once you open word, no matter if it was saved to OneDrive or locally. And it certainly isn't so hard to choose where to save it, if OneDrive, a SharePoint site or locally. At least nowadays.
Microsoft in a nutshell… I swear they offplanered their ux people to the moon where they couldn’t do anything. Or they have no ux people. Or their ux people have no effect.
I'm not a psychologist, but I think it's the same reason I still can't get into IntelliJ.
Let me explain: I cut my teeth on Vim. I've been using Vim since I was 17 (I'm 33 now). Nearly everything I do for fun has been with Vim. Most of what I've done for work has also been with Vim (or NeoVim). I write documents in Vim with Pandoc. I compose emails in Vim (using Mutt). I use Vim whenever I do an interactive rebase in git. I do CAD Modeling with Vim using openSCAD. The keystrokes are just second nature to me, I think in Vim keystrokes now, for better or worse.
The IntelliJ Vim plugin is actually very good, but it's not quite perfect, there's subtle, intangible things that I have to adapt to, but are different enough to annoy me. For 99% of people, I think this is more than "good enough", and I still use it when I write Java, but I still am just unable to "like" it.
I don't use MS Office, but I suspect that if you've been using it for a long time, even tiny differences that you'd experience with Google Docs would become infuriating.
> Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office.
I see you have never opened a large spreadsheet in competing software or you wouldn't call MS Office bloated. Sheets and Calc are extremely slow, inefficient software. Excel alone, if you have a use for it, makes it well worth the price of admission. It simply has no competition and neither Google nor Libreoffice can serve as drop in replacements for that.
Most of the features in the Office suite get out of the way and are only there if you need it. It's no bloat to the people who need the features. Office is where Microsoft still shows love for desktop software and it shows, they open very quickly and feel responsive in a way most other software they produce don't (opening the widget board on Windows 11 is a more stuttery experience at times than opening something in Word or Excel)
> It did save it. In their fucking cloud and made it so opaque that the user couldn’t possibly understand wtf was happening
You can't save it in the cloud "by accident". When creating a new document and clicking to save you explicitly have to pick "onedrive" or "this computer" as locations.
> It took me, a tech professional a good 5 minutes to snap out of the dark pattern and realise what was going on.
It took you 5 minutes because you had no idea what the user did. It's not the fault of the software if the user clicked to save to onedrive.
You can also still create new blank documents directly in the explorer.exe (right click -> new -> word document) as you always could since Windows 95 in which case you would have set a local location for the document you're working on before writing the first line of text.
I also find it interesting you're suggesting Docs, a piece of software that is cloud driven only, as a replacement for Word because a user mistakenly "saved to the cloud"
And if giving people the option to save to onedrive is a "dark pattern" then what is a piece of software that can /only/ save to google drive, exactly?
Microsoft 365 Family subscriptions is the whole desktop suite + the online apps (which are pretty competitive with Docs if you need to access something on another computer in a pinch) + 1 terabytes of storage + up to 6 users (each with their own 1tb of storage) on the same subscription for 99 bucks a year. Google can't even begin to compete on that level of offering. Some of the apps have no real google alternatives either, OneNote is an incredible tool for personal organization of ideas and clipping online content you want to keep. It's also very snappy and responsive, again, the Office division really cares about quality of desktop software in a way that has become all too rare. The people working on Windows's desktop/UI elements would do all too well to take inspiration from them because 11 is a damn sham.
Very hard for me to understand why as the owner of a computer you want to put precious data on someone else's computer. Especially someone that has no customer service, a history of killing products with no good options for their users and frequently breaking laws.
Office has become a bit of a UX mess in parts, due to the cloud and web integration, but the overall functionality and integrations are still unmatched. Many people also continue to prefer native applications.
I use MS Office and Softmaker Office, both native and with perpetual license. Works fine for me. Not sure why would I need online service that can cut me off at any point with no recourse
Yeah, they got it so fucked up that the average user has no idea where their files are. It is absolutely unbelievable how user hostile it is. Typical software designed for the goals of the creator. The world of computing has truly descended into hell for the average non-technical person.
Try editing a 200 page document in Google Docs. Last time I tried I had to give up. I detest MS Office too, and Google Docs is perfectly fine for a whole lot of my use cases, but it's not a complete replacement, and that'll be a problem for a lot of places where some subset of users will need other applications anyway if you pick Google.
The "lost" MS Office doc is infuriating, though - have had to help my son with several different variants of that for school over the years, including the reverse, where it's insisted there is no document at the location in the cloud drive it is meant to be, but where it turned out this was because it hadn't been synced from the local drive...
We'll have to see how long it takes, as it did with LiMux (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux) when Microsoft Germany headquarters magically moved to Munich and everything got back to running on Windows again.
I'm sorry, what year is it? Am I posting on Slashdot still? Is this year finally going to be the year where Linux desktops become something for normies?
When Munich did this it never got to a majority of their desktops, is my recollection, it maxed out in the 40%s. Now we're going to do it all over again with a different, much poorer, German state?
In the diesel repair shop I work in, I managed to convince the suits to switch out ms office for libre office. 90% of our stuff is now libre by default...only 2 users have full office suites and theyre both in the bean counting department. We print our BOMs, labels, envelopes and invoices using libre. Compared to office it runs like a scalded dog and never crashes.
I've tried LibreOffice, periodically over the years. The same thing always sends me back to MS Office. MS has really sweated the details of their UI in ways that can only be done by maintaining a huge army of coders. When I use LibreOffice, the lack of responsiveness is immediately noticeable, and actually makes the software physically laborious to use. I've also noticed something like a 10x or even 100x difference in the time to recalculate a large spreadsheet.
While I work for msft, I'm all for open source, even more in this space - consumer and office apps - however, my government has tried this and rolled it back a while later in some branches, while others just suffer with it.
Office is much superior to any open source and even paid alternatives, and we must remember that most people using the software don't have a degree in CS.
I wouldn't be surprised if we see the reverse news a few years later.
> Why? Schleswig-Holstein cites cost, security, and digital sovereignty - though not necessarily in that order.
It's been attempted before and costs has always been higher. But it's not a matter of costs. Reason and responsibility should make it mandatory for certain institutions and the government to own their data. Companies would be well advised to keep owning their data as well or try to get it back. We've all seen what happened with the "privat" Github repositories. No access from Github employees, but as they admitted by AI bots. I don't remember and it doesn't matter if it was on purpose or accidentally.
If using cloud then at least with true E2E encryption. The cloud should only hold strong E2E encrypted blobs and meta data. There're providers out there that I think can be trusted.
My (very large) employer has surrendered to Microsoft. Everything is Office 365 and in Azure. Our IT told us proudly that it's all E2E encrypted and Microsoft can't in any circumstances read our data. But how come I can search for content of Powerpoint and Word docs on Bing for work? A colleague of mine found secret project information this way before the classification levels were on place.
Am I missing something about E2E encryption or is our IT that stupid and naive?
EDIT: And recently our IT announced proudly that we soon can use Copilot.
1. Every software needs resources to be maintained and improved. Those resources finally will need to be paid for by someone.
2. Getting Linux and LibreOffice does not get you a functioning productivity environment. You still need mail, calendars, shared document storage, web conferencing, security etc. There are various levels of usability in those and on basic levels you could get those already 30 years ago mostly. But not on a level, where you could reliably have your workforce be flexibly working from home.
So, let's see how it plays out, but it is not making life easier for the IT admins I guess...
Wonder what will happen to this… The UK didn’t seem to get that far 10 years ago. I remember this article coming out, but was unable to find any follow up / outcomes:
For me Linux is so much better a user experience due to the lack of bloat in the operating system. Microsoft seems to be getting more and more intrusive with its data collection, in addition. Furthermore, being a foreign government that has been subject to US espionage in the past, I'm sure it's better for Germany to use an open source OS rather than US-state back software system.
I have been using Libreoffice/OpenOffice continuously pretty much for last 20 years (mostly Impress/presentation part for teaching/presentations). And the number of bugs, crashes, issues with video etc occasionally gets very annoying. I was hoping over the years things would improve, but I don't quite see that unfortunately. If I could get something to replace LibreOffice that is not online and works on Linux I would pay for it.
My current and past employers are all-in with Microsoft because (like it or not) managing large corporate fleets is easier. Our Linux and Mac machines are treated as exceptions.
This has nothing to do with user experience, it's all about risk management. If we need some software on our Mac, we need to sign a waiver accepting responsibility for any security issues. With the corporate issued windows laptops the IT department is responsible for risks.
Frankly I am shocked that they went with LibreOffice over OnlyOffice.
OnlyOffice supports online collaboration already, works online and offline, and has a much more familiar interface. Compatibility is also better with MS Office documents.
Microsoft is hilarious : We have created codeQL, the perfect solution to search all of source code in the world for known vulnerabilities at a scale very few can even comprehend.... but first it says you dont have candy crush installed, we are going to go ahead and install that for you and even pop up an unskippable ad taking up your entire screen every time mandatory windows updates completes, YOU ARE WELCOME
A few of the smartest people in the world get their reputation stomped into nothing by the sleeziest pieces of shit management that has ever existed
[+] [-] qwerty456127|2 years ago|reply
This time I almost believe them as there seems to be no alternative to LibreOffice given the changes Microsoft introduced during the recent years - forcing everyone to log-in with their Microsoft account at best, also moving from a classic desktop app to a web app. Conservative users like me and probably German state institutions consider classic desktop apps and web apps distinct tools for different tasks and don't want their desktop to depend on cloud.
It is also worth mentioning that LibreOffice became much better since the time the discussion began.
[+] [-] holografix|2 years ago|reply
I was helping an elderly relative who works as a translator and hasn’t touched a modern version of word in about 5 years.
They had a new computer and I got an ms office sub for them.
The poor person re-did about 4 hours of their work 3x because they couldn’t find the file MS Word had guaranteed them it had saved, so they had to start from scratch.
It did save it. In their fucking cloud and made it so opaque that the user couldn’t possibly understand wtf was happening. It took me, a tech professional a good 5 minutes to snap out of the dark pattern and realise what was going on.
[+] [-] CharlesW|2 years ago|reply
For knowledge workers who live in these tools, the difference is stark. Even for companies who've standardized on Google Workspace or Apple iWork, advanced users will need Microsoft Office.
[+] [-] Difwif|2 years ago|reply
I assume it's just that we prefer the devil we know than the one we don't.
[+] [-] jseliger|2 years ago|reply
I'm not an Excel jockey but friends who are testify to its power and flexibility.
I use Word a lot and the ease of use still beats gdoc's. For example, the macros and the "customize keyboard" options are great. cmd-l for "next edit," cmd-j for "accept and move on," cmd-; for "reject change." The speed is paramount.
[+] [-] wannacboatmovie|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsmith12673|2 years ago|reply
But I don't like excel much either. If working with spreadsheets was a bigger part of my day job, I'd switch to excel
[+] [-] csdreamer7|2 years ago|reply
My mom had to buy a copy of MS Office. Her university provided free ms office online, but there were certain features missing from it she needed for her papers. I am remembering wrong, but it was annotations? Citations? I do not remember.
Libreoffice kinda could do it, but I could not find how online, while MS had it properly documented on their website and so many youtubers making videos on MS Office had it listed on their website.
Edit: also found out MS Office can screen record and record her webcam. Very useful for her giving a remote presentation during covid.
[+] [-] etempleton|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] runeb|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] __MatrixMan__|2 years ago|reply
Like, how long after the advent of software will it take before our workflows find their authentic shape? Or was that shape really just a list of flat rectangles all along?
[+] [-] arielcostas|2 years ago|reply
Precisely because some of that "bloat" is useful for others. Off the top of my head, I really dislike that Google Docs doesn't support stuff like creating your own styles to apply in the document. My use case, for example, is having a style for inline code, with a monospaced font and a different colour, which I can do in Word creating a new style and applying it, but can't in GDocs.
> The poor person re-did about 4 hours of their work 3x because they couldn’t find the file MS Word had guaranteed them it had saved, so they had to start from scratch.
It should appear as a recent file once you open word, no matter if it was saved to OneDrive or locally. And it certainly isn't so hard to choose where to save it, if OneDrive, a SharePoint site or locally. At least nowadays.
[+] [-] bfrog|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acchow|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tombert|2 years ago|reply
Let me explain: I cut my teeth on Vim. I've been using Vim since I was 17 (I'm 33 now). Nearly everything I do for fun has been with Vim. Most of what I've done for work has also been with Vim (or NeoVim). I write documents in Vim with Pandoc. I compose emails in Vim (using Mutt). I use Vim whenever I do an interactive rebase in git. I do CAD Modeling with Vim using openSCAD. The keystrokes are just second nature to me, I think in Vim keystrokes now, for better or worse.
The IntelliJ Vim plugin is actually very good, but it's not quite perfect, there's subtle, intangible things that I have to adapt to, but are different enough to annoy me. For 99% of people, I think this is more than "good enough", and I still use it when I write Java, but I still am just unable to "like" it.
I don't use MS Office, but I suspect that if you've been using it for a long time, even tiny differences that you'd experience with Google Docs would become infuriating.
[+] [-] FdbkHb|2 years ago|reply
I see you have never opened a large spreadsheet in competing software or you wouldn't call MS Office bloated. Sheets and Calc are extremely slow, inefficient software. Excel alone, if you have a use for it, makes it well worth the price of admission. It simply has no competition and neither Google nor Libreoffice can serve as drop in replacements for that.
Most of the features in the Office suite get out of the way and are only there if you need it. It's no bloat to the people who need the features. Office is where Microsoft still shows love for desktop software and it shows, they open very quickly and feel responsive in a way most other software they produce don't (opening the widget board on Windows 11 is a more stuttery experience at times than opening something in Word or Excel)
> It did save it. In their fucking cloud and made it so opaque that the user couldn’t possibly understand wtf was happening
You can't save it in the cloud "by accident". When creating a new document and clicking to save you explicitly have to pick "onedrive" or "this computer" as locations.
> It took me, a tech professional a good 5 minutes to snap out of the dark pattern and realise what was going on.
It took you 5 minutes because you had no idea what the user did. It's not the fault of the software if the user clicked to save to onedrive.
You can also still create new blank documents directly in the explorer.exe (right click -> new -> word document) as you always could since Windows 95 in which case you would have set a local location for the document you're working on before writing the first line of text.
I also find it interesting you're suggesting Docs, a piece of software that is cloud driven only, as a replacement for Word because a user mistakenly "saved to the cloud"
And if giving people the option to save to onedrive is a "dark pattern" then what is a piece of software that can /only/ save to google drive, exactly?
Microsoft 365 Family subscriptions is the whole desktop suite + the online apps (which are pretty competitive with Docs if you need to access something on another computer in a pinch) + 1 terabytes of storage + up to 6 users (each with their own 1tb of storage) on the same subscription for 99 bucks a year. Google can't even begin to compete on that level of offering. Some of the apps have no real google alternatives either, OneNote is an incredible tool for personal organization of ideas and clipping online content you want to keep. It's also very snappy and responsive, again, the Office division really cares about quality of desktop software in a way that has become all too rare. The people working on Windows's desktop/UI elements would do all too well to take inspiration from them because 11 is a damn sham.
[+] [-] usr1106|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] layer8|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FpUser|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] briHass|2 years ago|reply
Thunderbird is (unfortunately) a joke, and web clients aren't as nice when managing complex folder arrangements and lots of mail.
[+] [-] dirkt|2 years ago|reply
You don't want Google to have data that is used to govern a federal German state.
[+] [-] aporetics|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karma_pharmer|2 years ago|reply
The answer is in the first sentence of the article: data sovereignty.
Most governments don't want to store their data with a foreign corporation.
[+] [-] datavirtue|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vidarh|2 years ago|reply
The "lost" MS Office doc is infuriating, though - have had to help my son with several different variants of that for school over the years, including the reverse, where it's insisted there is no document at the location in the cloud drive it is meant to be, but where it turned out this was because it hadn't been synced from the local drive...
[+] [-] Daz1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xw38011|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] to11mtm|2 years ago|reply
It's been interesting to watch because he's happy to embrace better tech but hates dark patterns.
[+] [-] ByQuyzzy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] midnight2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] abirahemmed1|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lwde|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mandevil|2 years ago|reply
When Munich did this it never got to a majority of their desktops, is my recollection, it maxed out in the 40%s. Now we're going to do it all over again with a different, much poorer, German state?
[+] [-] nimbius|2 years ago|reply
In the diesel repair shop I work in, I managed to convince the suits to switch out ms office for libre office. 90% of our stuff is now libre by default...only 2 users have full office suites and theyre both in the bean counting department. We print our BOMs, labels, envelopes and invoices using libre. Compared to office it runs like a scalded dog and never crashes.
[+] [-] analog31|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mlok|2 years ago|reply
https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...
[+] [-] HeavyStorm|2 years ago|reply
Office is much superior to any open source and even paid alternatives, and we must remember that most people using the software don't have a degree in CS.
I wouldn't be surprised if we see the reverse news a few years later.
[+] [-] WuxiFingerHold|2 years ago|reply
It's been attempted before and costs has always been higher. But it's not a matter of costs. Reason and responsibility should make it mandatory for certain institutions and the government to own their data. Companies would be well advised to keep owning their data as well or try to get it back. We've all seen what happened with the "privat" Github repositories. No access from Github employees, but as they admitted by AI bots. I don't remember and it doesn't matter if it was on purpose or accidentally.
If using cloud then at least with true E2E encryption. The cloud should only hold strong E2E encrypted blobs and meta data. There're providers out there that I think can be trusted.
My (very large) employer has surrendered to Microsoft. Everything is Office 365 and in Azure. Our IT told us proudly that it's all E2E encrypted and Microsoft can't in any circumstances read our data. But how come I can search for content of Powerpoint and Word docs on Bing for work? A colleague of mine found secret project information this way before the classification levels were on place.
Am I missing something about E2E encryption or is our IT that stupid and naive?
EDIT: And recently our IT announced proudly that we soon can use Copilot.
[+] [-] Perenti|2 years ago|reply
"Other countries, notably China, have proverbs that say they are much more stubborn when shifting gears from Windows to Linux."
Proverbs? A stitch in time saves nine. Many hands make light work.
Please, anyone, show me a proverb that says "they are much more stubborn when shifting gears from Windows to Linux."
[+] [-] yayr|2 years ago|reply
2. Getting Linux and LibreOffice does not get you a functioning productivity environment. You still need mail, calendars, shared document storage, web conferencing, security etc. There are various levels of usability in those and on basic levels you could get those already 30 years ago mostly. But not on a level, where you could reliably have your workforce be flexibly working from home.
So, let's see how it plays out, but it is not making life easier for the IT admins I guess...
[+] [-] perihelions|2 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39928173 ("German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice", 322 comments)
[+] [-] doener|2 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39916133
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39928173
[+] [-] jrgifford|2 years ago|reply
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/29/uk-govern...
[+] [-] mjfl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daneel_w|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sega_sai|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] korginator|2 years ago|reply
This has nothing to do with user experience, it's all about risk management. If we need some software on our Mac, we need to sign a waiver accepting responsibility for any security issues. With the corporate issued windows laptops the IT department is responsible for risks.
[+] [-] tredre3|2 years ago|reply
OnlyOffice supports online collaboration already, works online and offline, and has a much more familiar interface. Compatibility is also better with MS Office documents.
OnlyOffice is developed online-first but they provide an electron app that works fully offline on all OSes: https://www.onlyoffice.com/download-desktop.aspx?from=deskto...
Yep, an electron app is better than native LibreOffice. That's how low the bar is currently.
[+] [-] beefnugs|2 years ago|reply
A few of the smartest people in the world get their reputation stomped into nothing by the sleeziest pieces of shit management that has ever existed