• @filister@lemmy.world
    92•1 year ago

    Back then I read an article about how M$ is crippling the ability of other office packets to read their docx and xslx formats which are supposed to be open formats, but in reality are written in a way never to be fully integrated by competing products. More information about their pseudo open standard: https://fsfe.org/activities/msooxml/msooxml.en.html

    Munich in the past have used Linux PCs for quite some time until eventually switching back to windows. Back then they were citing the same incompatibilities to open and read and display M$ office files correctly. So Microsoft is definitely abusing their position as a market leader and trying to cripple competition as much as they can.

  • @jol@discuss.tchncs.de
    62•1 year ago

    Offices have way more power to convert the world to Linux than even gaming does.

    And ofc, Microsoft is well aware and is not interested in letting that happen.

    • @TwoCubed@feddit.de
      27•1 year ago

      Correct. Bavaria once tried the same thing, but then MS went to the local politicians, sucked their dicks a bit and boom, back to MS products it is! Hopefully the north doesn’t fall for that kind of shit, and they likely won’t because Bavaria is a backwards piece of shit of a Bundesland while Schleswig Holstein is kinda cool.

    • @jkrtn@lemmy.ml
      23•1 year ago

      Hopefully this at least forces Microsoft to rethink riddling their bullshit with ads. I feel sorry for people who are still stuck with that trash for whatever reason.

  • @NateNate60@lemmy.world
    58•1 year ago

    What I predict will happen is that Microsoft will offer them Windows for free or bribe the relevant decision makers with free Surface Pro laptops (for “evaluation”) or other Microsoft paraphernalia.

  • @Landless2029@lemmy.world
    43•1 year ago

    Since the huge push to SaaS I’ve seen plenty of companies that essentially run thin clients.

    The local workstations are just thier access to login to X website that host thier apps and data.

    Zero reason for them to switch to win11 or buy new hardware due to “incompatibility”.

    These end users can be trained to use mint or Ubuntu and be just as productive at work.

      • @Acters@lemmy.world
        1•1 year ago

        Funnily enough, this is what a chromebook was made to do. A computer that was only a browser. Unfortunately, the hardware was severely underpowered, and the custom software wasn’t as flexible as a simple Linux desktop is capable of. (Almost no software support outside of Google)

    • @Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
      4•1 year ago

      When web apps took off a decade ago, I was secretly rooting for this.

      OSes shouldnt matter anymore. Everything should funnel through a browser. WASM is already bringing traditional desktop apps to the web. Microsoft and Apple can die in a fire.

      But with the migration, now the fight is to stop Google from owning browsers.

  • @Churbleyimyam@lemm.ee
    11•1 year ago

    Fuck yeah. Biggest employer in Europe NHS England needs to wake up and do this too. In one single licensing agreement they handed Microsoft £163.1 million. Imagine what that could do if spent on linux development instead, or heaven forbid on actual healthcare. It actually boggles my mind that the NHS doesn’t have it’s own distro and do its own development.

    • @gerdesj@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      They don’t need a new distro, unless they hire a lot of highly skilled packagers. I’d take say Ubuntu or OpenSuSE … but it would be RedHat with Oracle for the NHS - they just can’t help losing money.

      For my tiny company, I’m going Kubuntu … bear with … Ubuntu means:

      • Multiple “enterprise AV” are available (ESET and others)
      • Secure Boot
      • Full disc encryption is available

      Those boxes ticked gets you on the way in the rather naff enterprise security word of tick boxes. Without those - give up now.

      The K(DE) bit gets you a lot of configurability and its reasonably easy to get an environment out of the box that Windows users can get to grips with. Besides, I like KDE/Plasma.

      I then tack on this rather fine project: https://cid-doc.github.io/ for AD, SYSVOL, “Drive letter” etc integration. Evolution with EWS does email.

      My test machine is my desktop (it used to run Arch (actually), my laptop still does) - I started off with Kubuntu 22.04 and wired up all the above and then whilst in a Teams meeting kicked off the upgrade to 23.04 for a laugh. Sound stopped after a while because the kernel modules switched out. Anyway, all good after a reboot.

      Seeing as I am competing with something that has GPO, I’ll allow myself to use Ansible.

      PS - I should point out that an Arch box can run one of the ESET for Linux products OK (I have). You can get it to do secure boot and it can do FDE. So can Gentoo but I spent 15 years constantly fixing my Gentoo pets too.

    • @z00s@lemmy.world
      1•1 year ago

      From what I’ve heard, the problem with IT in the health industry is with equipment manufacturers. MRIs, x-ray machines and other equipment that have control software that’s written not just for windows, but a particular version of windows, and won’t work without it. So you end up with a patchwork of different OSes that need to be updated and secure. Unifying that into one OS, even if it was to a pre-rolled Linux distro would be a nightmare, if not impossible.

      It breaks my brain every day of the week thinking about how much money could be put to better use in so many industries if they just switched to Linux, but big organisations are like big ships; they move slowly and are hard to steer. And they regard software licences as the cost of doing business 🤷‍♂️

      • @Churbleyimyam@lemm.ee
        1•1 year ago

        Yeah it’s a shame about that. I wonder if a customer the size of the NHS could make it worth releasing Linux versions of the software though. I mean, if I can get an appimage or flatpak of some small open source cross-platform project surely someone like Canon could release one for their new ultrasound stuff. Especially if they’re being offered an order to roll it out across an entire nations health service?

        It would be pretty funny if they just ran it using Wine though!

    • @LeroyJenkins@lemmy.world
      -2•1 year ago

      bro you need to wake up. this is not how software works with government. NHS is not going to write their own Linux distro. that’s crazy even for a company to do. its gonna take them a recurring budget every year just for maintaining the system. it’ll balloon way past the Microsoft number easily. 163mm pound is a tiny TINY budget for an undertaking like building a healthcare OS that they plan to maintain forever. they’ll have money to hire contractors once, then they’ll pass it to their internal teams that are staffed with people trying to pass time until they collect pension.

      also no way will any agency take the liability of building a custom OS for their health infra. health tech is honestly one of the hardest, most expensive things to dev just due to all the regulation and red tape behind it. you can’t just build health tech for the hell of it, even if you’re the NHS. it takes years and years and crazy money to have your systems certified to handle health data even if you’re building internally.

  • T (they/she)
    10•1 year ago

    When I was at university (also in Brazil) all the computers from my institute used Mandriva.

  • @TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9•1 year ago

    Nothing like paying your consulting friends to move everything to Linux to then pay them again to move back to Windows later one. Just like someone is Germany did at some point. :)

    • ProdigalFrogOPEnglish
      25•1 year ago

      The LiMux project in Germany had some shady stuff going on in the background. Microsoft almost certainly bribed the new conservative government to switch everything back to Windows. There was a great documentary about it from DW that interviewed some whistleblowers, but I can no longer find it. However, Quidsup on Youtube did a good video encapsulating the course of events.

      EDIT: I was able to find the documentary by searching the old title in German, which brought up the original German version, and from there found the English translation!

      • @TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        Great find, I was aware of that situation but it doesn’t mean what I said wasn’t also happening “in the background”. Everyone was profiting from consulting companies to Microsoft.

      • @Reygle@lemmy.world
        1•6 months ago

        Hey- sorry to revive a very old conversation, but this evening I was updating my pihole server and noticed there weren’t any changes/additions to Quidsup’s notrack block list- so I started looking around and realized I hadn’t seen a video from him in years either.

        Do you know what became of him? I used to really enjoy his stuff and it’s like he just left the internet.

        • ProdigalFrogOPEnglish
          1•6 months ago

          Huh, you’re right, he has been absent. He still seems to be updating notrack over on his gitlab, so I have to assume he just got bored with videos, or some other aspect of his life took priority. I don’t have a twitter account, so I can’t see if he’s posted there, but hopefully he’s in good spirits and health.

  • @mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8•1 year ago

    Interesting (and poorly paraphrased) story about a successful Linux migration:

    spoiler

    Several years ago someone made a post or cross-posted on r/sysadmin where OP (lead sysadmin) was in meeting with management and they complained about windows and the licensing costs.

    OP jokingly passed a comment about switching to Linux and management actually thought he was throwing out a real idea.

    Upon explaining the much lower cost due to FOSS and maybe only requiring a small contract for consulting/support, management actually agreed to his idea.

    He successfully transitioned the entire company to OpenSUSE which he determined was the best enterprise distro for desktop use.

    The other important part was how he handled the transition. iirc he got it going by first offering it to tech savvy departments who were ecstatic to get new stuff, so he lined it up with a hardware upgrade.

    Naturally the rest of the departments heard about it and also wanted the new stuff which locked them into using Linux.

    There were several holdouts clinging to Windows, but with the majority showing success, management forced them to change as well.

    For his use case, most of the employees were using web apps, so almost no additional desktop apps were required.

  • @LeroyJenkins@lemmy.world
    4•1 year ago

    I love Linux but I’ve seen so many of these efforts fail. I did a move where we moved an entire election system onto centos. the move was a quarter billion dollars for them, but a couple years later they came back needing us to move to Redhat… then back to windows eventually.

    the reason is governments are never willing to figure things out for themselves. if there’s any error at all that happens that might make some gov officials look bad, they need a support line to call immediately and threaten breaking contracts. maybe these guys are fuckin with Canonical but Linux support is so shit from my experience.

    as much as I hate Microsoft, you can pay them enough and they’ll elevate your tickets to engineers who actually can do something and fix your shit. THAT is what governments actually want. somebody to sue or blame when their tech hits the fan.