> Microsoft Chairman and General Counsel Brad Smith dismissed such worries
Every time I read this guy’s name, I remember how he made false statements to the US Congress about the Golden SAML vulnerability by claiming that Microsoft had no knowledge of it when in reality, they had known about it for years and buried it for the sake of making money. Nothing he says is credible.
That said, going with open source solutions is not getting away from US companies, but that is not what is needed here. What is needed is getting away from Microsoft, which cannot be trusted. They have had a pattern of poor security decisions for the sake of making money that has persisted for decades.
By the way, it does not matter how good end users are at security when Microsoft is making decisions that undermine it. For example, the hack of RSA Security occurred by exploiting vulnerabilities in Microsoft software. Those vulnerabilities were there
because Microsoft’s management prioritized making money (adding insecure features) over writing secure software. The single best security decision any organization can make is to ban Microsoft software and services.
Much of what you said is true, however the alternatives are quite poor. Believe me, If corporations could find a way to shrink the MS tax, they would be all over it. Corporations have run pilot staropenlibre office programs for decades now. They all fail because it stinks.
To note, their whole ecosystem might be changing, allowing for more flexibility in the Office software space.
There's better online options and many of their needs can be fulfilled by in-house We apps instead of the perennial Access DB or Excel files passed around in mails.
Even the sole reduction of printed documents should have impacted how much is expected from Word or Powerpoint, and make alternatives a lot more viable.
Power users will still need all features in the world, but the rest of the user's are probably less held as hostages as before.
A government could fund an audit for the code since it's open source, right? They might even have their own builds so their computers only install from there.
The article doesn't mention which Linux distribution was chosen. I'm curious about that, since in my opinion it can make or break the project. It's also possible that multiple distributions were used for different cases, which could make sense.
As for user-friendly options, I think Ubuntu and Mint are the best choices right now, with Mint (Cinnamon Edition) being a better fit for users coming from Windows, which seems to be the case here.
Also, I recently switched from LibreOffice to OnlyOffice. I find its UI and UX much better. That said, I'll look into the licensing aspect mentioned in the article, maybe LibreOffice aligns better with my values.
I tried OnlyOffice once and couldn't stand it. It felt as horrible as MS Office. I'm a happy Libreoffice user, and find that their UX choices make sense once you look into the rationale and are very functional and easy to adapt to.
I guess everyone's experience is different, but I'm always very surprised and humbled when people talk passionately about how bad the UX is on projects, which I use because of their UX rather than despite it. (GIMP is the other big example here)
Linux Mint with Cinnamon (or XFCE before that) was my daily driver for a while, really nice distro that just works and gets out of your way for the most part.
I do personally find the UI of LibreOffice to be good enough (you can even change it into a ribbon layout if you’re more used to how MS software works), the only complaint I have is that for whatever reason it works really slow on my current Windows install. Oh well.
The gendarmerie have their version of Ubuntu so they may go for something similar.
Not that different part of the French government communicate or help each other...
I hope these governments moving to open source can work together and assist in making a more modern and featured open source office suit that has a better UX. I say as someone that almost exclusively uses LibreOffice, it's still a pain to use for anything but the most basic (or esoteric/extreme, like CLI stuff) use cases.
> the city's collaboration suite, Territoire Numérique Ouvert (Open Digital Territory), is being developed in partnership with local digital organizations and will be hosted in regional data centers. This homegrown solution is designed to provide secure, interoperable tools for videoconferencing, office automation, and document collaboration.
It's nice they're not just moving to a fully baked solution with no control on it, potentially staying stuck there, and instead secured local developers who can help iron out the issues or move to other alternatives if push comes to shove.
Public sector migrations from an incumbent may the hardest ones of all. Most migration projects fail, but over time, they harden the target platform sufficiently well that eventually one works. And then another one does. And so on, until the target becomes so solid that people no longer choose the source in the first place.
The first Solaris to Linux migrations were horrible. The first prem to AWS migration moves sucked. So it goes.
However, in public sector, failure poisons the well. The peanut gallery claims waste of taxpayer funds. The incumbent starts astroturfing and lobbying against the target. Its an absolute shitshow. Other public sector entities, without the ruthless commercial imperatives that might override fear in a commercial environment, fear to jump in. And the whole thing wilts.
It will be very interesting if the fear of US hegemony is finally enough to overcome the fear of failure.
I switched, because I find the way they force you into one drive rather obnoxious. I tried a bunch and settled on WPSOffice, because it worked the best, but it still ended up being annoying and I just switched back and put up with it.
I've had pretty good luck with replacing Windows with MacOS, Acrobat with PDFExpert, Outlook with Superhuman, Google with Kagi and never looked back, but Microsoft Office works quickly, is smooth, works across many platforms. The other solutions are clunky in many different ways and I've tried a bunch of them.
I actually have licenses from work, my wife has licenses from school, I have a personal family license for my family. I was literally paying to use WPSOffice on top of it and it just doesn't work as well. Something about the way the interfaces just aren't as responsive in terms of cell sizes just makes everything super clunky in everything from Numbers to WPSOffice
I thought about this a little bit more as it's been a while, but I think the reason Office is so dominant is that it's really 5 different pieces of very different complicated software. It's easy to knock off Word, but to copy Word, Excel, Powerpoint and make them all great, and compatible is very difficult.
I think if you separated them and chose the best alternative word processor and best alternative spreadsheet and best alternative presentation software, maybe you would have a better shot at replacing them. WPSOffice has the best excel, but powerpoint isn't as good, etc.
> Microsoft Chairman and General Counsel Brad Smith dismissed such worries
Every time I read this guy’s name, I remember how he made false statements to the US Congress about the Golden SAML vulnerability by claiming that Microsoft had no knowledge of it when in reality, they had known about it for years and buried it for the sake of making money. Nothing he says is credible.
That said, going with open source solutions is not getting away from US companies, but that is not what is needed here. What is needed is getting away from Microsoft, which cannot be trusted. They have had a pattern of poor security decisions for the sake of making money that has persisted for decades.
By the way, it does not matter how good end users are at security when Microsoft is making decisions that undermine it. For example, the hack of RSA Security occurred by exploiting vulnerabilities in Microsoft software. Those vulnerabilities were there because Microsoft’s management prioritized making money (adding insecure features) over writing secure software. The single best security decision any organization can make is to ban Microsoft software and services.
Much of what you said is true, however the alternatives are quite poor. Believe me, If corporations could find a way to shrink the MS tax, they would be all over it. Corporations have run pilot staropenlibre office programs for decades now. They all fail because it stinks.
To note, their whole ecosystem might be changing, allowing for more flexibility in the Office software space.
There's better online options and many of their needs can be fulfilled by in-house We apps instead of the perennial Access DB or Excel files passed around in mails.
Even the sole reduction of printed documents should have impacted how much is expected from Word or Powerpoint, and make alternatives a lot more viable.
Power users will still need all features in the world, but the rest of the user's are probably less held as hostages as before.
Noting that onlyoffice is developed by a russian company, which attempted to hide its russian ties through shell companies.
The company develops its product in russia and presents itself in the Russian market as a russian company
A government could fund an audit for the code since it's open source, right? They might even have their own builds so their computers only install from there.
The article doesn't mention which Linux distribution was chosen. I'm curious about that, since in my opinion it can make or break the project. It's also possible that multiple distributions were used for different cases, which could make sense.
As for user-friendly options, I think Ubuntu and Mint are the best choices right now, with Mint (Cinnamon Edition) being a better fit for users coming from Windows, which seems to be the case here.
Also, I recently switched from LibreOffice to OnlyOffice. I find its UI and UX much better. That said, I'll look into the licensing aspect mentioned in the article, maybe LibreOffice aligns better with my values.
I tried OnlyOffice once and couldn't stand it. It felt as horrible as MS Office. I'm a happy Libreoffice user, and find that their UX choices make sense once you look into the rationale and are very functional and easy to adapt to.
I guess everyone's experience is different, but I'm always very surprised and humbled when people talk passionately about how bad the UX is on projects, which I use because of their UX rather than despite it. (GIMP is the other big example here)
Linux Mint with Cinnamon (or XFCE before that) was my daily driver for a while, really nice distro that just works and gets out of your way for the most part.
I do personally find the UI of LibreOffice to be good enough (you can even change it into a ribbon layout if you’re more used to how MS software works), the only complaint I have is that for whatever reason it works really slow on my current Windows install. Oh well.
>The article doesn't mention which Linux distribution was chosen
Given they've chosen OnlyOffice?.. Astra Linux?
I don’t know, but i would guess suse
The gendarmerie have their version of Ubuntu so they may go for something similar. Not that different part of the French government communicate or help each other...
I hope these governments moving to open source can work together and assist in making a more modern and featured open source office suit that has a better UX. I say as someone that almost exclusively uses LibreOffice, it's still a pain to use for anything but the most basic (or esoteric/extreme, like CLI stuff) use cases.
Governments working together to make things better?
I’m glad you’re optimistic but this is something likely up to the individual developers.
Working together doesn't have to mean anything more than providing funding for individual developers.
> the city's collaboration suite, Territoire Numérique Ouvert (Open Digital Territory), is being developed in partnership with local digital organizations and will be hosted in regional data centers. This homegrown solution is designed to provide secure, interoperable tools for videoconferencing, office automation, and document collaboration.
It's nice they're not just moving to a fully baked solution with no control on it, potentially staying stuck there, and instead secured local developers who can help iron out the issues or move to other alternatives if push comes to shove.
I feel it's the right time for the EU to focus on developing an administration focused Linux Desktop distribution.
All the ingredients are there, just a solid governance structure is needed to consolidate efforts of development and maintenance.
Great that it’s OnlyOffice and not surrendering control to a single company and using Google Docs.
Public sector migrations from an incumbent may the hardest ones of all. Most migration projects fail, but over time, they harden the target platform sufficiently well that eventually one works. And then another one does. And so on, until the target becomes so solid that people no longer choose the source in the first place.
The first Solaris to Linux migrations were horrible. The first prem to AWS migration moves sucked. So it goes.
However, in public sector, failure poisons the well. The peanut gallery claims waste of taxpayer funds. The incumbent starts astroturfing and lobbying against the target. Its an absolute shitshow. Other public sector entities, without the ruthless commercial imperatives that might override fear in a commercial environment, fear to jump in. And the whole thing wilts.
It will be very interesting if the fear of US hegemony is finally enough to overcome the fear of failure.
Good luck. I tried to replace office and failed. It’s just impractical if you really want to get something done to use anything else.
Any examples that you would like to share OR is it more about you being more familiar with office and the alternative were different?
I switched, because I find the way they force you into one drive rather obnoxious. I tried a bunch and settled on WPSOffice, because it worked the best, but it still ended up being annoying and I just switched back and put up with it.
I've had pretty good luck with replacing Windows with MacOS, Acrobat with PDFExpert, Outlook with Superhuman, Google with Kagi and never looked back, but Microsoft Office works quickly, is smooth, works across many platforms. The other solutions are clunky in many different ways and I've tried a bunch of them.
I actually have licenses from work, my wife has licenses from school, I have a personal family license for my family. I was literally paying to use WPSOffice on top of it and it just doesn't work as well. Something about the way the interfaces just aren't as responsive in terms of cell sizes just makes everything super clunky in everything from Numbers to WPSOffice
I thought about this a little bit more as it's been a while, but I think the reason Office is so dominant is that it's really 5 different pieces of very different complicated software. It's easy to knock off Word, but to copy Word, Excel, Powerpoint and make them all great, and compatible is very difficult.
I think if you separated them and chose the best alternative word processor and best alternative spreadsheet and best alternative presentation software, maybe you would have a better shot at replacing them. WPSOffice has the best excel, but powerpoint isn't as good, etc.
Is the shift to open source etc inevitable due to the enshitification of commercial products as their owners slide into low margin low growth?
Open source is not immune. Look at all the people who complain about the intrusions of Firefox.
I mean.. they survived clippy...