Also Microsoft products have become enshitified beyond recognition.
I teach boomers how to use SharePoint. Last week Microsoft updated office.com to be 95% copilot. The only way to find “All Apps” (word, SharePoint, PowerPoint, excel, etc.) is to find the tiny little “apps” button all the way at the bottom of the screen.
Everything else is copilot. Everyone is confused and my job just got 100% harder.
Important notice in this regard is that there is agreement on this among both left and right wing politicians.
So this is NOT something that will change with new administrations in either government or local communities.When this is implemented, I don’t see any way for Microsoft to get that business back!
Edit PS:
It’s not just office, it’s also mail and cloud services.People complain different, government sees increased costs, and then they switch back
IDK if you read the article, but in 5 years cost of licenses paid to Microsoft increased 72%.
Also even if cost increase temporarily, it creates local jobs skills knowhow and tax revenue. Every “dollar” spend benefits the local community! instead of just sending the money to USA.
Servicing with open source and Linux will rapidly become cheaper than Microsoft, because there will be no artificial disruptions caused by Microsoft planned obsolescence or forced updates or whatever crap Microsoft is pushing.I feel like there has to be a push in education for open source success
The majority of Internet infrastructure runs on either something Linux based or something FreeBSD based.
A lot of the tools used are also various flavours of open or semi open source.
I’d say open source already has success. Just not in places where you see consumers using it. Except… Wait a minute, Android is a fork of Linux, and Android is open source too.
I wouldn’t consider Android a fork, the differences at the kernel level aren’t unlike differences you might find on embedded devices. It mainly just has the Google software suite instead of GNU
Also the PS4/5 run on freebsd
But that’s not what is being compared
Yes average people need to learn the open source stack instead of Microsoft.
It used to be most people could just learn some Microsoft thing, and they were almost guaranteed a job. Obviously a lot of people will be unhappy that isn’t the case anymore, and they’ll be annoyed they have to learn something new.But this should have been done 20 years ago when Linux was obviously ready for it, and sensible people have advised it for just as long.
In the old CP/M days we had lots of good software developed locally, but when IBM became dominant, and chose to use MS-Dos, Microsoft was verycleverlydeviously leveraging that to sabotage the competition, and take mostly every main stream market.Trump is kind of a blessing in disguise, because he finally got people to wake up to reality.
Local libraries here and there in Copenhagen have already switched to Manjaro. Haven’t heard anyone complain about it.
I’m a Dane and I approve this, massively.
I think if I were any non-US government I’d be very seriously thinking about not using Microsoft software at this time, particularly if it connects to the cloud. And that goes for companies with government contracts, or merely companies who are potential targets of industrial espionage.
That said, LibreOffice needs to tap the EU for funding to broaden its features and also improve the UX because it’s not great tbh. It can be extremely frustrating using LibreOffice after using MS Office, in part because the UI is so different, noisy with esoteric actions, and very unrefined compared to its MS counterpart. That needs funding and to get to the point that somebody can pick up LibreOffice for the first time and not be surprised or stuck by the way it behaves.
Exactly recently downloaded Libre on my PC and it looks dated and busy, plus not their fault but every Office doc I open in a Libre app looks bad, the formatting and fonts are off and every change I make it says it can’t save in the office format and suggests converting the document to ODT format, that alone will scare away casual users who don’t understand what an open format is
Also good and free: Sumatra You can read any pdf.
Libre office drawer you can sign. No need for acrobat or any of that garbage.
Including adobe acrobat form pdfs?
Lets go Libreoffice. I hope to see more FOSS projects embraced.
I wonder if it creates more inhouse sysadmin jobs? When you buy a license from M$ you also get tech support. But if you have problems with open source, you gotta go get a computer person
Possibly does. On occasion I read about German cities trying to do similar, but then reverting back to M$.
Most of the issues are around people not wanting to take time to get use to new software (happened at a job where they moved to GSuite) or the FOSS stuff not having a corporation that can be sued for loss of earnings (like crowd strike when they didn’t read only friday). Note that these are not technical issues with FOSS.
Still there is political support to not just use this as an angle to get M$ to lower their pricing.
Anyone else think that this could lead enough pish for IT independence that a company starts selling micro clouds. Jist a bog ole computer that handles a semi local cloud say at a campus scale. Amd we just swing back to mainframes
I just hear that they move to LibreOffice but not to Linux, ateast not right now.
Everyone in tech did this 10 plus years ago.
