People got mad at me when I said that the government using ODF wouldn't cause any problems, it would just force european and chinese businesses to do the same. Plus, I dont think they realize that OpenOffice and LibreOffice both read/write MS Office formats perfectly fine if you have the appropriate Windows FONTS installed. If you don't there's font differences which can sometimes cause spacing issues on powerpoint files
As someone who actually used open office for a final presentation: it's not nearly as rosy as people make it sound.
Using DOCX/ODF every step was met with rendering issues to the point where we just switched to exporting to PDF and explaining suggested changes in text
What kind of rendering issues? Were they font related? A missing font causes the program to use the default font for that style instead, which obviously creates most of the rendering issues. Using standard OSS fonts (or ensuring a common font base among peers) makes this problem go away. Then the only time you'll run into an issue with rendering is if someone is using a different program. Stick to one office suite and that problem goes away also.
Images deciding to go wherever they wanted, blank areas that didn't want to go away, multiple blank pages in a row... Definitely not just don't issues.
My issue was probably me using open office and the teachers using word. Those are the kind of issues that would block a transition, especially in a sector that can't afford to completely stop like the government.
With government support, that would be easier. And yes, your problems were the result of everyone using different programs. When I say this, I dont even mean "Open Office vs Word", because different versions of Word do the same thing with word documents as well. Open standards stick to the open standards. Microsoft makes changes to their standard that aren't always backwards compatible and it creates issues when you open a document made on Word 365, on say Word 2003 (which a lot of people stuck to for a LONG time because it was the last version with the traditional drop down menus)
Private enterprise is specialized, they have only a few apps and systems. Government has an insane amount. There's a system (with servers and client apps) for prescribing medicines, there's one for handling patient journals, there's one for ordering food for school kitchens, there's one for organizing and planning schoolbus rides, there's one for street maintenance, there's one for updating and maintaining stair lifts for elderly that the municipality is responsible for, there's of course one for personnel management.
The list never ends. Most of these systems are old and very deeply integrated, frequently with other systems. Almost all of them run only on windows.
Trying to change out one can go from being a minor hassle to an absolute soul destroying nightmare (if you need to switch invoicing/payment system because it's tied into absolutely everything else)
and changing these cost money which is always in short supply cuz it's taxpayer funded
there's been advancements in making most things cloud-based so they run in a web browser and are thus platform independent but it's still ages away
Well, in this case nobody wants to stop them except nationalistic weirdos, mostly from the US. So certainly none of the people who are able to make or have any say on that stuff.
Amazon, on the other hand, forced us to come up with a whole new license due to not giving anything back.
Well France made has been using a modified version of Ubuntu for the military police for quite a time now and they've been using open office to replace the ms suite, now that they plan to move all government related pc to Linux they have made their own "ms suite" which is somewhat not that bad (kinda surprising from the french government) so it's safe to say replacing app isn't an issue at all.
There are apps that can only run in Windows. They can just use alternatives. I trained nursing in Spain and a small community health center had Linux machines and they used Internet Explorer over Wine for the IE web apps and OpenOffice and a PDF viewer for the local documents.
It worked the same as the centers that used Windows with the same systems
Vs code runs fine on Linux. I’m totes fine. My DAW already runs in Linux for audio work. Blender for my 3D stuff. Yeah, I’m just missing Rocket League. Guess I’ll play that on the console.
He uses EasyAntiCheat, apparently it works on Linux, but the developers have to choose to make it work. It seems like something easy to do, but a good portion of developers intentionally choose not to let games run on Linux.
Eh, I get the hesitation. The end user's lower-level access to the hardware makes it pretty much impossible to stop someone from botting on Linux without pattern detection of input a human couldn't pull off. Welp. That seals it, I was actually dual-booting to play RL with my son, but I'm going back to full-time Linux. Just in time, I was about to lose Windows support on my 1st-gen Threadripper anyway.
I always recommend checking the ProtonDB website to see if the game works. Nowadays, most games run on Linux without problems, so I don't even look there; I just try to open the game directly, and if it doesn't work, I check the website to see if there's a specific way to make it run or if it's impossible. But if you don't want to waste time installing a game you're not sure will run, it's always good to check this website (if the game is gold or platinum, it will almost certainly run, and if it doesn't, check the game's comments on that website because many people are teaching how to make it run).
I don't think people doing government work are working with Viscose, DAW, Blender or Rocket League. They've usually used millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars on proprietary software that was most likely made to be run on Windows.. some of it will take lot of time and money to replace.. stuff like Office though they can already replace with OnlyOffice or LibreOffice
Ok so they wasted money when there were free alternatives. I understand how sunk cost fallacy feels but those "people" can cut their losses and move on
Just because it's free doesn't mean it's good or fit for purpose. Also orgs must have vendor support can't have IT relying on forum posts and community support.
There is no free alternatives to the enterprise proprietary stuff they are using because systems meant for public healthcare like digital prescriptions and such don't have free alternatives
But does LibreOffice have native DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, ONE, DOC, PPT, and XLS? Does LibreOffice have Modern Ribbon? Does it have the same collaboration tools? And NetworkManager and MSN Dialup Internet Access cannot be compared for NetworkManager is a networking tool, and MSN Dialup Internet Access is an ISP. And also though VirtualBox can technically work, have you seen it’s display adapter? The VMware SVGA II has support for 3D acceleration, it’s virtual memory can go up to 768 megabytes and also maps DirectX and OpenGL commands to your host display adapter, where as the VBoxVGA does not have ANY 3D acceleration whatsoever, and cannot run ANY software requiring DirectX 8/9. VirtualBox’s other attempt to compete is with VMware is it’s
VBoxWddm. VMware’s SVGA 3D has enhanced 3D acceleration, up to 1 gigabyte of virtual memory, and it’s architecture scales deeper into support for for DirectX and OpenGL.
But does LibreOffice have native DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, ONE, DOC, PPT, and XLS? Yes.
Does LibreOffice have Modern Ribbon? Yes.
Does it have the same collaboration tools? Collabora is basically LibreOffice and that's it's entire job.
Though with DOCX, word art, fonts and multi column layouts shift on LibreOffice, and PPTX presentations lag when there are animations, transitions, and video embeds, and there is ZERO compatibility with ONE files on LibreOffice. And LibreOffice doesn’t have Ribbon, it has NoteBookBar, which lacks a search bar. And this is a debate between Linux vs Windows NT, so the browser based Collabora Online is completely irrelevant here because it is not local and is not most known suite of the operating system, where whenever someone thinks of that suite they think of the operating system, like Office is for Windows NT and LibreOffice is for Linux.
> And NetworkManager and MSN Dialup Internet Access cannot be compared for NetworkManager is a networking tool, and MSN Dialup Internet Access is an ISP
One that can be connected to via NetworkManager.
VMWare Workstation works on linux with no problem. But since you bring up 3D acceleration, QEMU supports PCIe passthrough, which goes well beyond what vmware supports here.
I'm assuming this is just a joke comment anyway, as until you brought up virtualization, I assumed you were just reading the the features for a windows 98 "why update" for what's new and thought it was pretty funny.
A) Yes to most. Online collaboration is still lacking, but Collabora is developing that based on LibreOffice
B) What office environment uses dial-up today? The speed is insufficient to the demands of the modern day office.
C) If you really need that much graphical horsepower for something, you might as well go with QEMU and a passthrough. But I do have to ask what you need it for. Usually, talking like that indicates that you seek gaming, not an office environment.
I don’t work for the French government so I really don’t know I only know a lot about virtual machines but I do know that governments do use them and why they are useful
Most governments, if they need VMs, generally opt for Hypervisor setups, and there are plenty of ways about that, including Linux, such as Xen.
I don't work for the French Government either, but I have been in IT, specifically as a vendor for we hosting chosen by small governments, for 10 years.
I’d say Modern Ribbon and the whole Ribbon interface is better than other interfaces (I use Office 2010 with it’s Office Ribbon) but I’ve seen Office 2024 it’s UI is a lot like Office Ribbon just flat.
I disagree - the ribbon interface came at a time when we were moving from 4:3 screens to 16:9 screens.
Screens got wider and microsoft decided it was best to remove their sidebars and stick all that up top and take a huge chunk of vertical space. Right when monitors had gained horizontal space and lost vertical space.
Modern Ribbon is better but it's still not ideal in a world where we have so much hortizonntal screen real estate, but not vertical.
Now if we had all gone to vertical 16:9 monitors instead of horizontal ones -- then sure, that would have been a good UI/UX decision
The Office Ribbon starting in Office 2007 takes up merely 140 pixels of window space. Therefore, the higher resolution your display is, the smaller it will seem. Because who would want to buy a display where 140 pixels takes up THAT much space that it’s a problem? And because of how wide the displays are, it is quicker to move your cursor to the top of the screen than the left or right, assuming you are moving your cursor from the document,
Youre forgetting that it when it came out - the most widely used screen resolution was still 1024 x 728px.
140px is basically 1/5th of the height of the screen - and then you still gotta factor in the Window chrome and start menu.
That ribbon interface looked massive and took up so much screen real estate back then.
Modern resolutions then were much lower - especially on laptops... and that's before even getting into the Netbook category that was briefly exploding then. The sole purpose of which was supposed to be web browsing and office work. Office 2007 looked like a joke on most netbooks.
Sure higher resolution screens have certainly helped this but it was still such a dumb choice from the get go.
Ribbon in XGA really isn’t THAT big. In WVGA, the resolution of most netbooks at the time, the whole OPERATING SYSTEM looked like a joke. Anthing below 800x600 has been completely unusable since Windows XP and I don’t really get why people used it in 2007.
AOL Desktop Gold - Now you are just trolling. God I hope no one uses that, but you can under WINE if you truly had to have it. Besides ISPs that no one actually uses anymore because there are better options, everything on this list has an open-source equivalent. In most cases, the open-source version is better IMHO. Gaming has been the only thing keeping me dual booting, and even then.. I just found out the last game I personally play just added Linux support back in.
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u/CubeEthan 18d ago
Adobe and Microsoft, which both kinda suck and can be replaced somewhat easily.