- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
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EU leaders are lying to you. This is a global class war.
What, did they try Win+E and it wouldn’t open a file browser on linux? 🤣
edit: Oh my bad, i read that as Microsoft, not Microsoft office.
So TDF has a fascinating article on their blog discussing how the Austrian military made the switch. It took a lot of planning and there was a huge amount of work to help move people along.
I suspect this may not have been the case here. But I’m sure we’ll find out the gory details soon enough
I swear I have been reading this article for 20 years. Some gov org balks at Microsoft cost and pitches free alternative. They dont plan on spending extra to complete the transition and then dont adequately train or build out the infrastructure.
Replacing an intrenched system with a free software alternative successfully will require more money in the first few years, not less.
Did MS offer them a huge deal?
Only some vacations for deciders.
They’re getting threatened by the US and they can’t even change a word processor, lol good luck to them
One thing I hate, but came to understand about governments and big companies, - is that they only leave stuff if it starts falling apart under them due to lack of support and growing incompatibilities.
Because otherwise the “technical problems” in the title can possibly be one Excel spreadsheet that turned out to not be bug-to-bug compatible when opened in LO.
And now I’ve read the article, and with the exception of Collabora instead of LO, this is even dumber, they’ve cancelled the pilot due to “formatting issues”. Even after looking a bit at big companies I think they are f-ng parasites and should have somehow gotten used to those “blank pages”, thank you very much.
That’s an excuse. I say continue the pilot, and fire the focus group of 38 lazy ministerial jerks.
But OK, I’m not a Danish citizen, so please be my guest, you hypothetical Danish citizen reading this, to borrow my opinion.
Used to work IT for american municipalities. I can guarantee you that if a single sheet looked at all different, id get a call. They mindlessly press the same 4 buttons they know how to press and ignore everything else until it “breaks”
Used to work IT at a university during the transition time from Win 3.11 to Win95. The amount of emotional hand-holding (not even so much technical support) involved in getting the admin staff through the process was unbelievable to me at my young age. Now I understand, but back then I was expecting way more “this doesn’t work” or “I can’t find this program” and way less “I don’t know how I’m going to do my job.”
Doing these things is not easy and they take a lot of time and effort. But from a short look at the article it seems that there were issues with expectations:
the officials were running into formatting issues such as blank pages when opening Office documents in Collabora and vice versa
Like what do you expect when using an ODF first tool for OpenXML (Microsoft Office) documents? Euro-Office would be a better fit, from my ONLYOFFICE experience. It’s not perfect but it’s the more drop-in solution for their use case. It’s sad that this has come to an end because of what a good, experienced Linux user could tell them even before they began.
I see this all the damned time. Some people are obsessed with pages breaking at a heading or figure so they insert manual page breaks all over the damned place.
Even the slightest font kerning difference and you end up with blank or mostly blank page when some manual page break gets pushed to the next page.
Delete the manual page break that never should have been there? Nah, just cancel everything.
It’s always going to be a band-aid ripping moment, switching from MS Office to anything else.
When I switched to Linux on my personal setups, it was at a time when Windows and Office were so different to what I was used to, I’d have to retool and retrain anyway. From what I hear from some of my white collar acquaintances, that’s basically coming. I’ve been hearing things like “I wrote this spreadsheet 20 years ago, it’s worked fine for decades, and now it’s breaking because they’re disabling VBA and it can’t run from OneDrive.” So I think we’re going to enter an era when all the things that probably shouldn’t have been implemented in Excel are gonna stop working.
It’s like they went straight for the most unintuitive option for MS Office users. Besides EuroOffice, LibreOffice (even OnlyOffice) would have been better.
I bet OpenAI and Copilot were the original source of this information.
I wonder if detecting incompatibilities in rendering docx formatted documents in LibreOffice and Collabora is something that AI models could actually help with. If you had a large enough dataset of various docx (or other Microsoft formatted files) you could have Word and LibreOffice render each of the files and then have the model check the two renderings for differences. If something shows up you could probably use a second model to highlight what elements of the relevant docx file was at fault. That way when something shows up consistently the tool could provide that data to the relevant teams to fix the problem. I think there will always be so many edge cases with problems like this that having humans test at this scale wouldn’t be a good use of engineering time.
Great going denmark. /s This should not have been much of a challange. And you failed.
I rather disagree, this was always going to be hard. Microsoft will have put serious pressure on them not to switch, and its pain-in-the-ass proprietary lock-in tactics create a lot of friction in making a transfer. And let’s also acknowledge that the average office worker is so much a creature of habit that they can’t easily adapt to new software without costly trainings and months of service, and even then many people never fully adapt. I don’t love that Denmark is stepping back, but let’s not pretend that entrenched technologies and contracts are easy to switch.
The worst is that they are expecting complex formats to “just open” and using those complex formats. It’s the EU, such a thing as a modern office format should be standardized the hell through, there should be a format specifically designed for all such places, MSO just shouldn’t be a factor. Yet when MS kickbacks are involved, it’s fine to use something unfit for the task and call a couple of blank pages (at page breaks, I assume) a fatal flaw. Anyway, text formats are complex, but not that complex, MSO’s OOXML is just intentionally left open and with variety of interpretations and with implementation’s data structures not important for anything written into the standard and in general it’s a scam device and MS should have been fined like 50 billion for publishing it and daring to propose it to official entities and as a standard.
What I don’t understand is why can’t we use something like XHTML with <tex> and <ps> and <csv> tags and a WYSIWIG editor.
I mean, OK, I’ve spent a few months playing with prototyping a document format with edits history and comments and it’s not as easy as it seems, but applying what worked for me to a content format like described above with links to blobs by hashes, blobs stored in the same zipfile, one could get something usable for many office tasks.
Not even talking about org-mode, you know, existing, with just a bit of extension that could fill the role of many office applications.
I mean, no need to even talk about “fit for the task” and efficiency. 90s’ WordPerfect was good enough for the same uses. The complexity of formats is a deliberate way to limit competition by MS and a deliberate excuse to keep getting kickbacks for the organizations in question.
There’s just one thing that can be done - to make it mandatory to use software developed by government contract for this specific purpose for all governmental stuff, and make it FOSS, and with a FOSS format, and with specifications simple enough for a student to write an editor.
Anyway. This is all dreams.
My organization is slowly switching away from all Microsoft and other SaaS software, there’s never been a better time to switch to open source, ever.
The only reason it’s taking long is because we are a small team and don’t have the capacity to handle that project full time, so it comes one small incremental step at a time.
A government has the resources to employ the right talent to get the job done, it’s either incompetence or interference.
Edit:
A pilot phase with 38 ministry employees kicked off last year to trial Collabora’s suite with Office documents. However, this trial was terminated when elections took place earlier this year. A spokesperson confirmed that the experiment had concluded, and would not resume again. They also confirmed that no evaluation benchmarking Collabora’s performance against Microsoft Office had taken place either.
It was interference.
Y’all being surprised is the funny part.
They got the call.
What a bunch of weak ass removed. I did it a few years ago. I’m on Nextcloud and collabora. I spend a lot of my life in spreadsheets. In their defense, collabora’s choices when it comes to key commands and defaults could not possibly be more stupid. For example, if you are pasting something into a spreadsheet, only a clown would think the default should be paste with formatting? At least give us a “ctl-shift-V” or something like that. So stupid. Just mimic google sheets and be done with it.
I don’t agree with their decision, but migrating any large organization to new software is typically a lot more difficult than migrating a single home user.
Maybe, but sometime you cannot stop trying to do something just because it is difficult, especially if you are a State government.
Agreed. But Fyi, I’m not a home user, I own a small business.We have to train employees on Collabpra and other open source tools. Its not that hard. We have tons of collaborative, shared documents that our clients interact with. Cybersecurity is a thing, but its not all that difficult to not be slave, or involuntary contributor to the dark side.live by your principles or capitulate. I know which choice I’ll make. I also know that 90+% of people wouldn’t even consider the extra burden of defining, much less living on principles. That’s so sad.
Denmark has abandoned plans to ditch technical problems
too quick to surrender
