Read the article (and, if you are able, the ones in German) – this has nothing at all to do with Excel having more hotkeys. LiMux has been around for a long time, and those wrinkles had been pretty much ironed out.

Mayor Reiter openly calls himself a "Microsoft fan". He got Microsoft to move their German HQ to Munich, which was a significant deal for the city. They then hired Accenture, an official MS partner company, to write an report on the city's IT problems. It concluded that LiMux administration is poorly coordinated between departments, and that was all the justification they needed to push for a migration back to Windows.

I am surprised this Techcrunch piece is so "balanced", including a parroting of the understated official cost estimates. This deal is a stupendous waste of taxpayers' money, and German-language news (at least those I've read) are much less subtle about it.

They are going to spend tens of millions of Euro on the migration. The cost of contracting someone to add hotkeys, equations and simple features to libreoffice is nothing compared to that.

The cost of figuring out exactly what to contract somebody to build, though — especially for a non-technical bureaucratic agency — is likely to be fairly astronomical.

(I doubt they are sitting around the conference table saying "Fuck! If only the Linux office suite had these seventeen keyboard shortcuts and the equation editor had these thirty-nine additional features, there would be no need to switch!")

Windows probably really does work better out of the box for their use cases and user base, but I doubt they could tell you why exactly.

> I doubt they are sitting around the conference table saying "Fuck! If only the Linux office suite had these seventeen keyboard shortcuts and the equation editor had these thirty-nine additional features, there would be no need to switch!"

What are the arguments supporting the switch, then? One would think they determined there are some features missing from the Linux based setup and found out that the Windows solution has those, then decided that they have to switch. If this wasn't the case, then what are they basing their decision on? Flipped a coin, or simply corruption, or what?

The $50 million is just for the switch. They'll probably pay a few million every year for the licenses. Yeah, I don't think they can justify it from a cost point of view. This move was political and Microsoft convinced them to do it by building an HQ there.

> MS Office simply blows Libre Office out of the water

Graphically, sure. But after not using MS Office for a few years, I really prefer LibreOffice. It does everything I need (and a lot more, actually) and I know where all the buttons are. Other than that it looks prettier, there is zero reason for me to use MS Office. (I can only think of reasons why I wouldn't want to use MS Office.)

And if MS Office is what you're going for, then it still runs in Wine. No need to convert the entire infrastructure.

How's LibreOffice compare to OpenOffice? Last time I tried the latter, it would create weird formatting in documents when opened in MS Word.

LibreOffice is the one you want to use. OpenOffice is so undermaintained that they have problems patching security holes, nevermind improving

I have very little experience with OpenOffice. If I remember correctly, OO was bought by Oracle after which the community forked LibreOffice, and that is now installed by default in many GNU/Linux distributions. I think I haven't used OO in at least five years, so I can't really say anything about it.

Generally, it seems that after the whole Oracle fiasco and the Apache part, LibreOffice is miles ahead.

When it comes to formatting in Word though, it should be worth noting that MS Word supports ODT files by now.

The switch now announced does not include switching back from LibreOffice to MS Office. They have a lot of existing LO templates which would cost too much (work/money) to migrate.

So they're switching from LiMux to W10 and will run LO on it?

And really, this is just to say we need to encourage better open source solutions. Open source will never win when closed source is better: Everywhere open source solutions have won is when the quality and user experience has beaten the closed source offering. Consumers, and largely, most businesses, will never choose open for open's sake.

I've used MS Office, Libreoffice and Google Apps and find them all equally appalling. Terrible, clumsy, complicated, inaccurate UI, unusable version control, ugly output. (Compared to git + emacs + TeX/docbook/perldoc/HTML/plain text).

Oh, I always come to HN and hold my breathe not to see comments like this...

Do you think that someone who has never touched computer except for Facebook, MS Office and emailing should know Lisp and UNIX environment?

"Terrible, clumsy, complicated and ugly" are exactly the kind of adjectives that spring to my mind when thinking of git, emacs and (to a lesser degree) TeX.

Now try to teach someone that pastes images into Word to send them as attachment into emails to use git + emacs + TeX/docbook/perldoc/HTML/plain text.

Well sure. But unlike You, bureaucrats are not computer scientists.

Can you make yourself more specific? What hotkeys, equations and simple features are missing?

Performance is relative easy to test: open a CSV with 100k rows in Excel, Calc and Google Spreadsheets.

I suspect most of Libre Office's slow performance is a result of using JAVA.

Nope. From https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Java - "Note though that very little of this Java code is actually part of the shipped product." A lot of the Java stuff is ancillary, and chunks of Java code have been rewritten to C++ over time.

Part of the reason that LibreOffice is slow is that it was essentially debugged into existence. Michael Meeks from Collabra would often post to Planet Gnome about his optimization work. There is certainly hope looking forward. It is a lot faster than it used to be, and they will hopefully be enabling Multi-threading in Calc for LibreOffice 6.0.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LibreOff...

Did you just time travel here from 1999?

Try doing that in MS Office for Mac, equally as bad. :(

IT team at a previous employer had to setup Windows VM for some sales folks (who otherwise loved Mac) because it was so bad.

The reality is that Munich is a "Microsoft City" with a large Microsoft Office there. I don't have any proof, but I doubt this is a coincidence.

What if Munich alone invested $50 million into making LibreOffice better? Wouldn't that be a much better ROI for their investment?

Besides, if they using Excel for finance stuff, they're doing it wrong anyway:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/stop-using-excel-finance-chiefs...

Not necessarily, one investment buys you the software that meets your needs now, the other is a donation that buys you at most a promise for software that maybe meets your needs sometime in the future.

This assuming they had a need that OSS Office didn't cover, of course.

Don’t disagree, but playing devils advocate, they won’t be on Windows / Office till 2023 per linked article. Five years is a long time in the land of software to resolve promises.

> I wouldn't trade Linux for Windows for any sort of development work.

Same. Windows has all the Linux dev tools plus a huge host of tools that Linux devs can only dream of. The only thing I need/want Linux for is cloud deployment. If I'm deploying an Intranet server, Windows servers is what people want there.

It amazes me that Linux devs speak so highly of their own tools and yet they can't even build a decent desktop system that just works, that masses of people want to actually use. And devs are people too :)

I wouldn't trade Windows for Linux for development and everyday computing, even gaming.

Microsoft and Apple both have slow and clunky UIs. I am actually more efficient on Gnome with extensions than either of the two.

Only use Mac OS and Windows for their compilers and application packaging with cross-platform code bases.

"Masses of, 1st world, people" are also the ones that don't understand or care about concepts such as security, privacy and true right to own. Never found the masses argument that supportive to a valid argument since group-think doesn't actually prevent problems but increases them.

Most developers aren't even using a Linux desktop OS though. Linux desktop distros are so bad that Apple was able to come along and eat up whatever market share it has among developers just by being stable.

> Never found the masses argument that supportive...

It is supportive when discussing things such as necessities. So, for instance, we can all agree that everybody needs to breathe air, right? Likewise, the masses (developers or otherwise) need stability in their OS (among many other things).

GNU/linux usage has been growing along with MacOS. If you include just kernel variants or anything other than desktop computing GNU/linux has been the market leader for a bit now comprising most supercomputers, servers, ChromeOS(variant not GNU), and Android (variant not GNU).

I use Ubuntu for everyday work and have no more problems (sometimes less) than my Mac and Windows co-workers.

Let me know when any real modern OS becomes "unstable". Aside from literal testing and beta releases modern platforms for Windows, MacOS, and linux based platforms are all relatively stable and show significant improvements over 10 years ago.

The only reason I can see for using a Microsoft based platform over any other platform is if you're heavily invested in VBA and macros. If you're not then there is no reason a company cannot use a GNU/linux based platform such as Ubuntu. LibreOffice, Google Apps, Zoho, Collabora/Nextcloud all provide platform agnostic tools that allow for easy use no matter what you're using.

You're working from a very old mindset of operating systems.

> GNU/linux usage has been growing along with MacOS.

That's a euphoric way of saying that Linux desktop systems (the actual thing we're discussing) has nowhere near the same market share, but it's growing I swear!. And of course Linux fanatics can't help but mention how widely the kernel is used even if it's completely off-topic. Should we mention how widely Intel ME/Minix is installed too just for kicks?

> I use Ubuntu for everyday work and have no more problems...

That's cool. Some people also bike to work instead of driving a car and they don't have any problems with that either.

> Let me know when any real modern OS becomes "unstable".

Right now. Linux doesn't even have an ABI for drivers and just this year I think Linus promised a whole 6 years of stable interfaces for drivers. Furthermore, historically and currently, next to nobody makes serious commercial software for Linux desktop systems because of the wildly unstable environment. Look at any discussion thread comparing Linux to Windows or Mac and you'll find plenty of people complaining about Linux drivers, lack of software, unstable/unfit desktop UIs and general fragmentation.

> The only reason I can see for using a Microsoft based platform over any other platform is if you're heavily invested in VBA and macros...

Oh, I thought your opinion would have been completely different after reading the first couple of paragraphs. Let me guess, you also think that command line apps are better than GUIs right? Oh and you think that configuring your system by opening up text files and typing in free-form text is better than using a GUI too.

Obviously the city of Munich and just about every other city and business on earth disagrees with you because none of them want Linux on their desks.

> You're working from a very old mindset of operating systems.

Nope. Your ideas about the state of the Linux desktop are altogether fanciful.

> that masses of people want to actually use

The masses want to use Windows. To make the masses want Linux, it would have to be like Windows.

Not at all. Look at the Macintosh OS - it's the polar opposite of Windows and it didn't take much to gain more popular acceptance than Linux.