German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

Re:German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice by hdjjhhvvhga on Thursday November 18, 2021 @01:25PM (#29268698)

I think the truth between what you say and the other person accusing you of being biased is somewhere in the middle. They basically went too mach ahead of the time. Mind you, the project started 18 years ago! The computing landscape was very different back then. I know what you mean as I was forced by my employer to use Linux on the desktop at that time and it was mediocre - but many things changed in the meantime. Probably the most important: the web revolution has happened. Nobody is using abominations like the ActiveX/Silverlight/whatever anymore. VBS is no longer omnipresent (partly because of security reasons). Hardware support in Linux is incomparable to what was in 2004. SO yes, I can imagine it was terrible back then, but I still think it's very important not to give up and I'm happy they basically restarted the project recently.

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Re:German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice by deknos on Thursday November 18, 2021 @04:44PM (#29271011)

the hardware thing was not a problem for us as we could dictate which computers were bought. so computers were bought which would be compatible.

our problem was: none of the tools we needed were available in the quality and richness as they exist today.

automatic deployment to hundred of PCs at the same time with extensive automatic configuration? session and configuration management per user?

departments want to use different backgrounds per house or subdepartment. all that stuff had to be built in a scalable way.

the solutions today were not available back then.

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Re:German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice by hdjjhhvvhga on Friday November 19, 2021 @05:12AM (#29275606)

I'm sorry, but I disagree about the two last points. Around 2001/2002 I was doing this kind of work of purchasing new desktops and deployments on hundreds of machines using a combination of PXE and Kickstart (I believe Kickstart appeared in 1998). It was not ideal, but it worked, and each department had their own settings. The only complaint I heard from my colleagues was that they cannot install "little sheep" (one of these gimmicks that would sit on your desktop and distract you). Actually some of them were upset they cannot install games, but they preferred not to voice this concern aloud.

As to your first problem, the lack of software, yes, it was a huge problem then. What we had to use at that time was substandard. I personally suffered (even though I love Linux on the server). Also KDE was unstable and a memory hog, Gnome wasn't much better, and you couldn't just buy more RAM. I'm very happy these days are over.

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