German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

Re:German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice by ffgjgf1 on Thursday April 04, 2024 @09:25AM (#39930105)

To be fair in certain cases the cost might be very high and considerably higher than whatever the license/subscription fees paid to MS are. e.g. Libre Office doesn’t really have a drop-in replacement for Excel (for non trivial use cases. To be fair it still might be sufficient for the majority of users, but that would mean that some proportion of your workforce has to stay on Excel/Office which kind of beats the whole purpose).

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Re:German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice by rightbyte on Thursday April 04, 2024 @09:58AM (#39930471)

Vendor lockin is no excuse leaking PI to MS though. You could buy some Office 2003 CD and use Excel locally.

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Re:German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice by alemanek on Thursday April 04, 2024 @10:35AM (#39930958)

Uh using an out of date and unsupported Excel version is a really bad idea. Lots of security vulnerabilities around VB scripting/macros which gives you the very real risk of being compromised by a malicious spreadsheet.

Better to just switch where you can and invest resources into improving FOSS offerings to handle the use cases it currently can’t.

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Re:German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice by rightbyte on Friday April 05, 2024 @04:38AM (#39940039)

Executing malicious code on your computer is a problem, ye.

If you want to give the users a nice programming environment you can't also prevent them from doing arbitrary computations.

You can run Excel in a VM if you want.

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Re:German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice by type0 on Thursday April 04, 2024 @06:19PM (#39936514)

Medical researchers in many places leak non-anonymized sensitive patient data to MS, even when they know better and that's one of the reasons Office LTSC exists

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Re:German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice by ffgjgf1 on Monday April 08, 2024 @03:46AM (#39967236)

> Vendor lockin

That, but also lack of feature parity. Unfortunately Libre Office is just not very good

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Re:German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice by pydry on Thursday April 04, 2024 @11:07AM (#39931361)

To be equally fair, in certain cases the non-licensing costs of Microsoft software are higher than the FOSS equivalent.

In fact, I'd argue that in some cases these are higher. A good example of this is that piece of shit that is Microsoft Teams - both the horrid security flaws and the ways it keeps breaking. I've used FOSS equivalents and they have a smaller attack surface and are more reliable.

They also play all sorts of user-hostile tricks that make vendor lock in possible, and this often has an underappreciated impact on delivery.

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