Based on Ubuntu. Interface and functionality like Windows, users will not feel much difference. BRICS countries committed to their own Linux distributions. South Africa has been the exception.
Huge win obviously and a very good choice for a lot of computers that just need a basic office suite. Unfortunately some users will lose their tooling but I expect a lot of gov. Services now to be using web-based tools exclusively.
This was proposed once before with Germany going open source. They eventually went back.
Germany’s attempt at switching to Linux is a prime example of bad management, wrong decisions and, well, idiocy.
If memory serves: they chose Debian, instead of Ubuntu and didn’t do enough research concerning hardware compatibility. When they were already in progress, it turned out they had craploads of office hardware like scanners, printers and such, that weren’t working under Debian.
But that should be a lesson to people as to why going Linux is foolhardy.
If the Germany government, with all its money and resources and knowledge, failed at switching (or staying switched), then why the bloody hell should an individual or business? I think the Germans have a well deserved reputation for being smart and tech savvy, so if they can’t do it, then why should some random individual out there bother trying? And blaming it on the distro is ridiculous. I have zero interest in Linux, but even I’ve heard of Debian (as well as Ubuntu and others), so there is no excuse why such a well known distro be incapable of handling what the Germans might have wanted.
The choice of a distro makes huge - crucial - difference. It dictates the possibilities, limitations and future evolution of every ecosystem it’s supposed to support.
That’s absurd. So installing a distro as a n00b and you happen to pick one because you’ve heard of it before only to find out it’s not the one you should have used. That’s not some obscure one that no one’s heard either.
You understand how frustrating that can be for a new user, right? I see all the Linux people have downvoted the hell out of me, and that’s fine, but Linux has a massive user-friendliness issue if you seemingly have to pick the right one, or your fucked. I’m sure the Germans didn’t take that selection lightly, and now someone is claiming that it’s because of that choice that the switch over failed.
Can this OS be any more user UNfriendly? It’s to the point of being user-hostile.
I would probably choos Debian over Ubuntu vecause “debian” is more fun yo say. Or even Arch. “Ubuntu” is just a clunky 3-syllable word that makes me sound like I have a speech imprdiment. I dont know the difference between any of those distros and would probably choose wrongly.
but Linux has a massive user-friendliness issue if you seemingly have to pick the right one, or your fucked.
That’s not really a “Linux” issue.
“Linux” isn’t some singular OS, it’s an ecosystem. It’s just like choosing a car, just because most cars have four wheels and an engine doesn’t mean they’re all the same. Selecting the right car is rightfully frustrating and can and does make a huge difference.
It’s like selling a Tesla to a 90 year old grandma and then her complaining that it’s unfriendly. And just because the Tesla is unfriendly to a particular audience doesn’t automatically make it a bad car, but even if it was, that doesn’t mean that all electric vehicles are as bad as Tesla.
Even the most complicated Linux distro is more user friendly than Windows 10 or later. And the mainstream linuxes are trivial to install and use as a daily driver. The only tech skills required are when you want to
use software that requires wine (windows binaries compatibility interface) which sometimes requires some fiddling
get proprietary drivers running for graphics 3d acceleration (most simple 3d chipset drivers work out of the box, other drivers work out of the box anyways on major distros)
do techie stuff, which by default requires fiddling and often isn’t even possible on windows because you go insane by the OS annoying you with notifications etc
Linux can be easy to use if it’s set up to be easy to use, and you have the right hardware. It’s the set up process that most people can’t get through on their own.
I tried installing Fedora the other day with the provided installer, and it failed to even launch from USB. Then I used the same image and wrote it with Rufus instead, and it worked fine. But your average person wouldn’t know to even try that.
Linux is almost never as easy to set up as techies make it out to be. And you can’t just hand wave issues like graphics drivers. Even after I installed the Nvidia drivers I still had to sign them manually so secure boot would actually accept them. That’s just too many hoops for most people.
secure boot is intentionally designed to lock out open source software as much as feasible within current legislation - turn it off and tell your HW vendor to shove it up their bum
at least for debian, nvidia drivers are part of the non-free software packages that come with the OS repositories, installing them is trivial. And even the driver downloads directly from nvidia are usually straightfoward to install, I have used them in the past and the last time I had troubles with configuration fiddling is well over 5 years ago
yes, installing Linux may appear a bit fiddly, however, it’s a TON easier than installing a windows from scratch. The only reason people tend to not see that is because everyone uses an OEM windows and never installs one
I’m not sure about the scope and details of Germany’s attempt to switch to Linux, but for the average user, any of the popular distros would likely serve them well. I think there’s a huge difference between a user installing Linux on a general purpose PC vs. trying to incorporate it into an entire country’s worth of devices.
I’ve heard horror stories of people spending loads of time tinkering with their OS to fix obscure issues, but generally, these distros are often as easy-to-use (if not more so) than Windows these days. I think the main issues people have stem from software built specifically for Windows that won’t work on Linux, which hardly seems the fault of Linux imo.
You have heard about Debian because it’s a really good distro that has wide usage (especially in the server space). It’s however a bad distro to install on PCs that are to be used by office workers who aren’t necessarily familiar with it, and whoever advised the government should’ve known that Debian is picky about hardware compatability.
It was truly a baffling decision to go for Debian in this instance.
Good question…me too. Most office apps are browser based now. Sometimes you have to build things from source to get bleeding edge versions of things, but a good Linux admin will have no trouble rolling their own repo with their own packages for the bleeding edge stuff. Most of the time the repo versions are fine though. The only thing I maintain from source on my personal machine is GnuCash.
As an engineer, it irks to no end hearing marketers say “German engineering” as if it is some kind of superpower that makes that particular product automatically better, but I’m not going to take anything away from the German people. I’d give them a lot of faith that they would choose the most logical, best solution.
I think the Germans have a well deserved reputation for being smart and tech savvy
This is just wrong. Well, they might have the reputation, but let me tell you: Every aspect of German governance relies on fax machines and paper forms. You can hardly do anything online, and when you can, it’s usually not at all easy to use.
The latest thing they tried was electronic doctor’s notes. (In Germany, when you’re sick, you go to a doctor and let him write a note that you can’t work. You still get paid for your sick leave if you bring a doctor’s note.) Two months ago my colleage got ill and it took 8 weeks to have the deducted hours added again.
One important factor is that one of our biggest political parties (the CDU/CSU, the one Angela Merkel is in) is basically run by and for 60+ year old people who stopped caring about technology in their teens.
To them, the internet with its homepages and electronic mail is a very recent and poorly understood development that will surely require another few decades of observation before anyone will know whether it’s actually good for anything.
And that’s the party that ran Germany for almost two decades uninterrupted. They’re by far not the only reason but they’re a major one.
Did they choose debian? IIirc they tried rolling their own release based on debian and quickly fell behind.
Faulty project management is spot on tho. No control of what hw they were working with. Should anyways have started with 5 years of requiering new hardware to be linux compatible. To weed out the worst win-only-devices
Reverse engeneering blackbox drivers without vendor support is insanly time and resource consuming. And would instantly remove any economic sense in their project.
I’m not sure how things were really, since across the years the message has changed.
In the initial “we failed, let’s revert to Win” times, Debian was named. I remember those times and news well, since I made a bunch of flamewars on both Debian and Ubuntu forums concerning the choice, especially since I myself had similar - hardware compatibility - issues in our corporate environment and I perceive the choice of distro as equally puzzling and idiotic.
Should anyways have started with 5 years of requiering new hardware to be linux compatible.
Exactly.
Or, they should check what hardware they need to replace on the spot and how much it’d cost.
Got a source other than “Germany” wanted to switch to Linux? The only thing I am aware of is the city of Munich switching for a couple of years, which went fine, but then a new mayor from the conservative shitheads who has about as much clue of technology as a towel probably rolled it all back to Windows.
What is “Debian, instead of Ubuntu” supposed to imply? Ubuntu is a piece of shit ever since canonical ramped up the enshittification, first with desktop search expressions being default-forwarded to canonical servers, and then with snap repositories under control of the corporation.
wow - 2002ish - okay, that really went by me at the time, I was still running on Windows (2000) myself back then, maybe that’s why. Indeed - back then, it was a wholly different story about HW support. Thanks for the link!
From what I gather, there were similar projects in the past attempted by great many deal of bodies and organizations. Some were quite successful. For example,CERN used and supported CENTOS-based computers and allowed Windows machines but on the “you care of this crap on your own” basis.
As far as I can tell, the most important challenges were:
hardware compatibility (it’s easy to bypass, but it isn’t cheap)
support (you can’t rely on “Google it” approach when serious business is involved, there absolutely has to be experienced technician team available on-site)
Linux/FOSS office applications are shit and pain in the ass to work with (unless the movement at large won’t acknowledge this problem, nothing will change - Linux won’t enter mainstream)
government and other official organizations force document filetypes and build official apps that won’t run good in Linux - funnily enough they won’t even work well on Windows machines all the time (this is really hard to bypass)
luckily the relevant points have been solved in the past 20 years
linux native hardware support is way better than windows for 99% of chipsets out there
libreoffice is very advanced and way better than ms office by now (although MS office has been enshittified ever since XP)
In terms of support, however, competent Linux support on site is a lot more feasible than competent windows support. Most organisations nowadays hire braindead morons for IT support & IT management, and then use Microsoft cloud / Office 365 services, and for any ticket the dumb mtherfckers in house can’t solve, they open a ticket at microsoft. And if that isn’t addressed, the user is shit outta luck.
I have seen the same dumb and stubborn idiots in corporate IT first level (and second level) support across most major organisations whose core business is not IT, because - especially engineering - CEOs tend to think “IT is just enabling our “actual” work, so let’s give the controllers authority to procure IT services from a contractor”.
Oh, and yes, that’s a lot of frustration speaking from my choice of words :)
I agree, but there’s one thing, that needs to be perceived from different perspective: Linux Office suites > ARE < awful.
They look ugly. They overcomplicate certain, simple tasks. They aren’t as compatible with MS’ documents as they need to be. The only exceptions to it are WPS Office, but since it joined the dark side (ads(, it can no longer be suggested, and OnlyOffice - possibly one of the most recent entries to the list of possible MS’ Office alternatives.
Yes, yes, I know “I can do in Libre everything MS packet can do, and more”.
…but the problem is that it’s not you who will need to work with it. People in business need a tool that gets the job done, is well supported and doesn’t get in the way. Libre, unfortunately does - everyone who tried to apply an unorthodox page numbering to a document knows that it’s too complicated for non tech-savvy user.
I haven’t worked somewhere that really requires a desktop office suite in like 15 years. Almost everyone seems to get by with browser based tools. The big exception being finance and their excel monstrosities.
hardly anyone properly uses Excel capabilities though - I have seen way too many calculations using 5+ extra columns with provisional results used for the next formula, because people were incapable of opening a VBA editor and writing a custom formula to do what they need.
I am honestly surprised about the conclusions you came to. I use LibreOffice as my daily driver, and while it’s far from perfect, Microsoft Office is not even playing in the same league in terms of usability & stability. MS Office is an abomination of bloatware, and the ribbon kills all productivity. Not to mention load times, and sporadic multi-second hangs on a quick CTRL-S. Literally the only thing MS Office has that LibreOffice does not, is MS Access - and the only thing MS Office does better is VBA, and that’s probably more so for trademark / copyright reasons rather than LO not being able to implement the same thing.
I work with “people in business”, and I see on a daily basis that most of them are unable to even memorize the simplest hotkeys / keyboard functions, such as shift + arrow keys to select, ctrl + arrow keys to jump words, wordstar (ctrl x,c,v) and so many others. I don’t think you will find many people who prefer MS Office and can work more efficiently on MS Office than an avid LibreOffice user on LO.
The office suite directs the workflow of the user, and MS Office getting rid of the standard drop-down menus in 2007, guided all MS Office users down a road to insanity.
E3 plan is the norm in more complicated workspaces now. Exchange, Outlook, Teams, OneNote, Sharepoint are commonly used in such an environment, followed by Forms (HR department loves these and rightly so), Onedrive and PowerBI. Viva (formerly Yammer) makes waves now. Teams entered the market aggressively during Pandemics and it had evolved almost as fast as Android. It can now connect to great many deal of applications thus expanding the possible workflow and collaboration.
The ribbon being the productivity killer you’re talking about is a non-existent issue, since typical office workers rarely venture further than the main set of icons + they have the most useful shortcuts pinned to the quick access toolbar.
In every environment where people have been using both pieces of software (MS Office and Star/Open/Apache/Libre), the former was preferred for its ease of use.
Again: Linux/FOSS movements tends to produce the mindset that is hard to convince that there’s something wrong about anything it does, while listening to people’s - common people, instead of experienced power users - complains, and following tested and appreciated standards should be preferred.
Exchange, Outlook, Teams, OneNote, Sharepoint are commonly used in such an environment, followed by Forms (HR department loves these and rightly so), Onedrive and PowerBI
Having worked and working with many of these:
Exchange is like poor man’s IMAP - it sucks in that it’s a closed ecosystem excluding non microsoft apps for emails
Outlook is worse than Thunderbird by far
Sharepoint is a clusterfuck of content management, especially(!) with in-website office document editing
Onedrive is only deemed “useful” because it is forced on people to share files e.g. in Teams, and because it is integrated into many IT environments to store homefolders etc. In effect, it’s a giant piece of spyware were users store their data in “clouds” that secret services will happily tap into
Teams is godawful in terms of UI - it’s decent conferencing, but so is matrix, with a much better chat interface / more flexibility for the user
FOSS office products have been far superior to what’s available on windows for at least a decade. There’s certainly occasionally one or the other app on windows that may shine in one aspect or two, but overall the bloatware user experience on windows is killing productivity of anyone who knows how to operate a keyboard.
I’m sorry, dude, but now these are emotions talking through you, not actual valid points., especially since it’s obvious that your knowledge about MS dates back to 2010, I assume? It had evolved. Massively. So much it became hard to compete with, even if you take the “money vs free model” argument into consideration.
You didn’t like it, but the fact is that I am now sitting in a corpo office, part of a body spanning across countries and continents, where what you don’t like and think bad, works well enough that nobody complains. It’s very rich corpo. It can afford a legion of experienced Linux technicians and sysadmins, and yet it prefers to pay money, serious money for licences in subscription mode. Think about it for a moment - corpos squeeze money of everything. They are greedy, to the point that they wouldn’t spare a cent to save a dying man. And yet they prefer to pay for MS.
Once again: Linux/FOSS needs to start to listen to what users actually want. Scornful “this is better, use this” won’t do.
I disagree. The part that you don’t see is that people prefer to use Windows products because that’s what they grew up with and they never used anything else. The majority of windows users only likes windows because posts like yours scare them away from even trying Linux. Windows is a catastrophic user experience and the majority of users put up with that because they think “that’s normal”.
Furthermore, there’s a corporate ecosystem where useless and incompetent IT management gets supported by Microsoft products because the paid support takes most of the expert work out of their hands. So companies are feeding a bunch of microbrains in IT who don’t actually do anything worth mentioning, except wasting their user’s time with dumb questions before opening a ticket with microsoft.
I worked in environments where MS Office and Star/Open/Apache/Libre Office was used, and Tbird was installed in addition to whatever Windows email client. I’m not even discussing other pieces of software, these are enough to make a point, I think. There was hardly a person who prefered the alternatives. These tools were perceived as slow, unreliable, uncooperative and the lack of compatibility, document-wise, only strengthened these opinions.
As for “posts scaring people away…” Do you seriously think that whatever people write in the Internet is enough to convince big corps, governments and other massive groups of recipients? Come on…
I disagree with your take on corpo environment. If what you’re saying would be true, then it’d be far more profitable for corpo to hire a bunch of Linux-oriented technicians and thus save costs of IT layer. But corpos don’t do that. You’re suggesting a paradox - a body that relies on cost-cutting and making everything as profitable as possible, that also is ok with wasting money on something that’s allegedly easy to replace.
Again: you’re doing what Linux/FOSS community usualy does. Instead of acknowledging the points and asking “what can be done to make this work”, you’re saying that your choice is better, good enough to work no matter what environment, what userbase is there, all consequences and the contradictory evidence be damned. It’s users that need to change their ways, certainly not Linux/FOSS.
This might work as Apple’s strategy, but it won’t as hell work in case of Linux/FOSS. 😉
I disagree with your take on corpo environment. If what you’re saying would be true, then it’d be far more profitable for corpo to hire a bunch of Linux-oriented technicians and thus save costs of IT layer. But corpos don’t do that. You’re suggesting a paradox - a body that relies on cost-cutting and making everything as profitable as possible, that also is ok with wasting money on something that’s allegedly easy to replace.
Hiring Linux professionals would require competent IT management. Most corporations don’t have that.
Hiring Linux professionals would require competent IT management. Most corporations don’t have that.
And again: you’re allowing for your emotions to dictate your opinion. This is wrong approach and indeed one of main reasons Linux/FOSS is hard to sell on. After all, would you really want to work with, and give your money to people who think yourself to be incompetent in spite of knowing you? 😉
This is true. I value FOSS immensely. But it’s not for everyone. It’s not for the non tech. It’s not for the people failing to embrace change; and let’s be honest ms has always done file sharing best. They still do. Yes you have to pay the man. Buy good things cost money.
FOSS is crucial to the survival of freedom in IT (broad sense) - whoever claims otherwise, doesn’t understand what is going on all around him.
But it doesn’t mean that Linux/FOSS is allowed to stay blind and deaf and resist evolution, especially if it wants to become something more than a set of tools for network administrators…
BRICS isn’t an alliance or a cohesive entity. It’s the equivalent of the G7 for major non-western economies. India and China hate each other. China and Russia only really get along in being anti-US. Brazil and South Africa have no real intersection with the geopolitical goals of the other. BRICS isn’t a geopolitical anything of any meaning.
I suspect India is doing this for the simple reason that they have zero control over Windows while they would have as much control as they want over internal-Linux use. They’re large enough that they can make it work, assuming they’re willing to dedicate the people and the money to it and put up with the non-insubstantial switching costs. Open question on what their follow through will look like, but it’s entirely within their capability.
Windows cut off plenty of actually solid devices and forced users to buy newer, but definitely worse equipment. At least that’s how it was when printers, scanners and multi-function devices are discussed. Especially INK printers.
BOSS was based on Debian, not Ubuntu. It was developed for the specific use case of being a standard client OS for Govt service computers, and never intended as a general-purpose distro for the public. Your expectations are wrong.
Also, there is no monolithic “Indian education system” whatsoever. In any case schools teaching Windows and MS Office to kids makes a LOT more sense since it’s something they have way higher chances of needing proficiency in for their future academic/professional lives. It’s not practical in any way to teach Linux instead.
We don’t have Linux in professional work because we don’t know Linux and We don’t know Linux because we don’t have Linux in professional work See it’s a chicken egg problem. Students should be encouraged to use Linux at school and on their PC.
Hopefully this work out better than Germany. Ever since Vista, the need to switch really has become a lot more justified, and only further compounded when Microsoft decided to stop committing to Windows 10.
Actually no, Impi Linux was SA govs Linux distro in mid 2000’s before politicians changed. It was all political decision making. Ubuntu was a private initiative of Mark Shuttleworth, which he took to the UK. He was from SA and did give support to Impi Linux.
I highly doubt the Indian military was using Windows for mission-critical equipment or systems any way. This news is about the normal bureaucracy using Linux, which is not new in India’s case.
Kerala has been using FOSS for a long time now. It’s a good step. In Kerala computer literacy centres actually teach Linux so hopefully this increase Linux usage in education sector as well.
realmd and sambafor AD, and smbclient can be used to map network printers.
As for how Maya OS looks, it’s going to be used for their defence systems, so it’s highly unlikely we’ll get to see it. But it’s supposedly based on Ubuntu and has a “familiar” interface, so I imagine it might look something like Zorin OS.
Well yes, it’s really difficult to switch when government only just managed to migrate to Windows 10 on most machines, and still uses Microsoft’s document formats for everything aside from PDF.
Up until a few years ago, UNISA was still using public-facing IIS servers and SARS was paying up the wazoo to maintain old Flash applets that people used to file their taxes.
One government department managed to waste R5 million on a WordPress website that used a $15 theme.
The bigger problem was a massive buy of Microsoft Cloud services with Office365 etc. It’s moved beyond the desktop and moving back is not going to be easy. MS cloud makes it’s easier to use Linux on desktops, but basically the horse has left the stable.
You usually want to know and control what goes into your distro, especially if we’re talking about more critical systems. If you just install Ubuntu, you’re handing over control to its creator, Canonical.
I was a hardcore Ubuntu user but I’m all in on Linux mint now. At one point I had lots of time to dedicate to getting my and other’s system working with their hardware through updates. Mint has for the most part been perfect.
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