As a Swiss, I'm happy they finally try it. It's only around 5% of all government machines, but at least it's a start and I wish them all the best!
We have to get independent asap from the US, they never were our (or any other countries) "friends" and most likely never will be.
OSS ftw!
We were neutral, but it's always funny how many US-guys always bring up WW2. That was maybe the last time, the US did anything "good" for the world. But yeah, I think it's useless to argue with you.
Nobody except Americans believe that. USAid is toxic, a weapon of empire and about as helpful as an Epstein charitable foundation.
USAid propaganda in the blue and yellow country is disgraceful, five billion spent telling the blue yellow people that they were some type of master race and that the enemy was in Moscow.
The funny mustache guy that was popular in Germany got the trains running on time, built out some motorways and many other things, and all is good until you mention some of the darker things that went on. USAid is a bit like that, theoretically there is some African somewhere that did not starve due to how "good" USAid was, however, it is ultimately a weapon of empire.
The world outside the USA wants precisely zero charity from the USA since it always comes with a cost to sovereignty.
WW2 was long enough ago that no one you end up talking about it actually experienced it themselves, but it's recent enough that people who felt their country did "Good", can still ride that high wave without being pulled down by everything that came after.
> That was maybe the last time, the US did anything "good" for the world. But yeah, I think it's useless to argue with you.
This is a completely mad assessment. Haven't you noticed the massive issues with scientific, health, and social funding globally now the US taxpayer has stopped bankrolling it?
Switzerland was “neutral” not neutral. The Swiss certainly crossed into the complicit side quite often, profiting from the Nazi regime, laundering their looted gold and closing their borders to fleeing Jews.
This is such a landmine topic, because most countries did this, including the UK and the US; see e.g. the MS St. Louis. This is why there are several "heroes of the resistance" that in modern parlance are "people smugglers", forging credentials and visas in order to help people escape.
Today you see exactly the same hostile attitudes to non-white refugees of basically every war except Ukraine.
Despite what Hollywood says, WW2 was more to do with German militarism and expansionism than the Jewish question. The Allies were certainly willing to use pro-Jewish sentiments and some Jewish troops, but it was never presented as the main issue.
Would this mean that if Country A for example starts closing their border for fleeing citizens of Country B, Country A would no longer be considered neutral in the Country-B <> Country-C war? I'm interested in how much you have to do/not have to do, in order for no longer be considered neutral.
I think, once you read about each individual country and what they did before/during/after WW2, it seems like not a single country on the European continent can be considered "neutral". So maybe with this lens, Switzerland was "the most neutral" if you compare with others?
There is a difference between someone running from persecution and someone leaving because they might be conscripted into invasion they agree with or because they dont like the economy. Equating Russians with Jews is particularly ugly here. You could sorta a little equate Ukrainians, a little.
And yes, actual historical events and motivations of past actors matter.
Yes, there were multiple fully on-the-nazi side countries, Swiss were not them. That does not make the comparison you made meaningful.
> That does not make the comparison you made meaningful.
Yeah, even when I tried my best to, apparently the labels just fire up too much emotions. I've removed the country names completely as it's irrelevant to what I was trying to discuss.
> Equating Russians with Jews is particularly ugly here
I didn't do anything of the like in the original text, but good try!
"Switzerland was “neutral” not neutral. The Swiss certainly crossed into the complicit side quite often, profiting from the Nazi regime, laundering their looted gold and closing their borders to fleeing Jews."
That still counts as neutral, as does Sweden's activities. Switzerland interned allied airmen and was even bombed but stayed out of the war.
There is a wonderful quote from the Irish parliament. The Irish government wanted to be neutral, but one of the politicians asked "but who shall we be neutral against ?" (By the way, the nature of the Irish Free State's "neutrality" remains controversial to this day, and again, I could point to examples both ways.) It is hard to think of any fully neutral countries in WW2, partly due to the large empires spanning Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Maybe certain Latin American countries, except some of them joined the war at the end and/or took in Nazi refugees like Eichmann.
When the US wins, it tends to be quick, clean, and easily forgotten. Consider our victories against ISIS, or against Saddam in the Gulf War. Both cases where an expansionist power violated territorial integrity norms by engaging in conquest, and was defeated by a US-led coalition.
> That was maybe the last time, the US did anything "good" for the world.
As a non-Swiss, non-American, I can assure you you need to study both American and Swiss modern history. The Swiss were far, far too cozy with the Nazis, and the Americans have done a spectacular amount of good since WWII ended.
How far you wanna go back to figure out what Linux would/wouldn't be without specific companies and individuals? You're taking "stealing credit for something" to a whole new level.
There are many, many things wrong with this statement, but let's repair it with past tense: "Linux was 100% created by an ethnically Swedish guy in Finland." The past tense from 30 years ago, the mid 1990s, because you've not been keeping up.
I’m a European who has contributed to the kernel (a single, pathetic patch but a patch nonetheless). That means at the very least it’s not 100% created by Linus
Yeah, because the only thing that's for certain is that American LLMs are so special that they cannot be reproduced, as everyone has been knowing already in 2023 from the public "we have a gigantic moat" Google memo.
Wouldn't a true Swiss person be neutral and cautious, and wouldn't they refrain from parroting all sorts of nonsense in public about other countries? Anyway, it doesn’t exactly seem like smart move when a government agency tasked with protecting its citizens’ sensitive information switches on a large scale from local, closed networks with energy-efficient desktop applications to externally hosted SaaS infrastructure, with wasteful, fragile, unsecure browser-based applications, sending each byte over many borders. This development should never have happened in the first place.
I’m disappointed they did. M365 represents a tiny proportion of the budget especially in light of the high Swiss salaries in government (~ $100-250k per employee per year) and all the surrounding infrastructure costs. Microsoft software became really good over time and the loss of productivity and the inefficiencies introduced by the change to clunky software will absolutely not be worth it.
The real risk to MS here is when people take the plunge and see how much nicer a (well supported, well put together) Linux distro is, compared to Windows etc! Will they want to buy their next laptop at home with MSFT installed?
Plus, if countries moving off Microsoft put a fraction of the savings into libre office product development, it might get an even more lopsided comparison!
Lifelong Linux/Unix user here, I love the widespread adoption of Linux.
But comments like this one makes me think people don't realize what a MacGyvere'd together hack job a Linux distro truly is.
The idea on paper is that a company like Microsoft can offer a more consistent and stable experience, but apparently they're even failing at that these days.
But to look at a Linux distro as an alternative to consistency and stability is pretty funny to me.
The truth is that any org that chooses to migrate from Microsoft to Open source will face completely new challenges. And the end result will be +-0, if they're lucky.
This was an issue, but at this point Microsoft is placing ads everywhere, negative news on my desktop, and update nags with changing buttons in every other start. Nothing about it is smooth or consistent anymore.
Seriously I've learned about the death of hundreds of people when I switched on my music PC (the only reason I have one windows machine is music software) - I haven't asked for this, and I removed news before, they just patched it back in
I've used plenty of sketchy third party tools to get rid of all that weirdness but they keep patching it back somehow. I never get rid of the ads long term, also sticking to win10. Thing is I DJ straight from soundcloud mostly so going offline is not a real option for me.
Fantasy software: something that uses hooks to intercept internet requests from a specified other program, and sends them through USB to a corresponding phone app using a weird protocol, and the app relays them to the phone's internet connection so it's like a tether, and then your Windows program can be online, but Windows can't.
I don't think you appreciate what a hack job Windows really is. It's just that it's quite visible in the Linux world, but more obscured in the case of proprietary software.
I haven’t used desktop Linux in ages, but I’m a Linux server user as I think maybe everyone here. Is the solution to desktop that some well funded company just needs to fork Debian, build the common application deites like word processing, spreadsheets, presentation, messaging apps, etc, and then build a proper App Store?
Or is the underlying system still bad, as in drivers, compatibilities, audio and video codecs, networking, etc. I know on servers when some of these break they take a bit of mucking around. But it seems many companies are trying, why are they failing?
Which is basically what Google did with ChromeOS and Android, except that they have little to nothing to do with GNU/Linux experience.
Rather a Java/Kotlin/C/C++ userspace with the Linux kernel as implementation detail, or Web/WebAssembly, equally with Linux kernel as implementation detail (Crostini runs in a VM similar to WSL, and lacks several features).
I bet Googlebooks might achieve more sales on regular consumer shops than any proper GNU/Linux distro, and it is basically Android on laptops as per what we know about them.
Yet my mom does not have a Ubuntu desktop. And if I set one up for her, I woudl have to split my time between my job and tech support for her. So well funded, but not sure they are the right company.
Id happily pay for a polished, commercial Linux distro, and I’d imagine governments will do too - either outsourced or with an internal team of civil servant sysadmins.
I wouldn't assume that moving off Microsoft will save money, or not for a long time. All staff will need a lot of retraining.
Or: if Microsoft are very smart they'll have Office for Linux and a GPO connector to manage Linux devices (and divert logins via Entra) in the wings, so much less retraining will be required.
Tbh the only reason I can't put an ubuntu for my parents/grandparents is Microsoft office.
Libre is generally ok, but they deal with lots of documents from different ppl/orgs that just need to have similar rendering. Windows is so bloated it's insane
Even Microsoft can't perfectly replicate MS Office rendering. Despite access to the source code. Lots of stuff renders slightly broken in the web version, especially once headers and footers are involved
As an individual that makes MS Office hard to replace in the workplace. But maybe entire agencies switching over will have enough weight that they can force everyone else to adapt to them
This will be fixed only by a govt push to do full replacement for all doc sharing at all levels, especially schools. But since in this country office is mostly pirated anyway, it's not such a big push
That's the same issue I hear Apple users complain about: how it's such a drag to copy paste screenshots from keynote into powerpoint, every time they can't present from their own laptop.
No, the risk is that Microsoft loses its de facto monopoly on Enterprise ecosystems.
It's pretty hard to switch to Linux, some have tried, bigger entities never stuck to it. So far. Now with the political landscape shifting, the priority to achieve that has gone much higher.
> how much nicer a (well supported, well put together) Linux distro is, compared to Windows
As someone who regularly uses both, and even in spite of the ad avalanche that (a bog-standard home install of) Windows has become: [X] to doubt. I regularly have issues on my corporate Linux laptop that I suspect wouldn't ever happen on Windows. Fleet management is easiest on Windows, with Active Directory, Group Policy, images, etc. Maybe package managers make software management easier on Linux, but fleet sysadmin is basically built-in on Windows.
Linux is superb for servers—I use Proxmox VE as the hypervisor on my homelab—but it still has a rather long way to go as a sharp-edge-free desktop OS, regardless of whether it is for home or corporate use.
I suppose it depends. I’ve seen MSFT platforms supported very well and very poorly - with all the things you mention present but permanently broken. I’ve only seen Linux well supported, though ofc that could well be the luck of my draw.
But even when the platform is well supported, you’re left with the user experience.
> The real risk to MS here is when people take the plunge and see how much nicer a (well supported, well put together) Linux distro is, compared to Windows etc! Will they want to buy their next laptop at home with MSFT installed?
Firstly, I would wager a large amount of personal computing is now done on a phone/tablet. None of my relatives have laptops for personal use. They may have work laptop (which will be running Windows). I this often with a lot of Linux users where they are still fighting the last war which has long been lost.
Secondly, Every single Linux/DE distro has a bunch of issues. Doesn't matter what it is. There are loads of odd bugs (doesn't matter the DE or Distro) that are present, that simply don't exist on Windows. These are things around device and display handling
e.g.
- My bluetooth mouse needs paired again every kernel update. My solution to this will be to buy another mouse probably.
- One of my USB wireless headsets doesn't work with Pipewire. The solution to this was to buy another one.
- Games while it is great that I could finally ditch Windows for playing games. You have to be using the right DE. This is because Mutter (which is Gnome's Window Manager), completely fucks the frame-pacing in some games. KDE that doesn't happen. This is why Gaming distros exist because all these stupid problems with Gaming are pre-fixed by the distro.
- When I changed from Gnome to KDE, all my browser sessions tabs, logins etc were gone because KDE Keyrings and Gnome Keyrings for some reason don't use the same underlying store.
All of these issues need either new hardware / obscure settings to be enabled via the terminal to fix, or require two large projects to actually talk to each other.
Thirdly, it isn't just the OS. For every application on the computer you have to either see if the program is supported on Linux and/or there is an alternative, or they may have a bunch of stuff tied into the Microsoft Ecosystem. Sometimes there isn't really an alternative.
Finally, Unlike big corporations you get bizarre things happening in Linux-distro land almost weekly due to some personal drama. This is seldom reported on because honestly this happens in smaller enthusiast projects normally, but they have a way of trickling up into the wider ecosystem.
Yes, because when they go to Media Market and FNAC they will only have macOS and Windows laptops to chose from.
Having Tuxedo, System76 and co is great, but what most people care about is what there are in regular consumer shops.
Linux adoption among consumer hardware has only been a success where it is invisible to the user, like the Linux kernel on Android or WebOS, firmware on DVD/BlueRay players,...
The average person walking into these shops has never heard of Linux. If, as I would hope, they find out about it and like it, they’ll ask. Then either the shops assortment will be improved, or as sibling comment says, they’ll look online.
Which is why "The Year of Desktop Linux" will keep being a meme (30 years to 4%), unless we are talking about running Linux Desktops from within WSL and Virtualisation Framework, or for the oldies, VMWare Workstation and Virtual Box.
"Linus Torvalds Explains The Reason Linux Lost The Desktop"
M$FT revenue is currently around $300bn a year, with a 40% profit margin. Canonical's revenue is less than $300m.
Even if Canonical wanted to create a perfect version of Ubuntu with driver support for almost everything and as many desktop bugs removed as possible, they still can't afford to do it.
A credible Linux-on-the-desktop needs a global or multinational consumer-oriented foundation that can herd all the cats and turn desktop Linux into a professionally-managed project with proper beta testing and some interest in user experience.
That's a 180 from Linux culture, so it's unlikely to ever happen.
The Linux Foundation is not that Linux foundation, because it's not remotely desktop or consumer-oriented. freedesktop.org is a nice side project but doesn't have anything like the budget or the profile or resources required.
That is literally the only way to make a desktop version that can compete with Windows and OS X.
There's an obvious opportunity for someone to do this for governments now - a standard gov-optimised distro with enhanced security and access control and a collection of boring productivity software.
You might want to contact Media Markt, FNAC, Corte Ingles and all the other stores to tell them apparently they have 0 customers yet they pay for rent, salaries and everything else even though no one goes there anymore.
Initially a post order-only for consumer electronics, but added bricks & mortar stores because many customers (of all ages, btw) prefer IRL service, viewing and touching actual hardware.
> prefer IRL service, viewing and touching actual hardware.
That did Fry's in, didn't it? People coming in viewing, touching hardware in store and then buy it on-line (elsewhere) so that they could save 2.5%. Or worse, buying it in store and returning it two weeks later when they found a better deal or didn't need it anymore.
> Or worse, buying it in store and returning it two weeks later when they found a better deal or didn't need it anymore.
Here a lot of places has a sort of price guarantee that I guess is supposed to work against this. Basically, if I know Media Markt sells something I want, but the very same thing is available for cheaper in other (big) store, I'll show them their competitors pricing and they'll lower their price to match it.
Assuming by the fact that the physical stores still exists, don't seem to be going anywhere soon, and these companies tend to get rid of stuff that doesn't make them profit anymore, I think it's safe to assume they at least are net positive on having the physical stores.
Not sure about goverment requirements, but many apps I use nowadays are on the web, Figma, Canva, google docs, outlook and so on. There is not much need for a dedicated OS for most users.
the browser is definitely becoming more OS-like. that’s the Chromebook bet. but for proper office work you need good file management. if they’re not keen on trusting cloudy solutions by the big corps then FOSS on bare metal is the way to go.
A Mac studio ultra with linux is the best computer I ever had. The only small thing that I miss is the copy/paste from iphone to the computer sync.
It seems to me really that there is no going back to macOS any time soon. I don’t think I would still be able to “compute” on Windows.
Guys, this is so pathetic. Twenty-three years after Munich and there are still comments waiting for the year of the Linux desktop. From a deployment about big enough for a small university. Stop! You’re embarrassing yourselves!
There are at least a couple or three things around that...
- One, that probably, for most of the users, what's is locking them to Windows is a bunch of Microsoft applications. Once you've moved out of those apps, you're free to move them to any other OS.
- Two, on government computers there are usually a bunch of things that might be a bit custom and not readily available in other OSes. Smart card readers for weird standards, custom software for security or administration processes, uncommon peripherals...
- Three, there are departments that are going to be tied to Windows for a long time, due to very specific software, for example CAD or things like that
So I'd say Office is a big and easier win that could allow later allow to move a lot of workstations to Linux. Then, you can focus on the other less common uses of Windows and see how feasible is migrating them. But starting directly moving to Linux would mean starting directly with edge cases and problems.
Having a core system be entirely dependent on a foreign entity seems silly when there is a very viable alternative (which also saves a lot on licensing). I say VIABLE not equivalent. Linux is a lot rougher, and the change management process will be brutal. Retooling an entire department/etc to use whatever Linux has instead of entra/intune for device management will also be complex/incomplete/a learning curve.
TLDR: any govt would be crazy not to at least trial it, and see if it works.
I'm not sure neither Microsoft, Apple, LG nor Sony is interested in developing software nor drivers for Linux so I think we're pretty safe on that front.
Also further down "If the pilot is successful, we might expect the migration to continue on all the 54,000 workstations owned by the federal administrations. That's my guess". So in the estimate of the author we can expect this to be phase 2 of a three-phase rollout
They have to keep in mind: it will be more expensive (significantly, and in competent people, not only $$$) as you cannot beat big tech with their thousands of billions of $ and the fact they are scaled on a worldwide scope. And with a long term perspective, it is going to be even harder and more 'expensive': being independent and small has a price.
Just do not go on the ground of their "complexity", if you do, you are done for, going to be hell (specs subset only of file formats/protocols, and/or very simple alternative file formats/protocols, think docx vs utf8 text file).
And you better work on those technical regulations, and it is hard since it must not imped real and pertinent "progress".
The long tail of ms Excel does not get replaced easily. For 90% of customers and 90% of workflows you see either no use of a program, or use cases that can be replaced with anything.
But eventually you'll find the power users who do business critical stuff in excel sheets that you notice can't be done in any other way, and if you stop doing it then people aren't paid in time or whatever.
This doesn't mean it's a good idea to not try this. But Microsoft also aren't dumb. They know exactly how common this is, and what fraction this is. And they will make sure that it costs little more to keep the Microsoft products across the org, than it costs to keep them for specific users and deal with the mess that happens.
This could be said for other things than Excel, but Excel has been one of those moats for decades now.
But the general usage of Excel is so negligible in terms of using its actual features that it can be easily replaced.
In my experience, non-basic formulas are beyond 99% of people and they use it simply for adding stuff up in a grid. This is why Google Sheets is used in many places as a replacement (even if it balloons RAM usage when presented with a large sheet of data), simply because all of the wonderful features of Excel are unused.
The most complex operation some people do seems to be lookup tables.
The biggest challenge with these kind of migrations is training users, especially government employees. Switzerland is relatively highly educated so this might be less of a challenge than in other countries but it won't be easy.
The technical part is probably relatively easy in comparison. Especially because the stakes are low (parallel run with the existing system, good will from everyone involved).
Educated or not, people that have been using the same system for many years will have a tough time IMHO. Looking at my mom and dad interactions with any UI, it seems to me they don't really read what that menu is about, they just use "muscle memory" to navigate it. So I expect a drop in efficiency until that memory is rebuilt.
> Switzerland is relatively highly educated so this might be less of a challenge than in other countries but it won't be easy.
True, but that's not accounting for a bunch of typically Swiss cultural factors:
- Swiss people tend to love to death the "one standard solution for one particular problem" approach
- Swiss people tend to be quite change-averse relative to other nearby cultures.
Don't get me wrong I love the Swiss to death, and the above cultural biases actually have their advantages, but re-training government employees is not going to be easy, however well educated they may be.
Fortunately, there is another cultural Swiss bias that's going to help: most large Swiss organizations have been designed using the army as a model, which mean Swiss employees tend to obey orders quite well.
So if the mandate comes from the top, it'll likely succeed. Eventually. Cause in Switzerland, they tend to take their time (yeah, that's another base cultural cliché, but I couldn't resist. And we're already deep into those already, why stop :-) ).
I'd guess the hurdles are always more structural and organizational - as even with Microsoft stack itself. See for instance the Limux/Munic story: https://lwn.net/Articles/737818/
Not really - this is akin to doing a complete rewrite of your 30 year old codebase to Rust.
Every organization has their own hacks, bespoke tools, processes and hardware that has to be painstakingly replaced, reprogrammed and users retrained. In many cases, Linux alternatives don't exist so they either have to be written or processes/hardware replaced.
These are OLD organizations and none of them is really the same as any other. Legendarily, companies like SAP made their whole fortunes managing this kind of complexity.
It's just a lot of work with a lot of edge cases you've never thought of (or seen in your life) that takes years.
There been work in this direction for multiple decades already, but up until the confirmation that Trump won his second election, things weren't happening that quickly. Since then though, the steam train been all aboard and everyone and their mother is currently trying to reduce US dependency in pretty much every way they can.
One key distinction is the permanancy of Trumpism. The fact that existing controls in the US government cannot stop the extreme Trump actions, and in fact for many cases are explicitly supporting, gave a clear message to other governments that the risk is real, permanent and needs de-risking.
Overall Trump is a stress test on the world and found many defects that is slowly getting fixes.
Office is going to be a blocker - not just because of the two XML file formats, but because of the different UI. I personally find the Microsoft version more productive despite a mental list of complaints I have with it.
The correct choice, in my opinion, would be to invest in a new EU_Office project that uses the Microsoft XML formats. If you're trying to run your government on a new platform, that would also be a hedge against TDF pulling in a direction you don't want: an "independent self-governing meritocratic entity" has possible failure modes that need to go on the risk register.
Office is very much not a problem. LibreOffice has UI plugins that arrange everything in a standard Office pre-365 layout. I've been using it for years and I can't recall a single time I've ran into any issues. I think Excel macros are where the start of dealbreakers begin, which is a niche issue. 90+% of Office users won't hit that wall.
Second, the EU has been pouring money into an OpenOffice fork for official use and replacement of Office 365 for a while. https://office.eu/
The 10% excel sheets are exactly the problem. You can replace 90% or even 99% with either some online simpler office suite or none at all. But it will turn out there are business critical things running in 2003 format excel sheets with macros and if anything stops working then the organization stops working. The person who made these sheets and macros has retired 20 years ago and "updating it" would require making a dozen little applications to replace them which would be a huge task.
The simple/cheap answer I think is to just keep the power users and legacy systems on the tools they need/want. Because that's where the pain point is that cause these projects to fail. If you aim for 100% you'll end up with 0% eventually. If you aim for 90%, you can do it.
But Microsoft know this, and would make sure that a 90% migration saves you much less than a 100% migration. Which is why this is so rare still.
(I think the number is probably 99% not 90%, but the point is the same)
How many people in most government positions are using Excel?
SaaS and mobile has taken over many apps. We sell SaaS to business and govt clients where most end users are either on a browser or a mobile app. There is a Windows application (path dependent history) but it is almost vestigial for configuration/management.
This is a great replacement for Office Online and Onedrive, but will it work as a standalone desktop application that stores files to by home directory?
I have been having some fun lately with some extra tokens from my work, experimenting with setting it loose on replicating software.
The results have been pretty surprisingly good. There’s a lot of functionality missing on first use, but I think if I let it churn through a few million more tokens it could get close.
I would be very concerned if I were a MS, SaaS or Adobe about what’s to come in the near future.
That‘s an interesting thought, because I see openDesk packs Collabora for document-editing, I‘ve never ever tried it. Does anyone know how it fairs with file-formats and MS-formatting in general?
I’m always surprised to see how naive people are when comparing the enterprise/government usage of software vs. Personal usage.
Linux and open source software are a good alternative for personal usage, but for government usage, wouldn’t they have to port every custom software they have built over decades to Linux? Not to mention driver support for legacy/custom hardware. Also, from where would they get the support and guarantee that critical bugs and issues are patched and distributed without disruption to every single computer in time?
Replacing MS office would be the easiest and what’s the point of migrating away from MS Office while still using Windows eco system? Is it just political symbolic migration because they don’t have anything better to do with tax payers money?
A lot of government software moved into some cloud-based, browser-accessible platform during COVID. It depends on the office and the government, but especially with how easily a vendor can modernize legacy software with an LLM, this isn't necessarily a dealbreaker issue. It might make more sense to modernize than rely in perpetuity on the one guy that should have retired 3 years ago and you can't let go because he knows COBOL.
And MS Office corporate licenses account for a significant part of MS's revenue stream. More than 400 million Office 365 licenses paid in 2024, not one-off Windows licenses. So a business might save $150 per person per year on a large group of staff migrating them to a FOSS alternative for email and a replacement for light users that only ever touch Word/Excel/PowerPoint. And they might never know the difference, functionally. That's also less of a tangled web than switching operating systems and network setups that would require work for any users of critical systems. I can see the logic in migrating the willing as a test out of Office, then a few more people every month until you have one pool of FOSS users, and one pool of must use Office 365 users.
That shift might not be nothing to a small business as well, and at scale, might also be significant to larger businesses. Even if 5% of Office 365 users moved over, that's tens of millions of users.
Their custom software probably runs fine under Wine? Also, if it's actual custom software, they might have the source and could even recompile it. And also, the software of the Swiss government is usually surprisingly good quality, so they probably have competent engineers who they could call upon to help with such porting.
I've written quite a few tools for the Swiss government in my time and 98% of them are part of the intranet or even external websites. It's all web anyway.
Porting software nowadays might prove easier than expected. Exactly how much custom software should one expect? Centralized web applications running on Java are probably the standard anyway, and they are not OS-dependent.
The point of migration seems to be data-storage compliance anyway. They can later migrate off Windows easily once openDesk gets them going.
I don't know the specific case of Switzerland but I worked in a University in Spain when I was student with servers and stuff and our serious software was never Microsoft's. It was from big Mainframes like IBM or Sun Microsystems servers. We ported that software to Linux and it took very little time, saving us a lot of money with small machines.
That was more than 20 years ago.
Half of our laboratory PC rooms used Linux or BSD and we had licences like Matlab for Linux early on. The other half used Windows and yes, we could get very good license prices from Microsoft precisely because we had so many Linux machines. It was almost free.
You could even say that Microsoft spent money on us trying to buy the University sales gatekeepers with things like free expensive travel to States' conferences, free laptops and stuff.
We were probably not a normal University as we were a technical University and regularly organised conferences inviting people like Stallman.(Our technical University also managed the servers of the Humanities side of the University).
It was not that hard. Today, with so many programs running in Webassembly, it should be much easier.
>Is it just political symbolic migration because they have anything better to do with tax payers money?
Usually when you replace privative software with open source you spend 10x or so less in licenses. The problem being that the open source software is not as capable as the privative.
I did not understood why instead of spending 10 times less with open source, you spend half and pay for the necessary capabilities improving the open source software.
I understood it later. In the past it was a scheme lots of politicians used for getting negotiation power against Microsoft. Digital sovereignty was very down the priorities list compared to getting a good price.
Now, after the Ukraine war, and Trump actively using the US dependence against Europe, digital sovereignty is a very real issue, even critical.
Custom software they have build over decades is pile of crap. Mostly could be replaced with web interface, gpg encryption, and batch processing of CSV files with bash or python.
It will fail because employees want "mouse point and click", "mouse point and double click" interfaces and are unable to use anything else.
It is sad that EU and USA are falling away from eachother. IMO we should try and stick together in these times. No doubt the US has financed a lot of things for te entire world and no doubt the European countries have put in a lot of effort too.
I don't think we should argue over it.
We have issues with privacy rights, elder burden, geopolitical turmoil, growing debt burden, environment and so on in all places we need to look forward and stick together...
What's wrong with having more sovereignty over your data and infrastructure? You don't need to stop working on the mentioned issues together but cutting foreign spies the access to your citizens data and reducing their leverage.
That's life, spies going to spy, state psychopaths from the military and the three-latter agencies exist regardless whether you see them or not and they don't care about the "common good". They must be taken into the account.
The less power humans have over each other - the better. Instead of pressuring each other to bring profits people would be able to speak like equals.
As a Swiss, I'm happy they finally try it. It's only around 5% of all government machines, but at least it's a start and I wish them all the best! We have to get independent asap from the US, they never were our (or any other countries) "friends" and most likely never will be. OSS ftw!
Hurry up Euros, get your anti-US comments in before we wake up!
We certainly weren’t on the same side in WW2
We were neutral, but it's always funny how many US-guys always bring up WW2. That was maybe the last time, the US did anything "good" for the world. But yeah, I think it's useless to argue with you.
USAid did "good" for the world, but because people took it for granted and it wasn't in the news until it was stopped (which has cost lives).
Nobody except Americans believe that. USAid is toxic, a weapon of empire and about as helpful as an Epstein charitable foundation.
USAid propaganda in the blue and yellow country is disgraceful, five billion spent telling the blue yellow people that they were some type of master race and that the enemy was in Moscow.
The funny mustache guy that was popular in Germany got the trains running on time, built out some motorways and many other things, and all is good until you mention some of the darker things that went on. USAid is a bit like that, theoretically there is some African somewhere that did not starve due to how "good" USAid was, however, it is ultimately a weapon of empire.
The world outside the USA wants precisely zero charity from the USA since it always comes with a cost to sovereignty.
The US has been by far the largest funder of medical and other scientific research since WW2 which has benefited billions immensely.
WW2 was long enough ago that no one you end up talking about it actually experienced it themselves, but it's recent enough that people who felt their country did "Good", can still ride that high wave without being pulled down by everything that came after.
> That was maybe the last time, the US did anything "good" for the world. But yeah, I think it's useless to argue with you.
This is a completely mad assessment. Haven't you noticed the massive issues with scientific, health, and social funding globally now the US taxpayer has stopped bankrolling it?
Bankrolling is an editorial word that implies almost a one way benefit.
Bailey: "Did you know that the US basically never does anything good for the world?"
Motte: "Well when the US does something good for the world the US also benefits."
Switzerland was “neutral” not neutral. The Swiss certainly crossed into the complicit side quite often, profiting from the Nazi regime, laundering their looted gold and closing their borders to fleeing Jews.
> closing their borders to fleeing Jews.
This is such a landmine topic, because most countries did this, including the UK and the US; see e.g. the MS St. Louis. This is why there are several "heroes of the resistance" that in modern parlance are "people smugglers", forging credentials and visas in order to help people escape.
Today you see exactly the same hostile attitudes to non-white refugees of basically every war except Ukraine.
[delayed]
It's also why Germany did the death camps. Originally their plan was just to force them to leave but most countries were not allowing them to do so.
Despite what Hollywood says, WW2 was more to do with German militarism and expansionism than the Jewish question. The Allies were certainly willing to use pro-Jewish sentiments and some Jewish troops, but it was never presented as the main issue.
I think Hollywood says exactly that. Most WW2 films are about war, not the Holocaust.
Would this mean that if Country A for example starts closing their border for fleeing citizens of Country B, Country A would no longer be considered neutral in the Country-B <> Country-C war? I'm interested in how much you have to do/not have to do, in order for no longer be considered neutral.
I think, once you read about each individual country and what they did before/during/after WW2, it seems like not a single country on the European continent can be considered "neutral". So maybe with this lens, Switzerland was "the most neutral" if you compare with others?
There is a difference between someone running from persecution and someone leaving because they might be conscripted into invasion they agree with or because they dont like the economy. Equating Russians with Jews is particularly ugly here. You could sorta a little equate Ukrainians, a little.
And yes, actual historical events and motivations of past actors matter.
Yes, there were multiple fully on-the-nazi side countries, Swiss were not them. That does not make the comparison you made meaningful.
> That does not make the comparison you made meaningful.
Yeah, even when I tried my best to, apparently the labels just fire up too much emotions. I've removed the country names completely as it's irrelevant to what I was trying to discuss.
> Equating Russians with Jews is particularly ugly here
I didn't do anything of the like in the original text, but good try!
"Switzerland was “neutral” not neutral. The Swiss certainly crossed into the complicit side quite often, profiting from the Nazi regime, laundering their looted gold and closing their borders to fleeing Jews."
That still counts as neutral, as does Sweden's activities. Switzerland interned allied airmen and was even bombed but stayed out of the war.
There is a wonderful quote from the Irish parliament. The Irish government wanted to be neutral, but one of the politicians asked "but who shall we be neutral against ?" (By the way, the nature of the Irish Free State's "neutrality" remains controversial to this day, and again, I could point to examples both ways.) It is hard to think of any fully neutral countries in WW2, partly due to the large empires spanning Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Maybe certain Latin American countries, except some of them joined the war at the end and/or took in Nazi refugees like Eichmann.
> funny how many US-guys always bring up WW2
Cut them some slack - its the last time they "won" a war.
When the US wins, it tends to be quick, clean, and easily forgotten. Consider our victories against ISIS, or against Saddam in the Gulf War. Both cases where an expansionist power violated territorial integrity norms by engaging in conquest, and was defeated by a US-led coalition.
> That was maybe the last time, the US did anything "good" for the world.
As a non-Swiss, non-American, I can assure you you need to study both American and Swiss modern history. The Swiss were far, far too cozy with the Nazis, and the Americans have done a spectacular amount of good since WWII ended.
The argument is much cleaner if immutable past actions remain un-weaponized.
If somebody wants to tap me for reparations over chattel slavery in the US, and all I can say is that my in-country ancestors fought for the Union.
Which, along with $5, will get you a cup of coffee down' the beanery.
Linux is largely financed by American corporations. Without that, Linux wouldn't be anywhere near what it is today.
How far you wanna go back to figure out what Linux would/wouldn't be without specific companies and individuals? You're taking "stealing credit for something" to a whole new level.
Linux is 100% created by an ethnically Swedish guy in Finland. Your point is?
There are many, many things wrong with this statement, but let's repair it with past tense: "Linux was 100% created by an ethnically Swedish guy in Finland." The past tense from 30 years ago, the mid 1990s, because you've not been keeping up.
I’m a European who has contributed to the kernel (a single, pathetic patch but a patch nonetheless). That means at the very least it’s not 100% created by Linus
And without American AI to patch security holes, Linux and the software running on it will become hopelessly insecure.
Yeah, because the only thing that's for certain is that American LLMs are so special that they cannot be reproduced, as everyone has been knowing already in 2023 from the public "we have a gigantic moat" Google memo.
lol somebody didn’t hear the news about Kimi and GLN 5.3 cyber
Wouldn't a true Swiss person be neutral and cautious, and wouldn't they refrain from parroting all sorts of nonsense in public about other countries? Anyway, it doesn’t exactly seem like smart move when a government agency tasked with protecting its citizens’ sensitive information switches on a large scale from local, closed networks with energy-efficient desktop applications to externally hosted SaaS infrastructure, with wasteful, fragile, unsecure browser-based applications, sending each byte over many borders. This development should never have happened in the first place.
That’s a lot of misconceptions for one paragraph…
I’m disappointed they did. M365 represents a tiny proportion of the budget especially in light of the high Swiss salaries in government (~ $100-250k per employee per year) and all the surrounding infrastructure costs. Microsoft software became really good over time and the loss of productivity and the inefficiencies introduced by the change to clunky software will absolutely not be worth it.
The real risk to MS here is when people take the plunge and see how much nicer a (well supported, well put together) Linux distro is, compared to Windows etc! Will they want to buy their next laptop at home with MSFT installed?
Plus, if countries moving off Microsoft put a fraction of the savings into libre office product development, it might get an even more lopsided comparison!
Lifelong Linux/Unix user here, I love the widespread adoption of Linux.
But comments like this one makes me think people don't realize what a MacGyvere'd together hack job a Linux distro truly is.
The idea on paper is that a company like Microsoft can offer a more consistent and stable experience, but apparently they're even failing at that these days.
But to look at a Linux distro as an alternative to consistency and stability is pretty funny to me.
The truth is that any org that chooses to migrate from Microsoft to Open source will face completely new challenges. And the end result will be +-0, if they're lucky.
This was an issue, but at this point Microsoft is placing ads everywhere, negative news on my desktop, and update nags with changing buttons in every other start. Nothing about it is smooth or consistent anymore.
Seriously I've learned about the death of hundreds of people when I switched on my music PC (the only reason I have one windows machine is music software) - I haven't asked for this, and I removed news before, they just patched it back in
Have you considered going offline for the music PC? I took an old rig off and stuck it with win10.
I have one setup with all my media/games and have removed every piece of Microsoft possible.
I've used plenty of sketchy third party tools to get rid of all that weirdness but they keep patching it back somehow. I never get rid of the ads long term, also sticking to win10. Thing is I DJ straight from soundcloud mostly so going offline is not a real option for me.
Fantasy software: something that uses hooks to intercept internet requests from a specified other program, and sends them through USB to a corresponding phone app using a weird protocol, and the app relays them to the phone's internet connection so it's like a tether, and then your Windows program can be online, but Windows can't.
I don't think you appreciate what a hack job Windows really is. It's just that it's quite visible in the Linux world, but more obscured in the case of proprietary software.
Economics are becoming less and less important when it comes to switch to Linux. The risk of relying on US companies has gone through the roof lately.
I haven’t used desktop Linux in ages, but I’m a Linux server user as I think maybe everyone here. Is the solution to desktop that some well funded company just needs to fork Debian, build the common application deites like word processing, spreadsheets, presentation, messaging apps, etc, and then build a proper App Store?
Or is the underlying system still bad, as in drivers, compatibilities, audio and video codecs, networking, etc. I know on servers when some of these break they take a bit of mucking around. But it seems many companies are trying, why are they failing?
Which is basically what Google did with ChromeOS and Android, except that they have little to nothing to do with GNU/Linux experience.
Rather a Java/Kotlin/C/C++ userspace with the Linux kernel as implementation detail, or Web/WebAssembly, equally with Linux kernel as implementation detail (Crostini runs in a VM similar to WSL, and lacks several features).
I bet Googlebooks might achieve more sales on regular consumer shops than any proper GNU/Linux distro, and it is basically Android on laptops as per what we know about them.
That well funded company already happened 20 years ago. Canonical. Their distribution is called Ubuntu, you might have heard of it.
Yet my mom does not have a Ubuntu desktop. And if I set one up for her, I woudl have to split my time between my job and tech support for her. So well funded, but not sure they are the right company.
You're going to have that problem with any kind of change.
Windows and a Linux distro are not comparable in the extent of the software that they include/provide.
Id happily pay for a polished, commercial Linux distro, and I’d imagine governments will do too - either outsourced or with an internal team of civil servant sysadmins.
Usually they pay for SuSE or Red Hat Enterprise, with selected hardware providers, not something regular consumers get.
I wouldn't assume that moving off Microsoft will save money, or not for a long time. All staff will need a lot of retraining.
Or: if Microsoft are very smart they'll have Office for Linux and a GPO connector to manage Linux devices (and divert logins via Entra) in the wings, so much less retraining will be required.
Tbh the only reason I can't put an ubuntu for my parents/grandparents is Microsoft office.
Libre is generally ok, but they deal with lots of documents from different ppl/orgs that just need to have similar rendering. Windows is so bloated it's insane
Even Microsoft can't perfectly replicate MS Office rendering. Despite access to the source code. Lots of stuff renders slightly broken in the web version, especially once headers and footers are involved
As an individual that makes MS Office hard to replace in the workplace. But maybe entire agencies switching over will have enough weight that they can force everyone else to adapt to them
Office in the browser works really well, in my experience.
The rendering won't be 1:1 but installing the most common MS fonts already does a lot
The thing is, it needs to be 1:1.
This will be fixed only by a govt push to do full replacement for all doc sharing at all levels, especially schools. But since in this country office is mostly pirated anyway, it's not such a big push
That's the same issue I hear Apple users complain about: how it's such a drag to copy paste screenshots from keynote into powerpoint, every time they can't present from their own laptop.
No, the risk is that Microsoft loses its de facto monopoly on Enterprise ecosystems. It's pretty hard to switch to Linux, some have tried, bigger entities never stuck to it. So far. Now with the political landscape shifting, the priority to achieve that has gone much higher.
> how much nicer a (well supported, well put together) Linux distro is, compared to Windows
As someone who regularly uses both, and even in spite of the ad avalanche that (a bog-standard home install of) Windows has become: [X] to doubt. I regularly have issues on my corporate Linux laptop that I suspect wouldn't ever happen on Windows. Fleet management is easiest on Windows, with Active Directory, Group Policy, images, etc. Maybe package managers make software management easier on Linux, but fleet sysadmin is basically built-in on Windows.
Linux is superb for servers—I use Proxmox VE as the hypervisor on my homelab—but it still has a rather long way to go as a sharp-edge-free desktop OS, regardless of whether it is for home or corporate use.
I suppose it depends. I’ve seen MSFT platforms supported very well and very poorly - with all the things you mention present but permanently broken. I’ve only seen Linux well supported, though ofc that could well be the luck of my draw.
But even when the platform is well supported, you’re left with the user experience.
I think the issues you're having on your "corporate linux laptop" are due to the "corporate" part.
I'm also having a lot of issues on my corporate linux laptop (such as dbus crashing) that just do not happen normally.
They are due to all the proprietary ~~spyware~~ security software they install, that hook pretty deep into the system and isn't as well tested.
> The real risk to MS here is when people take the plunge and see how much nicer a (well supported, well put together) Linux distro is, compared to Windows etc! Will they want to buy their next laptop at home with MSFT installed?
Firstly, I would wager a large amount of personal computing is now done on a phone/tablet. None of my relatives have laptops for personal use. They may have work laptop (which will be running Windows). I this often with a lot of Linux users where they are still fighting the last war which has long been lost.
Secondly, Every single Linux/DE distro has a bunch of issues. Doesn't matter what it is. There are loads of odd bugs (doesn't matter the DE or Distro) that are present, that simply don't exist on Windows. These are things around device and display handling
e.g.
- My bluetooth mouse needs paired again every kernel update. My solution to this will be to buy another mouse probably.
- One of my USB wireless headsets doesn't work with Pipewire. The solution to this was to buy another one.
- Games while it is great that I could finally ditch Windows for playing games. You have to be using the right DE. This is because Mutter (which is Gnome's Window Manager), completely fucks the frame-pacing in some games. KDE that doesn't happen. This is why Gaming distros exist because all these stupid problems with Gaming are pre-fixed by the distro.
- When I changed from Gnome to KDE, all my browser sessions tabs, logins etc were gone because KDE Keyrings and Gnome Keyrings for some reason don't use the same underlying store.
All of these issues need either new hardware / obscure settings to be enabled via the terminal to fix, or require two large projects to actually talk to each other.
Thirdly, it isn't just the OS. For every application on the computer you have to either see if the program is supported on Linux and/or there is an alternative, or they may have a bunch of stuff tied into the Microsoft Ecosystem. Sometimes there isn't really an alternative.
Finally, Unlike big corporations you get bizarre things happening in Linux-distro land almost weekly due to some personal drama. This is seldom reported on because honestly this happens in smaller enthusiast projects normally, but they have a way of trickling up into the wider ecosystem.
These things swing back and forth. Look up LiMux. Things don't just go in one direction.
Yes, because when they go to Media Market and FNAC they will only have macOS and Windows laptops to chose from.
Having Tuxedo, System76 and co is great, but what most people care about is what there are in regular consumer shops.
Linux adoption among consumer hardware has only been a success where it is invisible to the user, like the Linux kernel on Android or WebOS, firmware on DVD/BlueRay players,...
The average person walking into these shops has never heard of Linux. If, as I would hope, they find out about it and like it, they’ll ask. Then either the shops assortment will be improved, or as sibling comment says, they’ll look online.
Which is why "The Year of Desktop Linux" will keep being a meme (30 years to 4%), unless we are talking about running Linux Desktops from within WSL and Virtualisation Framework, or for the oldies, VMWare Workstation and Virtual Box.
"Linus Torvalds Explains The Reason Linux Lost The Desktop"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQMujWFUDSg
M$FT revenue is currently around $300bn a year, with a 40% profit margin. Canonical's revenue is less than $300m.
Even if Canonical wanted to create a perfect version of Ubuntu with driver support for almost everything and as many desktop bugs removed as possible, they still can't afford to do it.
A credible Linux-on-the-desktop needs a global or multinational consumer-oriented foundation that can herd all the cats and turn desktop Linux into a professionally-managed project with proper beta testing and some interest in user experience.
That's a 180 from Linux culture, so it's unlikely to ever happen.
The Linux Foundation is not that Linux foundation, because it's not remotely desktop or consumer-oriented. freedesktop.org is a nice side project but doesn't have anything like the budget or the profile or resources required.
That is literally the only way to make a desktop version that can compete with Windows and OS X.
There's an obvious opportunity for someone to do this for governments now - a standard gov-optimised distro with enhanced security and access control and a collection of boring productivity software.
Stores are dead to anyone who is under 35 years of age.
You might want to contact Media Markt, FNAC, Corte Ingles and all the other stores to tell them apparently they have 0 customers yet they pay for rent, salaries and everything else even though no one goes there anymore.
Add CoolBlue (Netherlands) to that list.
Initially a post order-only for consumer electronics, but added bricks & mortar stores because many customers (of all ages, btw) prefer IRL service, viewing and touching actual hardware.
> prefer IRL service, viewing and touching actual hardware.
That did Fry's in, didn't it? People coming in viewing, touching hardware in store and then buy it on-line (elsewhere) so that they could save 2.5%. Or worse, buying it in store and returning it two weeks later when they found a better deal or didn't need it anymore.
> Or worse, buying it in store and returning it two weeks later when they found a better deal or didn't need it anymore.
Here a lot of places has a sort of price guarantee that I guess is supposed to work against this. Basically, if I know Media Markt sells something I want, but the very same thing is available for cheaper in other (big) store, I'll show them their competitors pricing and they'll lower their price to match it.
Assuming by the fact that the physical stores still exists, don't seem to be going anywhere soon, and these companies tend to get rid of stuff that doesn't make them profit anymore, I think it's safe to assume they at least are net positive on having the physical stores.
Tell that to Apple, glance inside next time you pass by an Apple Store.
Apple stores also do repairs, so I'm not sure what's the point of this comparison.
Which ones? Usually they send the device to some center like everyone else.
Not really, otherwise I wouldn't bump into them all over the place around here.
This is not about Linux.
They are replacing Office365.
Not sure about goverment requirements, but many apps I use nowadays are on the web, Figma, Canva, google docs, outlook and so on. There is not much need for a dedicated OS for most users.
the browser is definitely becoming more OS-like. that’s the Chromebook bet. but for proper office work you need good file management. if they’re not keen on trusting cloudy solutions by the big corps then FOSS on bare metal is the way to go.
SAP, Oracle, weird Office macros from decades ago …
They might know their own use case better than you and I?
Their comment said "most users".
I don’t know what’s going these days.
Users seem to have become much more combative, yet shorter in attention span and shallower in understanding
A Mac studio ultra with linux is the best computer I ever had. The only small thing that I miss is the copy/paste from iphone to the computer sync. It seems to me really that there is no going back to macOS any time soon. I don’t think I would still be able to “compute” on Windows.
> I miss is the copy/paste from iphone to the computer sync
Such a key feature and probably the one thing that keeps me locked into the Apple ecosystem
Guys, this is so pathetic. Twenty-three years after Munich and there are still comments waiting for the year of the Linux desktop. From a deployment about big enough for a small university. Stop! You’re embarrassing yourselves!
Why don't they replace Windows with Linux Mint? That would be much more groundbreaking than simply replacing online Office and Outlook.
If you use Linux Mint you can replace Office with LibreOffice (offline) and Outlook with one of the many email clients available for Linux.
There are at least a couple or three things around that...
- One, that probably, for most of the users, what's is locking them to Windows is a bunch of Microsoft applications. Once you've moved out of those apps, you're free to move them to any other OS.
- Two, on government computers there are usually a bunch of things that might be a bit custom and not readily available in other OSes. Smart card readers for weird standards, custom software for security or administration processes, uncommon peripherals...
- Three, there are departments that are going to be tied to Windows for a long time, due to very specific software, for example CAD or things like that
So I'd say Office is a big and easier win that could allow later allow to move a lot of workstations to Linux. Then, you can focus on the other less common uses of Windows and see how feasible is migrating them. But starting directly moving to Linux would mean starting directly with edge cases and problems.
Having a core system be entirely dependent on a foreign entity seems silly when there is a very viable alternative (which also saves a lot on licensing). I say VIABLE not equivalent. Linux is a lot rougher, and the change management process will be brutal. Retooling an entire department/etc to use whatever Linux has instead of entra/intune for device management will also be complex/incomplete/a learning curve.
TLDR: any govt would be crazy not to at least trial it, and see if it works.
When it finally is the year of the linux desktop, what are we going to do about malware on linux?
I'm not sure neither Microsoft, Apple, LG nor Sony is interested in developing software nor drivers for Linux so I think we're pretty safe on that front.
How many of ALL/total government employees are these 3k computers?
> This is the pilot phase, with 3,000 workstations moving away from Microsoft 365. The federal administration has over 54,000 computers.
If only the title had a subtitle or even a full article to provide more information.
Also further down "If the pilot is successful, we might expect the migration to continue on all the 54,000 workstations owned by the federal administrations. That's my guess". So in the estimate of the author we can expect this to be phase 2 of a three-phase rollout
They have to keep in mind: it will be more expensive (significantly, and in competent people, not only $$$) as you cannot beat big tech with their thousands of billions of $ and the fact they are scaled on a worldwide scope. And with a long term perspective, it is going to be even harder and more 'expensive': being independent and small has a price.
Just do not go on the ground of their "complexity", if you do, you are done for, going to be hell (specs subset only of file formats/protocols, and/or very simple alternative file formats/protocols, think docx vs utf8 text file).
And you better work on those technical regulations, and it is hard since it must not imped real and pertinent "progress".
The long tail of ms Excel does not get replaced easily. For 90% of customers and 90% of workflows you see either no use of a program, or use cases that can be replaced with anything.
But eventually you'll find the power users who do business critical stuff in excel sheets that you notice can't be done in any other way, and if you stop doing it then people aren't paid in time or whatever.
This doesn't mean it's a good idea to not try this. But Microsoft also aren't dumb. They know exactly how common this is, and what fraction this is. And they will make sure that it costs little more to keep the Microsoft products across the org, than it costs to keep them for specific users and deal with the mess that happens.
This could be said for other things than Excel, but Excel has been one of those moats for decades now.
But the general usage of Excel is so negligible in terms of using its actual features that it can be easily replaced.
In my experience, non-basic formulas are beyond 99% of people and they use it simply for adding stuff up in a grid. This is why Google Sheets is used in many places as a replacement (even if it balloons RAM usage when presented with a large sheet of data), simply because all of the wonderful features of Excel are unused.
The most complex operation some people do seems to be lookup tables.
Clever move.
Do migrations like this get easier each time? With prior art being available, and an ecosystem and pipeline starts to form around the new norm.
The biggest challenge with these kind of migrations is training users, especially government employees. Switzerland is relatively highly educated so this might be less of a challenge than in other countries but it won't be easy.
The technical part is probably relatively easy in comparison. Especially because the stakes are low (parallel run with the existing system, good will from everyone involved).
Educated or not, people that have been using the same system for many years will have a tough time IMHO. Looking at my mom and dad interactions with any UI, it seems to me they don't really read what that menu is about, they just use "muscle memory" to navigate it. So I expect a drop in efficiency until that memory is rebuilt.
> Switzerland is relatively highly educated so this might be less of a challenge than in other countries but it won't be easy.
True, but that's not accounting for a bunch of typically Swiss cultural factors:
- Swiss people tend to love to death the "one standard solution for one particular problem" approach
- Swiss people tend to be quite change-averse relative to other nearby cultures.
Don't get me wrong I love the Swiss to death, and the above cultural biases actually have their advantages, but re-training government employees is not going to be easy, however well educated they may be.
Fortunately, there is another cultural Swiss bias that's going to help: most large Swiss organizations have been designed using the army as a model, which mean Swiss employees tend to obey orders quite well.
So if the mandate comes from the top, it'll likely succeed. Eventually. Cause in Switzerland, they tend to take their time (yeah, that's another base cultural cliché, but I couldn't resist. And we're already deep into those already, why stop :-) ).
With a couple of exceptions, my guess is that these migrations are part of the commercial negotiation pack of government procurement agencies.
At a certain point I’d expect that tech sovereignty concerns will tip while governments out of the US-vendor mindset.
As exemplified by a major project recently started by the French government:
https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20260417-france-to-remove-windo...
https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows/france-has-ditch...
I'd guess the hurdles are always more structural and organizational - as even with Microsoft stack itself. See for instance the Limux/Munic story: https://lwn.net/Articles/737818/
Not really - this is akin to doing a complete rewrite of your 30 year old codebase to Rust.
Every organization has their own hacks, bespoke tools, processes and hardware that has to be painstakingly replaced, reprogrammed and users retrained. In many cases, Linux alternatives don't exist so they either have to be written or processes/hardware replaced.
These are OLD organizations and none of them is really the same as any other. Legendarily, companies like SAP made their whole fortunes managing this kind of complexity.
It's just a lot of work with a lot of edge cases you've never thought of (or seen in your life) that takes years.
“Sovereign” is a good brand. Sovereign AI, Sovereign Office Suite (as opendesk bills itself). All a reaction to Trump? Or longer term disentangling?
There been work in this direction for multiple decades already, but up until the confirmation that Trump won his second election, things weren't happening that quickly. Since then though, the steam train been all aboard and everyone and their mother is currently trying to reduce US dependency in pretty much every way they can.
One key distinction is the permanancy of Trumpism. The fact that existing controls in the US government cannot stop the extreme Trump actions, and in fact for many cases are explicitly supporting, gave a clear message to other governments that the risk is real, permanent and needs de-risking.
Overall Trump is a stress test on the world and found many defects that is slowly getting fixes.
Office is going to be a blocker - not just because of the two XML file formats, but because of the different UI. I personally find the Microsoft version more productive despite a mental list of complaints I have with it.
The correct choice, in my opinion, would be to invest in a new EU_Office project that uses the Microsoft XML formats. If you're trying to run your government on a new platform, that would also be a hedge against TDF pulling in a direction you don't want: an "independent self-governing meritocratic entity" has possible failure modes that need to go on the risk register.
Office is very much not a problem. LibreOffice has UI plugins that arrange everything in a standard Office pre-365 layout. I've been using it for years and I can't recall a single time I've ran into any issues. I think Excel macros are where the start of dealbreakers begin, which is a niche issue. 90+% of Office users won't hit that wall.
Second, the EU has been pouring money into an OpenOffice fork for official use and replacement of Office 365 for a while. https://office.eu/
The 10% excel sheets are exactly the problem. You can replace 90% or even 99% with either some online simpler office suite or none at all. But it will turn out there are business critical things running in 2003 format excel sheets with macros and if anything stops working then the organization stops working. The person who made these sheets and macros has retired 20 years ago and "updating it" would require making a dozen little applications to replace them which would be a huge task.
The simple/cheap answer I think is to just keep the power users and legacy systems on the tools they need/want. Because that's where the pain point is that cause these projects to fail. If you aim for 100% you'll end up with 0% eventually. If you aim for 90%, you can do it.
But Microsoft know this, and would make sure that a 90% migration saves you much less than a 100% migration. Which is why this is so rare still.
(I think the number is probably 99% not 90%, but the point is the same)
How many people in most government positions are using Excel?
SaaS and mobile has taken over many apps. We sell SaaS to business and govt clients where most end users are either on a browser or a mobile app. There is a Windows application (path dependent history) but it is almost vestigial for configuration/management.
This is a great replacement for Office Online and Onedrive, but will it work as a standalone desktop application that stores files to by home directory?
I have been having some fun lately with some extra tokens from my work, experimenting with setting it loose on replicating software.
The results have been pretty surprisingly good. There’s a lot of functionality missing on first use, but I think if I let it churn through a few million more tokens it could get close.
I would be very concerned if I were a MS, SaaS or Adobe about what’s to come in the near future.
That‘s an interesting thought, because I see openDesk packs Collabora for document-editing, I‘ve never ever tried it. Does anyone know how it fairs with file-formats and MS-formatting in general?
>but because of the different UI
Not a problem in the age of infinite redesign churn.
I’m always surprised to see how naive people are when comparing the enterprise/government usage of software vs. Personal usage.
Linux and open source software are a good alternative for personal usage, but for government usage, wouldn’t they have to port every custom software they have built over decades to Linux? Not to mention driver support for legacy/custom hardware. Also, from where would they get the support and guarantee that critical bugs and issues are patched and distributed without disruption to every single computer in time?
Replacing MS office would be the easiest and what’s the point of migrating away from MS Office while still using Windows eco system? Is it just political symbolic migration because they don’t have anything better to do with tax payers money?
A lot of government software moved into some cloud-based, browser-accessible platform during COVID. It depends on the office and the government, but especially with how easily a vendor can modernize legacy software with an LLM, this isn't necessarily a dealbreaker issue. It might make more sense to modernize than rely in perpetuity on the one guy that should have retired 3 years ago and you can't let go because he knows COBOL.
And MS Office corporate licenses account for a significant part of MS's revenue stream. More than 400 million Office 365 licenses paid in 2024, not one-off Windows licenses. So a business might save $150 per person per year on a large group of staff migrating them to a FOSS alternative for email and a replacement for light users that only ever touch Word/Excel/PowerPoint. And they might never know the difference, functionally. That's also less of a tangled web than switching operating systems and network setups that would require work for any users of critical systems. I can see the logic in migrating the willing as a test out of Office, then a few more people every month until you have one pool of FOSS users, and one pool of must use Office 365 users.
That shift might not be nothing to a small business as well, and at scale, might also be significant to larger businesses. Even if 5% of Office 365 users moved over, that's tens of millions of users.
Their custom software probably runs fine under Wine? Also, if it's actual custom software, they might have the source and could even recompile it. And also, the software of the Swiss government is usually surprisingly good quality, so they probably have competent engineers who they could call upon to help with such porting.
I've written quite a few tools for the Swiss government in my time and 98% of them are part of the intranet or even external websites. It's all web anyway.
Porting software nowadays might prove easier than expected. Exactly how much custom software should one expect? Centralized web applications running on Java are probably the standard anyway, and they are not OS-dependent.
The point of migration seems to be data-storage compliance anyway. They can later migrate off Windows easily once openDesk gets them going.
The greater the dependence, the greater the risk.
I don't know the specific case of Switzerland but I worked in a University in Spain when I was student with servers and stuff and our serious software was never Microsoft's. It was from big Mainframes like IBM or Sun Microsystems servers. We ported that software to Linux and it took very little time, saving us a lot of money with small machines.
That was more than 20 years ago.
Half of our laboratory PC rooms used Linux or BSD and we had licences like Matlab for Linux early on. The other half used Windows and yes, we could get very good license prices from Microsoft precisely because we had so many Linux machines. It was almost free.
You could even say that Microsoft spent money on us trying to buy the University sales gatekeepers with things like free expensive travel to States' conferences, free laptops and stuff.
We were probably not a normal University as we were a technical University and regularly organised conferences inviting people like Stallman.(Our technical University also managed the servers of the Humanities side of the University).
It was not that hard. Today, with so many programs running in Webassembly, it should be much easier.
>Is it just political symbolic migration because they have anything better to do with tax payers money?
Usually when you replace privative software with open source you spend 10x or so less in licenses. The problem being that the open source software is not as capable as the privative.
I did not understood why instead of spending 10 times less with open source, you spend half and pay for the necessary capabilities improving the open source software.
I understood it later. In the past it was a scheme lots of politicians used for getting negotiation power against Microsoft. Digital sovereignty was very down the priorities list compared to getting a good price.
Now, after the Ukraine war, and Trump actively using the US dependence against Europe, digital sovereignty is a very real issue, even critical.
> but for government usage, wouldn’t they have to port every custom software they have built over decades to Linux?
Maybe not the case for everyone, but this has been the reason for making as much in-house software as possible behind a web frontend.
Custom software they have build over decades is pile of crap. Mostly could be replaced with web interface, gpg encryption, and batch processing of CSV files with bash or python.
It will fail because employees want "mouse point and click", "mouse point and double click" interfaces and are unable to use anything else.
It is sad that EU and USA are falling away from eachother. IMO we should try and stick together in these times. No doubt the US has financed a lot of things for te entire world and no doubt the European countries have put in a lot of effort too.
I don't think we should argue over it.
We have issues with privacy rights, elder burden, geopolitical turmoil, growing debt burden, environment and so on in all places we need to look forward and stick together...
What's wrong with having more sovereignty over your data and infrastructure? You don't need to stop working on the mentioned issues together but cutting foreign spies the access to your citizens data and reducing their leverage.
That's life, spies going to spy, state psychopaths from the military and the three-latter agencies exist regardless whether you see them or not and they don't care about the "common good". They must be taken into the account.
The less power humans have over each other - the better. Instead of pressuring each other to bring profits people would be able to speak like equals.