Linux in the World
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Every now and then some company or state administration tries to move away from Windows to some kind of Linux.
Freshest entry is the Indian Ministry of Defense. They use "Maya OS".Anyways, Wikipedia tells us about the concept of Maya:
Maya is a prominent and commonly referred to concept in Vedanta philosophies. Maya is often translated as "illusion", in the sense of "appearance".
How fitting.
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@BernieTheBernie said in Linux in the World:
Freshest entry is the Indian Ministry of Defense. They use "Maya OS".
Worse. They created it.
It's an OS cobbled together by Indians.
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@loopback0 The Creation
.
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@BernieTheBernie said in Linux in the World:
Every now and then some company or state administration tries to move away from Windows to some kind of Linux.
Freshest entry is the Indian Ministry of Defense. They use "Maya OS".Anyways, Wikipedia tells us about the concept of Maya:
Maya is a prominent and commonly referred to concept in Vedanta philosophies. Maya is often translated as "illusion", in the sense of "appearance".
How fitting.
I feel like the OK buttons all need to say 'Do the needful'.
And the cancel buttons should say 'Thank you, come again' but that feels churlish to suggest.
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@Arantor Where's the "revert back to me"?
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@BernieTheBernie said in Linux in the World:
Every now and then some company or state administration tries to move away from Windows to some kind of Linux.
Which works just fine, if it’s well executed. Well, at least until Microsoft comes along with a big
bribe for the mayorpromise to move their HQ over, so the tax money goes to your district instead of the neighboring one.Filed under:Limux
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@loopback0 said in Linux in the World:
@BernieTheBernie said in Linux in the World:
Freshest entry is the Indian Ministry of Defense. They use "Maya OS".
Worse. They created it.
It's an OS cobbled together by Indians.Compared to a Windows configured by the same™ that sounds like a step in the right direction.
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@BernieTheBernie its usually been used as a bargaining ploy when Microsoft renegotiations come around.
Realistically it's not doable. The only real alternative in the open source sphere that does most of what office does out of the box is a nextcloud, libre office and thunderbird/evolution combination. Its like 5 years behind Micrsoft Office but with an even worse web option. Anyone use to the ribbon interface is going to need retraining.
Google docs, maybe, but poor desktop support and you’ve swapped one monopoly for another. No real offline support either but the mobile apps are fairly decent. it might make a better bargaining chip.
Linux on the desktop is doable if your office staff are anyway technically inclined. Otherwise, some desktops could be good substitutes but you’re going to need a massive amount of IT staff to guide them and find replacement software.
That’s with nary a thought to hardware considerations. That’s actually quite a big hurdle. Popular hardware is usually fine but giant manufactures like dell tend to go their own way with specially made hardware that may not have a good driver which leads to all sorts of quirks that regular users might not be able to work around.
Its doomed to failure like all the rest when Microsoft calls their bluff.
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@DogsB last workplace but one was “committed” to open source. Head office was “you want to run non-open-source software? Get a director’s approval in writing” levels of commitment (yes, for many years their marketing team made graphics in GIMP)
The UK office was a bit more practical but still Ubuntu was the default desktop situation, most people had Thinkpads upon which to run said Ubuntu and most people seemed to have no significant trouble with email (even when mandatory signing became a thing) or LibreOffice.
Biggest pain in the arse group, the developers who “customised” shit. And failed hard at Docker for the weird setup we had for our dev stuff.
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@DogsB said in Linux in the World:
Realistically it's not doable. The only real alternative in the open source sphere that does most of what office does out of the box is a nextcloud, libre office and thunderbird/evolution combination. Its like 5 years behind Micrsoft Office but with an even worse web option. Anyone use to the ribbon interface is going to need retraining.
Google docs, maybe, but poor desktop support and you’ve swapped one monopoly for another. No real offline support either but the mobile apps are fairly decent. it might make a better bargaining chip.The Microsoft stuff mostly just works and it all mostly just works together, and for a large enough organisation where such things matter it means you're only paying one company for support.
They're big benefits. Another is that it's generally what most users are already familiar with.
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@DogsB said in Linux in the World:
Realistically it's not doable. The only real alternative in the open source sphere that does most of what office does out of the box is a nextcloud, libre office and thunderbird/evolution combination. Its like 5 years behind Micrsoft Office but with an even worse web option. Anyone use to the ribbon interface is going to need retraining.
5 years behind doesn't matter. Besides the ribbon in 2008, Office didn't get any useful new features in the last two decades. Only anti-features.
Google docs, maybe, but poor desktop support and you’ve swapped one monopoly for another. No real offline support either but the mobile apps are fairly decent. it might make a better bargaining chip.
Linux on the desktop is doable if your office staff are anyway technically inclined. Otherwise, some desktops could be good substitutes but you’re going to need a massive amount of IT staff to guide them and find replacement software.
Eh, the city of Munich IT people pulled it of successfully and according to the LiMux wikipedia page they saved millions of euros.
Its doomed to failure like all the rest when Microsoft calls their bluff.
It wasn't failing, that's why Microsoft tried hard to stop it, so as not to set an example.
The return to MS was a political decision from people with no technical clue and cost a lot of money for migrating back. Maybe they couldn't figure out how to start solitaire, but it was mostly bribes, in some form or another. Of course, they argued that users were unhappy, but users are always "unhappy" and the actual IT people managing this shit said they hadn't seen an increase in complaining or required support compared to MS shit before, it was just the expected amount for the size of the organization.
@loopback0 said in Linux in the World:
The Microsoft stuff mostly just works
and it all mostly just works together,
and for a large enough organisation where such things matter it means you're only paying one company for support.
They're big benefits. Another is that it's generally what most users are already familiar with.I'm still using both an IT-administered Linux workstation in the office and RDP into a Windows server.
Some time late 2020 during the
pandemic, the weenies at our Munich HQ decided to jump all in with MS shit, too. Forcing not just MS Teams on everyone, but also all of their other garbage. We had to replace our mail server / CalDav with exchange, so now I can't sync either mail or calender with my phone anymore. Well, I can use OWA, but before I could just use the native option. Our intranet websites got dumped onto some sharepoint 
, which the PR people seem to like (the pages have a nice CD-looking header that takes up 30% of the page and is backed by some JS so you can't scroll it away) but is entirely useless and I can't find shit. At least I get an email once a week with "here's what you missed", which is everything, because I don't even go there anymore. I also have to log in with Microsoft for everything now, otherwise I can't save documents, print, or do anything else.
Office didn't get better either. It now tries to save everything in the cloud, which I want exactly as often as I want the "steal an image from the web" option when I click to insert image: never. Instead I want to save locally (or open a local image, respectively). Best case that takes me about ~5 additional clicks, worst case I just accidentally dumped it onto some cloud shit to never find it again.If the local proximity to MS was able to have an influence on our org's (now shitcanned) president is, of course, just idle speculation. But workflows for me certainly haven't improved at all with this. Everything got more annoying.
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@topspin I have to admit the workflows with Nextcloud/libre office are better for my liking but it was a complete arseache to set up and get working. MS Office will mostly work out of the box for most people and serve 90% of their needs.
I agree about SharePoint. It's god-awful. I have no idea how people put up with it. It must be years of working with shit web apps that have ruined people's expectations. A mapped network drive with your own apps would be a better experience but file managers are awful too.
There seems to be an air of mysticism around using anything that isn’t installed with the os.
On my scale its more expensive than Microsoft but I think at corporate/government scale it would work out well. They’ll look at the wage bill and level of actual technical expertise and run a mile though.
*edit I’m trying to convince IT where I work to allow me to install Double Commander. They seem genuinely confused that I want to use something other than finder.
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@topspin said in Linux in the World:
We had to replace our mail server / CalDav with exchange, so now I can't sync either mail or calender with my phone anymore. Well, I can use OWA, but before I could just use the native option.
That's not an Exchange criticism though - that's how your company have it setup. I've had work email on my phone far longer than we've been using Exchange 365 or whatever that's called this week.
@topspin said in Linux in the World:
Office didn't get better either. It now tries to save everything in the cloud, which I want exactly as often as I want the "steal an image from the web" option when I click to insert image: never. Instead I want to save locally (or open a local image, respectively). Best case that takes me about ~5 additional clicks, worst case I just accidentally dumped it onto some cloud shit to never find it again.
I told Office on Mac once that I wanted things saving locally and that's what it does by default. Unless it's been opened from somewhere online then it saves it where it came from.
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@topspin said in Linux in the World:
Office didn't get better either.
Current MS Cloud Office is
.
What about MS Office 2007 SP3? Works just fine.
Perhaps LibreOffice can do that too.
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@BernieTheBernie said in Linux in the World:
What about MS Office 2007 SP3? Works just fine.
It didn't even work fine in 2007.
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@loopback0 said in Linux in the World:
@BernieTheBernie said in Linux in the World:
What about MS Office 2007 SP3? Works just fine.
It didn't even work fine in 2007.
Eh, neither does current Office.
And of course LibreOffice sucks too, for compatibility.
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@TimeBandit So mostly (mostly) means >25%.
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@jinpa Depends on what your expectations are for "works".
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@dkf No, it just depends on a mathematical understanding of the phrase, "mostly mostly".
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@topspin said in Linux in the World:
but users are always "unhappy"
AIUI you were talking about government workers. So I don't understands the quotes.
