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/
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).
> 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 :-) ).
As a Swiss I'm a little surprised about your points:
1. We have a wide, per-canton range of solutions for everything even up to school system or tax software. Almost nothing is the same everywhere in the country (not even mentality...)
2. I am quite surprised about the "chage adverse" comment as well, except maybe in rural/conservative villages, people are on the contrary quite forward looking. Our economy is regularly listed as the most competitive in the world. How can competitive economy exist if nothing ever changes? Where does your impression come from?
3. My wife works in the Swiss government and uses a linux desktop at home...
Amen, I've worked in a few European countries and (outside the big companies and banks) the Swiss love to poke around and experiment.
They do have a tendency to complain (but so do a lot of Europeans) but that complaining does often translate into action (something, seemingly, a lot less common in the south of Europe) so perhaps that gives outsiders the impression that the Swiss are change adverse?
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
Is that true? No stock tickers, no ads, no ai nags? No "news"? No weird notifications that ask for my attention? I guess no regular weird update windows would be the case, but the rest?
On any Windows release, you can switch all of those off, and GPE out the update channels for non-system-critical changes. Windows Enterprise doesn't even get the so-called 'fun stuff'.
I only have this one windows PC and I hate it, so correct me if I am wrong but I can't simply turn these off. First I either need to understand the registry or trust some third party software, and second windows just turns it on again in the next updates where I have to go back and trust random third party software again.
Every other onboard tool or software wastes space to advertise for some AI or office subscription. I wasn't able to disable that at all.
And for notifications there is seems barely any control at all. All software is able to constantly nag me with weird notifications.
You make it sounds like I could just turn it off, but I googled a lot and turned out I can't. But maybe it's just me?
Yes; as a home user you have to use some 3rd party script or software to achieve the same outcome, but there are examples that are well-regarded and open-source.
Yes, your MDM lets you do almost everything you want to Windows. You can really tell that it is a commercial first offering, or at least used to be. And given that as a company you are also paying them I guess they don't care that much that there are fewer ads.
I do see the same kind of ads (and many many other issues) on corporate computers at the Hospitals I work in. And to think we pay immensely for all this...
When you have no windows experience? Barely anyone to ask for expertise and only depend on Google, Chatgpt and sketchy third party tools and does feel hard tho. And it doesn't end, it just keeps coming up with new bloat.
Imo windows users are just blind for all the bloat
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.
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 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?
The main thing that has changed isn't that Linux has got much better but that most corporations deliver their internal applications through a web browser. The days of companies being anchored to win32 are long gone.
Of course there are exceptions like Excel but that is rarely more than a small portion of the workforce.
> Of course there are exceptions like Excel but that is rarely more than a small portion of the workforce.
Excel is still a huge (ginormous) moat, particularly as MS have built basically all of their data tools into it.
Unless someone creates a better Excel, MS will be around ~forever.
And even if only a small proportion of the workforce needs excel, those people tend to be concentrated in the portion of the business which measures money, which means it'll never get cancelled.
That being said, I do think that basically all institutions in the EU/Europe need to get off the US tech stack, as inevitably it'll be weaponised against us.
> But to look at a Linux distro as an alternative to consistency and stability is pretty funny to me.
I don't understand why. The vast majority of people doesn't have to know about the OS below: they run a handful of apps, that's it. You just need to get them to start those apps and learn to use them. It's not like government employees would have to compile their kernel...
> 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 repairing every kernel update.
- One of my usb wireless headsets doesn't work with Pipewire.
- 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.
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.
I think any movement is gradual and for it to be significant it would need to be sustained, people love dramatic sudden changes but it's going up against decades of momentum. As you mentioned mobiles, that took a long time to transition and that was with a starting point where a large proportion already had a non-smart phone along with the decisions they made about replacing aging devices.
The point about "fighting the last war" is interesting as there's a lot of uncertainty right now about how personal computing with a PC is going to look in the next few years. The angle I've been wondering about with the pressures on consumer hardware pricing/availability is if manufacturers can use it as an opportunity to establish new standards if/when it's easier to buy new again (eg, a major ATX revision/rethink) or if they keep following the same template. Over on the software side, what could a non-stagnant OS offer that would be attractive to consumers, what can consumer/desktop linux do that isn't following windows/macos, what would create a need for a mirror image of WINE as linux is leading with new features first?
The Linux community needs to embrace being something for the enthusiast.
If you look at things that have got people interested in Linux. It wasn't just that Windows 11 is awful, because a lot of people just install Windows 11 LTSC and call it a day.
Hyprland was/is something that excites people. There was a lot of hype around Omarchy (I don't care about the guys' politics, and please don't bring it up; I find the discussion tedious, and it goes nowhere). Ricing your desktop and terminal can be fun and everyone done it when the first started mucking about with stuff and broke their whole install. "I use Arch BTW" became a meme, much like "The Glorious PC Master race". While I think projects like Debian, Mint, etc., are great at bringing users a boring but stable desktop, you need hype to gain people's attention.
I am not so convinced: most staff do relatively basic stuff with MS365, right?
People don't like to even try something else, but when they have no choice, it doesn't take them 5 years to understand how to select text in one of the Microsoft Word competitors and click "bold".
No, they're frequently using things like track changes in Word docs and even small variants to that (why not use Confluence with comments instead so we stop emailing docs around?) encounter a lot of tissue rejection. And marketing want their template with the latest branding pushed to everyone's Word as a default template. And it should integrate nicely with Sharepoint. And and and.
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.
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.
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.
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)
of people with a laptop? Maybe half (Just a guess). But most of those are not using it for anything complex. But it doesn't matter, it's that 1% of excel users and their sheet that is the problem. You'll find where it is WHEN you try to phase out excel. Not before. The report will be "I can no longer run our weekly report thing because google sheets/liberoffice doesn't run the macro and now we can't update the schedule for the drivers and they're angry, please advise". The solution, invariably, is not to throw a contractor at the problem and write a web service for it. It's to just let that sheet keep working another decade and pay the excel license. It's much much cheaper. But it also means that the long tail of Excel stays.
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’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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
Who's "We" here? The US pursued its own interests from a (seemingly) nice, safe distance until it was attacked. The Swiss had no such luxury of distance, and also pursued their own interests so long as they were not attacked.
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.
Ouch, so many wrong statements with your comment, where to begin. For starters, you seem to imply that Linux is done created, but Linus is still actively creating more of Linux, so check mate, mate.
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
I should have been more specific about what “created” meant, but my point was just to emphasize how ridiculous it is to ascribe national provenance to a massive open source project like Linux.
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? 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.
What misconception? The administration wrote themselves few years ago: https://www.edoeb.admin.ch/de/07032023-bundesverwaltung-fueh...
Now (eventually) they seem to reconsider that this dependability might not have been a good idea. I worked for the administration myself as an external consultant for many years and have I pretty good insight.
- They feel like the Swiss person above shouldn't say stuff like "the US were never friends". And... you know... they are entitled to their feelings, I guess?
- Switzerland should not have become dependent on BigTech (or any kind of external tech). Which goes in the direction of digital sovereignty.
Switzerland and Europe in general didn’t start a trade war against their long term ally. The USA did.
It makes sense to decouple yourself from a country that decided to vote in an unhinged con artist as their president that is actively hostile towards you.
The number of so-called liberals in my life who didn't vote in 2024 because "both sides suck" is greater than zero, and this gnaws at me every time I think about it.
I am not offended at the idea of countries decoupling from cloud- and AI- laced US business software. Dunno how manageable Linux DEs are via enterprise MDM but KDE rocks these days.
I’m disappointed they did. M365 represents a tiny proportion of the budget especially in light of the high Swiss salaries in government (100-200k per employee) and the infrastructure. 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.
I think I can. In 2026 Excel is unusable for me (I cannot see the active cell at a glance, I cannot trace dependent cells to “debug” my formulas, I cannot save directly to my local hard disk with a keystroke combination- I have to click around to avoid OneDrive)
Outlook freezes all the time. And in the past year or so AI “helpers” became very intrusive and distracting.
Office 365 usually has an authentication snafu twice a year-those days are completely lost for me. But even in the days without outages Office 365 is glitching and requires multiple attempts to login.
Actually I am not logged on OneDrive (AFAIK I did not create any OneDrive accounts) Excel insists that I should save my spreadsheets on OneDrive. Thus the infuriation.
Considering how shocking and foolish and different Trump's approach to foreign policy is from any past president, it doesn't follow that it's always been this way.
From what I heard, the shakedown of the Swiss government over the F35 contract couldn’t have happened without the active support of many actors in the beltway.
So it seems sensible for them to doubt the intentions of many hundreds of decision makers, not just a single person.
The US singlehandedly dismantled the swiss offshore banking industry. You can’t say they were doing it for moral or legal purposes since they have now moved the activities to the US.
So, yeah, they were never their friends but they were kinda in an abusive yet still beneficial relationship.
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.
Whatever is in those Excel sheets. In any nontrivial org, you'll find it if you try. We found users designing roof trusses in Excel with heavy vbscript macros...
> ...Excel has been one of those moats for decades now...
I think if we focus on "has been", and not consider something dire like "will always be"...then i see it as an opportunity (and opportunity for LibreOffice and others like it). Because i do agree that a small % of people do use/need advance features from excel...so if i were the European Union, then i would gather such data for advanced usage (which is best done when pilots are rolled out), and throw a little money at addressing that (by a little, i mean little for big governments, so talking like a few million, etc.). I'd throw some money at the devs who contribute to LibreOffice, openDesk, whatever...and specifically address whatever shotcomings might exist in the free and open source offerings. Maybe its not an overnight solution, but it would serve to produce 2 things:
1. You pay devs to address the issue...reducing or removing any gaps between excel and offerings like LibreOffice, etc.
2. The devs you threw money at will gain ever more experience addressing needs for this now more expanded marketplace...creating possibly some more jobs and/or opportunites for more local vendors to support these govs, and any businesses that follow suit in adopting such open source offerings...
...I think these create or expedite a marketplace...and one that is not controlled by the U.s. or any single dominant player. So, i think while it might be slow, its a good long-term approach.
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.
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.
Because IT often doesn't know how / doesn't want to deal with Linux installations.
Also Linux Mint isn't community supported. Large corporations and governments like to have operating systems with long support cycles. That why RHEL has like 10 year support cycles.
They consistently choose to depend more and more on the US (see the latest military developments). I'm already surprised they would even consider an alternative to MS365.
Switching multiple things at once is more likely to fail than just one thing. Once people get used to alternative software and any kinks get worked out, switching the OS should be possible
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.
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.
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...
I don't think it's a matter of "US-hate," of renewed nationalism, or of relations collapsing randomly. Let's not pretend PRISM didn't happen, that Cambridge Analytica didn't happen, or that one government didn't threaten to invade another government. All the news points to one fact: if the American government gives an order, American tech companies obey. The message is clear: being a customer of a company means being at the mercy of the government where the company is headquartered. Who would want to find themselves in the vortex when a certain government decides to devote its Two Minutes Hate to another place in the world?
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!
Also: it is unclear if this is a switch on operating system, the article only mentions MS Office and OpenOffice. And it is only on 7% off the government's computers.
There isn't really anything worth attention here. Pathetic, indeed.
> Do note that during the pilot phase, the new system runs in parallel with Microsoft 365 rather than replacing it outright. That's okay, I think.
Well I think it's not ok without at least a fixed deadline for removal of MS365. People usually have work to do and learning new ways to get it done means extra work, and (almost) nobody takes upon extra work if they don't have to. So the new software will be largely ignored by default.
That's the problem, nobody is going to test the new software unless they have to, it will sit unused until the end of the pilot period as long as the old software is available too. Those people are no cs nerds who like testing new software, they are office people and learning new tools is stressful for (most of) them. I have been there.
I worked in Switzerland for 5 years in the 1980’s before Windows when the IBM PC/AT’s I ordered ran DOS with my own menu software. (And my father who fought in WW2 asked “Didn’t the Swiss allow sealed troop trains through their country?”, but that’s not my topic.) Anyway, I once installed a new version of WordPerfect alongside the old version, guess which version was never used? And the poor secretary who accidentally ran the new version couldn’t work with her old files & went home crying for 3 days. I was blamed for not explaining things, but I was sure anyone could tell the difference between the old & new versions - no, they evidently could not.
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[ 9.7 ms ] story [ 923 ms ] threadAt a certain point I’d expect that tech sovereignty concerns will tip while governments out of the US-vendor mindset.
https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20260417-france-to-remove-windo...
https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows/france-has-ditch...
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).
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 :-) ).
1. We have a wide, per-canton range of solutions for everything even up to school system or tax software. Almost nothing is the same everywhere in the country (not even mentality...)
2. I am quite surprised about the "chage adverse" comment as well, except maybe in rural/conservative villages, people are on the contrary quite forward looking. Our economy is regularly listed as the most competitive in the world. How can competitive economy exist if nothing ever changes? Where does your impression come from?
3. My wife works in the Swiss government and uses a linux desktop at home...
They do have a tendency to complain (but so do a lot of Europeans) but that complaining does often translate into action (something, seemingly, a lot less common in the south of Europe) so perhaps that gives outsiders the impression that the Swiss are change adverse?
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.
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!
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,...
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.
But even when the platform is well supported, you’re left with the user experience.
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
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
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.
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 have one setup with all my media/games and have removed every piece of Microsoft possible.
There are other reasons that Windows sucks, even (or especially?) in a corporate environment, just not those.
Every other onboard tool or software wastes space to advertise for some AI or office subscription. I wasn't able to disable that at all.
And for notifications there is seems barely any control at all. All software is able to constantly nag me with weird notifications.
You make it sounds like I could just turn it off, but I googled a lot and turned out I can't. But maybe it's just me?
e.g. https://github.com/raphire/win11debloat
Guess that's like adblock these days. You need domain specific knowledge or you get not what you expect.
Imo windows users are just blind for all the bloat
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?
Of course there are exceptions like Excel but that is rarely more than a small portion of the workforce.
Excel is still a huge (ginormous) moat, particularly as MS have built basically all of their data tools into it.
Unless someone creates a better Excel, MS will be around ~forever.
And even if only a small proportion of the workforce needs excel, those people tend to be concentrated in the portion of the business which measures money, which means it'll never get cancelled.
That being said, I do think that basically all institutions in the EU/Europe need to get off the US tech stack, as inevitably it'll be weaponised against us.
I don't understand why. The vast majority of people doesn't have to know about the OS below: they run a handful of apps, that's it. You just need to get them to start those apps and learn to use them. It's not like government employees would have to compile their kernel...
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 repairing every kernel update.
- One of my usb wireless headsets doesn't work with Pipewire.
- 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.
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.
The point about "fighting the last war" is interesting as there's a lot of uncertainty right now about how personal computing with a PC is going to look in the next few years. The angle I've been wondering about with the pressures on consumer hardware pricing/availability is if manufacturers can use it as an opportunity to establish new standards if/when it's easier to buy new again (eg, a major ATX revision/rethink) or if they keep following the same template. Over on the software side, what could a non-stagnant OS offer that would be attractive to consumers, what can consumer/desktop linux do that isn't following windows/macos, what would create a need for a mirror image of WINE as linux is leading with new features first?
If you look at things that have got people interested in Linux. It wasn't just that Windows 11 is awful, because a lot of people just install Windows 11 LTSC and call it a day.
Hyprland was/is something that excites people. There was a lot of hype around Omarchy (I don't care about the guys' politics, and please don't bring it up; I find the discussion tedious, and it goes nowhere). Ricing your desktop and terminal can be fun and everyone done it when the first started mucking about with stuff and broke their whole install. "I use Arch BTW" became a meme, much like "The Glorious PC Master race". While I think projects like Debian, Mint, etc., are great at bringing users a boring but stable desktop, you need hype to gain people's attention.
They are replacing Office365.
People don't like to even try something else, but when they have no choice, it doesn't take them 5 years to understand how to select text in one of the Microsoft Word competitors and click "bold".
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.
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.
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 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)
Not a problem in the age of infinite redesign churn.
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?
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.
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.
If only the title had a subtitle or even a full article to provide more information.
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.
- They feel like the Swiss person above shouldn't say stuff like "the US were never friends". And... you know... they are entitled to their feelings, I guess?
- Switzerland should not have become dependent on BigTech (or any kind of external tech). Which goes in the direction of digital sovereignty.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It makes sense to decouple yourself from a country that decided to vote in an unhinged con artist as their president that is actively hostile towards you.
I am not offended at the idea of countries decoupling from cloud- and AI- laced US business software. Dunno how manageable Linux DEs are via enterprise MDM but KDE rocks these days.
Outlook freezes all the time. And in the past year or so AI “helpers” became very intrusive and distracting.
Office 365 usually has an authentication snafu twice a year-those days are completely lost for me. But even in the days without outages Office 365 is glitching and requires multiple attempts to login.
Or maybe he in fact is not logged into onedrive, and 365 simply sucks.
Considering how shocking and foolish and different Trump's approach to foreign policy is from any past president, it doesn't follow that it's always been this way.
So it seems sensible for them to doubt the intentions of many hundreds of decision makers, not just a single person.
So, yeah, they were never their friends but they were kinda in an abusive yet still beneficial relationship.
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.
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 problem is that they all utilise a different 10%.
What can't be done in any other way?
I think if we focus on "has been", and not consider something dire like "will always be"...then i see it as an opportunity (and opportunity for LibreOffice and others like it). Because i do agree that a small % of people do use/need advance features from excel...so if i were the European Union, then i would gather such data for advanced usage (which is best done when pilots are rolled out), and throw a little money at addressing that (by a little, i mean little for big governments, so talking like a few million, etc.). I'd throw some money at the devs who contribute to LibreOffice, openDesk, whatever...and specifically address whatever shotcomings might exist in the free and open source offerings. Maybe its not an overnight solution, but it would serve to produce 2 things:
1. You pay devs to address the issue...reducing or removing any gaps between excel and offerings like LibreOffice, etc.
2. The devs you threw money at will gain ever more experience addressing needs for this now more expanded marketplace...creating possibly some more jobs and/or opportunites for more local vendors to support these govs, and any businesses that follow suit in adopting such open source offerings...
...I think these create or expedite a marketplace...and one that is not controlled by the U.s. or any single dominant player. So, i think while it might be slow, its a good long-term approach.
Such a key feature and probably the one thing that keeps me locked into the Apple ecosystem
If you use Linux Mint you can replace Office with LibreOffice (offline) and Outlook with one of the many email clients available for Linux.
- 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.
Also Linux Mint isn't community supported. Large corporations and governments like to have operating systems with long support cycles. That why RHEL has like 10 year support cycles.
TLDR: any govt would be crazy not to at least trial it, and see if it works.
Just do not go on the ground of their "complexity", if you do, you are done for, going to be hell.
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...
It's almost a standard negotiating tactic when it comes time for license renewal.
There isn't really anything worth attention here. Pathetic, indeed.
I am genuinely happy for you, I wish all you the very best, more competition is good for everyone, and now please stop telling me about it.
It's not actually hacker news. It's not even tech news. It's European bureaucracy news.
Well I think it's not ok without at least a fixed deadline for removal of MS365. People usually have work to do and learning new ways to get it done means extra work, and (almost) nobody takes upon extra work if they don't have to. So the new software will be largely ignored by default.
I guess that when you "test" something, it means that you have not yet decided that you will completely migrate there?
News article: https://www.rts.ch/info/suisse/2026/article/microsoft-l-admi...