Switzerland's Federal Government Is Replacing Microsoft on 3k Computers

iivell about 3 hours ago 39 commentsRead Article on itsfoss.com

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Discussion (39 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

rich_sasha•about 1 hour ago

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!

Moldoteck•13 minutes ago

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

wongarsu•5 minutes ago

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

meekins•9 minutes ago

The rendering won't be 1:1 but installing the most common MS fonts already does a lot

repelsteeltje•3 minutes ago

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.

pjmlp•21 minutes ago

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,...

rich_sasha•3 minutes ago

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.

LtWorf•12 minutes ago

Stores are dead to anyone who is under 35 years of age.

embedding-shape•5 minutes ago

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 to anymore.

delta_p_delta_x•18 minutes ago

> 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.

LtWorf•13 minutes ago

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.

KellyCriterion•8 minutes ago

How many of ALL/total government employees are these 3k computers?

kovariantenkak•5 minutes ago

> 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.

wongarsu•3 minutes ago

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

mikaTheThird•about 1 hour ago

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.

pitchlatte•about 1 hour ago

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.

rrr_oh_man•about 1 hour ago

SAP, Oracle, weird Office macros from decades ago …

LtWorf•11 minutes ago

They might know their own use case better than you and I?

arjie•6 minutes ago

“Sovereign” is a good brand. Sovereign AI, Sovereign Office Suite (as opendesk bills itself). All a reaction to Trump? Or longer term disentangling?

embedding-shape•3 minutes ago

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.

sajithdilshan•36 minutes ago

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?

brainwad•11 minutes ago

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.

herbst•8 minutes ago

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.

p2detar•23 minutes ago

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.

flippingheck•9 minutes ago

The greater the dependence, the greater the risk.

thefz•28 minutes ago

> 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.

lifestyleguru•28 minutes ago

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.

red_admiral•43 minutes ago

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.

3RTB297•12 minutes ago

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/

discordance•24 minutes ago

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.

p2detar•16 minutes ago

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?

ares623•about 3 hours ago

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.

LaurensBER•about 1 hour ago

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).

marcyb5st•about 1 hour ago

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.

ur-whale•about 1 hour ago

> 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 :-) ).

com•about 2 hours ago

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.

walrus01•about 1 hour ago

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...

phorkyas82•about 1 hour ago

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/

izacus•29 minutes ago

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.