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

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

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,...

> 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.

> 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.

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 …

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.

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.

> 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.

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/

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?

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).

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.

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.