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!
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.
We were neutral, but it's always funny how many US-guys always bring up WW2. That was maybe the last time, the US did anything "good" for the world. But yeah, I think it's useless to argue with you.
WW2 was long enough ago that no one you end up talking about it actually experienced it themselves, but it's recent enough that people who felt their country did "Good", can still ride that high wave without being pulled down by everything that came after.
Right, I didn't mean "Everyone who was alive during WW2 is today dead", that's obviously not true, it was just 80 years ago or so.
What I meant was that most people who discuss WW2 with others online, mostly talk from the perspective of not having experienced the war themselves, nor did the person who they speak to, most likely.
If you go to countries that were invaded, people have been in contact with their grandparents. It's not "something that happened far away", it's "stories from family I've known".
Of course in the US it's very different. That's possibly why Elon Musk can do Nazi salutes there and nothing happens. Of course not everybody cares: many people still buy Teslas in Europe. But I think the WW2 memory is not as far as you make it sound.
> That was maybe the last time, the US did anything "good" for the world. But yeah, I think it's useless to argue with you.
This is a completely mad assessment. Haven't you noticed the massive issues with scientific, health, and social funding globally now the US taxpayer has stopped bankrolling it?
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us??
Yes, the world should get it for free, but that mean nothing because the US gets something back at all. It's mad. I'm not from the US, but it's obvious why cutting global funding was popular in the US.
Switzerland was “neutral” not neutral. The Swiss certainly crossed into the complicit side quite often, profiting from the Nazi regime, laundering their looted gold and closing their borders to fleeing Jews.
This is such a landmine topic, because most countries did this, including the UK and the US; see e.g. the MS St. Louis. This is why there are several "heroes of the resistance" that in modern parlance are "people smugglers", forging credentials and visas in order to help people escape.
Today you see exactly the same hostile attitudes to non-white refugees of basically every war except Ukraine.
Niels Bohr, the Great Dane, was one of these skid greasers! He worked with the queen of Sweden, and also used his academic contacts in various countries to secure jobs/visas.
Interesting connection, as her father was a foreign member of the Nazi party (while living in Brazil) and had lied about his Nazi affiliation in the past. When he moved back to Germany, he joined the main party.
Despite what Hollywood says, WW2 was more to do with German militarism and expansionism than the Jewish question. The Allies were certainly willing to use pro-Jewish sentiments and some Jewish troops, but it was never presented as the main issue.
I don't know where Hollowood ever said it WW2 was about Jews.
IDK if things have changed but generally the whole narrative in the US is presented as unwitting yankies discovering the horrors of the death camps. It's debated how much some levels of the government knew, but it certainly wasn't public knowledge in the US.
Difficult to pin something as all consuming as WW2 on "about" anything, but we can look at who fired the first shots, which was clearly the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in the east and the German invasion of Poland in the West (followed shortly after by the USSR invading Poland and later Finland from the other direction.)
It is not at all a given that, had Germany stayed within her international borders, that the Holocaust would have on its own triggered WW2. After all, mass murder in the Congo Free State didn't trigger invasion of Belgium.
>Today you see exactly the same hostile attitudes to non-white refugees of basically every war except Ukraine.
Perhaps that's because most of those refugees could more easily shelter in neighboring countries that they are more culturally similar to... if shelter was actually the primary thing that they were seeking.
> Originally their plan was just to force them to leave
That is 1930s pre-war Germany and Austria; and around 550k people by the most generous calculation. Yes, the world wronged them. But you cannot say death camps happened because the US didn’t hand out enough visas.
After 1939, when Germany invaded Poland (home of 3-3.5m Jews) and in 1941 the USSR (home of another 1-2m Jews) no one was being forced to leave (or live) anymore. People were being killed with bullets to the head or back, and when this started to be unbecoming/too inefficient, the German state devised an industrial approach to the killing of humans.
Would this mean that if Country A for example starts closing their border for fleeing citizens of Country B, Country A would no longer be considered neutral in the Country-B <> Country-C war? I'm interested in how much you have to do/not have to do, in order for no longer be considered neutral.
I think, once you read about each individual country and what they did before/during/after WW2, it seems like not a single country on the European continent can be considered "neutral". So maybe with this lens, Switzerland was "the most neutral" if you compare with others?
"Neutrality" for a country (as per the Hague convention) basically means that you cannot help a belligerent and you have to treat the belligerents equally.
So I assume that if you open your borders to all fleeing citizens, that's neutral, and if you close it to all, that's neutral as well.
There is a difference between someone running from persecution and someone leaving because they might be conscripted into invasion they agree with or because they dont like the economy. Equating Russians with Jews is particularly ugly here. You could sorta a little equate Ukrainians, a little.
And yes, actual historical events and motivations of past actors matter.
Yes, there were multiple fully on-the-nazi side countries, Swiss were not them. That does not make the comparison you made meaningful.
> That does not make the comparison you made meaningful.
Yeah, even when I tried my best to, apparently the labels just fire up too much emotions. I've removed the country names completely as it's irrelevant to what I was trying to discuss.
> Equating Russians with Jews is particularly ugly here
I didn't do anything of the like in the original text, but good try!
Ah another week another instance of this maga level crap. Read up on [1], read up on Geneva accepting migrants way after it was clear that Switzerland will starve since it was 100% surrounded by axis. Even after federal government forbade that.
Private Swiss banks accepted money from both nazis and jews alike, thats true. Sounds neutral to me. They have anonymous numbered accounts here, practice for local citizens used long before WWII. Together the reasons why it ended up as it did.
"Switzerland was “neutral” not neutral. The Swiss certainly crossed into the complicit side quite often, profiting from the Nazi regime, laundering their looted gold and closing their borders to fleeing Jews."
That still counts as neutral, as does Sweden's activities. Switzerland interned allied airmen and was even bombed but stayed out of the war.
There is a wonderful quote from the Irish parliament. The Irish government wanted to be neutral, but one of the politicians asked "but who shall we be neutral against ?" (By the way, the nature of the Irish Free State's "neutrality" remains controversial to this day, and again, I could point to examples both ways.) It is hard to think of any fully neutral countries in WW2, partly due to the large empires spanning Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Maybe certain Latin American countries, except some of them joined the war at the end and/or took in Nazi refugees like Eichmann.
You can find complicity in the holocaust everywhere. The United States strictly enforced immigration quotas and turned away entire refugee ships. Legislation to address the issue and provide an exception failed in the house in 1939. Those people were returned to their deaths.
After the war, the genuine shock of what was discovered by the Army was presented to imply that nobody had any idea what was happening.
The Swiss also turned a blind eye to allied activity. The OSS and MI6 operated pretty blatantly and received some assistance from the Swiss authorities.
The Swiss cannot claim moral superiority by any means, but it’s unfair to brand them as nazi collaborators. These issues are black and white a hundred years later and thousands of miles away, not so much when you’re surrounded.
When the US wins, it tends to be quick, clean, and easily forgotten. Consider our victories against ISIS, or against Saddam in the Gulf War. Both cases where an expansionist power violated territorial integrity norms by engaging in conquest, and was defeated by a US-led coalition.
I really hope you're referring to GW1, rather than 2. And yeah, if you weren't a Kurd who believed GW Bush, then that was a pretty effective war from the US (and global) perspective.
Only if you ignore the rise of ISIS and various militias, along with the collapse of Iraqi society (mind you, the sanctions had done a pretty good job of wrecking that before GW2 anyway).
> That was maybe the last time, the US did anything "good" for the world.
As a non-Swiss, non-American, I can assure you you need to study both American and Swiss modern history. The Swiss were far, far too cozy with the Nazis, and the Americans have done a spectacular amount of good since WWII ended.
- Would you say that "France was far, far too cozy with the Nazis"? Half of France was occupied for most of the war, after all. And enough people were collaborating.
- Would you say that the UK was far, far too cozy with the Nazis? They considered not fighting against them in the beginning.
- Would you say that the US was far, far too cozy with the Nazis? They didn't do anything for years, until Pearl Harbour, right?
I think it's always more complicated than just blaming an entire country.
I am not an expert in modern history, but my understanding is that Switzerland was entirely surrounded. I guess they did their best to avoid getting occupied? Certainly some assholes in Switzerland profited from the war, but that's true in many (most? all?) other countries.
> Would you say that "France was far, far too cozy with the Nazis"?
Vichy France? Yes, of course. It's taught to French school children as a deeply disgraceful chapter of French history, despite it being under significant pressure. The North was under military occupation, having put up a fight. Collaborationist politicians were put to death after the war.
> the [UK/US] was far, far too cozy with the Nazis?
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.
I’m disappointed they did. M365 represents a tiny proportion of the budget especially in light of the high Swiss salaries in government (~ $100-250k per employee per year) and all the surrounding infrastructure costs. Microsoft software became really good over time and the loss of productivity and the inefficiencies introduced by the change to clunky software will absolutely not be worth it.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, because the only thing that's for certain is that American LLMs are so special that they cannot be reproduced, as everyone has been knowing already in 2023 from the public "we have a gigantic moat" Google memo.
Wouldn't a true Swiss person be neutral and cautious, and wouldn't they refrain from parroting all sorts of nonsense in public about other countries? Anyway, it doesn’t exactly seem like smart move when a government agency tasked with protecting its citizens’ sensitive information switches on a large scale from local, closed networks with energy-efficient desktop applications to externally hosted SaaS infrastructure, with wasteful, fragile, unsecure browser-based applications, sending each byte over many borders. This development should never have happened in the first place.
- 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.
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 Swiss administration myself as an external consultant for many years and have I pretty good insight.
> 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.
The real risk to MS here is when people take the plunge and see how much nicer a (well supported, well put together) Linux distro is, compared to Windows etc! Will they want to buy their next laptop at home with MSFT installed?
Plus, if countries moving off Microsoft put a fraction of the savings into libre office product development, it might get an even more lopsided comparison!
Lifelong Linux/Unix user here, I love the widespread adoption of Linux.
But comments like this one makes me think people don't realize what a MacGyvere'd together hack job a Linux distro truly is.
The idea on paper is that a company like Microsoft can offer a more consistent and stable experience, but apparently they're even failing at that these days.
But to look at a Linux distro as an alternative to consistency and stability is pretty funny to me.
The truth is that any org that chooses to migrate from Microsoft to Open source will face completely new challenges. And the end result will be +-0, if they're lucky.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
I've used plenty of sketchy third party tools to get rid of all that weirdness but they keep patching it back somehow. I never get rid of the ads long term, also sticking to win10. Thing is I DJ straight from soundcloud mostly so going offline is not a real option for me.
Fantasy software: something that uses hooks to intercept internet requests from a specified other program, and sends them through USB to a corresponding phone app using a weird protocol, and the app relays them to the phone's internet connection so it's like a tether, and then your Windows program can be online, but Windows can't.
I don't think you appreciate what a hack job Windows really is. It's just that it's quite visible in the Linux world, but more obscured in the case of proprietary software.
> 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...
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?
Yet my mom does not have a Ubuntu desktop. And if I set one up for her, I woudl have to split my time between my job and tech support for her. So well funded, but not sure they are the right company.
Which is basically what Google did with ChromeOS and Android, except that they have little to nothing to do with GNU/Linux experience.
Rather a Java/Kotlin/C/C++ userspace with the Linux kernel as implementation detail, or Web/WebAssembly, equally with Linux kernel as implementation detail (Crostini runs in a VM similar to WSL, and lacks several features).
I bet Googlebooks might achieve more sales on regular consumer shops than any proper GNU/Linux distro, and it is basically Android on laptops as per what we know about them.
Id happily pay for a polished, commercial Linux distro, and I’d imagine governments will do too - either outsourced or with an internal team of civil servant sysadmins.
I wouldn't assume that moving off Microsoft will save money, or not for a long time. All staff will need a lot of retraining.
Or: if Microsoft are very smart they'll have Office for Linux and a GPO connector to manage Linux devices (and divert logins via Entra) in the wings, so much less retraining will be required.
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.
Tbh the only reason I can't put an ubuntu for my parents/grandparents is Microsoft office.
Libre is generally ok, but they deal with lots of documents from different ppl/orgs that just need to have similar rendering. Windows is so bloated it's insane
Even Microsoft can't perfectly replicate MS Office rendering. Despite access to the source code. Lots of stuff renders slightly broken in the web version, especially once headers and footers are involved
As an individual that makes MS Office hard to replace in the workplace. But maybe entire agencies switching over will have enough weight that they can force everyone else to adapt to them
This will be fixed only by a govt push to do full replacement for all doc sharing at all levels, especially schools. But since in this country office is mostly pirated anyway, it's not such a big push
That's the same issue I hear Apple users complain about: how it's such a drag to copy paste screenshots from keynote into powerpoint, every time they can't present from their own laptop.
> how much nicer a (well supported, well put together) Linux distro is, compared to Windows
As someone who regularly uses both, and even in spite of the ad avalanche that (a bog-standard home install of) Windows has become: [X] to doubt. I regularly have issues on my corporate Linux laptop that I suspect wouldn't ever happen on Windows. Fleet management is easiest on Windows, with Active Directory, Group Policy, images, etc. Maybe package managers make software management easier on Linux, but fleet sysadmin is basically built-in on Windows.
Linux is superb for servers—I use Proxmox VE as the hypervisor on my homelab—but it still has a rather long way to go as a sharp-edge-free desktop OS, regardless of whether it is for home or corporate use.
I suppose it depends. I’ve seen MSFT platforms supported very well and very poorly - with all the things you mention present but permanently broken. I’ve only seen Linux well supported, though ofc that could well be the luck of my draw.
But even when the platform is well supported, you’re left with the user experience.
> The real risk to MS here is when people take the plunge and see how much nicer a (well supported, well put together) Linux distro is, compared to Windows etc! Will they want to buy their next laptop at home with MSFT installed?
Firstly, I would wager a large amount of personal computing is now done on a phone/tablet. None of my relatives have laptops for personal use. They may have work laptop (which will be running Windows). I this often with a lot of Linux users where they are still fighting the last war which has long been lost.
Secondly, Every single Linux/DE distro has a bunch of issues. Doesn't matter what it is. There are loads of odd bugs (doesn't matter the DE or Distro) that are present, that simply don't exist on Windows. These are things around device and display handling
e.g.
- My bluetooth mouse needs paired again every kernel update. My solution to this will be to buy another mouse probably.
- One of my USB wireless headsets doesn't work with Pipewire. The solution to this was to buy another one.
- Games while it is great that I could finally ditch Windows for playing games. You have to be using the right DE. This is because Mutter (which is Gnome's Window Manager), completely fucks the frame-pacing in some games. KDE that doesn't happen. This is why Gaming distros exist because all these stupid problems with Gaming are pre-fixed by the distro.
- When I changed from Gnome to KDE, all my browser sessions tabs, logins etc were gone because KDE Keyrings and Gnome Keyrings for some reason don't use the same underlying store.
All of these issues need either new hardware / obscure settings to be enabled via the terminal to fix, or require two large projects to actually talk to each other.
Thirdly, it isn't just the OS. For every application on the computer you have to either see if the program is supported on Linux and/or there is an alternative, or they may have a bunch of stuff tied into the Microsoft Ecosystem. Sometimes there isn't really an alternative.
Finally, Unlike big corporations you get bizarre things happening in Linux-distro land almost weekly due to some personal drama. This is seldom reported on because honestly this happens in smaller enthusiast projects normally, but they have a way of trickling up into the wider ecosystem.
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?
Yes, because when they go to Media Market and FNAC they will only have macOS and Windows laptops to chose from.
Having Tuxedo, System76 and co is great, but what most people care about is what there are in regular consumer shops.
Linux adoption among consumer hardware has only been a success where it is invisible to the user, like the Linux kernel on Android or WebOS, firmware on DVD/BlueRay players,...
The average person walking into these shops has never heard of Linux. If, as I would hope, they find out about it and like it, they’ll ask. Then either the shops assortment will be improved, or as sibling comment says, they’ll look online.
Which is why "The Year of Desktop Linux" will keep being a meme (30 years to 4%), unless we are talking about running Linux Desktops from within WSL and Virtualisation Framework, or for the oldies, VMWare Workstation and Virtual Box.
"Linus Torvalds Explains The Reason Linux Lost The Desktop"
M$FT revenue is currently around $300bn a year, with a 40% profit margin. Canonical's revenue is less than $300m.
Even if Canonical wanted to create a perfect version of Ubuntu with driver support for almost everything and as many desktop bugs removed as possible, they still can't afford to do it.
A credible Linux-on-the-desktop needs a global or multinational consumer-oriented foundation that can herd all the cats and turn desktop Linux into a professionally-managed project with proper beta testing and some interest in user experience.
That's a 180 from Linux culture, so it's unlikely to ever happen.
The Linux Foundation is not that Linux foundation, because it's not remotely desktop or consumer-oriented. freedesktop.org is a nice side project but doesn't have anything like the budget or the profile or resources required.
That is literally the only way to make a desktop version that can compete with Windows and OS X.
There's an obvious opportunity for someone to do this for governments now - a standard gov-optimised distro with enhanced security and access control and a collection of boring productivity software.
You might want to contact Media Markt, FNAC, Corte Ingles and all the other stores to tell them apparently they have 0 customers yet they pay for rent, salaries and everything else even though no one goes there anymore.
Initially a post order-only for consumer electronics, but added bricks & mortar stores because many customers (of all ages, btw) prefer IRL service, viewing and touching actual hardware.
> prefer IRL service, viewing and touching actual hardware.
That did Fry's in, didn't it? People coming in viewing, touching hardware in store and then buy it on-line (elsewhere) so that they could save 2.5%. Or worse, buying it in store and returning it two weeks later when they found a better deal or didn't need it anymore.
> Or worse, buying it in store and returning it two weeks later when they found a better deal or didn't need it anymore.
Here a lot of places has a sort of price guarantee that I guess is supposed to work against this. Basically, if I know Media Markt sells something I want, but the very same thing is available for cheaper in other (big) store, I'll show them their competitors pricing and they'll lower their price to match it.
Assuming by the fact that the physical stores still exists, don't seem to be going anywhere soon, and these companies tend to get rid of stuff that doesn't make them profit anymore, I think it's safe to assume they at least are net positive on having the physical stores.
Not sure about goverment requirements, but many apps I use nowadays are on the web, Figma, Canva, google docs, outlook and so on. There is not much need for a dedicated OS for most users.
the browser is definitely becoming more OS-like. that’s the Chromebook bet. but for proper office work you need good file management. if they’re not keen on trusting cloudy solutions by the big corps then FOSS on bare metal is the way to go.
A Mac studio ultra with linux is the best computer I ever had. The only small thing that I miss is the copy/paste from iphone to the computer sync.
It seems to me really that there is no going back to macOS any time soon. I don’t think I would still be able to “compute” on Windows.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure neither Microsoft, Apple, LG nor Sony is interested in developing software nor drivers for Linux so I think we're pretty safe on that front.
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.
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
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.
> ...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.
They have to keep in mind: it will be more expensive (significantly, and in competent people, not only $$$) as you cannot beat big tech with their thousands of billions of $ and the fact they are scaled on a worldwide scope. And with a long term perspective, it is going to be even harder and more 'expensive': being independent and small has a price.
Just do not go on the ground of their "complexity", if you do, you are done for, going to be hell (specs subset only of file formats/protocols, and/or very simple alternative file formats/protocols, think docx vs utf8 text file).
And you better work on those technical regulations, and it is hard since it must not imped real and pertinent "progress".
The biggest challenge with these kind of migrations is training users, especially government employees. Switzerland is relatively highly educated so this might be less of a challenge than in other countries but it won't be easy.
The technical part is probably relatively easy in comparison. Especially because the stakes are low (parallel run with the existing system, good will from everyone involved).
Educated or not, people that have been using the same system for many years will have a tough time IMHO. Looking at my mom and dad interactions with any UI, it seems to me they don't really read what that menu is about, they just use "muscle memory" to navigate it. So I expect a drop in efficiency until that memory is rebuilt.
> Switzerland is relatively highly educated so this might be less of a challenge than in other countries but it won't be easy.
True, but that's not accounting for a bunch of typically Swiss cultural factors:
- Swiss people tend to love to death the "one standard solution for one particular problem" approach
- Swiss people tend to be quite change-averse relative to other nearby cultures.
Don't get me wrong I love the Swiss to death, and the above cultural biases actually have their advantages, but re-training government employees is not going to be easy, however well educated they may be.
Fortunately, there is another cultural Swiss bias that's going to help: most large Swiss organizations have been designed using the army as a model, which mean Swiss employees tend to obey orders quite well.
So if the mandate comes from the top, it'll likely succeed. Eventually. Cause in Switzerland, they tend to take their time (yeah, that's another base cultural cliché, but I couldn't resist. And we're already deep into those already, why stop :-) ).
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...
I'd guess the hurdles are always more structural and organizational - as even with Microsoft stack itself. See for instance the Limux/Munic story: https://lwn.net/Articles/737818/
Not really - this is akin to doing a complete rewrite of your 30 year old codebase to Rust.
Every organization has their own hacks, bespoke tools, processes and hardware that has to be painstakingly replaced, reprogrammed and users retrained. In many cases, Linux alternatives don't exist so they either have to be written or processes/hardware replaced.
These are OLD organizations and none of them is really the same as any other. Legendarily, companies like SAP made their whole fortunes managing this kind of complexity.
It's just a lot of work with a lot of edge cases you've never thought of (or seen in your life) that takes years.
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.
There been work in this direction for multiple decades already, but up until the confirmation that Trump won his second election, things weren't happening that quickly. Since then though, the steam train been all aboard and everyone and their mother is currently trying to reduce US dependency in pretty much every way they can.
One key distinction is the permanancy of Trumpism. The fact that existing controls in the US government cannot stop the extreme Trump actions, and in fact for many cases are explicitly supporting, gave a clear message to other governments that the risk is real, permanent and needs de-risking.
Overall Trump is a stress test on the world and found many defects that is slowly getting fixes.
Office is going to be a blocker - not just because of the two XML file formats, but because of the different UI. I personally find the Microsoft version more productive despite a mental list of complaints I have with it.
The correct choice, in my opinion, would be to invest in a new EU_Office project that uses the Microsoft XML formats. If you're trying to run your government on a new platform, that would also be a hedge against TDF pulling in a direction you don't want: an "independent self-governing meritocratic entity" has possible failure modes that need to go on the risk register.
Office is very much not a problem. LibreOffice has UI plugins that arrange everything in a standard Office pre-365 layout. I've been using it for years and I can't recall a single time I've ran into any issues. I think Excel macros are where the start of dealbreakers begin, which is a niche issue. 90+% of Office users won't hit that wall.
Second, the EU has been pouring money into an OpenOffice fork for official use and replacement of Office 365 for a while. https://office.eu/
The 10% excel sheets are exactly the problem. You can replace 90% or even 99% with either some online simpler office suite or none at all. But it will turn out there are business critical things running in 2003 format excel sheets with macros and if anything stops working then the organization stops working. The person who made these sheets and macros has retired 20 years ago and "updating it" would require making a dozen little applications to replace them which would be a huge task.
The simple/cheap answer I think is to just keep the power users and legacy systems on the tools they need/want. Because that's where the pain point is that cause these projects to fail. If you aim for 100% you'll end up with 0% eventually. If you aim for 90%, you can do it.
But Microsoft know this, and would make sure that a 90% migration saves you much less than a 100% migration. Which is why this is so rare still.
(I think the number is probably 99% not 90%, but the point is the same)
How many people in most government positions are using Excel?
SaaS and mobile has taken over many apps. We sell SaaS to business and govt clients where most end users are either on a browser or a mobile app. There is a Windows application (path dependent history) but it is almost vestigial for configuration/management.
This is a great replacement for Office Online and Onedrive, but will it work as a standalone desktop application that stores files to by home directory?
I have been having some fun lately with some extra tokens from my work, experimenting with setting it loose on replicating software.
The results have been pretty surprisingly good. There’s a lot of functionality missing on first use, but I think if I let it churn through a few million more tokens it could get close.
I would be very concerned if I were a MS, SaaS or Adobe about what’s to come in the near future.
That‘s an interesting thought, because I see openDesk packs Collabora for document-editing, I‘ve never ever tried it. Does anyone know how it fairs with file-formats and MS-formatting in general?
Oh for God's sake, can the Europeans please make a European HN already, so these incessant stories go there?
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 your upcoming Swabian clone of MS Paint or how the Moldovan Ministry of Transport is convening a subcommittee to discuss switching to RedoxOS by 2043.
It's not actually hacker news. It's not even tech news. It's European bureaucracy news. And it's drowning out far more interesting things on HN.
Why not just hide/flag the story and move on with your life? No one is forcing you to comment. And apparently the rest of HN disagrees with you, it is on the frontpage after all which happens after we all vote or don't vote for it.
If I didn't knew better, it does sound like you're slightly jealous of something...
It's true, I'm terribly jealous of the Swabian clone of MS Paint.
I stopped using HN recently, as a long time user, because the direction of the site has gone away from neat tech things ("Hacker News") towards boring bullshit like this ("Politico.eu, but make it Reddit").
I still have an RSS feed pointed this way, and it frustrates me. I vented with this throwaway account and comment. These stories are actual garbage. The front page is now full of AI spam and Europeans falling in love with Juche economics. On repeat, forever. Think of all the slow interesting things you don't get to read, because people with rage meters stuck on 11 want to argue over this crap. Think of how difficult it is to discuss anything with any degree of nuance when the Eurobrigade comes out (maybe Europe should have a serious and mature discussion about structural reforms required to boost competitiveness? a reform to the common fisheries policy so that places like Iceland would actually be interested in joining? no no, much easier to just holler about how America is mean and Europe is sunshine and unicorns.)
Think of how much more HN is like all the other places on the Internet now. It's been a dramatic change in the last year or two (new moderator... ).
I suppose I should just remove the RSS feed and move on. A little sad, honestly.
Haah, well, at least you put a smile on this Europeans face before you left us for good, good riddance :) Imagine if Europe actually had jawi, life would have been good probably.
I'm all for Europe weaning itself off American tech. Genuinely, totally in support. I think people misinterpreted my original post - I actually want a European HN. I want all of this content to migrate there asap.
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?
What's wrong with having more sovereignty over your data and infrastructure? You don't need to stop working on the mentioned issues together but cutting foreign spies the access to your citizens data and reducing their leverage.
That's life, spies going to spy, state psychopaths from the military and the three-latter agencies exist regardless whether you see them or not and they don't care about the "common good". They must be taken into the account.
The less power humans have over each other - the better. Instead of pressuring each other to bring profits people would be able to speak like equals.
I’m always surprised to see how naive people are when comparing the enterprise/government usage of software vs. Personal usage.
Linux and open source software are a good alternative for personal usage, but for government usage, wouldn’t they have to port every custom software they have built over decades to Linux? Not to mention driver support for legacy/custom hardware. Also, from where would they get the support and guarantee that critical bugs and issues are patched and distributed without disruption to every single computer in time?
Replacing MS office would be the easiest and what’s the point of migrating away from MS Office while still using Windows eco system? Is it just political symbolic migration because they don’t have anything better to do with tax payers money?
A lot of government software moved into some cloud-based, browser-accessible platform during COVID. It depends on the office and the government, but especially with how easily a vendor can modernize legacy software with an LLM, this isn't necessarily a dealbreaker issue. It might make more sense to modernize than rely in perpetuity on the one guy that should have retired 3 years ago and you can't let go because he knows COBOL.
And MS Office corporate licenses account for a significant part of MS's revenue stream. More than 400 million Office 365 licenses paid in 2024, not one-off Windows licenses. So a business might save $150 per person per year on a large group of staff migrating them to a FOSS alternative for email and a replacement for light users that only ever touch Word/Excel/PowerPoint. And they might never know the difference, functionally. That's also less of a tangled web than switching operating systems and network setups that would require work for any users of critical systems. I can see the logic in migrating the willing as a test out of Office, then a few more people every month until you have one pool of FOSS users, and one pool of must use Office 365 users.
That shift might not be nothing to a small business as well, and at scale, might also be significant to larger businesses. Even if 5% of Office 365 users moved over, that's tens of millions of users.
Their custom software probably runs fine under Wine? Also, if it's actual custom software, they might have the source and could even recompile it. And also, the software of the Swiss government is usually surprisingly good quality, so they probably have competent engineers who they could call upon to help with such porting.
I've written quite a few tools for the Swiss government in my time and 98% of them are part of the intranet or even external websites. It's all web anyway.
Porting software nowadays might prove easier than expected. Exactly how much custom software should one expect? Centralized web applications running on Java are probably the standard anyway, and they are not OS-dependent.
The point of migration seems to be data-storage compliance anyway. They can later migrate off Windows easily once openDesk gets them going.
I don't know the specific case of Switzerland but I worked in a University in Spain when I was student with servers and stuff and our serious software was never Microsoft's. It was from big Mainframes like IBM or Sun Microsystems servers. We ported that software to Linux and it took very little time, saving us a lot of money with small machines.
That was more than 20 years ago.
Half of our laboratory PC rooms used Linux or BSD and we had licences like Matlab for Linux early on. The other half used Windows and yes, we could get very good license prices from Microsoft precisely because we had so many Linux machines. It was almost free.
You could even say that Microsoft spent money on us trying to buy the University sales gatekeepers with things like free expensive travel to States' conferences, free laptops and stuff.
We were probably not a normal University as we were a technical University and regularly organised conferences inviting people like Stallman.(Our technical University also managed the servers of the Humanities side of the University).
It was not that hard. Today, with so many programs running in Webassembly, it should be much easier.
>Is it just political symbolic migration because they have anything better to do with tax payers money?
Usually when you replace privative software with open source you spend 10x or so less in licenses. The problem being that the open source software is not as capable as the privative.
I did not understood why instead of spending 10 times less with open source, you spend half and pay for the necessary capabilities improving the open source software.
I understood it later. In the past it was a scheme lots of politicians used for getting negotiation power against Microsoft. Digital sovereignty was very down the priorities list compared to getting a good price.
Now, after the Ukraine war, and Trump actively using the US dependence against Europe, digital sovereignty is a very real issue, even critical.
Custom software they have build over decades is pile of crap. Mostly could be replaced with web interface, gpg encryption, and batch processing of CSV files with bash or python.
It will fail because employees want "mouse point and click", "mouse point and double click" interfaces and are unable to use anything else.
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!
You had me until "never were".
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.
We certainly weren’t on the same side in WW2
We were neutral, but it's always funny how many US-guys always bring up WW2. That was maybe the last time, the US did anything "good" for the world. But yeah, I think it's useless to argue with you.
WW2 was long enough ago that no one you end up talking about it actually experienced it themselves, but it's recent enough that people who felt their country did "Good", can still ride that high wave without being pulled down by everything that came after.
What? My grandmother experienced it herself, she saw bombings.
Right, I didn't mean "Everyone who was alive during WW2 is today dead", that's obviously not true, it was just 80 years ago or so.
What I meant was that most people who discuss WW2 with others online, mostly talk from the perspective of not having experienced the war themselves, nor did the person who they speak to, most likely.
I think it depends a lot on the country.
If you go to countries that were invaded, people have been in contact with their grandparents. It's not "something that happened far away", it's "stories from family I've known".
Of course in the US it's very different. That's possibly why Elon Musk can do Nazi salutes there and nothing happens. Of course not everybody cares: many people still buy Teslas in Europe. But I think the WW2 memory is not as far as you make it sound.
USAid did "good" for the world, but because people took it for granted and it wasn't in the news until it was stopped (which has cost lives).
The US has been by far the largest funder of medical and other scientific research since WW2 which has benefited billions immensely.
Sure. Even more so the handful of patent holders in the US.
Want to ignore those patents? Unless you have nukes you're not.
> That was maybe the last time, the US did anything "good" for the world. But yeah, I think it's useless to argue with you.
This is a completely mad assessment. Haven't you noticed the massive issues with scientific, health, and social funding globally now the US taxpayer has stopped bankrolling it?
Bankrolling is an editorial word that implies almost a one way benefit.
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us??
Bailey: "Did you know that the US basically never does anything good for the world?"
Motte: "Well when the US does something good for the world the US also benefits."
Yes, the world should get it for free, but that mean nothing because the US gets something back at all. It's mad. I'm not from the US, but it's obvious why cutting global funding was popular in the US.
Switzerland was “neutral” not neutral. The Swiss certainly crossed into the complicit side quite often, profiting from the Nazi regime, laundering their looted gold and closing their borders to fleeing Jews.
> closing their borders to fleeing Jews.
This is such a landmine topic, because most countries did this, including the UK and the US; see e.g. the MS St. Louis. This is why there are several "heroes of the resistance" that in modern parlance are "people smugglers", forging credentials and visas in order to help people escape.
Today you see exactly the same hostile attitudes to non-white refugees of basically every war except Ukraine.
Niels Bohr, the Great Dane, was one of these skid greasers! He worked with the queen of Sweden, and also used his academic contacts in various countries to secure jobs/visas.
> He worked with the queen of Sweden
Interesting connection, as her father was a foreign member of the Nazi party (while living in Brazil) and had lied about his Nazi affiliation in the past. When he moved back to Germany, he joined the main party.
Despite what Hollywood says, WW2 was more to do with German militarism and expansionism than the Jewish question. The Allies were certainly willing to use pro-Jewish sentiments and some Jewish troops, but it was never presented as the main issue.
I don't know where Hollowood ever said it WW2 was about Jews.
IDK if things have changed but generally the whole narrative in the US is presented as unwitting yankies discovering the horrors of the death camps. It's debated how much some levels of the government knew, but it certainly wasn't public knowledge in the US.
Well, that or fighting the Japanese.
Not sure why this is down voted.
“Go save the Jews” was hardly a motivating factor for any nation in the war.
Downvoted but basically correct.
Difficult to pin something as all consuming as WW2 on "about" anything, but we can look at who fired the first shots, which was clearly the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in the east and the German invasion of Poland in the West (followed shortly after by the USSR invading Poland and later Finland from the other direction.)
It is not at all a given that, had Germany stayed within her international borders, that the Holocaust would have on its own triggered WW2. After all, mass murder in the Congo Free State didn't trigger invasion of Belgium.
I think Hollywood says exactly that. Most WW2 films are about war, not the Holocaust.
>Today you see exactly the same hostile attitudes to non-white refugees of basically every war except Ukraine.
Perhaps that's because most of those refugees could more easily shelter in neighboring countries that they are more culturally similar to... if shelter was actually the primary thing that they were seeking.
It's also why Germany did the death camps. Originally their plan was just to force them to leave but most countries were not allowing them to do so.
> Originally their plan was just to force them to leave
That is 1930s pre-war Germany and Austria; and around 550k people by the most generous calculation. Yes, the world wronged them. But you cannot say death camps happened because the US didn’t hand out enough visas.
After 1939, when Germany invaded Poland (home of 3-3.5m Jews) and in 1941 the USSR (home of another 1-2m Jews) no one was being forced to leave (or live) anymore. People were being killed with bullets to the head or back, and when this started to be unbecoming/too inefficient, the German state devised an industrial approach to the killing of humans.
There is a definition of neutrality [1][2] based on the Hague convention.
[1]: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hague05.asp
[2]: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hague13.asp
Would this mean that if Country A for example starts closing their border for fleeing citizens of Country B, Country A would no longer be considered neutral in the Country-B <> Country-C war? I'm interested in how much you have to do/not have to do, in order for no longer be considered neutral.
I think, once you read about each individual country and what they did before/during/after WW2, it seems like not a single country on the European continent can be considered "neutral". So maybe with this lens, Switzerland was "the most neutral" if you compare with others?
"Neutrality" for a country (as per the Hague convention) basically means that you cannot help a belligerent and you have to treat the belligerents equally.
So I assume that if you open your borders to all fleeing citizens, that's neutral, and if you close it to all, that's neutral as well.
There is a difference between someone running from persecution and someone leaving because they might be conscripted into invasion they agree with or because they dont like the economy. Equating Russians with Jews is particularly ugly here. You could sorta a little equate Ukrainians, a little.
And yes, actual historical events and motivations of past actors matter.
Yes, there were multiple fully on-the-nazi side countries, Swiss were not them. That does not make the comparison you made meaningful.
> That does not make the comparison you made meaningful.
Yeah, even when I tried my best to, apparently the labels just fire up too much emotions. I've removed the country names completely as it's irrelevant to what I was trying to discuss.
> Equating Russians with Jews is particularly ugly here
I didn't do anything of the like in the original text, but good try!
Ah another week another instance of this maga level crap. Read up on [1], read up on Geneva accepting migrants way after it was clear that Switzerland will starve since it was 100% surrounded by axis. Even after federal government forbade that.
Private Swiss banks accepted money from both nazis and jews alike, thats true. Sounds neutral to me. They have anonymous numbered accounts here, practice for local citizens used long before WWII. Together the reasons why it ended up as it did.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campione_d%27Italia
"Switzerland was “neutral” not neutral. The Swiss certainly crossed into the complicit side quite often, profiting from the Nazi regime, laundering their looted gold and closing their borders to fleeing Jews."
That still counts as neutral, as does Sweden's activities. Switzerland interned allied airmen and was even bombed but stayed out of the war.
There is a wonderful quote from the Irish parliament. The Irish government wanted to be neutral, but one of the politicians asked "but who shall we be neutral against ?" (By the way, the nature of the Irish Free State's "neutrality" remains controversial to this day, and again, I could point to examples both ways.) It is hard to think of any fully neutral countries in WW2, partly due to the large empires spanning Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Maybe certain Latin American countries, except some of them joined the war at the end and/or took in Nazi refugees like Eichmann.
They walked a fine line.
You can find complicity in the holocaust everywhere. The United States strictly enforced immigration quotas and turned away entire refugee ships. Legislation to address the issue and provide an exception failed in the house in 1939. Those people were returned to their deaths.
After the war, the genuine shock of what was discovered by the Army was presented to imply that nobody had any idea what was happening.
The Swiss also turned a blind eye to allied activity. The OSS and MI6 operated pretty blatantly and received some assistance from the Swiss authorities.
The Swiss cannot claim moral superiority by any means, but it’s unfair to brand them as nazi collaborators. These issues are black and white a hundred years later and thousands of miles away, not so much when you’re surrounded.
> funny how many US-guys always bring up WW2
Cut them some slack - its the last time they "won" a war.
When the US wins, it tends to be quick, clean, and easily forgotten. Consider our victories against ISIS, or against Saddam in the Gulf War. Both cases where an expansionist power violated territorial integrity norms by engaging in conquest, and was defeated by a US-led coalition.
> against Saddam in the Gulf War
I really hope you're referring to GW1, rather than 2. And yeah, if you weren't a Kurd who believed GW Bush, then that was a pretty effective war from the US (and global) perspective.
We won in Iraq 2 as well, and considering the fight against conventional Iraqi forces, they were quickly defeated.
> We won in Iraq 2 as well,
Only if you ignore the rise of ISIS and various militias, along with the collapse of Iraqi society (mind you, the sanctions had done a pretty good job of wrecking that before GW2 anyway).
> That was maybe the last time, the US did anything "good" for the world.
As a non-Swiss, non-American, I can assure you you need to study both American and Swiss modern history. The Swiss were far, far too cozy with the Nazis, and the Americans have done a spectacular amount of good since WWII ended.
Genuinely interested:
- Would you say that "France was far, far too cozy with the Nazis"? Half of France was occupied for most of the war, after all. And enough people were collaborating.
- Would you say that the UK was far, far too cozy with the Nazis? They considered not fighting against them in the beginning.
- Would you say that the US was far, far too cozy with the Nazis? They didn't do anything for years, until Pearl Harbour, right?
I think it's always more complicated than just blaming an entire country.
I am not an expert in modern history, but my understanding is that Switzerland was entirely surrounded. I guess they did their best to avoid getting occupied? Certainly some assholes in Switzerland profited from the war, but that's true in many (most? all?) other countries.
> Would you say that "France was far, far too cozy with the Nazis"?
Vichy France? Yes, of course. It's taught to French school children as a deeply disgraceful chapter of French history, despite it being under significant pressure. The North was under military occupation, having put up a fight. Collaborationist politicians were put to death after the war.
> the [UK/US] was far, far too cozy with the Nazis?
ok bro.
Well, "bro", I was trying to see what you consider "far, far too cozy".
So apparently you consider that Switzerland was obviously just like Vichy France? At least obviously-enough to "ok bro" me?
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.
The argument is much cleaner if immutable past actions remain un-weaponized.
If somebody wants to tap me for reparations over chattel slavery in the US, and all I can say is that my in-country ancestors fought for the Union.
Which, along with $5, will get you a cup of coffee down' the beanery.
I’m disappointed they did. M365 represents a tiny proportion of the budget especially in light of the high Swiss salaries in government (~ $100-250k per employee per year) and all the surrounding infrastructure costs. Microsoft software became really good over time and the loss of productivity and the inefficiencies introduced by the change to clunky software will absolutely not be worth it.
Sorry, none of what you just said makes any practical sense.
Could you elaborate?
Linux is largely financed by American corporations. Without that, Linux wouldn't be anywhere near what it is today.
How far you wanna go back to figure out what Linux would/wouldn't be without specific companies and individuals? You're taking "stealing credit for something" to a whole new level.
Linux is 100% created by an ethnically Swedish guy in Finland. Your point is?
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.
fnord
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.
You sunk my battleship!
> as American citizens
As a Finish/American citizen. Not sure why people should trust the rest of what you write when you cannot even get the basics correctly.
Edit: Aww, you were so wrong you had to edit the complete comment to say something else? Boo! Come on, stand up for being wrong when it happens.
And without American AI to patch security holes, Linux and the software running on it will become hopelessly insecure.
Yeah, because the only thing that's for certain is that American LLMs are so special that they cannot be reproduced, as everyone has been knowing already in 2023 from the public "we have a gigantic moat" Google memo.
lol somebody didn’t hear the news about Kimi and GLN 5.3 cyber
Wouldn't a true Swiss person be neutral and cautious, and wouldn't they refrain from parroting all sorts of nonsense in public about other countries? Anyway, it doesn’t exactly seem like smart move when a government agency tasked with protecting its citizens’ sensitive information switches on a large scale from local, closed networks with energy-efficient desktop applications to externally hosted SaaS infrastructure, with wasteful, fragile, unsecure browser-based applications, sending each byte over many borders. This development should never have happened in the first place.
That’s a lot of misconceptions for one paragraph…
I believe they are saying two things:
- 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.
To the point, thanks.
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 Swiss administration myself as an external consultant for many years and have I pretty good insight.
> 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.
> Well I think it's not ok without at least a fixed deadline for removal of MS365
I guess that when you "test" something, it means that you have not yet decided that you will completely migrate there?
The real risk to MS here is when people take the plunge and see how much nicer a (well supported, well put together) Linux distro is, compared to Windows etc! Will they want to buy their next laptop at home with MSFT installed?
Plus, if countries moving off Microsoft put a fraction of the savings into libre office product development, it might get an even more lopsided comparison!
Lifelong Linux/Unix user here, I love the widespread adoption of Linux.
But comments like this one makes me think people don't realize what a MacGyvere'd together hack job a Linux distro truly is.
The idea on paper is that a company like Microsoft can offer a more consistent and stable experience, but apparently they're even failing at that these days.
But to look at a Linux distro as an alternative to consistency and stability is pretty funny to me.
The truth is that any org that chooses to migrate from Microsoft to Open source will face completely new challenges. And the end result will be +-0, if they're lucky.
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.
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
None of those issues are a problem for corporate managed Windows installations, which would be the proper comparator in the case given in the article.
There are other reasons that Windows sucks, even (or especially?) in a corporate environment, just not those.
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?
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.
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.
e.g. https://github.com/raphire/win11debloat
Have you considered going offline for the music PC? I took an old rig off and stuck it with win10.
I have one setup with all my media/games and have removed every piece of Microsoft possible.
I've used plenty of sketchy third party tools to get rid of all that weirdness but they keep patching it back somehow. I never get rid of the ads long term, also sticking to win10. Thing is I DJ straight from soundcloud mostly so going offline is not a real option for me.
Fantasy software: something that uses hooks to intercept internet requests from a specified other program, and sends them through USB to a corresponding phone app using a weird protocol, and the app relays them to the phone's internet connection so it's like a tether, and then your Windows program can be online, but Windows can't.
I don't think you appreciate what a hack job Windows really is. It's just that it's quite visible in the Linux world, but more obscured in the case of proprietary software.
> 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...
Economics are becoming less and less important when it comes to switch to Linux. The risk of relying on US companies has gone through the roof lately.
I haven’t used desktop Linux in ages, but I’m a Linux server user as I think maybe everyone here. Is the solution to desktop that some well funded company just needs to fork Debian, build the common application deites like word processing, spreadsheets, presentation, messaging apps, etc, and then build a proper App Store?
Or is the underlying system still bad, as in drivers, compatibilities, audio and video codecs, networking, etc. I know on servers when some of these break they take a bit of mucking around. But it seems many companies are trying, why are they failing?
That well funded company already happened 20 years ago. Canonical. Their distribution is called Ubuntu, you might have heard of it.
Yet my mom does not have a Ubuntu desktop. And if I set one up for her, I woudl have to split my time between my job and tech support for her. So well funded, but not sure they are the right company.
My 73yo mom actually runs RHEL 10 on her laptop, uses one of my 16 free developer licenses.
But it would never work without my help. On the other hand, Windows wasn't working too well either and I just couldn't help with that.
RHEL was the most stable alternative I could think of when her Windows computer stopped being reliable.
I have setup rustdesk on it for remote support.
What kind of issue would you expect that the OS she currently uses does not have?
You're going to have that problem with any kind of change.
Which is basically what Google did with ChromeOS and Android, except that they have little to nothing to do with GNU/Linux experience.
Rather a Java/Kotlin/C/C++ userspace with the Linux kernel as implementation detail, or Web/WebAssembly, equally with Linux kernel as implementation detail (Crostini runs in a VM similar to WSL, and lacks several features).
I bet Googlebooks might achieve more sales on regular consumer shops than any proper GNU/Linux distro, and it is basically Android on laptops as per what we know about them.
Windows and a Linux distro are not comparable in the extent of the software that they include/provide.
Windows is too at this point; it’s just a little less obvious.
Id happily pay for a polished, commercial Linux distro, and I’d imagine governments will do too - either outsourced or with an internal team of civil servant sysadmins.
Usually they pay for SuSE or Red Hat Enterprise, with selected hardware providers, not something regular consumers get.
I wouldn't assume that moving off Microsoft will save money, or not for a long time. All staff will need a lot of retraining.
Or: if Microsoft are very smart they'll have Office for Linux and a GPO connector to manage Linux devices (and divert logins via Entra) in the wings, so much less retraining will be required.
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.
Tbh the only reason I can't put an ubuntu for my parents/grandparents is Microsoft office.
Libre is generally ok, but they deal with lots of documents from different ppl/orgs that just need to have similar rendering. Windows is so bloated it's insane
Even Microsoft can't perfectly replicate MS Office rendering. Despite access to the source code. Lots of stuff renders slightly broken in the web version, especially once headers and footers are involved
As an individual that makes MS Office hard to replace in the workplace. But maybe entire agencies switching over will have enough weight that they can force everyone else to adapt to them
Office in the browser works really well, in my experience.
The rendering won't be 1:1 but installing the most common MS fonts already does a lot
The thing is, it needs to be 1:1.
This will be fixed only by a govt push to do full replacement for all doc sharing at all levels, especially schools. But since in this country office is mostly pirated anyway, it's not such a big push
>The thing is, it needs to be 1:1.
I'm not sure about that outside of Excel and even then only for a small proportion of users.
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.
> how much nicer a (well supported, well put together) Linux distro is, compared to Windows
As someone who regularly uses both, and even in spite of the ad avalanche that (a bog-standard home install of) Windows has become: [X] to doubt. I regularly have issues on my corporate Linux laptop that I suspect wouldn't ever happen on Windows. Fleet management is easiest on Windows, with Active Directory, Group Policy, images, etc. Maybe package managers make software management easier on Linux, but fleet sysadmin is basically built-in on Windows.
Linux is superb for servers—I use Proxmox VE as the hypervisor on my homelab—but it still has a rather long way to go as a sharp-edge-free desktop OS, regardless of whether it is for home or corporate use.
I suppose it depends. I’ve seen MSFT platforms supported very well and very poorly - with all the things you mention present but permanently broken. I’ve only seen Linux well supported, though ofc that could well be the luck of my draw.
But even when the platform is well supported, you’re left with the user experience.
I think the issues you're having on your "corporate linux laptop" are due to the "corporate" part.
I'm also having a lot of issues on my corporate linux laptop (such as dbus crashing) that just do not happen normally.
They are due to all the proprietary ~~spyware~~ security software they install, that hook pretty deep into the system and isn't as well tested.
> The real risk to MS here is when people take the plunge and see how much nicer a (well supported, well put together) Linux distro is, compared to Windows etc! Will they want to buy their next laptop at home with MSFT installed?
Firstly, I would wager a large amount of personal computing is now done on a phone/tablet. None of my relatives have laptops for personal use. They may have work laptop (which will be running Windows). I this often with a lot of Linux users where they are still fighting the last war which has long been lost.
Secondly, Every single Linux/DE distro has a bunch of issues. Doesn't matter what it is. There are loads of odd bugs (doesn't matter the DE or Distro) that are present, that simply don't exist on Windows. These are things around device and display handling
e.g.
- My bluetooth mouse needs paired again every kernel update. My solution to this will be to buy another mouse probably.
- One of my USB wireless headsets doesn't work with Pipewire. The solution to this was to buy another one.
- Games while it is great that I could finally ditch Windows for playing games. You have to be using the right DE. This is because Mutter (which is Gnome's Window Manager), completely fucks the frame-pacing in some games. KDE that doesn't happen. This is why Gaming distros exist because all these stupid problems with Gaming are pre-fixed by the distro.
- When I changed from Gnome to KDE, all my browser sessions tabs, logins etc were gone because KDE Keyrings and Gnome Keyrings for some reason don't use the same underlying store.
All of these issues need either new hardware / obscure settings to be enabled via the terminal to fix, or require two large projects to actually talk to each other.
Thirdly, it isn't just the OS. For every application on the computer you have to either see if the program is supported on Linux and/or there is an alternative, or they may have a bunch of stuff tied into the Microsoft Ecosystem. Sometimes there isn't really an alternative.
Finally, Unlike big corporations you get bizarre things happening in Linux-distro land almost weekly due to some personal drama. This is seldom reported on because honestly this happens in smaller enthusiast projects normally, but they have a way of trickling up into the wider ecosystem.
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?
These things swing back and forth. Look up LiMux. Things don't just go in one direction.
Yes, because when they go to Media Market and FNAC they will only have macOS and Windows laptops to chose from.
Having Tuxedo, System76 and co is great, but what most people care about is what there are in regular consumer shops.
Linux adoption among consumer hardware has only been a success where it is invisible to the user, like the Linux kernel on Android or WebOS, firmware on DVD/BlueRay players,...
The average person walking into these shops has never heard of Linux. If, as I would hope, they find out about it and like it, they’ll ask. Then either the shops assortment will be improved, or as sibling comment says, they’ll look online.
Which is why "The Year of Desktop Linux" will keep being a meme (30 years to 4%), unless we are talking about running Linux Desktops from within WSL and Virtualisation Framework, or for the oldies, VMWare Workstation and Virtual Box.
"Linus Torvalds Explains The Reason Linux Lost The Desktop"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQMujWFUDSg
M$FT revenue is currently around $300bn a year, with a 40% profit margin. Canonical's revenue is less than $300m.
Even if Canonical wanted to create a perfect version of Ubuntu with driver support for almost everything and as many desktop bugs removed as possible, they still can't afford to do it.
A credible Linux-on-the-desktop needs a global or multinational consumer-oriented foundation that can herd all the cats and turn desktop Linux into a professionally-managed project with proper beta testing and some interest in user experience.
That's a 180 from Linux culture, so it's unlikely to ever happen.
The Linux Foundation is not that Linux foundation, because it's not remotely desktop or consumer-oriented. freedesktop.org is a nice side project but doesn't have anything like the budget or the profile or resources required.
That is literally the only way to make a desktop version that can compete with Windows and OS X.
There's an obvious opportunity for someone to do this for governments now - a standard gov-optimised distro with enhanced security and access control and a collection of boring productivity software.
Stores are dead to anyone who is under 35 years of age.
You might want to contact Media Markt, FNAC, Corte Ingles and all the other stores to tell them apparently they have 0 customers yet they pay for rent, salaries and everything else even though no one goes there anymore.
Add CoolBlue (Netherlands) to that list.
Initially a post order-only for consumer electronics, but added bricks & mortar stores because many customers (of all ages, btw) prefer IRL service, viewing and touching actual hardware.
> prefer IRL service, viewing and touching actual hardware.
That did Fry's in, didn't it? People coming in viewing, touching hardware in store and then buy it on-line (elsewhere) so that they could save 2.5%. Or worse, buying it in store and returning it two weeks later when they found a better deal or didn't need it anymore.
> Or worse, buying it in store and returning it two weeks later when they found a better deal or didn't need it anymore.
Here a lot of places has a sort of price guarantee that I guess is supposed to work against this. Basically, if I know Media Markt sells something I want, but the very same thing is available for cheaper in other (big) store, I'll show them their competitors pricing and they'll lower their price to match it.
Assuming by the fact that the physical stores still exists, don't seem to be going anywhere soon, and these companies tend to get rid of stuff that doesn't make them profit anymore, I think it's safe to assume they at least are net positive on having the physical stores.
Tell that to Apple, glance inside next time you pass by an Apple Store.
Apple stores also do repairs, so I'm not sure what's the point of this comparison.
Which ones? Usually they send the device to some center like everyone else.
Not really, otherwise I wouldn't bump into them all over the place around here.
This is not about Linux.
They are replacing Office365.
Not sure about goverment requirements, but many apps I use nowadays are on the web, Figma, Canva, google docs, outlook and so on. There is not much need for a dedicated OS for most users.
the browser is definitely becoming more OS-like. that’s the Chromebook bet. but for proper office work you need good file management. if they’re not keen on trusting cloudy solutions by the big corps then FOSS on bare metal is the way to go.
SAP, Oracle, weird Office macros from decades ago …
They might know their own use case better than you and I?
Their comment said "most users".
I don’t know what’s going these days.
Users seem to have become much more combative, yet shorter in attention span and shallower in understanding
A Mac studio ultra with linux is the best computer I ever had. The only small thing that I miss is the copy/paste from iphone to the computer sync. It seems to me really that there is no going back to macOS any time soon. I don’t think I would still be able to “compute” on Windows.
I've got great news for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49415386
KDE Connect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45557599
> I miss is the copy/paste from iphone to the computer sync
Such a key feature and probably the one thing that keeps me locked into the Apple ecosystem
I love to hear news like that! It was only a matter of time if you ask me.
Why don't they replace Windows with Linux Mint? That would be much more groundbreaking than simply replacing online Office and Outlook.
If you use Linux Mint you can replace Office with LibreOffice (offline) and Outlook with one of the many email clients available for Linux.
It's easier to replace apps with ones that are available on both Windows and Linux, then later switch to Linux.
There are at least a couple or three things around that...
- One, that probably, for most of the users, what's is locking them to Windows is a bunch of Microsoft applications. Once you've moved out of those apps, you're free to move them to any other OS.
- Two, on government computers there are usually a bunch of things that might be a bit custom and not readily available in other OSes. Smart card readers for weird standards, custom software for security or administration processes, uncommon peripherals...
- Three, there are departments that are going to be tied to Windows for a long time, due to very specific software, for example CAD or things like that
So I'd say Office is a big and easier win that could allow later allow to move a lot of workstations to Linux. Then, you can focus on the other less common uses of Windows and see how feasible is migrating them. But starting directly moving to Linux would mean starting directly with edge cases and problems.
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.
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.
When it finally is the year of the linux desktop, what are we going to do about malware on linux?
I'm not sure neither Microsoft, Apple, LG nor Sony is interested in developing software nor drivers for Linux so I think we're pretty safe on that front.
How are they gonna do email without Outlook Mail servers.
Less duopolistically, hopefully.
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.
How many of ALL/total government employees are these 3k computers?
> This is the pilot phase, with 3,000 workstations moving away from Microsoft 365. The federal administration has over 54,000 computers.
If only the title had a subtitle or even a full article to provide more information.
Also further down "If the pilot is successful, we might expect the migration to continue on all the 54,000 workstations owned by the federal administrations. That's my guess". So in the estimate of the author we can expect this to be phase 2 of a three-phase rollout
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.
Even casual users utilise more than 10% of the features.
The problem is that they all utilise a different 10%.
> ...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.
>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
What can't be done in any other way?
They have to keep in mind: it will be more expensive (significantly, and in competent people, not only $$$) as you cannot beat big tech with their thousands of billions of $ and the fact they are scaled on a worldwide scope. And with a long term perspective, it is going to be even harder and more 'expensive': being independent and small has a price.
Just do not go on the ground of their "complexity", if you do, you are done for, going to be hell (specs subset only of file formats/protocols, and/or very simple alternative file formats/protocols, think docx vs utf8 text file).
And you better work on those technical regulations, and it is hard since it must not imped real and pertinent "progress".
Do migrations like this get easier each time? With prior art being available, and an ecosystem and pipeline starts to form around the new norm.
The biggest challenge with these kind of migrations is training users, especially government employees. Switzerland is relatively highly educated so this might be less of a challenge than in other countries but it won't be easy.
The technical part is probably relatively easy in comparison. Especially because the stakes are low (parallel run with the existing system, good will from everyone involved).
Educated or not, people that have been using the same system for many years will have a tough time IMHO. Looking at my mom and dad interactions with any UI, it seems to me they don't really read what that menu is about, they just use "muscle memory" to navigate it. So I expect a drop in efficiency until that memory is rebuilt.
> Switzerland is relatively highly educated so this might be less of a challenge than in other countries but it won't be easy.
True, but that's not accounting for a bunch of typically Swiss cultural factors:
- Swiss people tend to love to death the "one standard solution for one particular problem" approach
- Swiss people tend to be quite change-averse relative to other nearby cultures.
Don't get me wrong I love the Swiss to death, and the above cultural biases actually have their advantages, but re-training government employees is not going to be easy, however well educated they may be.
Fortunately, there is another cultural Swiss bias that's going to help: most large Swiss organizations have been designed using the army as a model, which mean Swiss employees tend to obey orders quite well.
So if the mandate comes from the top, it'll likely succeed. Eventually. Cause in Switzerland, they tend to take their time (yeah, that's another base cultural cliché, but I couldn't resist. And we're already deep into those already, why stop :-) ).
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...
With a couple of exceptions, my guess is that these migrations are part of the commercial negotiation pack of government procurement agencies.
At a certain point I’d expect that tech sovereignty concerns will tip while governments out of the US-vendor mindset.
As exemplified by a major project recently started by the French government:
https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20260417-france-to-remove-windo...
https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows/france-has-ditch...
I'd guess the hurdles are always more structural and organizational - as even with Microsoft stack itself. See for instance the Limux/Munic story: https://lwn.net/Articles/737818/
Not really - this is akin to doing a complete rewrite of your 30 year old codebase to Rust.
Every organization has their own hacks, bespoke tools, processes and hardware that has to be painstakingly replaced, reprogrammed and users retrained. In many cases, Linux alternatives don't exist so they either have to be written or processes/hardware replaced.
These are OLD organizations and none of them is really the same as any other. Legendarily, companies like SAP made their whole fortunes managing this kind of complexity.
It's just a lot of work with a lot of edge cases you've never thought of (or seen in your life) that takes years.
Clever move.
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!
The French "gendarmerie" has been on Linux for decades now, hasn't it?
It feels like if you count up all the European countries/cities that have converted to Linux you get something like ten times the population by now.
It's almost a standard negotiating tactic when it comes time for license renewal.
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.
“Sovereign” is a good brand. Sovereign AI, Sovereign Office Suite (as opendesk bills itself). All a reaction to Trump? Or longer term disentangling?
There been work in this direction for multiple decades already, but up until the confirmation that Trump won his second election, things weren't happening that quickly. Since then though, the steam train been all aboard and everyone and their mother is currently trying to reduce US dependency in pretty much every way they can.
One key distinction is the permanancy of Trumpism. The fact that existing controls in the US government cannot stop the extreme Trump actions, and in fact for many cases are explicitly supporting, gave a clear message to other governments that the risk is real, permanent and needs de-risking.
Overall Trump is a stress test on the world and found many defects that is slowly getting fixes.
Office is going to be a blocker - not just because of the two XML file formats, but because of the different UI. I personally find the Microsoft version more productive despite a mental list of complaints I have with it.
The correct choice, in my opinion, would be to invest in a new EU_Office project that uses the Microsoft XML formats. If you're trying to run your government on a new platform, that would also be a hedge against TDF pulling in a direction you don't want: an "independent self-governing meritocratic entity" has possible failure modes that need to go on the risk register.
Office is very much not a problem. LibreOffice has UI plugins that arrange everything in a standard Office pre-365 layout. I've been using it for years and I can't recall a single time I've ran into any issues. I think Excel macros are where the start of dealbreakers begin, which is a niche issue. 90+% of Office users won't hit that wall.
Second, the EU has been pouring money into an OpenOffice fork for official use and replacement of Office 365 for a while. https://office.eu/
The 10% excel sheets are exactly the problem. You can replace 90% or even 99% with either some online simpler office suite or none at all. But it will turn out there are business critical things running in 2003 format excel sheets with macros and if anything stops working then the organization stops working. The person who made these sheets and macros has retired 20 years ago and "updating it" would require making a dozen little applications to replace them which would be a huge task.
The simple/cheap answer I think is to just keep the power users and legacy systems on the tools they need/want. Because that's where the pain point is that cause these projects to fail. If you aim for 100% you'll end up with 0% eventually. If you aim for 90%, you can do it.
But Microsoft know this, and would make sure that a 90% migration saves you much less than a 100% migration. Which is why this is so rare still.
(I think the number is probably 99% not 90%, but the point is the same)
How many people in most government positions are using Excel?
SaaS and mobile has taken over many apps. We sell SaaS to business and govt clients where most end users are either on a browser or a mobile app. There is a Windows application (path dependent history) but it is almost vestigial for configuration/management.
This is a great replacement for Office Online and Onedrive, but will it work as a standalone desktop application that stores files to by home directory?
I have been having some fun lately with some extra tokens from my work, experimenting with setting it loose on replicating software.
The results have been pretty surprisingly good. There’s a lot of functionality missing on first use, but I think if I let it churn through a few million more tokens it could get close.
I would be very concerned if I were a MS, SaaS or Adobe about what’s to come in the near future.
That‘s an interesting thought, because I see openDesk packs Collabora for document-editing, I‘ve never ever tried it. Does anyone know how it fairs with file-formats and MS-formatting in general?
>but because of the different UI
Not a problem in the age of infinite redesign churn.
Oh for God's sake, can the Europeans please make a European HN already, so these incessant stories go there?
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 your upcoming Swabian clone of MS Paint or how the Moldovan Ministry of Transport is convening a subcommittee to discuss switching to RedoxOS by 2043.
It's not actually hacker news. It's not even tech news. It's European bureaucracy news. And it's drowning out far more interesting things on HN.
Yeah, if anything, you sure sound happy about it.
Why not just hide/flag the story and move on with your life? No one is forcing you to comment. And apparently the rest of HN disagrees with you, it is on the frontpage after all which happens after we all vote or don't vote for it.
If I didn't knew better, it does sound like you're slightly jealous of something...
It's true, I'm terribly jealous of the Swabian clone of MS Paint.
I stopped using HN recently, as a long time user, because the direction of the site has gone away from neat tech things ("Hacker News") towards boring bullshit like this ("Politico.eu, but make it Reddit").
I still have an RSS feed pointed this way, and it frustrates me. I vented with this throwaway account and comment. These stories are actual garbage. The front page is now full of AI spam and Europeans falling in love with Juche economics. On repeat, forever. Think of all the slow interesting things you don't get to read, because people with rage meters stuck on 11 want to argue over this crap. Think of how difficult it is to discuss anything with any degree of nuance when the Eurobrigade comes out (maybe Europe should have a serious and mature discussion about structural reforms required to boost competitiveness? a reform to the common fisheries policy so that places like Iceland would actually be interested in joining? no no, much easier to just holler about how America is mean and Europe is sunshine and unicorns.)
Think of how much more HN is like all the other places on the Internet now. It's been a dramatic change in the last year or two (new moderator... ).
I suppose I should just remove the RSS feed and move on. A little sad, honestly.
> Europeans falling in love with Juche economics
Haah, well, at least you put a smile on this Europeans face before you left us for good, good riddance :) Imagine if Europe actually had jawi, life would have been good probably.
I'll take putting a smile on someone's face. :)
I'm all for Europe weaning itself off American tech. Genuinely, totally in support. I think people misinterpreted my original post - I actually want a European HN. I want all of this content to migrate there asap.
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?
What's wrong with having more sovereignty over your data and infrastructure? You don't need to stop working on the mentioned issues together but cutting foreign spies the access to your citizens data and reducing their leverage.
That's life, spies going to spy, state psychopaths from the military and the three-latter agencies exist regardless whether you see them or not and they don't care about the "common good". They must be taken into the account.
The less power humans have over each other - the better. Instead of pressuring each other to bring profits people would be able to speak like equals.
I’m always surprised to see how naive people are when comparing the enterprise/government usage of software vs. Personal usage.
Linux and open source software are a good alternative for personal usage, but for government usage, wouldn’t they have to port every custom software they have built over decades to Linux? Not to mention driver support for legacy/custom hardware. Also, from where would they get the support and guarantee that critical bugs and issues are patched and distributed without disruption to every single computer in time?
Replacing MS office would be the easiest and what’s the point of migrating away from MS Office while still using Windows eco system? Is it just political symbolic migration because they don’t have anything better to do with tax payers money?
A lot of government software moved into some cloud-based, browser-accessible platform during COVID. It depends on the office and the government, but especially with how easily a vendor can modernize legacy software with an LLM, this isn't necessarily a dealbreaker issue. It might make more sense to modernize than rely in perpetuity on the one guy that should have retired 3 years ago and you can't let go because he knows COBOL.
And MS Office corporate licenses account for a significant part of MS's revenue stream. More than 400 million Office 365 licenses paid in 2024, not one-off Windows licenses. So a business might save $150 per person per year on a large group of staff migrating them to a FOSS alternative for email and a replacement for light users that only ever touch Word/Excel/PowerPoint. And they might never know the difference, functionally. That's also less of a tangled web than switching operating systems and network setups that would require work for any users of critical systems. I can see the logic in migrating the willing as a test out of Office, then a few more people every month until you have one pool of FOSS users, and one pool of must use Office 365 users.
That shift might not be nothing to a small business as well, and at scale, might also be significant to larger businesses. Even if 5% of Office 365 users moved over, that's tens of millions of users.
Their custom software probably runs fine under Wine? Also, if it's actual custom software, they might have the source and could even recompile it. And also, the software of the Swiss government is usually surprisingly good quality, so they probably have competent engineers who they could call upon to help with such porting.
I've written quite a few tools for the Swiss government in my time and 98% of them are part of the intranet or even external websites. It's all web anyway.
Porting software nowadays might prove easier than expected. Exactly how much custom software should one expect? Centralized web applications running on Java are probably the standard anyway, and they are not OS-dependent.
The point of migration seems to be data-storage compliance anyway. They can later migrate off Windows easily once openDesk gets them going.
The greater the dependence, the greater the risk.
> 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.
I don't know the specific case of Switzerland but I worked in a University in Spain when I was student with servers and stuff and our serious software was never Microsoft's. It was from big Mainframes like IBM or Sun Microsystems servers. We ported that software to Linux and it took very little time, saving us a lot of money with small machines.
That was more than 20 years ago.
Half of our laboratory PC rooms used Linux or BSD and we had licences like Matlab for Linux early on. The other half used Windows and yes, we could get very good license prices from Microsoft precisely because we had so many Linux machines. It was almost free.
You could even say that Microsoft spent money on us trying to buy the University sales gatekeepers with things like free expensive travel to States' conferences, free laptops and stuff.
We were probably not a normal University as we were a technical University and regularly organised conferences inviting people like Stallman.(Our technical University also managed the servers of the Humanities side of the University).
It was not that hard. Today, with so many programs running in Webassembly, it should be much easier.
>Is it just political symbolic migration because they have anything better to do with tax payers money?
Usually when you replace privative software with open source you spend 10x or so less in licenses. The problem being that the open source software is not as capable as the privative.
I did not understood why instead of spending 10 times less with open source, you spend half and pay for the necessary capabilities improving the open source software.
I understood it later. In the past it was a scheme lots of politicians used for getting negotiation power against Microsoft. Digital sovereignty was very down the priorities list compared to getting a good price.
Now, after the Ukraine war, and Trump actively using the US dependence against Europe, digital sovereignty is a very real issue, even critical.
Custom software they have build over decades is pile of crap. Mostly could be replaced with web interface, gpg encryption, and batch processing of CSV files with bash or python.
It will fail because employees want "mouse point and click", "mouse point and double click" interfaces and are unable to use anything else.