Comment by mmooss
6 days ago
The issues in this situation are always,
1. How much is compatibility with outside users and past documents necessary? No office application can successfully, reliably convert anything but relatively simple documents (have LLMs done better somehow?). Each conversion reduces fidelity and often integrity; send a few revisions back and forth and it can become a problem. Simply adding a small headache every time an outsider emails your users' a document - or vice verssa - becomes a big issue. Regarding past documents, some users create complex applications in Excel, for example. How much of a problem is that for these users? How will those problems be solved?
2. What is the system management story? Essential to IT beyond even 30 users is a way to deploy, administer (including configuring settings), and upgrade/patch applications en masse. Microsoft provides those tools and Office, of course, integrates well with them. There are third party tools, but they need to do much better than exist; they need to function efficiently and reliably - imagine the deployment bug implemented en masse. Are there such tools for Linux and LibreOffice?
While I won't comment on whether the move made is smart:
> 1. How much is compatibility with outside users and past documents necessary?
Not an issue, document compatibility is a solved problem and any issues experienced would be minor (e.g., a missing font or broken animation leading to slightly different presentation).
> 2. What is the system management story?
Corporate "system management" solutions are entirely broken on Windows, especially upgrade and software bundle management. It actively causes more harm and security issues than it solves, and needs to die.
It's dumpster fire of technologies that get stitched on top of each other, all conflicting and ultimately training all employees to ignore all signs of malicious intervention: How do you expect a user to sceptical of questionable popups/browser hijacking/similar, when your setup involves training users to ignore cmd.exe windows popping up randomly and to always interact with highly inconsistent, constantly changing and overall questionable popups appearing at any time of day asking you to do weird things (installing apps you didn't ask for, updating, rebooting, upgrading, often with countdown timers for making decisions)?
Should you have the ill-advised desire to bring the worst and most defective parts of Windows IT management to Linux, there's a handful of big vendors providing similar solutions there. So "not an issue", other than it being a terrible idea.
In regards to your first point, I'm actively testing conversion scenarios of .xlsx to .ods (ODF 1.3) with LibreOffice, and depending on what you consider significant properties there's definitely some loss along the way that might hurt. Mostly looking into diagrams at the moment, and some break under conversion (histograms and pareto for example), while others aren't displayed properly (stock charts).
What is it with Microsoft shills everywhere? Everytime some subject like this headline comes up, people fetch some kind of dubious arguments like "muh deployment". This is actually trivial in linux, and even if not, the effort to implement a solution will be of use to future parties switching to FOSS. Why is it that people always want change to make something better, but screach when they actually have to improve something. It's really curious. But I guess shills are gonna shill, or maybe I am just ignorant and or too stupid to see the grave mistake Denmark is committing right now, because they don't use Microsoft® PowerDeploy™ Copilot enabled Decentralized Update Solutions™
Are these not legitimate questions that need to be asked and problems that need to be solved? Writing them off as shilling and screeching is part of the reason why Microsoft is so dominant. Perhaps education and raising awareness of these trivial solutions in Linux would be more beneficial for the movement than mudslinging.
UK public sector education smallish organisation. All ms365 for doc sharing email and teams. A number of subscription services for other functions. Everybody accessed via chrome/edge.
I've been using chromium on Linux for years and noone has noticed. Could probably move all the endpoints to Linux without too outrageous level of disruption.
How would you implement the features of Group Policy in Linux? Legitimately asking, I don’t know. I use Ansible when managing multiple Linux servers but I’m by no means a system admin.