Technology

When it comes to the UI, I guess it depends on what you're used to. The LibreOffice UI is a lot more similar to the UI used by MS Office 2003, so I've always been pretty comfortable with it. But Microsoft's "ribbon" UI which debuted back in 2007 is now old enough to vote, so I can see how there are people out there where that's all they've ever used.

Personally, while I've learned to deal with it in Word and Outlook, even after all of these years the ribbon still pisses me off every time I have to use Excel.

But if you have problems with open source, you gotta go get a computer person

• Not necessarily, most commercial enterprise Linux distros sell support contracts, for example, RHEL and SUSE being the two most famous examples of that.

Not necessarily, lots of open source projects offer enterprise support contracts and in house staff could be retrained. Definitely going to be good for training, consulting, and MSPs though

Hopefully. But I think companies are already starting to realise the value of having your bytes in a place you control

Possibly does. On occasion I read about German cities trying to do similar, but then reverting back to M$.

Most of the issues are around people not wanting to take time to get use to new software (happened at a job where they moved to GSuite) or the FOSS stuff not having a corporation that can be sued for loss of earnings (like crowd strike when they didn't read only friday). Note that these are not technical issues with FOSS.

Still there is political support to not just use this as an angle to get M$ to lower their pricing.

There are infinite undocumented "things" integrated with Microsoft solutions. Just of the top of my head, here are couple that i've encountered

• SCADA software

• Entire business critical database application written in access

• Hundreds of tailor made order documents for logistics that are made with Excel

• Accounting software that only runs on Windows

• The immense cost of moving all of your projects from the web that is teams/sharepoint/OneDrive

The best thing Europe could do is take those savings and use it to cover the salaries of a couple full time developers per country to help verify code and add new features.

It would be such a boon to the whole world.

I'd think it would be obvious that a country wouldn't want to depend on a foreign country's proprietary product when an open source alternative exists. Even if it's not spying, what if the US forced Microsoft to put some kill switch on their products? Even if it doesn't affect your most secure systems because of air gap, it could still cripple enough to cause huge problems.

There's simply no reason to take the risk.

If I was running a government, I would strongly desire proof that all of my government software is doing only what I want it to. That means not only do I have access to the source code, but I also need it to be simple enough that my government teams can actually audit all of it.

Obviously, that's not going to be feasible in every situation. There might be proprietary software that is protected from competition via IP laws, and some software is so necessarily complex that it would be really hard to audit completely, but overall, I find it shocking that any foreign government would run a Microsoft product when a feature comparable open source alternative exists.

Sumatra? I am going to take note of that.

The funny thing about that story, and the outset that no one covered after the fact, is that Munich reversed direction again and ultimately did go with Linux and open source stacks.

I teach boomers how to use SharePoint. Last week Microsoft updated office.com to be 95% copilot. The only way to find “All Apps” (word, SharePoint, PowerPoint, excel, etc.) is to find the tiny little “apps” button all the way at the bottom of the screen.

Everything else is copilot. Everyone is confused and my job just got 100% harder.

I can't recall a single MS product that ever was good. Maybe I was late to the party (or quit early, as lots of people seam to like vscode for some reason)

Just earlier this week I created some Sharepoint folders for my father-in-laws business. I created the groups in Outlook and used the ”See files in Sharepoint”-button to access them. Next it required to ask for permission for him to the folder. I granted them using his own account. It was funny because the request was literally John Doe asked John Doe for permission, and the emails were identical too. So I granted him his own access with his own account.

The funniest thing though was that the process was different all of the four times, like different links opening to completely different tools. Now I’m not a Microsoft MVP and probably did it the wrong way, but at least I had fun doing it.

I always wondered how any head of state could feel like they were not being spied on if they were using windows.

Can governments really ensure that windows has been secured that well or is there always a possibility that Microsoft is spying for the United States?