Switzerland's Federal Government Is Replacing Microsoft on 3k Computers (itsfoss.com)

We certainly weren’t on the same side in WW2

Linux is largely financed by American corporations. Without that, Linux wouldn't be anywhere near what it is today.

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.

Yes, because when they go to Media Market and FNAC they will only have macOS and Windows laptops to chose from.

Having Tuxedo, System76 and co is great, but what most people care about is what there are in regular consumer shops.

Linux adoption among consumer hardware has only been a success where it is invisible to the user, like the Linux kernel on Android or WebOS, firmware on DVD/BlueRay players,...

> how much nicer a (well supported, well put together) Linux distro is, compared to Windows

As someone who regularly uses both, and even in spite of the ad avalanche that (a bog-standard home install of) Windows has become: [X] to doubt. I regularly have issues on my corporate Linux laptop that I suspect wouldn't ever happen on Windows. Fleet management is easiest on Windows, with Active Directory, Group Policy, images, etc. Maybe package managers make software management easier on Linux, but fleet sysadmin is basically built-in on Windows.

Linux is superb for servers—I use Proxmox VE as the hypervisor on my homelab—but it still has a rather long way to go as a sharp-edge-free desktop OS, regardless of whether it is for home or corporate use.

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

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.

These things swing back and forth. Look up LiMux. Things don't just go in one direction.

> 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.

This is not about Linux.

They are replacing Office365.

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.

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.

SAP, Oracle, weird Office macros from decades ago …

the browser is definitely becoming more OS-like. that’s the Chromebook bet. but for proper office work you need good file management. if they’re not keen on trusting cloudy solutions by the big corps then FOSS on bare metal is the way to go.

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.

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?

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/

>but because of the different UI

Not a problem in the age of infinite redesign churn.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

The greater the dependence, the greater the risk.

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.

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.

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.