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A German state is ditching Windows and Microsoft Office for Linux and LibreOffice on the 30,000 PCs it uses for local government functions (www.theregister.com)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Schleswig-Holstein, Germany's most northern state, is starting its switch from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, and is planning to move from Windows to Linux on the 30,000 PCs it uses for local government functions.

Concerns over data security are also front and center in the Minister-President's statement, especially data that may make its way to other countries. Back in 2021, when the transition plans were first being drawn up, the hardware requirements for Windows 11 were also mentioned as a reason to move away from Microsoft.

Saunders noted that "the reasons for switching to Linux and LibreOffice are different today. Back when LiMux started, it was mostly seen as a way to save money. Now the focus is far more on data protection, privacy and security. Consider that the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) recently found that the European Commission's use of Microsoft 365 breaches data protection law for EU institutions and bodies."

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

I wonder what they will choose for their base. I was surprised LiMux was based off Debian since Suse is headquartered in Luxembourg City. I personally would welcome a large organization choosing Suse products as we need more competition for RHEL (which would be a huge boon in productivity since we won't need like 3 projects to spend a decent amount of time repackaging RHEL).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

According to an old interview, pretty much whatever: They're saying "five big distributions are suitable".

They're starting the switch with apps, not the OS. From a technical POV it'd be nice to see NixOS as it's devops / managed deployment heaven. It also happens to be European and, just like Debian, it's a community distro.

For a project of this size, doubly and triply if it gets even more states as users, it absolutely does make sense to have your own release channel, have a team working on nothing but pushing patches (security and otherwise) onto an LTS branch and upstream as well as integration testing for the precise desktop you're shipping to users: The states are paying them to support a desktop, not an OS to run whatever on.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Nix does have an interesting package manager.

The states are paying them to support a desktop, not an OS to run whatever on.

Don't they need money to fund both aspects? Is there any support to lean on someone goes with Nix?

A lot of governments in the US pretty much go through Microsoft for simplicity. There's a lot of software obtained from a single vendor. I suppose that's why rhel is so popular.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Dataport is big enough (5200 employees) to support that kind of thing themselves, and they precisely are the single vendor for the participating states (it's an inter-state public corporation). More than twice the employees Suse has, quarter the size of RedHat.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Good to know. I did not realize that this team was this large. I hope it works out.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Redhat and Debian are separate projects, tmk.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

I don't know if you understood my original post, it was too get an alternative to an enterprise distro with vendor paid support. In this regard the alternatives to Debian are more OpenSuse and Rocky, not RHEL (this is not a comparison of quality).

Yeah, the other alternative would be to set up a consultation company that is based around Debian. I guess that is what Dataport is supposed to be then, the support. It's s different route but still works.