According to a recent report, the Defence Ministry of India has decided to replace Windows with an in-house developed Linux distro called 'Maya' on all computers that are connected to the Internet. While details are very slim on this distro, we know that it is based on Ubuntu and has been developed locally within a...

Based on Ubuntu. Interface and functionality like Windows, users will not feel much difference. BRICS countries committed to their own Linux distributions. South Africa has been the exception.

    • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      wow - 2002ish - okay, that really went by me at the time, I was still running on Windows (2000) myself back then, maybe that’s why. Indeed - back then, it was a wholly different story about HW support. Thanks for the link!

      • Maharashtra@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        Noprob.

        From what I gather, there were similar projects in the past attempted by great many deal of bodies and organizations. Some were quite successful. For example,CERN used and supported CENTOS-based computers and allowed Windows machines but on the “you care of this crap on your own” basis.

        As far as I can tell, the most important challenges were:

        • hardware compatibility (it’s easy to bypass, but it isn’t cheap)
        • support (you can’t rely on “Google it” approach when serious business is involved, there absolutely has to be experienced technician team available on-site)
        • Linux/FOSS office applications are shit and pain in the ass to work with (unless the movement at large won’t acknowledge this problem, nothing will change - Linux won’t enter mainstream)
        • government and other official organizations force document filetypes and build official apps that won’t run good in Linux - funnily enough they won’t even work well on Windows machines all the time (this is really hard to bypass)
        • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          luckily the relevant points have been solved in the past 20 years

          • linux native hardware support is way better than windows for 99% of chipsets out there
          • libreoffice is very advanced and way better than ms office by now (although MS office has been enshittified ever since XP)

          In terms of support, however, competent Linux support on site is a lot more feasible than competent windows support. Most organisations nowadays hire braindead morons for IT support & IT management, and then use Microsoft cloud / Office 365 services, and for any ticket the dumb mtherfckers in house can’t solve, they open a ticket at microsoft. And if that isn’t addressed, the user is shit outta luck.

          I have seen the same dumb and stubborn idiots in corporate IT first level (and second level) support across most major organisations whose core business is not IT, because - especially engineering - CEOs tend to think “IT is just enabling our “actual” work, so let’s give the controllers authority to procure IT services from a contractor”.

          Oh, and yes, that’s a lot of frustration speaking from my choice of words :)

          • Maharashtra@lemmy.worldEnglish
            21·
            1 year ago

            I agree, but there’s one thing, that needs to be perceived from different perspective: Linux Office suites > ARE < awful.

            They look ugly. They overcomplicate certain, simple tasks. They aren’t as compatible with MS’ documents as they need to be. The only exceptions to it are WPS Office, but since it joined the dark side (ads(, it can no longer be suggested, and OnlyOffice - possibly one of the most recent entries to the list of possible MS’ Office alternatives.

            Yes, yes, I know “I can do in Libre everything MS packet can do, and more”.

            …but the problem is that it’s not you who will need to work with it. People in business need a tool that gets the job done, is well supported and doesn’t get in the way. Libre, unfortunately does - everyone who tried to apply an unorthodox page numbering to a document knows that it’s too complicated for non tech-savvy user.

            • darth_helmet@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              I haven’t worked somewhere that really requires a desktop office suite in like 15 years. Almost everyone seems to get by with browser based tools. The big exception being finance and their excel monstrosities.

                • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  1·
                  1 year ago

                  hardly anyone properly uses Excel capabilities though - I have seen way too many calculations using 5+ extra columns with provisional results used for the next formula, because people were incapable of opening a VBA editor and writing a custom formula to do what they need.

            • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              I am honestly surprised about the conclusions you came to. I use LibreOffice as my daily driver, and while it’s far from perfect, Microsoft Office is not even playing in the same league in terms of usability & stability. MS Office is an abomination of bloatware, and the ribbon kills all productivity. Not to mention load times, and sporadic multi-second hangs on a quick CTRL-S. Literally the only thing MS Office has that LibreOffice does not, is MS Access - and the only thing MS Office does better is VBA, and that’s probably more so for trademark / copyright reasons rather than LO not being able to implement the same thing.

              I work with “people in business”, and I see on a daily basis that most of them are unable to even memorize the simplest hotkeys / keyboard functions, such as shift + arrow keys to select, ctrl + arrow keys to jump words, wordstar (ctrl x,c,v) and so many others. I don’t think you will find many people who prefer MS Office and can work more efficiently on MS Office than an avid LibreOffice user on LO.

              The office suite directs the workflow of the user, and MS Office getting rid of the standard drop-down menus in 2007, guided all MS Office users down a road to insanity.

              • Maharashtra@lemmy.worldEnglish
                2·
                1 year ago

                Literally the only thing MS Office has that LibreOffice does not, is MS Access

                Not quite. 😉

                https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/office365-plans-and-pricing

                E3 plan is the norm in more complicated workspaces now. Exchange, Outlook, Teams, OneNote, Sharepoint are commonly used in such an environment, followed by Forms (HR department loves these and rightly so), Onedrive and PowerBI. Viva (formerly Yammer) makes waves now. Teams entered the market aggressively during Pandemics and it had evolved almost as fast as Android. It can now connect to great many deal of applications thus expanding the possible workflow and collaboration.

                The ribbon being the productivity killer you’re talking about is a non-existent issue, since typical office workers rarely venture further than the main set of icons + they have the most useful shortcuts pinned to the quick access toolbar.

                In every environment where people have been using both pieces of software (MS Office and Star/Open/Apache/Libre), the former was preferred for its ease of use.

                Again: Linux/FOSS movements tends to produce the mindset that is hard to convince that there’s something wrong about anything it does, while listening to people’s - common people, instead of experienced power users - complains, and following tested and appreciated standards should be preferred.

                • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  1·
                  1 year ago

                  Exchange, Outlook, Teams, OneNote, Sharepoint are commonly used in such an environment, followed by Forms (HR department loves these and rightly so), Onedrive and PowerBI

                  Having worked and working with many of these:

                  • Exchange is like poor man’s IMAP - it sucks in that it’s a closed ecosystem excluding non microsoft apps for emails
                  • Outlook is worse than Thunderbird by far
                  • Sharepoint is a clusterfuck of content management, especially(!) with in-website office document editing
                  • Onedrive is only deemed “useful” because it is forced on people to share files e.g. in Teams, and because it is integrated into many IT environments to store homefolders etc. In effect, it’s a giant piece of spyware were users store their data in “clouds” that secret services will happily tap into
                  • Teams is godawful in terms of UI - it’s decent conferencing, but so is matrix, with a much better chat interface / more flexibility for the user

                  FOSS office products have been far superior to what’s available on windows for at least a decade. There’s certainly occasionally one or the other app on windows that may shine in one aspect or two, but overall the bloatware user experience on windows is killing productivity of anyone who knows how to operate a keyboard.

                  • Maharashtra@lemmy.worldEnglish
                    11·
                    1 year ago

                    I’m sorry, dude, but now these are emotions talking through you, not actual valid points., especially since it’s obvious that your knowledge about MS dates back to 2010, I assume? It had evolved. Massively. So much it became hard to compete with, even if you take the “money vs free model” argument into consideration.

                    You didn’t like it, but the fact is that I am now sitting in a corpo office, part of a body spanning across countries and continents, where what you don’t like and think bad, works well enough that nobody complains. It’s very rich corpo. It can afford a legion of experienced Linux technicians and sysadmins, and yet it prefers to pay money, serious money for licences in subscription mode. Think about it for a moment - corpos squeeze money of everything. They are greedy, to the point that they wouldn’t spare a cent to save a dying man. And yet they prefer to pay for MS.

                    Once again: Linux/FOSS needs to start to listen to what users actually want. Scornful “this is better, use this” won’t do.

                    Until it changes, “20xx - the year of Linux”. 😉