Quokk.auAustria's Armed Forces Gets Rid of Microsoft Office (Mostly) for LibreOffice
news.itsfoss.com/austrian-forces-ditch-microsof…
The Austrian military didn’t just adopt LibreOffice; they actually contributed back to it. Over five person-years of development work went into adding features they needed. Those improvements are now available to everyone using LibreOffice, which is pretty cool.
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besseljAll the cool kids are using military-grade, open-source productivity tools now
Fun fact about military-grade.
It means jack shit. It’s a marketing buzz word, and should be illegal to use in commercial sense.
It generally means the cheapest option with the simplest possible operation that does the job well enough.
I’m fairly certain people are talking about like tank armor not underwear.
Same thing. It has to be barely thick enough to stop a predefined caliber weapon. And made of the cheapest possible material that still makes the armored vehicle mobile. Equipping armies is kind of expensive.
That’s compleat bullshit at least with the US army they overspend by millions and are constantly one upping every army on earth and either way a military tank is better than a civilian grade sedan.
they overspend by millions
Because everyone needs their cut.
either way a military tank is better than a civilian grade sedan.
Because they’re two different vehicles, not two different classes of product. If you compare military grade phones to civilian phones, the civilian would be better, and probably cheaper due to not having the buzzwords attached. And I bet a tank made by a private firm for non-government entities would in fact be better and cheaper than a military tank.
The Menemen!I assumed it meant that they just bribed the right politician/general?
M0oP0o
qevlarrLibreOffice is just as good nowadays
No, LibreOffice is way better nowadays.
And that is mainly thanks to MS Office having gotten way worse than before.
There is a long standing problem where LibreOffice becomes very slow when adding images.
That hasn’t been fixed, last I checked.
But thanks to MS Office now being slow all the time and also taking up way too much RAM, meaning that opening 4-5 Word+Excel documents on 8GB RAM means you are constantly using the page file (my exp. with Office 2015 back then), LibreOffice’s problem is not a big deal any more.
Your experience might not match what I am saying, because I am comparing MS Office on Windows vs LibreOffice on Linux.
Deleted by moderator
I am comparing a 10 year old version of Office on Windows 10 with a version of LibreOffice I used in the same week on that same computer on Linux.
My conclusion of “Office has gotten worse” comes from comparing the ability of MS Office 2015 on Win 10 on a Laptop with Core i7 6700H with 8GB DDR4 RAM vs MS Office 2007 on Windows 7 on a Core2Quad with 4GB DDR2 RAM (oh and an old SATA2 HDD here vs SATA3 7200RPM HDD on the laptop) and observing that they are able to open about the same amount of files before starting to hang.
In fact, at that time, I decided to use the old Desktop PC for that particular work, because it was working better in general and was more productive despite me having to keep it off the internet.
I am no longer making that comparison, because I don’t use MS Office on my PC any more.
But I can say this, if I were making that comparison of LibreOffice of that time with MS Office 2007 (which would actually be much older), then LibreOffice would have lost.
No one should have 8GB of RAM in their pc in 2025 either
And guess what saved my old 4GB DDR2 computer from becoming e-waste, making me still be able to use it when I want?
KDE Plasma. Yes, it works well on a system which I wouldn’t even dare try installing Windows 10.
Does it do any of the Microsoft 365 features like versioning, collaboration / multi-editing and such? This has been a game changer for many corporate environments that used to rely on file servers and usb drives. I feel LibreOffice might be stuck in a previous decade of office software without this.
Its great to have another 5 or 6 users! Good work Australia! LOL.
isn’t openoffice the better one or is the jury still out on that one?
i dunno, I just wordpad everything
RachelLibreOffice is based on OpenOffice but OpenOffice is basically abandoned with every few updates or improvements over a good handful of years now. LibreOffice is generally seen as the successor and I wouldn’t be surprised is OpenOffice just gets archived.
absconded
Are you sure this is the word you meant to use? Having trouble parsing the sentence. How does a piece of software “abscond”?
I meant to say abandoned, no clue why it autocorrected to that on my phone.
I think you have it backwards. LibreOffice is the better one. OpenOffice has not seen any real updates since 2015. ( The apache foundation that is technicality still maintaining openoffice themselves say that OpenOffice has too many open security issues)
I think openoffice might be better for compatibility with Microsoft format docx.
AnUnusualRelicNo, OpenOffice is dead in the water. Either use LibreOffice or, maybe, one of its forks.
The Austrian military didn’t just adopt LibreOffice; they actually contributed back to it. Over five person-years of development work went into adding features they needed. Those improvements are now available to everyone using LibreOffice, which is pretty cool.
The open source dream!
This is how public money should be spent. Every dollar spent on proprietary code is money wasted. Every dollar spent on public code benefits every other country, org, and individual who runs that software. It reduces the cost for everyone, in perpetuity, instead of enriching some sociopathic technofascist and their oligarch investors.
I wasn’t a big fan of GNU initiatives, and even less of ‘viral licenses’, until I encountered Public Money, Public Code. The more you think about it, the more fucked up it appears to you that governments pay for Windows/365/AWS licenses, using your tax money, because decision makers haven’t got the slightest clue about FLOSS, and if they do, they mostly don’t have the nutsack to implement the sweeping changes that would be necessary to migrate.
The MenemenI’ll never not be angry about the EU not developing their own OS/Distro, but using US software with backdoors. It is just insane. Yes, it probably would cost a few hundred millions extra, but a fighter jet also costs 100-130 million € and a safe OS is so extremly more important than a couple of extra fighter jets…
The EU does contribute to free software to some extent. But not enough.
At least 7% of Linux contributors are in Germany+France. An extra 2% from the UK. This is probably underestimated since the source has country info on only half of contributors. https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contributors?timeRange=past365days&start=2024-10-06&end=2025-10-06
The EU commission funded free software via NGI, and indirectly via NLnet. It’s a great initiative helping many small projects, but its future is incertain. https://nextgraph.org/eu-ngi-funding/
The EU does contribute to free software to some extent. But not enough.
At least 7% of Linux contributors are in Germany+France.
That’s not the EU contributing, that’s individual germans and french, on their own time or if lucky while employed by private companies. Not the EU [government].
That’s right, the commission probably isn’t involved on those cases. I interpreted “The EU” literally by including its various components, ie the EU commission, the member states governments, companies and individuals in those countries.
There’s no central “EU government” that decides everything. The EU is not a centralized country, not even a federation. Members states takes many decisions on their own, and often need to approve EU comission proposals.
I am not just talking about funding, but about investing in operating an alternative OS. All goverment institutions should be switched over. A single entity alone is not able to do this, because they face too many compatibility problems with other institutions/contractors/software companies (this is also why the article says “mostly”, even the military isn’t able to do it on its own, not even just for the office package, leave alone the OS). But if the EU decides to do this, everyone else will follow and start using compatible software.
You’re talking about a great number of organisations, with different decision makers. It takes time and political will to coordinate and execute this kind of big switch. This needs to happen to become independant from foreign monopolies, but I’m not surprised it hasn’t already happened.
The EU commission decides for some EU institutions. Member countries decide for their own institutions and military. Each country and military has its own labyrinth of bureaucracy with lengthy decision making, and large+complex IT infrastructures. All of this has inertia. And switching cost money, even if it’s possible to save on license cost on the long run.
Nah, they can give out directives and regulations to force the hand of local legislation. It happens all the time for many things. I personally have to deal with the fallout of one atm.
And I already said it costs money. And that is okay. National security costs money
The EU spends several hundred billions every year on its military. A safe OS is much more important than a couple more jets. Even if it costs 5 billion euros, screw it even if it is 5 billion every year, it is still cheap compared to what it brings.
Great news.
I want my boss to do this with GIMP. He’d save a lot of money. There’s even a guy living nearby who said he’d work for us to write plugins.
ZerushWell, Gimp is great, but still lacks some features for the professional user, eg a good RAW support, it can substitute PS if you also use Krita to fill the holes Gimp still has-
You’re right that Photoshop has features incorporated into it which GIMP doesn’t. It’s worth remembering though that although GIMP follows the unix philosophy of not trying to do everything it does do a lot to interoperate with other software. For example, if I want to open a RAW file directly from GIMP, it launches Rawtherapee or Darktable for me, which processes the file and then opens it in GIMP, much the same as an Adobe workflow but more visibly two separate programs working together. And of course there are G’MIC, Batcher and Resynthsizer but they do need to be installed manually as plugins, which is not ideal for newcomers.
I think a big game-changer for some users is going to be the upcoming release of ‘Link Layers’. You’ll be able to have a layer in your GIMP project which is linked to an external file. So for example you could have a layer in your GIMP project which you are editing Krita.
I’m sure a lot will depend on what you’re working on but in my workplace the only thing really holding us back from switching to GIMP is setting correct scaling and position for printing on rolls on Windows 11. If I could get my boss to switch to Linux (probably even more amibitious) we would be done with Adobe.
Curiosity apart, the intelligent object removing in PS is also based on the Resynthesize, which is a invention from GIMP. It it used now also by other editors, even in online versions, like eg.Lunapic, there called “Remove and inpaint” in the seleccion tool.
In Spain also a lot of administrations and companies use LibreOffice or OpenOffice, saving a lot of money by the way.
does anybody know why libreoffice and not only office?
user experience and ms office compatibilty is way better for onlyoffice at leas from my perspective.
Might be the licensing type.
Might also just be what was/is known at the time to the decision makers. I’m in the IT world and didn’t know/learn about ONLYOFFICE until this past year.
Drunk & Rootno microsoft but the military bases r alright ig cos words not paying them
マリウスWe shouldn’t be celebrating military forces, a branch of the government that is notoriously expensive for tax payers, to use FOSS without giving anything significant back in return.
I get where you’re coming from, but Military documents getting out of Microsoft’s(USA) reach is absolutely something positive
Check out @themurphy@lemmy.ml ‘s comment. They did contribute significantly. Also, y’know, it’s in the article and on the post itself…
They contributed code that they needed, that is not giving back. I am speaking about actual long-term maintenance and/or money, which isn’t mentioned anywhere.
See, the problem with these code contributions is that they are just that: One time effort. In most cases, this code will be handed over to the core maintainers, who will then have to deal with it for the rest of the project’s lifecycle. There are many documented instances in which FOSS projects are actually suffering because of contributions like this, as they are struggling to maintain the added features long term.
But all the people downvoting this care about is that a public money drain like the military writes some code and throws it into the faces of FOSS developers, even completely disregarding whether these improvements are actually relevant for the everyday user of the software. And again, by contributing I am referring to actually funding the project with significant amounts. We are speaking of a public entity that spends multiple millions on a single fighter jet.
So, whether this is a good or a bad thing hinges on the question of whether they are willing to maintain the code/features they have produced?
As it stands, their course of action, even if they are only contributing code for features they want to have, is “better than nothing,” I think?
Would it be significantly better if they didn’t contribute anything from the get-go? As it stands, I would stand on the side of “careful optimism” that they will maintain whatever they are building, but only time will tell…
As an Austrian, the fact that they are doing anything sensible at all within the digital world is astonishing to me.
get the fourth reich out of our open source software
nullptrlibre office is spyware
تحريرها كلها ممكنWhy are you posting this? Where in the source code is the spyware?
If you are right, a community fork without the spyware will be started before the end of the day.
text: “Where are proofy, Billy? We need proofy” where proofs is a slang for a proofy (Пруфы) in russian.spoiler
Abrinoxus
I keep wondering how they’d deal with things set up with M. Then I remember they don’t have the same hurdles I do where I’m trying to work with my work’s files in Calc…because they don’t have to worry about PowerQuery anymore.
Even with M in BI, you get to a point where you realise it’s so shit, once again Microsoft has left a product 70% complete, and you’re better off learning python in the long run.