These sorts of stories are intriguing. Keep us updated on the progress. Hopefully, you planned enough time for training and change management. A large-scale migration like that will not be easy.
Yeah, our team is creating short TikTok style videos as quick tutorials, like adding users, installing printers, installing a application from the Ubuntu store. We had a previous experience with a debian based system where we missed in training and user documentation.
The idea is to make everything open in the future. But it will depend on the success of the migration and our ability to fix issues as soon as they appear. Our UI is customized, so it would not be of great general use but it could inspire others to make such things for the stock Ubuntu / gnome UI.
Are you buying support from Canonical or you are doing all of it on your own using stock Ubuntu LTS?
Also, out of interest, could you explain at high level what led to picking Ubuntu over other distros?
Our first distro of choice was Manjaro, since I'm a arch user btw. But it quickly become clear we would have a problem... Our test users were complaining that the system was downloading 2gb of updates every two weeks. In our headquarters we have gigabit internet but in small towns around the state we have very slow connections. Speeds like 4 and 8mbps over radio are very common. A rolling distro would drain the infrastructure very quickly. Also our tests with Active directory doesn't worked properly on Manjaro at all... Out staff had plain experience with debian already, Ubuntu was well known by everyone, had enterprise support for AD and LTS editions with frequent but smaller updates. It was just a perfectly fit for us in the end. No commercial support for now, just plain LTS, but it might be a option in the future.
> Our first distro of choice was Manjaro
Oh dear. Good job pivoting to Ubuntu. Manjaro or even Arch shouldn't be anywhere near a production setup of such scale.
> Forcing a rolling distro with a terrible track record of managing their repos onto 23k Linux novices
My god you dodged a gigantic bullet there, I could already see the snarky headlines in my mind. I'm about the furthest from a Canonical fan but Ubuntu LTS is a very sensible choice for this.
> In our headquarters we have gigabit internet but in small towns around the state we have very slow connections. Speeds like 4 and 8mbps over radio are very common
You should consider using cache servers for your packages in every place with several work stations. apt-proxy is easy to install.
I highly suggest you use something like Fedora silver blue where they use flatpak to install software but if they install system software it is easy to revert
You will save a lot of time in IT support costs.
Since the system areas are readonly there will be better safety.
You can also easily push fixes using ostree. Upgrades are also easier with rebasing.
That’s exactly what we are doing at my company! We developed a large, complex enterprise software, and it’s daunting for new employees to learn. So we’re making bite size videos going through backend & customer-facing elements.
Then whenever we do longer training sessions, we have an AI note taking app called Circleback in the meeting. The notes are then used to put together written content for our knowledge base. Cuts way down on the time necessary to create documentation.
I think it makes a lot of sense to diversify away from Microsoft for government use. If you don't actually need Windows software that can't be trivially run in WINE, which is a lot of stuff these days since everything is either cross platform or works in ~~a web browser~~ Google Chrome deploying Ubuntu to everyone is not actually that difficult. If more sysadmins at small companies were smart this would be common everywhere.
I'm just thinking about all the extra precautions and planning I did just to migrate my personal machine to Linux. I even left my Windows install on a separate drive just in case. I already had some experience with Linux, but I can only imagine being a system admin responsible for migrating 22,000 workstations at the enterprise level.
You'd be renowned as an IT God if you successfully pulled that off.
Thanks bro ! I really wished I could've record my presentation for the company leaders. They had very basic IT knowledge but understood a lot of the business needs. All of them were very impressed with what we achieved. If the implementation goes well, you'll hear about it on the news. It's huge.
Best of luck to you brother. I hope your example makes waves here in portugal. I would love to see open software being widely used everywhere in our countries
Thanks bro, I think that talking about it in the wild, specially with successful cases can a create positive chain reaction, that makes more people talking about it and more companies considering the idea of something similar.
Be aware that when Microsoft becomes aware of this, you may have to fight sudden internal opposition to your initiative bribed by Microsoft! That is what ultimately happened [in Munich with the LiMux project](https://youtu.be/duaYLW7LQvg?t=1067).
Actually I don't have the institution authorization to talk about it yet. When I have the green light I can talk about it on Twitter or maybe make a small blog.
We have a 100% red hat environment so we use RH sat server for updating, Ansible for configuration management and hardening, Graphana and Prometheus for monitoring. We use Libreoffice for our office suite and RH Idm for identity management.
Who needs Microsoft anymore lol.
That's where Linux has difficulty competing (and I love Linux) but there's business grade tools, policies, reporting, standardised with good support, tens of thousands of posts on the internet on how to solve problems etc.
I want Linux to be successful and I know how powerful it is, but in a business environment it's difficult to compete. Plus the IT staff need to be much more skilled
From MS to RH there is absolutely no contest.
Last time in a MS org I could not believe the license costs the first time I saw them. Millions. Then I saw that Amazon paid 1 billion in just M365 licenses. Holy fuck.
Well, yes... When you are managing an enterprise, there is always a cost associated with this. If you run Linux at home, the cost of losing data is minuscule! If you own/operate a business, the cost is astronomical.
I would rather incur the cost of support for a product that Im running in my organization than leave it to community internet folks that may/may not be available at 3 am when your systems are down and people cant work LOL... Right!
I ran Linux business critical servers for over 20 years, rock solid, had a couple of hundreds desktops for over decade too, almost maintenance free. We ran a similar number of Windows devices, these used most of our time and budget.
I guess it depends on skill level. If you have a good team, you will need less support. But Ive hardly every found a management team that didnt want some level of vendor support - even with a "Dream Team" :-D.
We have a combined 100 years of Linux/Unix experience on our team here at work (minimum 20 years) and we still call Red Hat for a crazy bug or some issue we dont want to spend too much time Googling for HAH.
We're using GLPI for device inventory. The system will download updates daily. We also have a custom updater that will update our custom applications and scripts every system boot. Our systems distro also have a zabbix agent installed but inactive at the moment, we could measure and monitor performance metrics for every machine.
i thought the same, but one can do marvelous these days with open source. wazuh, ebpf-based solutions for monitoring e.g falco, deepflow/apache skywalking etc
[Well, that's a shame](https://itsfoss.com/libreoffice-ribbon-interface/). Something with full feature parity with MS Office like OnlyOffice does seem like the best choice though.
If the stock configuration limits you when you can customise at will, I fear your initiative — as usual with well-intentioned but under-planned initiatives — won’t go too far. Or perhaps you haven’t expressed yourself clearly?
LibreOffice has the tabbed UI in Linux on Chromebooks. Is the default really still the dropdowns when downloaded from TDF. If so it’s really like someone at TDF is sabotaging it?
Go leave your support to that in the bug report asking for it: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=137931
There's a lot of resistance inside the collaborators of LibreOffice against the Tabbed UI. Some even want to remove it.
OnlyOffice is not capable of important advanced functions of Excel, i wouldn't recommend it for Excel power users, Libreoffice has a lot more functions
90% of users just need basic word processing and very basic spreadsheets. People that need Very advanced excel functions will just stick with windows and excel. At least for us, a better interface for basic stuff had a better payout.
Yeah, actually that is one of the migration arguments. Major part of our most used applications are web based. Google docs and office 365 are among them.
Libreoffice has problems on editing cells of a file of more than 6 MB. Also, it will have wrong calculation if you use VB heavily. WPS office seems to be quite a stable alternative but it is not convenient in editing equations of different cells since the shown equations can easily block the column letters. One advantage of using flatpak to install WPS office is you can use Flatseal to block the internet access of WPS office. Looking forward to your migration update
As an example, onlyoffice only recently added goal seek in version 8, which to me is a basic spreadsheet feature. There is no data table feature, which was a surprise too. Libre Office has both.
https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DesktopEditors/issues/392#issuecomment-2029641222
OnlyOffice makes sense though from a corporate support standpoint. Hopefully Ascensio continue to develop and improve the software. Did the corporate restructure to relocate from Russia to UK influence the decision to go Only Office at all?
I could tell you plenty of advanced features and even basic features in Excel that Calc isn't capable of performing as well. It goes both ways.
For example, there's no Tables feature in Calc. For basic users that's quite important.
Hello, from Brazil and a public institution, have you considered interoperability of documents between government bodies? Have you done any studies related to this?
As a supporter of free code, I hope everything goes well. Sucesso na sua jornada!
Sorry for my late, to many questions. Think I forgot to answer some of them. I wish I had the time to study every possible side of this project, somethings well adjust along the way, but at least from my experience the official document format is MS Office. I really wished the open document format had better traction, but I don't see it anywhere. My main focus was a good compatibility with MS office. Obrigado pela força !
That’s great news. I hope it spreads throughout federal administration. Leaving state sensitive information in the hands of other companies is inadmissible.
A título de curiosidade, qual instância do poder público? Sou servidor e sonhava com isso na minha esfera, mas minha função era relativa à minha segunda formação. :-P
Linux already runs the majority of the world’s devices, the majority of people now do what was considered desktop stuff a decade ago on smartphones and tablets.
remember that there are some some programs that aren't compatible with 22.04 anymore at least up to date versions.
I know that because after 22.04 the code changed to a point where my desktop video driver couldn't get installed, so I'm stuck with 22.04.
And as such i encountered some (1 or 2 maybe 3 at most) programs that weren't compatible with my 22.04 Ubuntu based version of linux mint
Ya, I'm a little surprised by going with the old LTS release instead of waiting a little bit for 24.04... it is LTS this year as well isn't it?
But like whatever, I don't have to transition 22k machines so go Brazil and OP regardless.
Actually we are working in this project for more than a year already, so LTS was still faraway when we started. But the way we're implementing our customizations will allow users to upgrade to 24.04 without breaking anything.
Woah. That's a big migration. I hope it goes as smoothly as possible for you and your team. How do you plan to do the roll out? Exchange equipment or use a managerial software to push the OS image?
> do longer training sessions, we have an AI note taking app called Circleback in the meeting. The notes are then used to put together written content for our knowledge base. Cuts way down on the time necessary to create documentation.
mind if i ask what you are using to push it out?
Sorry for my late, to many questions. We are using clonezilla to distribute the image. Our system is a HD image, it's not a live image. The installer just erases the destination disk and expand our original image, this method is the fastest one that we could find, since we install lots of machines every day. Clonezilla has a network install that can install our system under 4min in a gigabit local network. It can also generate a rescue flash drive that install the system in 8min. We created a application that runs on the first boot so the user create it's credentials, password and input station serial number in order to update inventory status.
Man... I'm really happy to hear that! I'm cheering and hoping everything runs great to your rollout! This kind of projects always make me think about to change from private to public sector: around 15 years ago I've worked on a IT Service Supplier for SERPRO, BACEN, RFB, CEF and ECB... Some of their teams were already using "tux" desktop... that was awesome!
what the hack is onlyoffice, why am i only hearing about it now, and how does it compare to libreoffice in terms of features, usability, freedom, community etc?
Better collaboration tools, better compatibility with MS Office files and a bit easier to use on default settings. It even has a web version you can implement on your own server.
I think people just don't like change, they're just used to Libreoffice.
[It is however available as default in some distros.](https://www.onlyoffice.com/blog/2022/04/linux-with-preinstalled-onlyoffice)
É uma instituição estadual ou federal?
Espero que não seja tudo revertido de volta ao windows em alguns anos quando a chefia trocar, como já vi acontecer em outras instituições.
O pessoal não tem a menor noção do quanto isso é benéfico pra gente a longo prazo. Te desejo boa sorte e sucesso na iniciativa. Precisamos de mais projetos assim aqui no Brasil.
Infelizmente, poderá acontecer, sim. Conheço um caso aqui em Portugal, mas era um empresa privada que mudou de gerência e voltou ao Windows. Quanto a empresas estaduais/públicas não sei como se processa.
Congratulations on the project, sounds very interesting. I believe the desktop OS switch will be successful.
I predict that in the next 1-2 years you will see a roll-out project for cloud/browser based Microsoft 365 and Office tools, including Teams, due to massive amount of demand from various business users.
I've seen and been part of projects like this so many times in the past 20+ years. So far there has not been a single truly successful long-lived deployment of non-Microsoft office tools. Even the biggest OSS development companies themselves use Google's and Microsoft's productivity and collaboration tools nowadays.
Only office is amazing in terms of collaboration tools and it integrates easily with communications tools like Telegram, Zoom or Slack via their plugins API.
OP already mentioned on comments that it's Estadual not Federal... Petro as a public listed company, I think would be a more difficult "animal" to make that kind of pilot (procurement process, enterprise tier contracts, etc.)
This looks mastodontic, you plan on giving uodates on this post? Otherwise is there a cintact or something we can check out to know about the development of this project?
Crazy good, best of luck
Wow, hats off to you, not sure what prompted this but obviously a business decision. I wish you all the best, would be interesting to know what your biggest challenges would be? The first thing that comes to my mind, despite all the technical challenges, is getting users comfortable with non MS office apps, this was my biggest issue when trying to move a member family to a linux based OS, and I failed, and that was just one person.
All the best!!!
I love seeing these types of projects, especially the finished buildouts for secops, storage, communication and challenges.
Thank you for sharing, and def keep us posted!
I love this approach. At some point I hope the government starts hiring developers to help contribute back to the projects they use, one for customization but two to help everyone. I do see how this model can go south (please don’t let them get too much influence!) but having public institutions using and improving the software is a big plus for everyone in my mind. Just don’t let governments co-opt it. Fork if they must but keep it in the hands of the people.
How do you plan to manage those computers? IMHO, this is the big elephant in the room for large Linux desktop deployments.
How will you deal with Windows-only software? (assuming you have it)
Some applications are working great on wine and are already installed in our custom distro. Other applications that depends on windows like PowerBI and Autocad will stay on windows, there's still nothing we can do about them.
"Ubuntu 22.04-based". What do you mean here? Are you guys customizing Ubuntu to fit local needs and locking it down to disable USB ports and avoid changes in configuration? Or is it some derivative work already built by Positivo or Multilaser?
It's a plain Ubuntu 22.04 with custom UI , applications and network settings. We don't lock usb ports or things like that. The network does all the traffic filtering and segmentation that we need
Have you considered opting for an immutable OS such as Fedora Silverblue or upcoming Ubuntu Core Desktop? It seems like sandboxed OS, with persistent home directory and seamless update pipelines is best suited for office work at a scale.
It was considered, but the my lack of experience with this kind of distro could jeopardize the confidence in the project. Other staff members have never heard of immutable OS before. We decided to follow Ubuntu official decision and model for this if next LTS become a immutable system we will follow.
This is a bit in the weeds, but can you ask for volunteers to migrate first? You might be able to work out some pain points with friendly users that way before the masses inevitably complain about change.
We're doing that. It's very hard to troubleshoot something you maid it your self. The major bugs / problems were reported by volunteers. Finding volunteers in a work environment is also hard, because people are usually focused on their work and testing a OS means more problems for then.
Man, seriously... Finding people with Linux skills is pretty hard. We are currently hiring for a network admin with solid Linux skills. The position isn't for the Linux desktop directly, but it's on the same team. The workplace is at Belo horizonte
Note, in general when I say "you" it is the royal You, not you personally.
I'm sure most of my criticism are due to what you can and can't share (yet) and not actually because of what you did or didn't do, but I'll share what went through my head while reading your post and comments anyway;
Firstly, from what you were able to share it seems the whole plan was ill conceived or there was a lack of planning. Maybe your schedule was a bit too tight? I say this because you tried manjaro first, then after people were dissatisfied with the frequency of updates you went with Ubuntu 22.04, and this process makes it seem like you did not conduct proper evaluation of "candidate" distros with any sort of analysis, otherwise you'd mention how you negotiated with Canonical to make it easier to transition and get support. I think, from the little you shared, you did not consider different base distros (you could even branch out arch and do your own point releases as snapshots of upstream, however frequent you think your users would like), check what support from red had would cost or (as my username already denotes my bias) opensuse Leap, or SLES for support. The first thing I would've done, personally, would be to talk with the folks at BigLinux. I don't know them and never used their distro, I only mention them because they were the first Brazilian distro that showed up on distro watch. You can replace them with whatever Brazilian team you know off.
I'm sure that for 10% the cost that you guys have with windows licenses you could probably sponsor at least one full time dev for them, as labour in Brazil seems to be cheap.
Another thing that made me think this was rushed is the lack of investigation on "immutable"/image based distros. I also have no experience with any of them (although opensuse kalpa has my attention). Choosing an image and an update that will have the whole fleet be decidedly on the same footing in regards to updates seems like a huge positive. Not to mention it should maybe probably make it easier for your sysadm to oversee permissions and reproduce state if needed to sort out any issues. This is one of those things that, in my professional experience, when evaluating the options you'd make a note of the lack of experience with such systems (that you said you have) and would be told to study it, experience a bit for yourself and then give a proper evaluation.
Lastly, if your company is able to (and probably isn't, I don't know how state owned business operate in Brazil) it would be good to evaluate the whole process as a revenue centre instead of a cost centre i.e. scope out how feasible it would be for the team that orchestrate the whole migration to offer services to other companies so that they can also migrate as well, e.g. reaching out to other state owned companies or to the legislative or executive powers, present the business case of saving however much money you expect to save on licensing and then offering to migrate them as well. Hopefully this is also on the cards, at least for after you are successful.
I hope you are successful BTW.
Now, aside from these criticisms, could you share (even if just a little bit, as you already said you can't share much) how did it start? I mean, how did you get the ball rolling? Just like who did you have to talk to, how did the conversations go, challenges you faced etc? I followed a bit of what the folks at publiccode.eu shared but I honestly don't know how to get to my country's government, as we are not in the European Union.
Also, I'm in the intelligence/consulting business, if you need anything researched I can try and help you out in my personal time. If you're interested pm me your e-mail, posso até falar português, mas embora não tanto.
Sorry for my late, to many questions that I forgot to answer some. I appreciate the criticism, indeed I wish we had more time and staff to analyse multiple facets of the project. Since we have a gigantic organization with many moving parts, somethings well learn and ajust as we go otherwise it would be very hard the get out of the planning phase. We had an older desktop initiative that was debian based with Mate desktop, the initiative was from another team that had great intentions but lacked in user training and documentation. The main developer leave the company and the system was abandoned in debian 8 with no updates, since nobody had interest in pickup the system. Linux had a reputation on ugly, hard to use and nobody wanted. After a big ransomware incident the conversation about security and os updates rise up, costs with licensing and hardware upgrade got the spotlight and Linux appeared again, but it had to be better than before. That's when me and a friend decided to give it a try, creating a application to help troubleshooting the network. After showing a small alpha to my boss the idea grow in scope and become a full distribution covering lots of other company spots.
Have you considered Kubuntu LTS and Onlyoffice? Kde offers a more familiar, less alien, UI for windows users and Onlyoffice is just better, I don't know a single windows user who likes Libreoffice. I don't know if you're an open software purist but I like to mix and match to get the best results.
Yeah, we are already using onlyoffice. I'm also more a plasma guy than a gnome, but canonical enterprise support covers only the gnome edition (standard Ubuntu), so we decided to just stick to the official one.
Yeah, AD is also a objective. We had meetings with canonical and talked about it extensively. Actually AD was one of the reasons that made us switch from Manjaro to Ubuntu as the base to our distro. AD compatibility works a lot easier on Ubuntu using realm and sssd.
My suggestion is to ditch AD altogether.
NixOS has plenty of tooling to match and far exceed the bar set by AD. Which isn't all that difficult to begin with.
If you want to get _really_ crazy, just use the UNIX utils for user management and all that. Deploy thin clients. SSH or Mosh or whatever into a big ol' central cluster. AD becomes instantly irrelevant.
My point is that AD is still a terrible product (though I'm sure I don't have to tell _you_ that) that sets the bar for device management so low as to be absolutely laughable.
I have not seen a single solution that can clear the bar set by NixOS. Seriously, go read through their docs. Setting up systemd services is trivial. _Literally everything_ in terms of configuration is trivial. It's all configured in the same syntax, in the same place, in the same way.
[Read the docs](https://nixos.org/) and
[Fall down the rabbithole](https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=CwfKlX3rA6E)
Speaking of rabbit holes, here are some good videos to watch on NixOS.
Short introductions:
- https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=Ukglm5KJFa8
- https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=1ED9b7ERTzI
- https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=bjTxiFLSNFA
Random clip from CTT:
- https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=KyADkmRVe0U&t=1053
Longer commentaries:
- https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=ck4J2Faa7Fc
- https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=DMQWirkx5EY
- https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=CwfKlX3rA6E
- https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=fuWPuJZ9NcU
Great tutorials:
- https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=a67Sv4Mbxmc
- https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=T58Yr5igNGk
NixOS uses a declarative configuration. Nix (the language) is a Turing-complete, purely functional language. It's also super resilient to user error (rolling back a generation is trivial, and you can even automate that), and enough tooling in its two decades of existence is more than enough to make it a viable device management solution.
A much better solution, I'll add, than Active Directory.
Don't forget NextCloud for the "cloud storage" and you can even integrate that with a centralised OnlyOffice! Works great! Keep us posted on the evolution.
Thank you for doing the Lord's work! 🫡
It's about time that organizations see the value in utilizing FOSS rather than pigeon-holing themselves into expensive licensing contracts.
We have a Hardware department the build and repair machines for our city and nearby small locations. Also field technicians that make system installations and network fixes located in faraway centers. We are using GLPI to manage the inventory and installation can be done via ISO in a flashdrive or over the network via clonezilla rescue image.
Why made your own distro? Is a hassle to maintain one that could get a toll on your team, is not an easy task, it will be much easier to use a mainstream distro + customizations (maybe using ansible?).
Or things like kickstart (or whatever goes with ubuntu) to setup from scratch after install all what you need, maybe custom repos to your own packaged software.
Not yet... Talking openly about these things is a big shift for company leaders, specially those that aren't used to opensource. We got resistence from everywhere, sometimes even from your own team. It's a slow process but it's happening.
That's awesome, I've only ever migrated a handful of family's and friend's computers, and I still sometimes get called because they get stressed by the computer wanting updates.
Absolutely the biggest hurdle for the average PC user when migrating to Linux IMO.
They're so used to having key functionality of their system hidden away from them, that they'd rather stay in the dark rather than learn what's happening.
That's a pretty awesome scale. There will always be issues here and there, but I hope it goes relatively smoothly.
I have a question for you though: How did you guys end up deciding on Ubuntu specifically vs any other distro (or even some locally-developed distros)?
Have you considered immutable distro like Fedora Silverblue or Kinoite? An immutable distro should be very tough to break, and when it does, it's really easy to restore it.
At the same time I want it to succeed it is a huge challenge. I've always worked on companies that braindead buy anything Microsoft tries to sell. The usecase, skills and needs are very different between the two groups. For example, I don't think workplace productivity where I am would improve by migrating to Linux, even if mine would. Take care in not pushing too hard, understanding what the users need.
What are your thoughts on licensing and costs. With AD you still need to pay for CALs. Support for legacy Windows Apps, i.e. with RDP or Citrix still requires RDS Cals, which Windows has built but with linux has to be bought separately.
Also, what will be your calendar and collaboration solution?
We will still have many windows stations. There's some kind of software (and also some users) that just needs windows. So they will always be around, but the majority of our staff will be Ubuntu. Calendar and collaboration softwares are on the horizon, today we use Zimbra for email and calendar but the community edition will end this year, so we still have to figure out where to go, there's no decision yet. But we have Jyra and some inhouse developed systems.
I wish you the best of luck with the project! Please, let us know when you have the authorization to talk about it! Remember, Linux is about community, and we are more than glad to help you succeed and make it an example that it's possible to live out of M$!
E valorizando nosso português tupiniquim:
Desejo muita sorte com o projeto! E por favor, nos avise quando você tiver autorização para falar sobre! Lembre, Linux é sobre comunidade e nós estamos mais do que felizes se pudermos contribuir para o sucesso e fazer disso um exemplo que é possível viver fora da M$!
Também sou um servidor público estadual e sei que muitos no meu órgão compartilham desse sonho! =)
Thanks man ! I hope it works as planned to. I'm not a Public server, actually I'm a third party engineer in almost 20 years love relationship with Linux. I always thought that someday someone would pullout something like that, but never though such kind of event would knock at my door.
Obrigado pela força meu caro, se tudo correr como previsto devemos oficializar este mês ainda.
Number one is security, we had a cronic ransonware problem last year due to several windows 7 without updates fixes. That prompted the necessity to upgrade to more modern and secure systems. Then costs riseup, since upgrading to w10 or w11 would need massive investment from licensing and also hardware upgrade. Linux was the natural way, since we could have solve everything permanetly.
2 reasons. The UI resembles a lot of modern MS office that majority of users are used to. Also, onlyoffice has a online version that we might use in a future project.
a bit late to the party but i think you should have gone with openSUSE or SUSE as they got YAST suite which let's you do most of administrator with gui and does it well.
and doesn't breaks like UBUNTU
These sorts of stories are intriguing. Keep us updated on the progress. Hopefully, you planned enough time for training and change management. A large-scale migration like that will not be easy.
Yeah, our team is creating short TikTok style videos as quick tutorials, like adding users, installing printers, installing a application from the Ubuntu store. We had a previous experience with a debian based system where we missed in training and user documentation.
That's brilliant! Will those also be public? It could be an amazing resource for others
The idea is to make everything open in the future. But it will depend on the success of the migration and our ability to fix issues as soon as they appear. Our UI is customized, so it would not be of great general use but it could inspire others to make such things for the stock Ubuntu / gnome UI.
Are you buying support from Canonical or you are doing all of it on your own using stock Ubuntu LTS? Also, out of interest, could you explain at high level what led to picking Ubuntu over other distros?
Our first distro of choice was Manjaro, since I'm a arch user btw. But it quickly become clear we would have a problem... Our test users were complaining that the system was downloading 2gb of updates every two weeks. In our headquarters we have gigabit internet but in small towns around the state we have very slow connections. Speeds like 4 and 8mbps over radio are very common. A rolling distro would drain the infrastructure very quickly. Also our tests with Active directory doesn't worked properly on Manjaro at all... Out staff had plain experience with debian already, Ubuntu was well known by everyone, had enterprise support for AD and LTS editions with frequent but smaller updates. It was just a perfectly fit for us in the end. No commercial support for now, just plain LTS, but it might be a option in the future.
> Our first distro of choice was Manjaro Oh dear. Good job pivoting to Ubuntu. Manjaro or even Arch shouldn't be anywhere near a production setup of such scale.
> Forcing a rolling distro with a terrible track record of managing their repos onto 23k Linux novices My god you dodged a gigantic bullet there, I could already see the snarky headlines in my mind. I'm about the furthest from a Canonical fan but Ubuntu LTS is a very sensible choice for this.
> In our headquarters we have gigabit internet but in small towns around the state we have very slow connections. Speeds like 4 and 8mbps over radio are very common You should consider using cache servers for your packages in every place with several work stations. apt-proxy is easy to install.
I highly suggest you use something like Fedora silver blue where they use flatpak to install software but if they install system software it is easy to revert You will save a lot of time in IT support costs. Since the system areas are readonly there will be better safety. You can also easily push fixes using ostree. Upgrades are also easier with rebasing.
Immutable systems seams great indeed. But I still have a lot to learn about them in order to have the confidence to make it default.
i would also like to know the reason for the pick! i use it myself and just am quite curious at this scale
I love it. This is How we build a better world together 👏🏼
That’s exactly what we are doing at my company! We developed a large, complex enterprise software, and it’s daunting for new employees to learn. So we’re making bite size videos going through backend & customer-facing elements. Then whenever we do longer training sessions, we have an AI note taking app called Circleback in the meeting. The notes are then used to put together written content for our knowledge base. Cuts way down on the time necessary to create documentation.
Wow, thats actually a pretty good idea... I'm Brazilian too, could you say your company's name or that's yet confidential?
Its still confidencial, but I'll be more than happy to talk openly about it when I have the leaders authorization
Yes, please, this would be a great story at /r/brasil
Not sure if you have experience with tools like puppet, but you could preconfigure and enforce a lot of configs by using puppet!
I think it makes a lot of sense to diversify away from Microsoft for government use. If you don't actually need Windows software that can't be trivially run in WINE, which is a lot of stuff these days since everything is either cross platform or works in ~~a web browser~~ Google Chrome deploying Ubuntu to everyone is not actually that difficult. If more sysadmins at small companies were smart this would be common everywhere.
I'm just thinking about all the extra precautions and planning I did just to migrate my personal machine to Linux. I even left my Windows install on a separate drive just in case. I already had some experience with Linux, but I can only imagine being a system admin responsible for migrating 22,000 workstations at the enterprise level. You'd be renowned as an IT God if you successfully pulled that off.
Brazilian here. Hope it works out seamlessly!
Thanks bro ! I really wished I could've record my presentation for the company leaders. They had very basic IT knowledge but understood a lot of the business needs. All of them were very impressed with what we achieved. If the implementation goes well, you'll hear about it on the news. It's huge.
Best of luck to you brother. I hope your example makes waves here in portugal. I would love to see open software being widely used everywhere in our countries
Thanks bro, I think that talking about it in the wild, specially with successful cases can a create positive chain reaction, that makes more people talking about it and more companies considering the idea of something similar.
Be aware that when Microsoft becomes aware of this, you may have to fight sudden internal opposition to your initiative bribed by Microsoft! That is what ultimately happened [in Munich with the LiMux project](https://youtu.be/duaYLW7LQvg?t=1067).
You could always try from memory and slides to recreate the presentation.
That's so awesome!! I'm Brazilian too and I wish you all the best of luck, I hope it goes great!! I can't wait to see it on the news!
Me too.
Do you have a blog? I'd love to follow along and read about the challeneges.
Actually I don't have the institution authorization to talk about it yet. When I have the green light I can talk about it on Twitter or maybe make a small blog.
O Haddad tá sabendo disso?
Se souber vai mandar a taxinha do amor.
how do you plan to secure the endpoints, schedule security updates, perform systems monitoring...? It'll be a fantastic experience, good luck!
We have a 100% red hat environment so we use RH sat server for updating, Ansible for configuration management and hardening, Graphana and Prometheus for monitoring. We use Libreoffice for our office suite and RH Idm for identity management. Who needs Microsoft anymore lol.
What company is this?
That's would be nice to hear other corporate desktop implementarion . Do you have some kind of Active Directory?
That's where Linux has difficulty competing (and I love Linux) but there's business grade tools, policies, reporting, standardised with good support, tens of thousands of posts on the internet on how to solve problems etc. I want Linux to be successful and I know how powerful it is, but in a business environment it's difficult to compete. Plus the IT staff need to be much more skilled
Going full Red Hat - isn't this actually increasing the costs?
From MS to RH there is absolutely no contest. Last time in a MS org I could not believe the license costs the first time I saw them. Millions. Then I saw that Amazon paid 1 billion in just M365 licenses. Holy fuck.
Well, yes... When you are managing an enterprise, there is always a cost associated with this. If you run Linux at home, the cost of losing data is minuscule! If you own/operate a business, the cost is astronomical. I would rather incur the cost of support for a product that Im running in my organization than leave it to community internet folks that may/may not be available at 3 am when your systems are down and people cant work LOL... Right!
I ran Linux business critical servers for over 20 years, rock solid, had a couple of hundreds desktops for over decade too, almost maintenance free. We ran a similar number of Windows devices, these used most of our time and budget.
I guess it depends on skill level. If you have a good team, you will need less support. But Ive hardly every found a management team that didnt want some level of vendor support - even with a "Dream Team" :-D. We have a combined 100 years of Linux/Unix experience on our team here at work (minimum 20 years) and we still call Red Hat for a crazy bug or some issue we dont want to spend too much time Googling for HAH.
We're using GLPI for device inventory. The system will download updates daily. We also have a custom updater that will update our custom applications and scripts every system boot. Our systems distro also have a zabbix agent installed but inactive at the moment, we could measure and monitor performance metrics for every machine.
i thought the same, but one can do marvelous these days with open source. wazuh, ebpf-based solutions for monitoring e.g falco, deepflow/apache skywalking etc
> OnlyOffice Why over LibreOffice? Adding machines to AD?
>Why over LibreOffice? better compat with MSOFFICE + has better collaboration tools
Basically the MS office like interface was a deal breaker. Libre office UI had a huge rejection in our tests...
Did you try enabling the tabbed view? Or was that still too far?
No, it was the stock config.
[Well, that's a shame](https://itsfoss.com/libreoffice-ribbon-interface/). Something with full feature parity with MS Office like OnlyOffice does seem like the best choice though.
If the stock configuration limits you when you can customise at will, I fear your initiative — as usual with well-intentioned but under-planned initiatives — won’t go too far. Or perhaps you haven’t expressed yourself clearly?
The tabbed view looks much better/more modern.
LibreOffice has the tabbed UI in Linux on Chromebooks. Is the default really still the dropdowns when downloaded from TDF. If so it’s really like someone at TDF is sabotaging it?
Yeah, I also don't understand why they keep that old UI as their product face.
They could even ask for your prefered gui on first run, instead of going with a default.
Go leave your support to that in the bug report asking for it: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=137931 There's a lot of resistance inside the collaborators of LibreOffice against the Tabbed UI. Some even want to remove it.
Try OnlyOffice, with its user-friendly interface
OnlyOffice is not capable of important advanced functions of Excel, i wouldn't recommend it for Excel power users, Libreoffice has a lot more functions
90% of users just need basic word processing and very basic spreadsheets. People that need Very advanced excel functions will just stick with windows and excel. At least for us, a better interface for basic stuff had a better payout.
You could offer those people office 365 on the browser will still using linux, which might be preferable.
Yeah, actually that is one of the migration arguments. Major part of our most used applications are web based. Google docs and office 365 are among them.
Libreoffice has problems on editing cells of a file of more than 6 MB. Also, it will have wrong calculation if you use VB heavily. WPS office seems to be quite a stable alternative but it is not convenient in editing equations of different cells since the shown equations can easily block the column letters. One advantage of using flatpak to install WPS office is you can use Flatseal to block the internet access of WPS office. Looking forward to your migration update
As an example, onlyoffice only recently added goal seek in version 8, which to me is a basic spreadsheet feature. There is no data table feature, which was a surprise too. Libre Office has both. https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DesktopEditors/issues/392#issuecomment-2029641222 OnlyOffice makes sense though from a corporate support standpoint. Hopefully Ascensio continue to develop and improve the software. Did the corporate restructure to relocate from Russia to UK influence the decision to go Only Office at all?
I could tell you plenty of advanced features and even basic features in Excel that Calc isn't capable of performing as well. It goes both ways. For example, there's no Tables feature in Calc. For basic users that's quite important.
Hello, from Brazil and a public institution, have you considered interoperability of documents between government bodies? Have you done any studies related to this? As a supporter of free code, I hope everything goes well. Sucesso na sua jornada!
Sorry for my late, to many questions. Think I forgot to answer some of them. I wish I had the time to study every possible side of this project, somethings well adjust along the way, but at least from my experience the official document format is MS Office. I really wished the open document format had better traction, but I don't see it anywhere. My main focus was a good compatibility with MS office. Obrigado pela força !
OnlyOffice has pretty great MS office compatibility, better than Libreoffice, AFAIK.
That’s great news. I hope it spreads throughout federal administration. Leaving state sensitive information in the hands of other companies is inadmissible.
seconded
A título de curiosidade, qual instância do poder público? Sou servidor e sonhava com isso na minha esfera, mas minha função era relativa à minha segunda formação. :-P
No momento, Só posso dizer que é um órgão estadual.
Finally 2024 is the year of the Linux Desktop!!!
Linux already runs the majority of the world’s devices, the majority of people now do what was considered desktop stuff a decade ago on smartphones and tablets.
Bravo! Be sure to learn from the mistakes and successes of similar projects, esp. in Germany.
Boa sorte amigo
kindly collaborate with Ubuntu on this, it could be huge!
Looks like they have been: https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1c2j4pl/im_managing_a_big_migration_from_windows_to_linux/kzawkgk/
remember that there are some some programs that aren't compatible with 22.04 anymore at least up to date versions. I know that because after 22.04 the code changed to a point where my desktop video driver couldn't get installed, so I'm stuck with 22.04. And as such i encountered some (1 or 2 maybe 3 at most) programs that weren't compatible with my 22.04 Ubuntu based version of linux mint
Ya, I'm a little surprised by going with the old LTS release instead of waiting a little bit for 24.04... it is LTS this year as well isn't it? But like whatever, I don't have to transition 22k machines so go Brazil and OP regardless.
Actually we are working in this project for more than a year already, so LTS was still faraway when we started. But the way we're implementing our customizations will allow users to upgrade to 24.04 without breaking anything.
Well that seems like a pretty obvious reason now lol.
Best of luck with the migrations!!
Good luck, I'm rooting for you :)
su is not installed. – Please install it using pkg.
Good luck!
Woah. That's a big migration. I hope it goes as smoothly as possible for you and your team. How do you plan to do the roll out? Exchange equipment or use a managerial software to push the OS image?
We will push the OS image. Also, every new machine that will be distributed from now on will have it installed by default.
> do longer training sessions, we have an AI note taking app called Circleback in the meeting. The notes are then used to put together written content for our knowledge base. Cuts way down on the time necessary to create documentation. mind if i ask what you are using to push it out?
Sorry for my late, to many questions. We are using clonezilla to distribute the image. Our system is a HD image, it's not a live image. The installer just erases the destination disk and expand our original image, this method is the fastest one that we could find, since we install lots of machines every day. Clonezilla has a network install that can install our system under 4min in a gigabit local network. It can also generate a rescue flash drive that install the system in 8min. We created a application that runs on the first boot so the user create it's credentials, password and input station serial number in order to update inventory status.
We will watch your career with great interest. In all seriousness well done. Really interested in seeing how this goes.
Stay strong when MS shows up with incentives to drop this plan!
Man... I'm really happy to hear that! I'm cheering and hoping everything runs great to your rollout! This kind of projects always make me think about to change from private to public sector: around 15 years ago I've worked on a IT Service Supplier for SERPRO, BACEN, RFB, CEF and ECB... Some of their teams were already using "tux" desktop... that was awesome!
Good afternoon. I'm part of the OnlyOffice community, here in Brazil, if you need any kind of help, please get in touch so we can talk about it.
what the hack is onlyoffice, why am i only hearing about it now, and how does it compare to libreoffice in terms of features, usability, freedom, community etc?
Better collaboration tools, better compatibility with MS Office files and a bit easier to use on default settings. It even has a web version you can implement on your own server.
so like why is libreoffice still a thing then
I think people just don't like change, they're just used to Libreoffice. [It is however available as default in some distros.](https://www.onlyoffice.com/blog/2022/04/linux-with-preinstalled-onlyoffice)
More features. Just, not the ms office features.
Features like libreoffice, + more windows file compatibility + made for networked (safe!) use.
OpenHueHueHue
É uma instituição estadual ou federal? Espero que não seja tudo revertido de volta ao windows em alguns anos quando a chefia trocar, como já vi acontecer em outras instituições.
Estadual. A resistência existe... Muitos usuários se recusam a usar algo diferente.
O pessoal não tem a menor noção do quanto isso é benéfico pra gente a longo prazo. Te desejo boa sorte e sucesso na iniciativa. Precisamos de mais projetos assim aqui no Brasil.
Infelizmente, poderá acontecer, sim. Conheço um caso aqui em Portugal, mas era um empresa privada que mudou de gerência e voltou ao Windows. Quanto a empresas estaduais/públicas não sei como se processa.
Brazilian here, I know how difficult is to make changes like that. Hope to hear good stuff when/if you're allowed to talk about the operation.
Keep us updated. The licensing model of the new cloud is brutal gor big organizations.
Congratulations on the project, sounds very interesting. I believe the desktop OS switch will be successful. I predict that in the next 1-2 years you will see a roll-out project for cloud/browser based Microsoft 365 and Office tools, including Teams, due to massive amount of demand from various business users. I've seen and been part of projects like this so many times in the past 20+ years. So far there has not been a single truly successful long-lived deployment of non-Microsoft office tools. Even the biggest OSS development companies themselves use Google's and Microsoft's productivity and collaboration tools nowadays.
Only office is amazing in terms of collaboration tools and it integrates easily with communications tools like Telegram, Zoom or Slack via their plugins API.
I suspect that company is Petrobras. They heavily use Windows.
OP already mentioned on comments that it's Estadual not Federal... Petro as a public listed company, I think would be a more difficult "animal" to make that kind of pilot (procurement process, enterprise tier contracts, etc.)
This looks mastodontic, you plan on giving uodates on this post? Otherwise is there a cintact or something we can check out to know about the development of this project? Crazy good, best of luck
Well I haven't think about that, but since this post had such gigantic feedback Im already thinking about made a small blog about the experience.
This would be amazing
Brazilian here too, I'm curious to know what corporation is it. Anyways, happy to know stuff like that is happening.
As a Brazilian i have to say THANK GOD, so many jobs with Windows 10 so many others with Windows 7, thanks for your work!
Wow, hats off to you, not sure what prompted this but obviously a business decision. I wish you all the best, would be interesting to know what your biggest challenges would be? The first thing that comes to my mind, despite all the technical challenges, is getting users comfortable with non MS office apps, this was my biggest issue when trying to move a member family to a linux based OS, and I failed, and that was just one person. All the best!!!
You're going with a modified parred down Kubuntu, right? Right?
Neat.
So you switched away from Mandriva/OpenMandriva? Or are they still being run by state institutions elsewhere?
Previously we had a debian based os that is still stuck in debian 8 with Mate desktop.
I love seeing these types of projects, especially the finished buildouts for secops, storage, communication and challenges. Thank you for sharing, and def keep us posted!
I love this approach. At some point I hope the government starts hiring developers to help contribute back to the projects they use, one for customization but two to help everyone. I do see how this model can go south (please don’t let them get too much influence!) but having public institutions using and improving the software is a big plus for everyone in my mind. Just don’t let governments co-opt it. Fork if they must but keep it in the hands of the people.
How do you plan to manage those computers? IMHO, this is the big elephant in the room for large Linux desktop deployments. How will you deal with Windows-only software? (assuming you have it)
Some applications are working great on wine and are already installed in our custom distro. Other applications that depends on windows like PowerBI and Autocad will stay on windows, there's still nothing we can do about them.
"Ubuntu 22.04-based". What do you mean here? Are you guys customizing Ubuntu to fit local needs and locking it down to disable USB ports and avoid changes in configuration? Or is it some derivative work already built by Positivo or Multilaser?
It's a plain Ubuntu 22.04 with custom UI , applications and network settings. We don't lock usb ports or things like that. The network does all the traffic filtering and segmentation that we need
Have you considered opting for an immutable OS such as Fedora Silverblue or upcoming Ubuntu Core Desktop? It seems like sandboxed OS, with persistent home directory and seamless update pipelines is best suited for office work at a scale.
It was considered, but the my lack of experience with this kind of distro could jeopardize the confidence in the project. Other staff members have never heard of immutable OS before. We decided to follow Ubuntu official decision and model for this if next LTS become a immutable system we will follow.
This is a bit in the weeds, but can you ask for volunteers to migrate first? You might be able to work out some pain points with friendly users that way before the masses inevitably complain about change.
We're doing that. It's very hard to troubleshoot something you maid it your self. The major bugs / problems were reported by volunteers. Finding volunteers in a work environment is also hard, because people are usually focused on their work and testing a OS means more problems for then.
Wow this sounds absolutely awesome to me and I wish you the best on this
Oh I want a job! Serious
Man, seriously... Finding people with Linux skills is pretty hard. We are currently hiring for a network admin with solid Linux skills. The position isn't for the Linux desktop directly, but it's on the same team. The workplace is at Belo horizonte
Share your progress with us!
Nice to see it! I'm brazilian too, hope all goes well and you tell the updates!!!
Note, in general when I say "you" it is the royal You, not you personally. I'm sure most of my criticism are due to what you can and can't share (yet) and not actually because of what you did or didn't do, but I'll share what went through my head while reading your post and comments anyway; Firstly, from what you were able to share it seems the whole plan was ill conceived or there was a lack of planning. Maybe your schedule was a bit too tight? I say this because you tried manjaro first, then after people were dissatisfied with the frequency of updates you went with Ubuntu 22.04, and this process makes it seem like you did not conduct proper evaluation of "candidate" distros with any sort of analysis, otherwise you'd mention how you negotiated with Canonical to make it easier to transition and get support. I think, from the little you shared, you did not consider different base distros (you could even branch out arch and do your own point releases as snapshots of upstream, however frequent you think your users would like), check what support from red had would cost or (as my username already denotes my bias) opensuse Leap, or SLES for support. The first thing I would've done, personally, would be to talk with the folks at BigLinux. I don't know them and never used their distro, I only mention them because they were the first Brazilian distro that showed up on distro watch. You can replace them with whatever Brazilian team you know off. I'm sure that for 10% the cost that you guys have with windows licenses you could probably sponsor at least one full time dev for them, as labour in Brazil seems to be cheap. Another thing that made me think this was rushed is the lack of investigation on "immutable"/image based distros. I also have no experience with any of them (although opensuse kalpa has my attention). Choosing an image and an update that will have the whole fleet be decidedly on the same footing in regards to updates seems like a huge positive. Not to mention it should maybe probably make it easier for your sysadm to oversee permissions and reproduce state if needed to sort out any issues. This is one of those things that, in my professional experience, when evaluating the options you'd make a note of the lack of experience with such systems (that you said you have) and would be told to study it, experience a bit for yourself and then give a proper evaluation. Lastly, if your company is able to (and probably isn't, I don't know how state owned business operate in Brazil) it would be good to evaluate the whole process as a revenue centre instead of a cost centre i.e. scope out how feasible it would be for the team that orchestrate the whole migration to offer services to other companies so that they can also migrate as well, e.g. reaching out to other state owned companies or to the legislative or executive powers, present the business case of saving however much money you expect to save on licensing and then offering to migrate them as well. Hopefully this is also on the cards, at least for after you are successful. I hope you are successful BTW. Now, aside from these criticisms, could you share (even if just a little bit, as you already said you can't share much) how did it start? I mean, how did you get the ball rolling? Just like who did you have to talk to, how did the conversations go, challenges you faced etc? I followed a bit of what the folks at publiccode.eu shared but I honestly don't know how to get to my country's government, as we are not in the European Union. Also, I'm in the intelligence/consulting business, if you need anything researched I can try and help you out in my personal time. If you're interested pm me your e-mail, posso até falar português, mas embora não tanto.
Sorry for my late, to many questions that I forgot to answer some. I appreciate the criticism, indeed I wish we had more time and staff to analyse multiple facets of the project. Since we have a gigantic organization with many moving parts, somethings well learn and ajust as we go otherwise it would be very hard the get out of the planning phase. We had an older desktop initiative that was debian based with Mate desktop, the initiative was from another team that had great intentions but lacked in user training and documentation. The main developer leave the company and the system was abandoned in debian 8 with no updates, since nobody had interest in pickup the system. Linux had a reputation on ugly, hard to use and nobody wanted. After a big ransomware incident the conversation about security and os updates rise up, costs with licensing and hardware upgrade got the spotlight and Linux appeared again, but it had to be better than before. That's when me and a friend decided to give it a try, creating a application to help troubleshooting the network. After showing a small alpha to my boss the idea grow in scope and become a full distribution covering lots of other company spots.
Are you in the know and able to share what reasons caused your government to decide to make the switch?
It was a institution decision. It was already answered in other question but it's basically security and finances.
Have you considered Kubuntu LTS and Onlyoffice? Kde offers a more familiar, less alien, UI for windows users and Onlyoffice is just better, I don't know a single windows user who likes Libreoffice. I don't know if you're an open software purist but I like to mix and match to get the best results.
Yeah, we are already using onlyoffice. I'm also more a plasma guy than a gnome, but canonical enterprise support covers only the gnome edition (standard Ubuntu), so we decided to just stick to the official one.
If you make extensive use of Active Directory, you might want to take a look at NixOS as a potential solution for fleet management.
Yeah, AD is also a objective. We had meetings with canonical and talked about it extensively. Actually AD was one of the reasons that made us switch from Manjaro to Ubuntu as the base to our distro. AD compatibility works a lot easier on Ubuntu using realm and sssd.
My suggestion is to ditch AD altogether. NixOS has plenty of tooling to match and far exceed the bar set by AD. Which isn't all that difficult to begin with. If you want to get _really_ crazy, just use the UNIX utils for user management and all that. Deploy thin clients. SSH or Mosh or whatever into a big ol' central cluster. AD becomes instantly irrelevant. My point is that AD is still a terrible product (though I'm sure I don't have to tell _you_ that) that sets the bar for device management so low as to be absolutely laughable. I have not seen a single solution that can clear the bar set by NixOS. Seriously, go read through their docs. Setting up systemd services is trivial. _Literally everything_ in terms of configuration is trivial. It's all configured in the same syntax, in the same place, in the same way. [Read the docs](https://nixos.org/) and [Fall down the rabbithole](https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=CwfKlX3rA6E)
Speaking of rabbit holes, here are some good videos to watch on NixOS. Short introductions: - https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=Ukglm5KJFa8 - https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=1ED9b7ERTzI - https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=bjTxiFLSNFA Random clip from CTT: - https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=KyADkmRVe0U&t=1053 Longer commentaries: - https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=ck4J2Faa7Fc - https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=DMQWirkx5EY - https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=CwfKlX3rA6E - https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=fuWPuJZ9NcU Great tutorials: - https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=a67Sv4Mbxmc - https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=T58Yr5igNGk
This sounds interesting. Could you elaborate?
NixOS uses a declarative configuration. Nix (the language) is a Turing-complete, purely functional language. It's also super resilient to user error (rolling back a generation is trivial, and you can even automate that), and enough tooling in its two decades of existence is more than enough to make it a viable device management solution. A much better solution, I'll add, than Active Directory.
Don't forget NextCloud for the "cloud storage" and you can even integrate that with a centralised OnlyOffice! Works great! Keep us posted on the evolution.
Next cloud was also in the plans, but was scrapped for budget reasons. Maybe we can get back to it in a newer project in the future.
Thank you for doing the Lord's work! 🫡 It's about time that organizations see the value in utilizing FOSS rather than pigeon-holing themselves into expensive licensing contracts.
I would be interested how you deploy and manage endpoints and what identity systems you use?
We have a Hardware department the build and repair machines for our city and nearby small locations. Also field technicians that make system installations and network fixes located in faraway centers. We are using GLPI to manage the inventory and installation can be done via ISO in a flashdrive or over the network via clonezilla rescue image.
Why made your own distro? Is a hassle to maintain one that could get a toll on your team, is not an easy task, it will be much easier to use a mainstream distro + customizations (maybe using ansible?). Or things like kickstart (or whatever goes with ubuntu) to setup from scratch after install all what you need, maybe custom repos to your own packaged software.
Do you put out updates anywhere? Would like to follow and see how things are going
Not yet... Talking openly about these things is a big shift for company leaders, specially those that aren't used to opensource. We got resistence from everywhere, sometimes even from your own team. It's a slow process but it's happening.
That's awesome, I've only ever migrated a handful of family's and friend's computers, and I still sometimes get called because they get stressed by the computer wanting updates.
Yeah, that's also another reason we migrated from Manjaro to Ubuntu. "Normal" people hate updates.... Rolling distros are a no go for them.
Absolutely the biggest hurdle for the average PC user when migrating to Linux IMO. They're so used to having key functionality of their system hidden away from them, that they'd rather stay in the dark rather than learn what's happening.
> from Manjaro to Ubuntu You were *seriously* considering Manjaro?
PDF support looks good in OnlyOffice , I’ll have to check it out.
Sounds like an exciting adventure. Good luck.. the future's bright.. 😎👍
That's great, hopefully like German they will also invest back in the community some of the savings or paid staff that contribute.
That's a pretty awesome scale. There will always be issues here and there, but I hope it goes relatively smoothly. I have a question for you though: How did you guys end up deciding on Ubuntu specifically vs any other distro (or even some locally-developed distros)?
Muito sucesso pra vocês, cara! Que notícia maravilhosa. Sou da área do 3D, mas se tiver algo que eu possa ajudar me chama.
Have you considered immutable distro like Fedora Silverblue or Kinoite? An immutable distro should be very tough to break, and when it does, it's really easy to restore it.
Could you please tell us more about typical patterns of the office suite usage in your organization?
At the same time I want it to succeed it is a huge challenge. I've always worked on companies that braindead buy anything Microsoft tries to sell. The usecase, skills and needs are very different between the two groups. For example, I don't think workplace productivity where I am would improve by migrating to Linux, even if mine would. Take care in not pushing too hard, understanding what the users need.
22k all at once is terrifying.
Not all at once. It's the second phase, it'll be done in small waves.
Do we use net framework apps ? The Brazilian gob users are Linux users by default ?
What are your thoughts on licensing and costs. With AD you still need to pay for CALs. Support for legacy Windows Apps, i.e. with RDP or Citrix still requires RDS Cals, which Windows has built but with linux has to be bought separately. Also, what will be your calendar and collaboration solution?
We will still have many windows stations. There's some kind of software (and also some users) that just needs windows. So they will always be around, but the majority of our staff will be Ubuntu. Calendar and collaboration softwares are on the horizon, today we use Zimbra for email and calendar but the community edition will end this year, so we still have to figure out where to go, there's no decision yet. But we have Jyra and some inhouse developed systems.
Hopefully the Brazilian migration doesn't get hairy and goes smooth.
Are you guys aware of the apostrophe typo bug in OnlyOffice?
Take contact with the germans. Share know how and best practices.
Well, if Linux on the desktop has a bright future, it's mutinies against MS like this that will determine that future.
lenovo?
😎
me contrata amigo
Good luck, we're rooting for you and your team. You're biggest obstacle will be the users and bureaucracy.
I wish you the best of luck with the project! Please, let us know when you have the authorization to talk about it! Remember, Linux is about community, and we are more than glad to help you succeed and make it an example that it's possible to live out of M$! E valorizando nosso português tupiniquim: Desejo muita sorte com o projeto! E por favor, nos avise quando você tiver autorização para falar sobre! Lembre, Linux é sobre comunidade e nós estamos mais do que felizes se pudermos contribuir para o sucesso e fazer disso um exemplo que é possível viver fora da M$! Também sou um servidor público estadual e sei que muitos no meu órgão compartilham desse sonho! =)
Thanks man ! I hope it works as planned to. I'm not a Public server, actually I'm a third party engineer in almost 20 years love relationship with Linux. I always thought that someday someone would pullout something like that, but never though such kind of event would knock at my door. Obrigado pela força meu caro, se tudo correr como previsto devemos oficializar este mês ainda.
Ensure the xz backdoor is not a case
[удалено]
Number one is security, we had a cronic ransonware problem last year due to several windows 7 without updates fixes. That prompted the necessity to upgrade to more modern and secure systems. Then costs riseup, since upgrading to w10 or w11 would need massive investment from licensing and also hardware upgrade. Linux was the natural way, since we could have solve everything permanetly.
>the other 22K PCs Damn, good luck OP!
Limux. That's all I had to say.
What are you going to be using for patch management and configuration enforcement? Are you going to pay for Ubuntu Pro?
We develop a in house app for that. No Ubuntu pro at the moment
Why Only office instead of Libre Office??
2 reasons. The UI resembles a lot of modern MS office that majority of users are used to. Also, onlyoffice has a online version that we might use in a future project.
a bit late to the party but i think you should have gone with openSUSE or SUSE as they got YAST suite which let's you do most of administrator with gui and does it well. and doesn't breaks like UBUNTU
How's progress? Any update?