Key takeaways:

Microsoft and its leadership refrained from endorsing Donald Trump during the 2024 campaign, unlike some other major tech companies.

However, European governments and enterprises are increasingly breaking ties with Microsoft products in favor of open-source alternatives.

Experts say such a transition can be largely attributed to Trumpโ€™s hostile policy towards Europe, which sparked digital sovereignty efforts.

Microsoft has reiterated its digital commitments, but it is yet to be seen if thatโ€™s enough to assuage concerns over dependency on US tech.

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[โ€“] 20 points 6 months ago (7 children)

Good, itโ€™s time this parasitic company hit its comeuppance and countries started taking responsibility for themselves.

On that note, itโ€™s also time open source does a v2 on office software.

LibreOffice is frankly not a good piece of software. I tried it this week. The interface is laggy on an incredibly beefy machine, itโ€™s confusing (e.g. with the first thing you see is a pop of with 5 different UI configuration options to choose from), and doesnโ€™t scale well to high DPI displays.

Just like how GIMP took a decade before the community acknowledged it was not a viable UI despite being packed with good features, LibreOffice needs a refresh for modern and low power computing

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  • [โ€“] 3 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    I wonder whether Java has something to do with it or not. I remember seeing itโ€™s in Java, and that got me thinking whether thatโ€™s a good stack here.

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  • [โ€“] 8 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    It is a Java stack, I feel like the Java ecosystem is mostly dead after the Oracle acquisition.

    Thereโ€™s openJDK, but Java was the defacto language for business for a long time.

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  • [โ€“] 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    I know itโ€™s a somewhat myth (or a thing of the past) that Java virtual machine is inefficient. But I was pretty disappointed to learn that Libre Office is written in Java. I mean, I donโ€™t expect to see Rust (however, why not?), but not Java either.

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  • [โ€“] 6 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Java did make sense when swing was coming out, and for a product like LibreOffice write one run anywhere is a big factor.

    I donโ€™t know what the state of cross platform UI is these days outside of Tauri/electron, or if GTK works.

    I agree that JVM isnโ€™t horribly inefficient, but I think Javaโ€™s design patterns are.

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  • [โ€“] 2 points 6 months ago

    Tauri uses system WebView, which on linux is webkit2-gtk. It's crap.

    I think they're investigating bundling similar to electron, or using servo. Not sure if any progress has been made over the last year

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