[canvascritic]

Real question is whether this is just symbolic or if the French state will actually redirect procurement pipelines + vendor mandates around these principles. i'd be more impressed if this came bundled with policy teeth, e.g. requiring all software vendors to deliver open-by-default interfaces or pushing funding toward open infra maintenance. Otherwise it's hardly much more than a manifesto

[RandomWorker]

It will take time but yes. There are already numerous case studies. Libre office is already running on more than 500k gov computers. Anecdotical story, as a researcher I worked with a few French PhD students and they tend to send me documents Libre documents and spreadsheets.

[jimbob45]

Oh then it’s dead. LibreOffice never Just Works™. Ideological changes like this only work if they’re painless for the hoi polloi.

[resource_waste]

LibreOffice UI is so awful I'm 90% convinced there is a Microsoft plant that actively disrupts progress.

I don't lurk the github, so I'm just assuming there are a few accounts that disagree with UI improvements just to kill time and fake debate.

But yeah that UI is just awful.

Further, you mention any UI issue on the subreddit and you get banned. Yeah...

Really a shame, Fedora + Google's Office Suite has been a near complete replacement for me. Although Sheets could be improved a bit.

[weikju]

> But yeah that UI is just awful.

As far as I can see, awful UI never stops people from using software that is "mandated" or "default". I mean have you seen Windows? MS Office? Web sites? Mobile apps??

[robertlagrant]

I get it, but LibreOffice is awful in a much worse way than Office. On MacOS, the fonts and images just look low res and blurry. There's no polish, even though that is probably quite an easy fix.

[victorbjorklund]

But if they know the alternative is better. Everyone knows about ms office so they will complain/demand that instead. People put up with shitty software when they dont know about an alternative

[mschild]

MS Office is far from a good piece of software itself though. Frankly, the amount sub-menus and other bullshit I constantly have to fix for my parents does not make for a great experience either.

Mind, I barely actually use any Excel/Word/PowerPoint software, but I often have the feeling that a lot of user complaints for these types of things simply come down to: "It's not what I'm used to, therefore it's terrible.".

[pessimizer]

I'm convinced this happens in a lot of projects. If you're e.g. Microsoft, you can pay a few people to contribute maliciously to a GPL competitor's coding and governance full time.

It's trivial to throw a million or two dollars at making sure some project ultimately goes nowhere (but survives), and that particular bugs don't get fixed or particular features don't get added. I've got no story to tell, and I've never heard solid evidence of it happening, but it would just be unbelievably tempting to do.

[knocte]

Talk is cheap, did you create any PRs for the suggested changes?

[IMTDb]

This is the GH for the official LibreOffice project: https://github.com/LibreOffice

Notice how they say “No PR” on every single repo ? So for sure no PR was open.

Putting a bit more energy, you are redirected to a whole other system which I have never seen anywhere else (and in this case; unique doesn’t mean good). After 5 minutes of trying to navigate what is probably the least intuitive software forge I ever had the displeasure to witness, you understand that clearly these guys live in a different UI/UX bubble than the rest of us.

[hamandcheese]

Seems like they use gerrit. A lot of larger projects use gerrit for their code review. It is different, yes, but many prefer it over GitHub's "pull request" paradigm which really sucks for high velocity contributors.

[throw10920]

This is bad faith. You are not obligated to contribute any sort of code to point out problems in an open source project.

When I go to a restaurant and order a steak, and it arrives and tastes awful, the waiter does not have the right to say to me "if you don't like it, cook it yourself". The chef does not have the right to say to me "tell me exactly what I did wrong, since you're claiming you're an expert on steaks".

No. Anyone can complain about a thing, and the fact that they haven't tried to fix the code themselves is utterly irrelevant.

[gbear605]

The difference is that at a restaurant you’re paying for it. If you show up at a soup kitchen and complain that it wasn’t seasoned just right, that’s fully on you.

[fdefitte]

I think it's more a guideline principle for public software, for exemple apps that are used by citizens to declare taxes, renews IDs...