…as a former graphic designer… The layouts of those documents are really nice.
It’ll take a while for me to read the original version as my German has become more than just a bit rusty. Thanks for sharing the documents.
I note the discussion is for a public sector distro. However, small organizations need to jump as well to Linux. I have made this small business transition with a couple of caveats.
- I use Tumbleweed and for the most part updates are smooth, but not for everything. Particularly with staples like Libreoffice (LO Base more specifically) with some updates.
- As a small charitable organization helping indigenous organizations, costs are kept down with using free opensource products (like Thunderbird, Libreoffice, Okular, Mariadb, and KDE). However, as a small charitable organization, I have no funds to support these amazing products. So, setting up some sort of financial support for these products (and others) will help stabilize them when Tumbleweed updates come out. So email, an office suite package and pdfs are central to the average small business computer.
- While Okular does a nice job with pdfs, it still can’t process all pdf fill-ins and of course there is a need for an opensource alternative to Acrobat professional.
- Given that many small businesses require specialized software and many times that specialized software needs on old windows version to run, a fool-proof virtual machine of some sort may be warranted. (although, public sector offices also have windows-centric specialize software).
So, while thinking of distros for the public sector (governments and large institutions), consider that those public sector distros will require integration to distros for business and homes that need to be … simple and resilient.
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One thing I’ve noticed when helping friends and family with their computers is that jumping to something new, OS or app, actually is preferred if the new is less of a problem. And that is simply what most people want, especially at work. Stuff shouldn’t come with added blood pressure.
So yes, simplicity and resilience are very important, also in my humble opinion.
I use Tumbleweed on my main computer, but intend to use Slowroll when my system has the functionality I need. Living at the ARM frontier is what it is.
Yes, I still need to scan documents through a virtual machine running Windows 10 because the scanner does not function with linux. I also use that virtual machine to run Acrobat Professional. Still another Ubuntu virtual machine is used to run Pinegrow software for my website. … Yes, simple and resilient.
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@richard-caid Pinegrow will run on openSUSE? I’d look at a distrobox container rather than a virtual machine, or is just the plugin on wordpress, kubernetes…
Perhaps you should start a new thread for the scanner to see if there is a linux method to get it running?
Have you tried wine or crossover for Adobe?
I still use my old Canon flatbed scanner for that reason, even though my latest laser printer (at least on the surface) seems to be all-in-one unit…
…but to be honest, more and more of the “scanning” now happens with my phone.
@malcolmlewis Actually, I have not checked fro a while to see if Pinegrow is still restricted to Ubuntu. As I work through a small charity I created, as much as it pains me to say, if working through Virtualbox isn’t broken, I do not have time to work on another path with a distrobox container.
As for the scanner, I use an old Epson DS-510. I can get it to scan in Opensuse, but the software (including awesome OCR) still has not match in opensuse. I can still depend on my 11 year old scanned to still do about 50 sheets (double-sided) per minute with OCR.
No I have not tried wine or crossover for Adobe. It is my understanding that is a poop-load of work to get fonts, etc. Time is still a premium with my work with Indigenous people so that if the Windows 10 VirtualBox machine still works with adobe, then that is one less task on my plate.
@richard-caid Pinegrow does, they have limited resources (strange since it’s non-free) so haven’t tested on other releases… it’s just a tarball, extract and run…
@hukka I do not have to do a lot of printing and so use my old Epson ET-4550 for printing and photocopies. The liquid ink does not gum up the print head like more traditional ink cartridges. I have not spent much time with the scanner or fax on the ET-4550 since my DS-510 is so much better at scanning and for the few faxes I send I use an email-fax service that I pay about $13/month.
I rarely print anything, but it is still necessary at times. The black and white (and quite small) laser printer stands in a cupboard and is only powered up when printing. It is connected through wifi because that cupboard is on the other side of the house.
Printing is one of those things that could be improved. Not by perfecting the printing user interface, but by thinking about how to improve alternative ways of transferring the documents and other information. Personally, printing documents is something I’m learning to do without, instead moving documents with servers of my own or by mail. The “paperless” office is actually something to strive for, and slowly I’m getting there. If an electronic document is easier to use than to print the stuff then more people would choose that. Adding other ways of communication, like Mastodon, is also a way to reach people without printing. All printing cannot be replaced but electronic information improves the life of both the printer and the colour cartridges.
This household is pretty much like a small office in that multiple parts, each with multiple computers, connect to one network and both printer and storage are shared. That also suggests an explanation to the strange placement of the printer…
Seems to me an alternative would be to build on an existing system like SLES and create a customized desktop environment to support/deploy…
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Now keep in mind that you (and everybody on this forum) are a tech-savvy user and you understand that for companies something like Leap or SLED is way more appealing and for good reasons.
Requirements for IT support are different and on my company laptop (running Windows) I would like less updates and zero occasions breakage. 70% of my work is on remote computers using VNC and almost all of the remainder is via the browser. I don’t get why companies do not switch to Linux, that would save license money and support.
I run Tumbleweed but for people that I support I chose Leap.
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While supporting people I’ve noticed that upgrading from one version of the operating system to another was something that most users would avoid. Making updates, on the other hand, was something they did it without much hesitation.
Even while keeping within a versioned distribution, such as Leap, the apps get updated. That makes the transition between one version of the OS to the next less clearly defined. Thus the work with updating support documents also has more separate “steps” than the OS has. Demanding the support people to keep up with the Tumbleweed schedule would be difficult.
So a rolling release with a more careful pace, such as Slowroll, might be worth a second look. It would discard the intimidating version upgrades of Leap while being less frequently updated than Tumbleweed. Slowroll now has a release once a month but It might be possible to slow the cadence even further. For the public sector having a release four or even two times a year would work well enough. Security updates would be more frequent, of course.
A bonus for those choosing to switch to the slowly rolling distribution at home is that they would be very familiar (and up to date) with the system at work too.
@hukka SUSE Manager to control/stage/deploy updates of what ever mix is required.
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For smaller workgroups a simple update procedure would be enough. Any user would be allowed to update the computer. Installation of software would still require administrator authentication.
For larger deployments more advanced tools are indeeed needed.
@hukka Working with Indigenous Peoples in Canada requires both physical and electronic copies of documents. These groups are small scale government offices and need to keep original documents for litigation. There is also the business continuity aspect for this group in that many communities are remote and have extremely slow internet speeds (whether statellite, DSL or dial-up), leaving offsite servers a no go. So, paperless for them can at best be restricted to intraoffice work.
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If it were me I would probably go with SLES for the support as mentioned above on most of our machines, and we would have one computer suite running Windows 11 because the sad fact of the world is we need industry standard CAD software which will only run on Windows.
@cakeisamadeupdrug nah, just virtualize on a suitable machine and access over spice and virt-viewer, that’s what I do here, any system can access Windows 11 Pro 
Could do, but actually given the software also supports MacOS the most cost effective way might actually be to get a suite of Mac Minis. They’re pretty cheap for the specs.
@cakeisamadeupdrug very likely an easier solution… I do have I think Big Sur running via qemu and maybe Ventura… it’s usable to play around with…