Buy European
Overview:
The community to discuss buying European goods and services.
Rules:
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Be kind to each other, and argue in good faith. No direct insults nor disrespectful and condescending comments.
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Do not use this community to promote Nationalism/Euronationalism. This community is for discussing European products/services and news related to that. For other topics the following might be of interest:
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Include a disclaimer at the bottom of the post if you're affiliated with the recommendation.
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No russian suggestions.
Feddit.uk's instance rules apply:
- No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia or xenophobia.
- No incitement of violence or promotion of violent ideologies.
- No harassment, dogpiling or doxxing of other users.
- Do not share intentionally false or misleading information.
- Do not spam or abuse network features.
- Alt accounts are permitted, but all accounts must list each other in their bios.
- No generative AI content.
Useful Websites
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General BuyEuropean product database: https://buy-european.net/ (relevant post with background info)
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Switching your tech to European TLDR: https://better-tech.eu/tldr/ (relevant post)
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Buy European meta website with useful links: https://gohug.eu/ (relevant post)
Benefits of Buying Local:
local investment, job creation, innovation, increased competition, more redundancy.
European Instances
Lemmy:
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Basque Country: https://lemmy.eus/
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๐ง๐ช Belgium: https://0d.gs/
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๐ง๐ฌ Bulgaria: https://feddit.bg/
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Catalonia: https://lemmy.cat/
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๐ฉ๐ฐ Denmark, including Greenland (for now): https://feddit.dk/
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๐ช๐บ Europe: https://europe.pub/
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๐ซ๐ท๐ง๐ช๐จ๐ญ France, Belgium, Switzerland: https://jlai.lu/
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๐ฉ๐ช๐ฆ๐น๐จ๐ญ๐ฑ๐ฎ Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Lichtenstein: https://feddit.org/
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๐ซ๐ฎ Finland: https://sopuli.xyz/ & https://suppo.fi/
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๐ฎ๐ธ Iceland: https://feddit.is/
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๐ฎ๐น Italy: https://feddit.it/
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๐ฑ๐น Lithuania: https://group.lt/
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๐ณ๐ฑ Netherlands: https://feddit.nl/
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๐ต๐ฑ Poland: https://fedit.pl/ & https://szmer.info/
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๐ต๐น Portugal: https://lemmy.pt/
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๐ธ๐ฎ Slovenia: https://gregtech.eu/
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๐ธ๐ช Sweden: https://feddit.nu/
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๐น๐ท Turkey: https://lemmy.com.tr/
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๐ฌ๐ง UK: https://feddit.uk/
Friendica:
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๐ฆ๐น Austria: https://friendica.io/
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๐ฎ๐น Italy: https://poliverso.org/
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๐ฉ๐ช Germany: https://piratenpartei.social/ & https://anonsys.net/
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๐ซ๐ท Significant French speaking userbase: https://social.trom.tf/
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๐ต๐ฑ Poland: soc.citizen4.eu
Matrix:
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๐ฌ๐ง UK: matrix.org & glasgow.social
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๐ซ๐ท France: tendomium & imagisphe.re & hadoly.fr
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๐ฉ๐ช Germany: tchncs.de, catgirl.cloud, pub.solar, yatrix.org, digitalprivacy.diy, oblak.be, nope.chat, envs.net, hot-chilli.im, synod.im & rollenspiel.chat
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๐ณ๐ฑ Netherlands: bark.lgbt
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๐ฆ๐น Austria: gemeinsam.jetzt & private.coffee
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๐ซ๐ฎ Finland: pikaviestin.fi & chat.blahaj.zone
Related Communities:
Buy Local:
Continents:
European:
Buying and Selling:
Boycott:
Countries:
Companies:
Stop Publisher Kill Switch in Games Practice:
Banner credits: BYTEAlliance
view the rest of the comments
Just as an example. The state of Schlewsig Holstein has 30,000 workers using LibreOffice. If the service goes down, that means that 30,000 workers can not work any longer, but still get paid. Median hourly wage in Germany is 25โฌ, so for every hour the serivce is down, you pay 750,000โฌ.
That is the level of support you need for a service like this and some forum and a bunch of volunteer devs do not cut that.
My experience with microsoft is thst there custom service is terrible
LibreOffice service cant go down, it's not always online like Microsoft 265
Yes updates break software all the time. It does not even have to be LibreOffice directly. Some OS update can do it.
You people have no idea what you are talking about. LibreOffice isnโt a service. Itโs a software package.
Also https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/
Support is a service, so is deploying and maintaining software.
Also the list is a great case in point. If you want them to speak German, looking at the names, you end up with three trainers and a single migration expert. To be fair there seem to be a lot of German speaking developers, but they tend to hate working in support. Just imagine somebody is sick or on vacation.
Also LibreOffice is a large open source project. For smaller ones it is much worse.
That's a LOT different than the support you can get from Office. Enterprise contracts usually come with guaranteed uptime, 24/7 immediate L3 support, custom hotfixes for specific workflow issues, and much more.
I get that it's expensive, most people don't need that, and there should be better options. Unfortunately, there quite often isn't. The difference between Office and the second best of a huge margin.
On top of that, the integration costs can be massive as all your workflows are built for Office products. At the least, the companies need to find a way to replace all your macros, addins, and queries.
Yeah, that's the point. Microsoft Office is a service with support and downtime guarantees.
So having worked in a few IT departments, I've noticed that ones where the general culture is "let's buy this off the shelf product and a support contract" tend to have a lot more dealing with issues while sitting on their hands and blaming the vendor whereas the departments that are more hands-on and take the approach of "let's find the right solution and make it work whether or not we can get the vendor support we'd like" tended to have more robust systems, but also more outages due to their own internal errors
So like most decisions in both business and IT it comes down to risk tolerance. I think in the context of your choice of Office suite that risk level is fairly low. Libre Office is an office suite which installs onto the client PC and has minimal integration with outside servers. Its extremely easy to uninstall and reinstall an earlier version if you identify a problem while rolling out an update, and it's extremely easy to hold a version and not update (which of course comes from security risks, but again, those are not terribly significant compared to other IT contexts)
The main thing in this context that a vendor support contract would provide is the ability to deploy developer resources that are already familiar with the codebasd on a bug if you encounter a problem that's significant enough. In the case of open source software like Libre Office you get the added benefit of being able to simply spend money on developers and maintain a fork if the upstream project is giving you enough trouble too.
The bigger risks where you will really want a support contract is on the server and network side, because those are much more critical when an issue does arise, may require restoring from backup to rollback and will often have contingency plans as expensive as maintaining warm/cold spares and separate failover regions and hot spares