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Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice
- fazza999 1y agoGosh. Is Linux now ready for the desktop?
- kalaksi 1y agoYou're probably joking but it has been for a long time.
- _joel 1y agoAny year now...
- dismalaf 1y agoI went through university only using Ubuntu like 15 years ago... It's been ready a very long time.
- exceptione 1y agoKDE + any rolling distro is miles ahead of Windows. So, as a user of both, I read your question with a smirk. If you would ask if LibreOffice is ready, I would say: yes and no. The UX of LO is worse than MS Office. LO is more feature rich in certain areas but it lacks the UX if you want to get a well-looking document with a minimum amount of work. Case in point: lack of acceptable Impress templates (they look from the year 1994), lack of document themes in Writer, lack of quick table style in Calc. The UX/UI is in dire need for attention.
- sneak 1y ago…unless you work all day in Excel, which many do. There is no reasonable substitute or replacement for Excel. There should be, but there isn’t.
- skinkestek 1y agoProbably true if you’re an advanced user using a machine with American language pack. Personally, I stick with LibreOffice. The biggest win? It doesn’t aggressively mangle my data by assuming everything is a U.S. date that needs “fixing.” And don’t get me started on how Excel insists that, just because my employer gave me a Norwegian-language Mac, every formula should now be written in some half-baked, poorly documented pseudo-Norwegian formula language. The one tool I do miss? Outlook.
- eisa01 1y agoJust set your preferred UI language to English in System Settings - Language and Region and Excel will honor that There's probably some similar system setting for the date format
- skinkestek 1y ago> Just set your preferred UI language to English in System Settings – Language and Region and Excel will honor that That might work - assuming IT policies don’t block it - but it could easily break a bunch of other things on my machine. > There's probably a similar system setting for the date format Maybe. But I’ve been a power user for 30 years (counting from my first full Windows restore), and I taught my first IT course in the late ’90s - so if there is an easy fix, I’m honestly kind of impressed with my own ability to miss it.
- rpdillon 1y agoI commented elsewhere on the thread about this, and while I agree with the way you're framing this, I think there is a reasonable substitute for Excel for the vast majority of users. But I think there are power users that use the long tail of features, and for them, there is going to be no replacement. But I use spreadsheets as part of my job and personal life, and I've been using Google Sheets and Libre/OnlyOffice for years and years, and haven't touched Excel in more than 20 years. But you gated your comment to those that work all day in Excel, and of course for those users, they're going to be needing Excel.
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- BoxOfRain 1y agoI've been using KDE for years now, I've recently put CachyOS with KDE on the new personal machine I just built and I've not been so impressed with a distro in ages. It's rock solid, minimal faff, very fast, and having got back into PC gaming after a long hiatus the playability of Windows games on Linux is amazing now. Even has a really good looking system theme (in my opinion). I definitely agree LO and particularly its terribly dated UI is a greater barrier to desktop Linux adoption than the desktop environment itself.
- timbit42 1y agoHave you tried any of the alternate UIs LibreOffice has such as the ribbon?
- sgt 1y agoI saw KDE a couple of years ago and it was not much better than KDE in 2005. It was visually more impressive, sure. But what has really happened in the last 2-4 years to make it miles ahead of Windows?
- sunbum 1y agoWindows jumped back multiple miles.
- _bent 1y agoWindows got worse
- dsego 1y agoWindows is only getting worse because of all the bloat like ads, telemetry, react ui, frequent updates (needs to restart like every other day), recall and so on. Software from 20 years ago feels snappier, even though they didn't add anything new.
- a2128 1y agoI've stopped recommending LibreOffice to anyone after I found out about OnlyOffice, its UI/UX is much better and I've personally been using it without running into any issues or limitations. I'm not a super big power user so I don't know if it lacks features that professionals need, but it's been perfect in my case
- mxuribe 1y agoI agree that the UI/UX of libreofice is not the prettiest...but its fine for what i need it for: regular work-related document management, word processing sorts of tasks. But my partner? They LOVE libreoffice specifically BECAUSE its looks like older versions of MS Word! Their needs are basic and are easily met with the functionality of libreoffice and onlyoffice...but they prefer libreoffice especially for the look-and-feel. Caveat: we are of a particularly advanced age, hence we recall many decades of the different versions of MS Office and its app offerings. ;-)
- seb1204 1y agoChanging infrastructure and software packages should not fail due to a missing or bad office template. Surely this can be made from scratch to suit the gov org and current standards/legislation within one work month by any skilled consultant. There are challenges yes, an office template should not be on the top list. Maybe I'm totally wrong...
- exceptione 1y agoStep in the shoes of an average user. You have to create a good looking document. As usual, there is time pressure. You would have no idea where to look online for templates, let alone create it from scratch (master page, huh, what?). In powerpoint or word, just pick one template or theme and it looks slick. Even when you import a template in Impress, you will find some weird bugs, like a slide insisting that it won't show the slide number. I found such random weird behavior that I wouldn't even know how to file a bug report for it, because they are impossible to reproduce. ---------------------------------------------- I know the stuff is built on top of some very ancient code. Sometimes I wish they would throw it all away and start from scratch in a modern managed, type safe language. It would be feasible if you forego backwards compatibility as I suppose a lot of the bugs have to do with trying to support the MS Office bugs. A consistent finding is that LO supports older office documents better than MS office itself.
- rurban 1y ago> You have to create a good looking document. Then any office product is horrible. I'm using emacs with markdown, and convert them to tex, pdf, blog posts automatically. Tables look better. Images look better. Everything's looks better. And it's 10x easier to work with.
- exceptione 1y agoHey, you don't have to kill the average user! I am sure your latex or custom pipeline produces better quality indeed. There has always been a gap between word processors and typesetting applications like Scribus and Indesign.
- marcosdumay 1y agoI'd say Writer is miles ahead from Word. To start with, it works and won't mangle your entire document because you added a line-break some place it didn't like. But also, office suites are becoming anachronistic very quickly. Every time you use one nowadays, it's a symptom of some organization failure. (Ok, there are a few reasonable use cases for spreadsheets.) So the entire question is kinda of moot.
- exceptione 1y ago> office suites are becoming anachronistic very quickly. I hope you did not mean online offerings as an alternative? In the tech world we are used to compile documents from plain text. But outside I don't see that. I see legal deeply entrenched into Word, with a bunch of macros. It looks masochistic to me, but I guess that is a matter of being entrenched.
- marcosdumay 1y agoOnline office suites are office suites. If legal is deeply entrenched into Word, it means your company has a problem with legal. Complex rich text is really not an adequate format for legal documents, they should really be generating HTML through some system. (When legal is deep into Word, there is almost always somebody that takes their results and turn them into HTML or PDF. The later group has 2 problems.)
- freehorse 1y agoLinux is better than windows nowadays as an OS to work on (also for non programming stuff), imo. Even the enterprise versions of windows are full of crap. For non-enterprise versions (home and pro) I really don't understand how people can put up with MS's total crap like installing candy crash and a ton of bloatware after each major update. The problem with Linux is the software ecosystem around it, esp security software, office suits, and tons of various specialised software that often target only windows, or at best also macos. But there has been a lot of improvement to that direction last years. I really hope linux takes over work desktop environments, the degree of slop that MS puts into windows is getting more and more over the years. In linux it is infinitely easier to get a machine do what you want once you get to understand some basics wrt how to configure stuff (and now with llms is much less steep curve to get relevant info). In windows you have to constantly dance around whatever horrible UX each version brings upon you.
- dncornholio 1y agoHas Linux... won?
- preisschild 1y agoI switched from a Macbook Pro M2 Max to a Fedora Silverblue-based Framework 16 and have been very happy with it for development & sysadmin work. Wayland is also in quite a good place compared to just a few years ago. Stuff like HDR, VRR, High-Refresh Rates, DisplayPort 2.1 and so on just works. Flatpak is also great and works really well with many apps when they support XDG Portals properly.
- kalaksi 1y agoPrevious post from 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234552
- reacharavindh 1y agoThe companies and Government offices in Denmark are heavily entrenched in Microsoft ecosystem as I remember from a few years ago. The amount of money they would be spending in license costs! It is 2025, couldn’t we get away with using cheaper/even free(and or open source) online versions of office software? I don’t even have MS Office installed on my personal computer. When I need to deal with .docs or .xlsx files, I either use Google docs or Libre Office if it is too complicated for Google Docs.
- bryanrasmussen 1y agoas I said previously there will be an inflection point and then MS is basically history in the whole country, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44238752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44238752 that's the way Denmark works which I am personally looking forward to, not because I think MS is so much worse than Linux, Mac etc. (although haven't really used for some years so I may be wrong) I personally think of OS's as being commodified, and I do like the ability that MS gives you to do globaly hotkeys and hotstrings that you really can't replicate easily, if at all, in other OS's (which security wise is probably a plus, if you can catch keystrokes easily enough you can make keyloggers), nope I have a personal beef here. Some years ago I was working for the Danish Governmental department of IT and Telephony, later changed to Digitization Department (a department or "styrelse" being a big government agency subsidiary to a ministry) running a project to provide overarching data standardization for the government - mainly providing and hosting XML schemas for data interchange, providing some services etc. The data interchange repository we were on was provided by Microsoft, which was built on top of some MS product the name of which I can't recall that they were thinking was good for this kind of thing, a glorified file server with some lousy search etc. It was extremely sub-par, so we had a meeting with some MS guys, Jean Paoli etc. where basically they got mad at us for their sub par product and said they couldn't be associated with it, this came about a month after Bill Gates had a meeting the prime minister and talked shit about how Denmark needed MS but MS didn't need Denmark. So anyway, personally, my spiteful little heart will sing when Denmark no longer "needs" MS.
- Wololooo 1y agoCheck https://www.onlyoffice.com/ https://www.onlyoffice.com/ honestly it's pretty good, open source, multiplatform and it opens everything I've thrown at it so far. I like libre in general but one too many times it just didn't play ball with some random docx documents.
- rcbdev 1y agoThe Austrian Federal Ministry of Justice has been on LibreOffice for many years now, with the Austrian Federal Computing Center developing extensions specifically for their use-cases. This is a great trend. I wonder how long until Microsoft's Ballmer-type people fly into Munich again to commit corruption / lobbying.
- ahartmetz 1y agoLicense fees for a few thousand workplaces of Microsoft can pay for a lot of development on FOSS alternatives instead. There is very little overhead there. Some things take a lot of work, but many changes that would be useful are pretty easy to make. Crash and bug and (some) performance fixes, time-saving automations and integrations with rough and / or minimal user interfaces and so on.
- UK-Al05 1y agoThis is normally a strategy to negotiate lower prices with microsoft. After awhile things go back to normal.
- nasretdinov 1y agoThey're surely going to be using SuSe, right?
- gggggggoodlord 1y agoSomething this article doesn't mention is that this only pertains to the ministry itself, which has like 80 employees, and not its much larger subsidiaries (Digitaliseringsstyrelsen and Danmarks Statistik). Aarhus and Copenhagen municipalities are planning to do the same, and have around 80000 employees, that's a much bigger deal in my opinion.
- whiplash451 1y agoUntil they switch back 3 years from now. And the circus continues.
- notTooFarGone 1y agoI hope they do the same in Germany and then invest some into maintenance and features based on the saved licencing fees. You can only do that if you are able to commit to a plan for more than one legislation.
- abenga 1y agoThe German sovereign tech fund gave gnome 1m Euro a year or so ago, so they do seem to be doingsomething.
- mrweasel 1y agoAs many IT people in Denmark is pointing out, it's not really about replacing Office and Windows, it's all the surrounding infrastructure that will be the main issue. Are these Linux machines going to authenticate against the Azure Active Directory, maybe just a local Active Directory, or are the IT department going to run a separate service in parallel? Are they moving away from Exchange Server... probably not, given that it's half of the staff. Are they using Intune, if so what's the replacement strategy where? My guess is that many of these staff members are going to use webmail and run Windows programs in remote desktop. The investments in the infrastructure isn't high enough, nor have they addressed any of the hard problems and the time frame is rather short. I doubt any significant money and time has been set aside for training. It is going to end in complete failure, the employees are going to complain about lost productivity and a frustrating work environment. They are setting themselves up for complete failure. The same is happening in a number of schools, where Linux and LibreOffice is set to replace ChromeBooks for some students. The expectation is that the cost is going to be €2.25M per year, for the next two years, then there will be a cost saving of €4-5M. Again no plans for handling authentication, email, file sharing or provisioning. They'll just force the students out of the relatively protected Google Workspace for Students, into the "real" Google/Gmail ecosystems where they are less protected against data mining. This will all end badly and it will be because of poor planning. Then the next US president steps in, calms things down and we forget the whole thing in 2 years.
- decide1000 1y agoI hope all employees will use their experience to make a success of this project. Switching to Linux and ditching Micro$oft should be priority of each European country.
- croemer 1y agoDupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234290 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234552
- henriquenunez 1y agoLET'S GO DENMARK!!!! LET'S GO!
- piker 1y agoSomebody tell the Danish legal team that Tritium (https://tritium.legal https://tritium.legal) runs on Linux :). I said it on the prior thread, and I think it's worth reiterating: Politics aside, Microsoft has such a strangle hold on so many industries it's insane. That reach is just extending with copilot + OpenAI and Azure. The next few years could be bleak if it plays the way MSFT is trying to push it. Good for Denmark.
- gizajob 1y agoFor any of their finance or planning people using Excel as a daily driver, the productivity lost will far outweigh any financial or ethical gains. We’re also at the cusp of AI getting added throughout MS Office and Windows which will be the next driver of productivity and collaboration, and it’ll be at least a decade before Libreoffice catches up. Saying this as a believer in open source and with no great love for M$. It’s just not 1997 any more.
- otabdeveloper4 1y agoWhat, again?
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- thisbeensaid 1y ago[dead]
- clejack 1y agoI was recently wondering why something of this nature hasn't happened long ago. Governments have to be spending so much money on licensing fees. It seems like you could throw a fraction of that money at open source software, actually make it good and then not be beholden to corporations like Microsoft or Google. Combine this sort push between multiple governments and the world gets good (at least relatively) software for all of the major office and design concerns. CAD software is the same. I tried freecad recently after a long hiatus and came back to immediately crashing after trying to make a cube from a sketch and also finding out that there's no midpoint constraint (wtf) if I remember correctly.
- basisword 1y ago>> It seems like you could throw a fraction of that money at open source software, actually make it good As much as I love OSS I don't think throwing money at it is what's going to make it rival large closed-source software projects. You need clear direction and goals which won't happen when building by committee.
- clejack 1y agoThat's a fair point, but I think it primarily depends on the nature of the committee. I could be wrong because I don't operate in oss spaces, so I'm not sure about their structure. The first acknowledgement is that ui and design is just as important as technical functionality because a good idea that no one can use is a bad idea. If we can have a technical team collaborate to design oss code, why can't we have a design team as well that's focused purely on themes, UX, and design philosophy? Of course this is all prefaced on the idea that the money is there to support such a team. I suspect good designers are less likely to be on the "working for free" bandwagon. Financial support can bring in better talent, then the oss teams need to structure them selves properly so intransigence doesn't set in.
- chaosbolt 1y agoIf you're a government, it makes more sense to throw the money at creating your own infrastructure than paying to make a foreign company control everything you're running. Everything is alright until the country with the highest obesity rate in the world chooses not to honor your patent for ozempic for example and makes it for a lot cheaper back home, then you escalate, then they escalate, something something your software stops getting updates or gets locked down. I obviously don't think this is a likely scenario to happen, but so is getting nuked, yet every government has some sort of bunker command center, but everyone just seems ok with trusting those US companies with everything. And today you don't even have to recreate the wheel, there are some open source alternatives for almost everything, and as a government if you put in the money you could improve on those, other governments can get inspired and improve on them as well, etc.
- chuckadams 1y agoThey're planning the whole migration in less than 6 months. As they say (or at least google translate says), "Held og lykke". A lot of these migration plans strike me as being basically a negotiating tactic with Microsoft.
- phkamp 1y agoPlease note that only approx 79 employees are affected by this.
- mettamage 1y agoGovernments should fund more open source projects. Apparently there's a model of governance here that could work. Enough people like writing software. The innate motivation is there. With funding, there could be more of it. There might be some iffy issues. For example, if a state backs certain open source software too hard, then I'm afraid you get "state backed vaporware" in some cases. I can definitely see where it'll be like "Denmark has start open source initiative xyz" but because it's so externally pushed, from a motivation standpoint, it becomes half baked. So I'm more advocating for a gentle monetary nudge.
- Tangokat 1y agoAmericans do not realize how much damage Trump has done to the trust in American services. Europeans used to consider America as an ally the same as other European countries, now it is more like an unreliable trade partner. Microsoft tried to reassure the Europeans [1] but not even a month later they were forced to disable the email account of ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan [2] due to sanctions from Trump voiding their reassurance completely. What happens when Trump gets mad at Denmark for not giving him Greenland and forces Microsoft to turn off Danish services? Every large European company and all of the governments are now considering how to move away from US services. They may not be able to do it quickly but it is a part of the conversation. Customers specifically request that new systems should be independent from US service providers. In my view the damage has been done and will not go away even after Trump. The Europeans have realized that their only true allies, that they can trust in terms of critical infrastructure, are other European nations. It used to include America, it no longer does. [1] https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/04/30/european-digital-commitments/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/04/30/europea... [2] https://nltimes.nl/2025/05/20/microsofts-icc-email-block-triggers-dutch-concerns-dependence-us-tech https://nltimes.nl/2025/05/20/microsofts-icc-email-block-tri...
- Herring 1y ago"We cannot leave the security of Europe in the hands of voters in Wisconsin every 4 years" - French Minister Delegate for European Affairs.
- dmix 1y agoWhich is what Trump seems to want. A Europe not totally dependent on the American taxpayers for their own self defense and their own global power projection agendas. Many countries like Germany are quite far from that. France is more of a leader in that regard. Although abandoning commercial American software wholesale would likely degrade their own security and GDPs even further than it already is.
- Herring 1y agoBoth the Biden and Trump administrations have generally opposed European efforts to reduce reliance on foreign arms - The "Buy European" strategy. The Trump administration seems to be pursuing a dual strategy: publicly demanding Europe be more self-sufficient while simultaneously trying to ensure U.S. economic and strategic interests are not sidelined in the process. Basically "Pay us more for less". Let's see how the NATO summit goes at the end of this month.
- trelane 1y agoHopefully they're using Collabora or similar, so they can get support and to help fund the development.
- bazoom42 1y agoAs far as I can tell, the announcement was only about replacing Microsoft Office 365 with LibreOffice, not about replacing Windows with Linux.
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- ThinkBeat 1y agoHow does Linux fit into the eco system that surrounds it? I have no idea what systems the Danish government uses, but being a "Microsoft shop" with Exchange, Active directory, Teams etc is not uncommon. I hope they will address and fix or have work arounds for all of them. I feel sorry for the people who work there havin to nmove to LibreOffice. IT is free, and it works, but if you have spent 20 years or more using Microsoft Office, it will feel quite foreign and it is missing a large set of features. The ministry will slow down considerably for some time while the employees learn how to use LibreOffice in all the ways they are used to. My experience from a few large companies and government institutions is that a lot of employees do not want to change, or learn a whole different system. Forcing this change upon all is guarateed to create friction. Much more important than that the change
- mihaaly 1y ago> if you have spent 20 years or more using Microsoft Office, it will feel quite foreign I am using MS Office for 30 years, and the current MS Office products feel offensively alien. Slown down in workflow. Meanwhile, in the past 20 years or so, I was affiliated with organizations (plural) having mixed composition of Win/Mac/Linux support throughout.
- josefritzishere 1y agoI'm honestly jealous.
- mihaaly 1y agoI am struggling with increasing number of daily (sometimes hourly) annoyances of Windows during my work, distracting me considerably by now, so this news fills me with envy. I have an increasing urge fuelled by this - but not only by this - to switch job/profession. Some from the top of my head: randomly forcing me to put the window I am moving to the numbered sections of 1-2-3 without the chance of cancel, forcing me to size and position choices mandated; 'update and shut down' actually works as 'update and restart' finding my computer on in the middle of night or in the morning; hibernating while update is available turns on the computer during the night; renaming of OneDrive files clears the name sometimes typing; switching wifi (between previously used ones) on its own, while being in a perfectly working remote desktop connection, breaking it randonly; taskbar buttons loose icons after resuming from hibernation; yes/no message box is transparent through remote desktop; ... some from the past few (less than 4) days.
- ngrilly 1y agoLibreOffice is great, but not supporting multiple users simultaneously editing the same document is a serious limitation compared to proprietary solutions such as MS Office and Google Workspace. Also, replacing Windows by Linux and MS Office by LibreOffice is only the surface of the problem. What about replacing Entra (identity and access management), Intune (endpoint management), file sharing (OneDrive), email and calendar (Exchange Online)? Russia, China, and India have invested a lot in developing their equivalent of 365 and Google Workspace (mainly via Yandex, Alibaba, and Zoho). Europe needs to accelerate on this. Edit: There is some progress on LibreOffice real-time collaboration: https://zetaoffice.net/ https://zetaoffice.net/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/13/libreoffice_wasm_zetaoffice/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/13/libreoffice_wasm_zeta...
- wizzwizz4 1y agoCollabora Office is a (somewhat-proprietary) LibreOffice fork/patchset with that functionality. If you want multiuser support, it exists.
- trelane 1y agoThat are also a, if not the, major contributor to LibreOffice.
- welshwelsh 1y agoLack of features is not an excuse for a government to adopt proprietary software. Surely, the Danish government can figure out how to support real-time collaboration in LibreOffice.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoI believe the Danish gov is roughly spending 50M EUR/year to MS, certainly you can get the features needed paying for dev time for an open source project with some of that spend.
- kube-system 1y ago
- udev4096 1y agoLibreOffice is terrible. I cannot believe how anyone can do anything with it. I cannot stand Word but it's just impossible to find a true replacement for it. OnlyOffice should get more recognition. It is the closest you can get for Word replacement
- tasuki 1y ago> I cannot stand Word but it's just impossible to find a true replacement for it. As someone who's never used Word: what do you use Word for that it's hard to find a replacement? (For me, the "light" things I want to note down and version, I use one of the lightweight markup languages. The "heavy" things, I either use TeX or something to convert my lightweight markup into a pdf or whatever people want. What am I missing?)
- Suppafly 1y ago>what do you use Word for that it's hard to find a replacement? Opening files created by other organizations and expecting them to load correctly and accurately, and then editing them and expecting them to load correctly and accurately when I send them back.
- v5v3 1y agoLibreOffice does everything I need it to... Most people only use a small percentage of functionality in any app.
- kube-system 1y agoIndividually, sure. But in an organization, the larger it is, the more probability that all of the features are being used approaches 1. Then you don't have a software issue anymore, you have a business workflow, retraining, or retooling issue.
- v5v3 1y agoMost admin staff don't do anything complex aside from writing letters. They don't create complex docs with table of contents and images and so on. I have worked for companies prior who gave basic online office 365 to 99% of staff and then more expensive subscriptions on a as needed basis.
- tokai 1y agoHave to see it before I believe it. There is already danish laws, from back in the early 00s, stating that open source software should be used or developed in all cases where it is possible. The public IT provider and supporter Statens IT are so bad at their job that I cannot see how they would carry this out.
- timbit42 1y agoMight be worth sending them back to college for upgrading.
- m101 1y agoDoes the Danish govt fund these open source projects at all?
- BobBagwill 1y ago<yawn> Kitchen-sink office suites are dinosaurs. It's like switching from riding an ankylosaurus to riding a glyptodont. Personal computing was and is a tarpit. It was and is used to automate and complicate paper-style processes. Every time I have to fill out a PDF form, I want to scream! <grimace>. Big fat slow 90's-style document-oriented processes have got to go!
- dardeaup 1y agoI think the best way to go about these types of efforts is to: (1) build a coalition with agreed upon goals, governance, etc. (2) define the desired systems and architecture for it (3) define the file formats and wire protocols to support the features/functionality (4) start building it There would need to be conferences every 6 or 12 months. There would also need to be lots of documentation, training, videos, podcasts, etc. It would be a huge effort but possibly also extremely rewarding.
- fefferkorn 1y agoI like cryptpad for shared documents... but it bugs with big files.
- a022311 1y agoHonestly, if they manage to make the transition without major problems, it will greatly improve Denmark's sovereignty. My concern is mostly about the government depending on open source software without contributing in some way. I really hope they fund and/or contribute to both projects. Another interesting question to consider is whether the likelihood of attacks on these projects will increase. Knowing that government(s) use LibreOffice makes it a much more valuable target for attackers willing to pull of something like xz-utils. Likewise, increasing adoption of Linux for desktop usage could result in more vulnerabilities being discovered and more malware targeting Linux desktops. I think there's a lot to see in the near future...
- miohtama 1y agoDoes anyone remember Munich Linux project and how Microsoft eventually bribed Munich to drop it? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
- EasyMark 1y agoPepperidge Farm erinnert sich
- waltercool 1y ago[dead]
- zevon 1y agoMaybe of interest to some people given the discussions in this thread: https://sciebo.de https://sciebo.de is an example of a successful "let's roll our own collaboration infrastructure" project at scale (aimed at about half a million users) based on Nextcloud with Collabora Office (= live document collaboration) and more integrated applications (calendars, contacts, tasks, forms, those kinds of things). All hosted and maintained at German universities, with federation between them, with support for guest users and whatnot. Quite nice and back when it started, it was very important for us because it enabled us to get a huge chunk of sensitive data back from Dropbox, Google Drive and the other cloud providers. There's not too much English documentation around but https://wwuit-sys.zivgitlabpages.uni-muenster.de/sciebo/docs/en/ https://wwuit-sys.zivgitlabpages.uni-muenster.de/sciebo/docs... is good.
- The_suffocated 1y agoMany comments here point out the difficulties in replacing the digital infrastructure of a large organisation, but according to the ministry’s website, the ministry is only ten months old: “As a result of the formation of a new government 29th of August 2024 the Ministry of Digital Affairs has been established”. There probably isn’t any huge or complex infrastructure to replace.
- chaz6 1y agoAs much as I applaud the move away from proprietary software, when it comes to Office, particularly Excel, there are going to be a LOT of custom macros dotted around that will be difficult to replace, particularly when they integrate with other applications via COM. These are usually written with the best intentions by people wanting to be more productive.
- Huntsecker 1y agolots of the comments on here focus on the, A isn't as good as B or the cost will be too great, the primary reason at least imo this has come is due to Trump and his focus on Greenland(https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/07/greenland-spying-surveillance https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/07/greenland-sp...). The supermarkets here have stars on items to show they are not from the USA(https://www.fastcompany.com/91296407/danish-grocery-stores-have-a-new-trick-for-boycotting-us-products https://www.fastcompany.com/91296407/danish-grocery-stores-h...), their is a concerted effort to detangle Denmark from the USA and I see this as a growing trend across EU.
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- rurban 1y agoThe nearby german country Schleswig-Holstein also announced the very same plan. https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/themen/digitalisierung/linux-plus1/Projekt https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/themen/... Other German countries were long advised to stop using illegal propriety cloud providers, such as Microsoft, also, but continue with it. Despite the privacy violations, risk and cost.