It's a few times over the years I've read about govs switching to linux like this. Anyone know how they got on?
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The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
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Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#12I used to love LibreOffice when it was OpenOffice.org. When it got unshackled from Oracle, it somehow became kinda uglier, and unfortunately it wasn't able to keep up with the times technology-wise, as all efforts to make it online are a failure of usability and speed.
What we, the humanity, need, is a free-as-in-freedom open source set of web applications that work like Google Docs / Spreadsheets / Slides, but can be self-hosted and would natively use OpenDocument file format.
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#13Talking to my Danish friends, and I have a fair few in tech, the country is owned by Microsoft. A lot of code jobs are c# on Azure, and all the office people use Excel.
This is a welcome change. I've thought for a long time, why would your average office worker even need to pay MS for their desktop OS when so many things could just be done on the web? And why develop a bunch of stuff on a proprietary platform when you can just code it on a Linux platform?
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#14I used to love LibreOffice when it was OpenOffice.org. When it got unshackled from Oracle, it somehow became kinda uglier, and unfortunately it wasn't able to keep up with the times technology-wise, as all efforts to make it online are a failure of usability and speed. What we, the humanity, need, is a free-as-in-freedom open source set of web applications that work like Google Docs / Spreadsheets / Slides, but can b…
I found onlyoffice a good replacement. It is certainly better looking.
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#15Good, especially if there are also budgets somewhere to fix issues they have with it.
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#16I used to love LibreOffice when it was OpenOffice.org. When it got unshackled from Oracle, it somehow became kinda uglier, and unfortunately it wasn't able to keep up with the times technology-wise, as all efforts to make it online are a failure of usability and speed. What we, the humanity, need, is a free-as-in-freedom open source set of web applications that work like Google Docs / Spreadsheets / Slides, but can b…
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Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#17It's a few times over the years I've read about govs switching to linux like this. Anyone know how they got on?
Usually they get a good offer from Microsoft and drop the conversation. But this time it is not about pricing, but politics, so maybe they won't budge as easily.
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#18Talking to my Danish friends, and I have a fair few in tech, the country is owned by Microsoft. A lot of code jobs are c# on Azure, and all the office people use Excel. This is a welcome change. I've thought for a long time, why would your average office worker even need to pay MS for their desktop OS when so many things could just be done on the web? And why develop a bunch of stuff on a proprietary platform when yo…
Same in Germany
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#19I hope this sets an example for the rest of Europe! Great news.
Linux monoculturalization is not great news. We should deploy e.g. *BSD and illumos as well to prevent having all eggs in one basket.
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#20I'm pleased at the overall tide here. I think governments especially ought to use and contribute back to FOSS. When I see announcements like this it does make me worry that MS (or whatever vendor) will try to make an example of them; by submarining stories about how the switchover is hard, non-techie civil servants want to keep what they're "used to", LibreOffice is technically inferior (no comment on that one, I thi…
I know many infrastructure techies that prefer Windows and swear that it's easier to maintain a Windows network. With regards to end users, I think the only office software that still has an undeniable grip is Excel, but as people use Google Sheets more and more, the idea of using something different is becoming less absurd.
Windows does have better user and device administrators tools. However, this doesn't stop people using Macs, which are absolutely terrible for mass administration.