Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

politiken.dk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 156 posts

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#111

Post by mrtksn »

lordnacho wrote: post #13

Talking 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…

It’s the same everywhere, that’s why Bill Gates is so rich :)

If you ever tried to use anything else than Word & Excel to interact with people who are using Word & Excel , chances are that you encountered problems like wrong encoding files, that don’t open, files that open, but look incomplete, problems with alignment, etc.

There’s so much friction that it’s not worth bothering.

unfortunately, the proprietary software has become the standard. IMHO the only solution would be to force a large number of people switch to something else and create the new standard, so maybe the Danes can pull it off. Since many years, I keep hearing about countries trying to move away from Microsoft, but I don’t know how much they succeeded.

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#112

Post by simongray »

LadyCailin wrote: post #102
jamesblonde wrote: post #32

David Heinemeir Hansson (ruby-on-rails) writes extensively about the risk to Danish sovereignty if they don't have digital sovereignty. In particular, Microsoft have already shown they will acquiesce to Trump's wishes. Turn off Microsoft in Denmark in the morning, you get Greenland by the afternoon. https://world.hey.com/dhh/denmark-gets-more-serious-about-di... P.s. this thread will be gone within 1-2 hrs when the m…

> P.s. this thread will be gone within 1-2 hrs when the mods on PT time wake back up. Anything about European Digital Sovereignty is killed quietly and quickly here. No it won’t.

It's gone from the frontpage now and isn't anywhere in the top 200 either. Hmmm. I guess he was right.

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#113

Post by raffael_de »

sgt wrote: post #77

It's a great way for Denmark to negotiate a better deal with Microsoft for the next round of licenses. No way they will stick with Linux. It's just too fiddly, requiring way more "IT people" running around configuring Samba shares and printer drivers. And LibreOffice is many many years behind MS Office, and it'll continue to be that way. Sorry for the pessimism but this was true in 2005, in 2015, and in 2025.

> And LibreOffice is many many years behind MS Office, and it'll continue to be that way.

Are you referring to compatibility with MS Office features? Because as far as I can tell Excel/Word/PowerPoint (and its OSS counterparts) are pretty much feature complete since about 10 years.

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#115

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

lordnacho wrote: post #13

Talking 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…

You can use c#, even c# on Azure and still be mostly Linux. For many common uses, it just works.

And at least it gives a migration path.

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#117

Post by moepstar »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #97
pieds wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have the capacity. The opinion you present is actually part of the narrative you are seemingly against. That you can compete with big tech if you just want to. And you "can" compete with big tech, but it isn't actually possible. Because the right pre-requisites, environment and priorities doesn't exist. Not in Europe, not in much of the US and not in much of the world. The European companies the would (or…

I think it's a question of habit / inertia. "This is how we've always done things". In the company I work for, 99% of people spend their days in some combination of teams, outlook, word, excel and chrome. Word is basically for random text which is expected to last longer than an email or for carting around screenshots, Excel is for people who need five lines in a table. All these things work fine in a browser. The ot…

> The other 1% are either accountants who actually use Excel for what it was made, designers, etc.

I, half-jokingly, recommend firing anyone who opens Excel and hasn't entered a formula within 15 minutes.

That alone would solve a lot of problems :)

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#118

Post by paxys »

mrtksn wrote: post #111
lordnacho wrote: post #13

Talking 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…

It’s the same everywhere, that’s why Bill Gates is so rich :) If you ever tried to use anything else than Word & Excel to interact with people who are using Word & Excel , chances are that you encountered problems like wrong encoding files, that don’t open, files that open, but look incomplete, problems with alignment, etc. There’s so much friction that it’s not worth bothering. unfortunately, the proprietary softwar…

Fun fact – Steve Ballmer has now made more money from Microsoft than Bill Gates.

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#119

Post by Arch-TK »

baobun wrote: post #43
Arch-TK wrote: post #35

You know, I really do think governments should not be paying into Microsoft's bank accounts. But thinking about this from another perspective, if I was hired as a programmer at a company and told I could use vim on i3 on some Linux distro and then suddenly the company decided that everyone would be switched over to windows machines and forced to use VSCode then I would be rightfully pissed. Just like someone hired to…

Mandating open and interoperable formats would be a good start. Moving off for a department becomes much less of a shift if it doesn't require coordination with everyone you might exchange files with.

I do agree there, although Microsoft will argue till the end of the earth that OOXML are already those formats.

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#120

Post by muth02446 »

dkga wrote: post #54
mike_hearn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They give up and switch to Windows (again). The highest profile was in Munich where they did migrate >10,000 desktops to Linux and OpenOffice, but eventually they migrated back to Windows and Office: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux Lower Saxony: https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-scores-a-win-over-linu... Vienna: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wienux Note that even when these projects succeed, the software user…

Speaking completely off the cuff here, but I suspect that as government applications move to be web-based, perhaps there could be another wave of Linux adoption since all it would take essentially is a functioning browser.

I am puzzled that they not already have moved to the web. Also speaking off the cuff: what are the main reasons for using word documents in government? If it is mostly communication with other parts of the government or the public, shouldn't this be email which requires very little functionality compared to word.

I can see niche cases, like laws where you want change tracking or very long reports but that does not seem to apply to most government employees. Somehow I feel I missing something big, maybe there is a lot of automation built around word documents?

Post reply on HN