phasing out Office and Windows is not hard. the only real difficulty is that corporate IT departs are populated with people who have built their entire careers on the Microsoft ecosystem and can't imagine a world beyond Microsoft.
The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
121–130 of 156 posts
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 :)
At the other extreme, also fire anyone who uses Excel as an app development platform or a databse. Fire even faster if its used for something mission critical.
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#123It'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.
My company has Linux and Windows laptop fleets. Windows requires more work and causes more pain, even though the Linux fleet is larger.
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 :)
At the other extreme, also fire anyone who uses Excel as an app development platform or a databse. Fire even faster if its used for something mission critical.
Yes, yes and yes.
Now, i really begin to wonder if that should be some kind of add-in to be sold..
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#125Denmark is at particular risk because if the US does something concrete against Greenland, they might want to retaliate with sanctions at the very least. Impossible to do that if you have a strong dependency on American tech companies.
> they might want to retaliate with sanctions at the very least. Just like what happened to the International Criminal Court recently, when Microsoft tried to obstruct war crimes investigations by blocking their email: https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Microsofts-ICC-email-...
A precedent was set.
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also think something fundamental is missing in the education of your average office worker. The reason why people are scared to change software is that they can't actually use any software. They basically don't know how it works and are just cargo culting. They memorize some functions, and they think that is all they need to do their job, which they consider to be some higher level thing like being a bureaucrat. Bu…
I entirely agree with you, but I'm at a loss as to how we might improve things. People just don't seem to care, just like they didn't seem to care to understand how machinery used to work. They know that they should press this button and expect that outcome.
We teach reading in school. I think the same could be done now for tech literacy.
It was pointless to try something like that before because the older generation was usually less tech literate than the kids. But these days tech literacy is dropping (and with AI, probably even more so), so it might be that the older generation could actually teach it.
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#127David 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.
I hate a told you so.
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#128Luckily this was never counted on the trade deficit. Phew!
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#129Please note that only ~79 employees will affected by this decision.
A number of circumstantial factors point at this being primarily political posturing.
Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
#130You 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…
It starts early : closed source software offers discounted or free licenses to schools to hook kids in early.
This is how matlab continues to have a hold in engineering fields.