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Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice

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Re: Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice

#121

Post by ngrilly »

LibreOffice 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://www.theregister.com/2025/02/13/libreoffice_wasm_zeta...

Re: Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice

#122

Post by udev4096 »

LibreOffice 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

Re: Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice

#123

Post by wizzwizz4 »

ngrilly wrote: post #121

LibreOffice 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 c…

Collabora Office is a (somewhat-proprietary) LibreOffice fork/patchset with that functionality. If you want multiuser support, it exists.

Re: Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice

#124

Post by MegaDeKay »

rpdillon wrote: post #64
IceDane wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also just absurd in general since no one who has used LibreOffice can seriously think it is a viable replacement. It can do in a pinch but I imagine the file format incompatibility issues between ms and libre are going to cost more in lost productivity than your number above.

This is a particular brand of take strikes me as lazy. In general, each type of product is going to have some core features that almost everyone needs. And then there's going to be a long tail of features that fewer and fewer users need to make use of the tool effectively. Office tools like LibreOffice and Google Sheets strike a sort of 80/20, where they can build perhaps less than half the features of the totally co…

In my past life, we had a mix of Linux users using LibreOffice and MS Windows using Office. It was indeed at times painful, especially when LO content had to be merged into a Word doc.

But too often I think people just think of Word vs Writer but we're talking the Office experience here. Calc is a poor man's version of Excel: I've found it slow with many rows of data and crash-prone (Office is surprisingly solid). Then there is Visio vs Draw. Use Draw for anything complex and you're going to have a really bad time. Us Engineering folk would put together Visio documents all the time and embed them in lengthy technical documents and proposals. Trying to do this in LO is a road to ruin. The Linux folks would either draw diagrams with sticks and boxes or get somebody in Windows to make something decent in Visio.

What we ended up doing was giving a Windows VM with Office on it for those Linux users that needed to produce documents and the like.

Re: Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice

#125

Post by udev4096 »

mrweasel wrote: post #24

As 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, give…

Linux desktop has terrible security model. Unless they intend to spend significant amount of time hardening the base distro, which also comes with it's own caveats. Windows, for all it's problems, is still a better choice for an enterprise environment

Re: Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice

#126

Post by sirjaz »

jve wrote: post #45
mrweasel wrote: post #24

As 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, give…

> Are these Linux machines going to authenticate against the Azure Active Directory... Are they using Intune, if so what's the replacement strategy where? This comes up all the time when we talk about Linux in corporate deployment. As I have only experience in MS word regarding governance, let me ask this: - Is there really no tools for Linux world that allows managing loads of Linux machines in an easy manner as it…

Funny thing is that Ubuntu, Suse, and RedHat support gpos now: https://ubuntu.com/blog/new-active-directory-integration-fea...

Re: Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice

#127

Post by dmix »

Herring wrote: post #80
Tangokat wrote: post #77

Americans 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 th…

"We cannot leave the security of Europe in the hands of voters in Wisconsin every 4 years" - French Minister Delegate for European Affairs.

Which 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.

Re: Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice

#128

Post by dusted »

skinkestek wrote: post #33
mrweasel wrote: post #24

As 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, give…

I'm currently working at a large public institution in Norway. Half the team runs Linux, and the only real constraint is using Edge for SSO. (Firefox works too - you just have to actually log in like it's 2008.) Honestly, everything else runs smoother than what my Windows-using teammates are dealing with.

kerberos is sort of magic when/if you finally get it working

Re: Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice

#129

Post by the__alchemist »

mrweasel wrote: post #24

As 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, give…

What required software will be rendered rendered incompatible after switching to Linux and Libre Office? Perhaps the crisis will be a shot across the bow at how IT systems almost-universally make computing a bad experience. Technical software like SolidWorks sometimes has OS-restrictions, but most of what I can think of that would be useful for school is, or should be OS-agnostic.

I suspect that some of the software devs here, especially at small companies, may be insulated from the horror that is government and enterprise computer networks. If that stuff breaks, this will be an improvement for users as long as they can get internet.

I suspect I am looking at this through a mix of optimism and naivite. Or colored by my own experiences.

Re: Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice

#130

Post by ddingus »

graemep wrote: post #120
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was watching my wife navigate Outlook the other day, I can't believe how bad it's got since I last used it. It was completely unresponsive on brand new hardware. The UI was awful.

I briefly used MS word recently, and the UI is so different. I found it quite hard to find things.

Heh, I fired up Libre Office a while back. Built up a home machine that does run Windows 10 (some embedded dev tools I want to run with low hassle), but all software on it is either OSS, or free beer type software.

No 365, lol and the Win 10 pro license was $5 (electronicsfirst.com)

Libre Office is GREAT. I have not used it in a while. In a couple hours, I had my styles, fonts and goodies all setup.

Making docs and a fairly detailed presentation were a pleasure.

Office is degrading rapidly right now!

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