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

Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice

heise.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 239 posts

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

#151

Post by kube-system »

v5v3 wrote: post #139
udev4096 wrote: post #122

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

LibreOffice does everything I need it to... Most people only use a small percentage of functionality in any app.

Individually, 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.

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

#152

Post by louiskottmann »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #145
welshwelsh wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack 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.

It doesn't need an excuse; it's a fully valid reason. Using proprietary software is a perfectly valid choice to make.

Chosing to pay millions when it is not necessary is definitely not a valid choice. It is at best stupidity, at worse corruption.

In my experience in the public sector in France, I have seen these decisions taken to advance someone's career.

For example, a first year free means a purchase person will get their promotion on incredible YoY progress.

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

#153

Post by okanat »

Wololooo wrote: post #25
reacharavindh wrote: post #8

The 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…

Check 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.

It is not as open. Try building the desktop editors yourself. Some parts of the build system are not documented / not included in the repo.

Moreover it is a rebranding of Russian P7 Office. The company didn't cut ties with Russia and they still sell to the military. The owner created multiple shell companies in Latvia and Singapore to obscure this. I don't think this is something that EU governments trust, unless a deep inspection of the entire source is done and the repo is forked under an EU entity.

https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/serious-claims-made-agai...

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

#154

Post by kube-system »

louiskottmann wrote: post #152
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't need an excuse; it's a fully valid reason. Using proprietary software is a perfectly valid choice to make.

Chosing to pay millions when it is not necessary is definitely not a valid choice. It is at best stupidity, at worse corruption. In my experience in the public sector in France, I have seen these decisions taken to advance someone's career. For example, a first year free means a purchase person will get their promotion on incredible YoY progress.

Deploying a free tool that doesn't solve an organizations problems isn't a valid choice. I'm tired of open source advocates hand-waving away the reasons people choose other software. For most organizations, software is not a big cost, labor is. It often makes sense to throw a million dollars at a piece of software to make people's job easier, because that can translate to tens of millions in labor.

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

#155

Post by bigstrat2003 »

dmix wrote: post #127
Herring wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> 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.

If so, good because that's what I want. I want to have "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none" as Jefferson said. I consider it a great betrayal of the American people that past governments put us in a position where other nations are depending on us for security. Untangling us from that should be done as gently as possible, but IMO it should be done.

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

#156

Post by exceptione »

seb1204 wrote: post #116
exceptione wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KDE + 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 th…

Changing 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...

Step 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.

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

#157

Post by nradov »

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…

The 80/20 rule doesn't apply here because it turns out the "20" is different for everyone. If you take away one critical piece of user or organization's workflow then it doesn't really matter that everything else still works.

For LibreOffice there is still a huge functionality gap in VBA support. This is mission critical in a lot of places.

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

#158

Post by trelane »

udev4096 wrote: post #125
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

The companies falling to malware and extortion/ransomware would seem to indicate otherwise

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

#159

Post by toast0 »

seanw444 wrote: post #141
udev4096 wrote: post #122

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

How is it terrible? I keep hearing people say this, but I've never actually experienced any shortcomings personally. Granted, I don't really use word processors much. But when I did, I never had any.

Fit and finish aren't there, and have barely improved. It just looks bad. And it starts slowly (but so does Microsoft Office). Having to decide which fork to use is a problem.

Otherwise, I haven't had major issues. Sometime it doesn't work well with complex excel sheets, or complex word docs; create doc in X, edit in Y, view in X is likely to be disappointing if formatting is critical, but I've seen people use a publish to PDF, edit by change requests flow for that instead.

Other than multiplayer support, it's still much nicer than Google Docs, which can look better but likes to get into weird partially loaded states or runs simple spreadsheet tasks very slowly due to mandatory interaction with a server.

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

#160

Post by dismalaf »

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…

Is simultaneous editing really that important? Especially in a government context? My experience with older office workers is that all of them use ancient, offline versions of Word anyway...
Post reply on HN