Does the Danish govt fund these open source projects at all?
Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice
161–170 of 239 posts
Re: Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice
#162As 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 have a related experience. Our project was moving from Office 365 to Google Workspace. Lot's of Windows PCs replaced with Chromebooks.
Over a year after completion, many users still have Excel and we do lots more app virtualization. I will say the biggest hurdle that still remains today, users accepting and adjusting to change. The migration also exposed lots of unknown user-created processes that no longer worked as usual, making it difficult for them to transition.
Overall, most users made the necessary adjustments, did the training provided, and are excelling. There's always that subset that can't, or maybe won't.
Re: Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
…unless you work all day in Excel, which many do. There is no reasonable substitute or replacement for Excel. There should be, but there isn’t.
Probably true if you’re an advanced user using a machine with American language pack. Personally, I stick with LibreOffice. The biggest win? It doesn’t aggressively mangle my data by assuming everything is a U.S. date that needs “fixing.” And don’t get me started on how Excel insists that, just because my employer gave me a Norwegian-language Mac, every formula should now be written in some half-baked, poorly documen…
Just set your preferred UI language to English in System Settings - Language and Region and Excel will honor that
There's probably some similar system setting for the date format
Re: Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Let's be real... Tons of governments employ people just to boost employment numbers. Government staff are almost always simply a cost, governments don't need to be profitable. They extract taxes and then spend it. And I think a lot of countries would prefer to spend more on salaries than on software licenses going to a different country...
Re: Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice
#165Earlier 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…
…unless you work all day in Excel, which many do. There is no reasonable substitute or replacement for Excel. There should be, but there isn’t.
Agree, LibreOffice at minimum need to implement the same alt-key ribbon shortcuts.
As those are not available in macOS Excel without 3rd party hacks, LO would actually beat MSO at something :)
Re: Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice
#166LibreOffice 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.
That are also a, if not the, major contributor to LibreOffice.
Re: Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That is stretching the subject beyond reasonable. Proprietary software as a general endeavor is not an invalid business and nobody is saying that here.
LibreOffice is close enough to Microsoft's offering that surely it makes sense accross the many EU states to stop spending millions on it, and spend a few to close the gap, saving even more millions in the future.
Re: Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice
#168The Austrian Federal Ministry of Justice has been on LibreOffice for many years now, with the Austrian Federal Computing Center developing extensions specifically for their use-cases. This is a great trend. I wonder how long until Microsoft's Ballmer-type people fly into Munich again to commit corruption / lobbying.
License fees for a few thousand workplaces of Microsoft can pay for a lot of development on FOSS alternatives instead. There is very little overhead there. Some things take a lot of work, but many changes that would be useful are pretty easy to make. Crash and bug and (some) performance fixes, time-saving automations and integrations with rough and / or minimal user interfaces and so on.
What's more, you can pay for local dev! I imagine not sending money to the US and keeping it local is not a small consideration.
Re: Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice
#169 Kitchen-sink office suites are dinosaurs. It's like switching from riding an ankylosaurus to riding a glyptodont. Personal computing was and is a tarpit. It was and is used to automate and complicate paper-style processes. Every time I have to fill out a PDF form, I want to scream! . Big fat slow 90's-style document-oriented processes have got to go!
Re: Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice
#170Earlier 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.
Defence and power projection is extremely expensive and tech is incredibly work demanding. Is the average EU citizen ready for 15 days PTO and 50-60 hour work weeks?
I don't mean this as a slight, but I genuinely do not think the average European worker, who has at this point spent most of their career in a pretty cushy worker friendly environment, is going to be up for American style death-race productivity. Or the European style death-race productivity of centuries past for that matter.
The average American worker works 500 more hours a year than their German counterpart. That is 62.5 more work days annually. Trying to close that gap will have people rioting. Never mind the cuts to social programs and bumping retirement age to boost defense spending. Double never mind avoiding Russian energy. Europe would need a wholesale societal rewrite, not just a few more bonds issued.
Its much less resistance to stick out 4 years and hope the US gets it's sanity back.