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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

#191

Post by yummypaint »

nradov wrote: post #143
yummypaint wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would go further and say that MS products have completely backwards priorities that lead to an overinflated feature count. What good is fancy formatting in excel if it chokes and crashes once the file hits about 20 MB? Yet despite all this emphasis on form over function over multiple decades of being a flagship product for a multibillion dollar software empire, it still produces plots that are unacceptable for publ…

It's possible you found a bug in Excel somewhere but I guarantee that when working with large files it's generally faster and more reliable than the competition. I have successfully worked with files way larger than 20 MB which make competing products such as Apple Numbers or Google Sheets completely choke.

Compare with gnumeric, that's the only spreadsheet I can recommend. I have files with hundreds of plots, non-trivial fits, and logic. 100% of everything works always and it's much faster.

I have a direct comparison because the exact same computations were previously implemented in excel and libre office. Both dropped plots from files, had straight-up reference bugs once things got large, and would regularly crash attempting to render dozens of tiled plots in 4k. The idea of using Google sheets for this is laughable.

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

#192

Post by skinkestek »

eisa01 wrote: post #163
skinkestek wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Just set your preferred UI language to English in System Settings – Language and Region and Excel will honor that

That might work - assuming IT policies don’t block it - but it could easily break a bunch of other things on my machine.

> There's probably a similar system setting for the date format

Maybe. But I’ve been a power user for 30 years (counting from my first full Windows restore), and I taught my first IT course in the late ’90s - so if there is an easy fix, I’m honestly kind of impressed with my own ability to miss it.

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

#193

Post by mxuribe »

timbit42 wrote: post #190
mxuribe wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the UI/UX of libreofice is not the prettiest...but its fine for what i need it for: regular work-related document management, word processing sorts of tasks. But my partner? They LOVE libreoffice specifically BECAUSE its looks like older versions of MS Word! Their needs are basic and are easily met with the functionality of libreoffice and onlyoffice...but they prefer libreoffice especially for the look-…

LibreOffice also has a ribbon interface.

Ah-ha, good to know....though my partner would have zero interest...and i careless about the UI/UX...but still is good to know especially for folks who *do* prefer a Ui/UX more similar to MS Word, etc. Thanks for sharing! :-)

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

#194

Post by ngrilly »

dismalaf wrote: post #160
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...

Not all office workers are old. Some are young and want to use modern collaboration tools. Even government workers. I think real-time collaborative editing is a chicken-and-egg. You don't know you need it until you start using it. I'm using this often in meetings where the participants all work on the same document, usually some notes/memo or spreadsheet. But I agree that for the note taking use case, a full-blown word processor is not necessary.

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

#195

Post by myk9001 »

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…

https://x.com/ISEUConcerned

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

#197

Post by maxdamantus »

ptx wrote: post #182
maxdamantus wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect nowadays it's more likely a matter of integrating with Microsoft's "identity broker", part of Intune, aka "Company Portal". You use Intune to log in and register your device against your Microsoft account, and microsoft-identity-broker is a DBus service that hands out tokens that can be passed to login.microsoft.com (either as a cookie or a special header) which identifies you (skipping the username/passwor…

How does this work if the conditional access policies require compliance with Microsoft's "security baseline" which involves e.g. checking that the latest Windows updates are installed? Presumably the Microsoft software running on the Linux machine will report it as non-compliant and prevent you from logging in?

Microsoft Intune is officially available for Linux. This mechanism doesn't involve making a Linux system pretend it's Windows. It's just about making non-Edge browsers able to authenticate as Edge does.

Microsoft is aware that the authentication is coming from a Linux system, so presumably there are different policies involved.

I don't know how these things are administrated, but the Linux Intune software has a notion of "Compliance" that might involve periodically running some program decided by the company. If Intune decides the system is non-compliant, authentication still works, but Microsoft login knows the compliance status, so it might prevent you from accessing certain applications, depending on what the company has configured.

Also in my experience ability to sign in from Linux can be limited to certain groups, so regular Windows users can't just run Linux without some company approval.

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

#198

Post by nradov »

cmilton wrote: post #162
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 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…

If those users have to work with large spreadsheets then Google Workspace is simply nonfunctional. I've tried to use Google Sheets but it hangs and never finishes recalculations that Excel completes in seconds.

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

#199

Post by cmilton »

nradov wrote: post #198
cmilton wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If those users have to work with large spreadsheets then Google Workspace is simply nonfunctional. I've tried to use Google Sheets but it hangs and never finishes recalculations that Excel completes in seconds.

Absolutely have run into that. In those instances they keep excel, or we move that data to a different platform for consumption.

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

#200

Post by EasyMark »

ahartmetz wrote: post #85
rcbdev wrote: post #9

The 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.

That's true but I don't see them taking the "money saved" and sending it to openOffice for software improvement.
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