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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

#21

Post by dsego »

sgt wrote: post #17
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…

I saw KDE a couple of years ago and it was not much better than KDE in 2005. It was visually more impressive, sure. But what has really happened in the last 2-4 years to make it miles ahead of Windows?

Windows is only getting worse because of all the bloat like ads, telemetry, react ui, frequent updates (needs to restart like every other day), recall and so on. Software from 20 years ago feels snappier, even though they didn't add anything new.

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

#22

Post by aitchnyu »

UK-Al05 wrote: post #10

This is normally a strategy to negotiate lower prices with microsoft. After awhile things go back to normal.

How would an official first say they dont want to be sanctioned by US/Microsoft and then be satisfied with a price drop?

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

#23

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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…

as I said previously there will be an inflection point and then MS is basically history in the whole country, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44238752 that's the way Denmark works

which I am personally looking forward to, not because I think MS is so much worse than Linux, Mac etc. (although haven't really used for some years so I may be wrong) I personally think of OS's as being commodified, and I do like the ability that MS gives you to do globaly hotkeys and hotstrings that you really can't replicate easily, if at all, in other OS's (which security wise is probably a plus, if you can catch keystrokes easily enough you can make keyloggers), nope I have a personal beef here.

Some years ago I was working for the Danish Governmental department of IT and Telephony, later changed to Digitization Department (a department or "styrelse" being a big government agency subsidiary to a ministry) running a project to provide overarching data standardization for the government - mainly providing and hosting XML schemas for data interchange, providing some services etc.

The data interchange repository we were on was provided by Microsoft, which was built on top of some MS product the name of which I can't recall that they were thinking was good for this kind of thing, a glorified file server with some lousy search etc. It was extremely sub-par, so we had a meeting with some MS guys, Jean Paoli etc. where basically they got mad at us for their sub par product and said they couldn't be associated with it, this came about a month after Bill Gates had a meeting the prime minister and talked shit about how Denmark needed MS but MS didn't need Denmark.

So anyway, personally, my spiteful little heart will sing when Denmark no longer "needs" MS.

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

#24

Post by mrweasel »

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, given that it's half of the staff. Are they using Intune, if so what's the replacement strategy where?

My guess is that many of these staff members are going to use webmail and run Windows programs in remote desktop. The investments in the infrastructure isn't high enough, nor have they addressed any of the hard problems and the time frame is rather short. I doubt any significant money and time has been set aside for training.

It is going to end in complete failure, the employees are going to complain about lost productivity and a frustrating work environment. They are setting themselves up for complete failure.

The same is happening in a number of schools, where Linux and LibreOffice is set to replace ChromeBooks for some students. The expectation is that the cost is going to be €2.25M per year, for the next two years, then there will be a cost saving of €4-5M. Again no plans for handling authentication, email, file sharing or provisioning. They'll just force the students out of the relatively protected Google Workspace for Students, into the "real" Google/Gmail ecosystems where they are less protected against data mining.

This will all end badly and it will be because of poor planning. Then the next US president steps in, calms things down and we forget the whole thing in 2 years.

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

#25

Post by Wololooo »

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.

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

#26

Post by Spooky23 »

UK-Al05 wrote: post #10

This is normally a strategy to negotiate lower prices with microsoft. After awhile things go back to normal.

Maybe. Now you have the added flavor of a fascist would be dictator changing the dynamics of international relations.

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

#27

Post by freehorse »

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…

I don't have ms office installed in my work macbook (it was not pre-installed, they just told me I should install it but I never did). Only once I actually needed access to a computer with ms office installed, because of some horrible word template that should not have existed in the first place. Most of the time microsoft's online suite works just fine, if I cannot do it in pages/numbers. The times I had to use teams (my group hates it and doesn't use it, so only when have to talk with outsiders) running it from the browser worked too.

My colleagues have more problems than me anyway with reading those csv files in excel in a locale that uses "," for decimals. A side effect of avoiding excel is that it is much easier to read csv files for me.

I understand others may make heavier use of more word-excel specific stuff and have more issues, but I never had actual issues with avoiding to install ms office at work, even though everybody here uses it all the time and I have to work together on documents with them.

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

#30

Post by decide1000 »

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 hope all employees will use their experience to make a success of this project. Switching to Linux and ditching Micro$oft should be priority of each European country.
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