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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

#211

Post by zevon »

kube-system wrote: post #185
davoneus wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Certainly the people buying software know best what their requirements are. I doubt it. The people who are going to use the software are the ones who know what the requirements are. The people buying it should be asking the users, but rarely do.

For a large software deployment, you should be getting part of your requirements from discussions with users, but there will often be a lot of requirements from non-user stakeholders. For government deployments, even more so.

Have you ever actually worked in a large org or government IT department? :D

Commendable ideas, but they do not translate to reality. Even taking the OSS discussion out of the equation: Understanding and integrating user requirements in development processes is a hard problem in general. It gets worse when we are talking about resource-constrained contexts (like government IT)

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

#212

Post by exceptione »

rurban wrote: post #208
exceptione wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

> You have to create a good looking document. Then any office product is horrible. I'm using emacs with markdown, and convert them to tex, pdf, blog posts automatically. Tables look better. Images look better. Everything's looks better. And it's 10x easier to work with.

Hey, you don't have to kill the average user!

I am sure your latex or custom pipeline produces better quality indeed. There has always been a gap between word processors and typesetting applications like Scribus and Indesign.

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

#213

Post by exceptione »

marcosdumay wrote: post #177
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'd say Writer is miles ahead from Word. To start with, it works and won't mangle your entire document because you added a line-break some place it didn't like. But also, office suites are becoming anachronistic very quickly. Every time you use one nowadays, it's a symptom of some organization failure. (Ok, there are a few reasonable use cases for spreadsheets.) So the entire question is kinda of moot.

> office suites are becoming anachronistic very quickly.

I hope you did not mean online offerings as an alternative?

In the tech world we are used to compile documents from plain text. But outside I don't see that. I see legal deeply entrenched into Word, with a bunch of macros. It looks masochistic to me, but I guess that is a matter of being entrenched.

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

#214

Post by zevon »

Maybe of interest to some people given the discussions in this thread: https://sciebo.de is an example of a successful "let's roll our own collaboration infrastructure" project at scale (aimed at about half a million users) based on Nextcloud with Collabora Office (= live document collaboration) and more integrated applications (calendars, contacts, tasks, forms, those kinds of things).

All hosted and maintained at German universities, with federation between them, with support for guest users and whatnot.

Quite nice and back when it started, it was very important for us because it enabled us to get a huge chunk of sensitive data back from Dropbox, Google Drive and the other cloud providers.

There's not too much English documentation around but https://wwuit-sys.zivgitlabpages.uni-muenster.de/sciebo/docs... is good.

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

#215

Post by The_suffocated »

Many comments here point out the difficulties in replacing the digital infrastructure of a large organisation, but according to the ministry’s website, the ministry is only ten months old: “As a result of the formation of a new government 29th of August 2024 the Ministry of Digital Affairs has been established”.

There probably isn’t any huge or complex infrastructure to replace.

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

#216

Post by skinkestek »

luuio wrote: post #205
heraldgeezer wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.) So everything in the backend is still MS? Office 365, Intune, the full stack? That is the point of the comment you are rerplying to. The "terminals" dont matter that much if the goal is to get rid of MS dependancy and they run Office 365... whats the point.

Windows licensing cost. They are a pretty penny at large scale.

Sometimes, the goal isn’t actually to switch - it’s to have a credible threat of switching. That alone can bring Microsoft to the table with a whole new attitude toward pricing.

Munich pulled off a version of this around 2010: announce a bold move to Linux and open source, let Microsoft panic, enjoy the sudden price cuts, and quietly stay put.

Personally, I think cost is just one part of the equation. The real value is being in a position where you’re not locked in—and where Microsoft knows it. That leverage is worth more than any licensing discount.

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

#217

Post by heraldgeezer »

luuio wrote: post #205
heraldgeezer wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.) So everything in the backend is still MS? Office 365, Intune, the full stack? That is the point of the comment you are rerplying to. The "terminals" dont matter that much if the goal is to get rid of MS dependancy and they run Office 365... whats the point.

Windows licensing cost. They are a pretty penny at large scale.

For workstation or laptops?? Non-factor for a business.

It is included in Office 365 E3/E5 that also does Intune device management, apps, Defender, the whole shebang. Nobody cares about individual licence costs.

Windows Server? Yea, that costs for sure, but that's not running on laptops.

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

#218

Post by marcosdumay »

exceptione wrote: post #213
marcosdumay wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say Writer is miles ahead from Word. To start with, it works and won't mangle your entire document because you added a line-break some place it didn't like. But also, office suites are becoming anachronistic very quickly. Every time you use one nowadays, it's a symptom of some organization failure. (Ok, there are a few reasonable use cases for spreadsheets.) So the entire question is kinda of moot.

> office suites are becoming anachronistic very quickly. I hope you did not mean online offerings as an alternative? In the tech world we are used to compile documents from plain text. But outside I don't see that. I see legal deeply entrenched into Word, with a bunch of macros. It looks masochistic to me, but I guess that is a matter of being entrenched.

Online office suites are office suites.

If legal is deeply entrenched into Word, it means your company has a problem with legal. Complex rich text is really not an adequate format for legal documents, they should really be generating HTML through some system.

(When legal is deep into Word, there is almost always somebody that takes their results and turn them into HTML or PDF. The later group has 2 problems.)

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

#219

Post by chaz6 »

As much as I applaud the move away from proprietary software, when it comes to Office, particularly Excel, there are going to be a LOT of custom macros dotted around that will be difficult to replace, particularly when they integrate with other applications via COM. These are usually written with the best intentions by people wanting to be more productive.

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

#220

Post by Huntsecker »

lots of the comments on here focus on the, A isn't as good as B or the cost will be too great, the primary reason at least imo this has come is due to Trump and his focus on Greenland(https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/07/greenland-sp...). The supermarkets here have stars on items to show they are not from the USA(https://www.fastcompany.com/91296407/danish-grocery-stores-h...), their is a concerted effort to detangle Denmark from the USA and I see this as a growing trend across EU.
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