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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

#221

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.

Ideally yes, but do you realistically think that happens?

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

#222

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…

Can we talk about the LibreOffice UI/UX? It's shit. It doesn't feel like MS Office, but like some Frankenstein's version of it. I would much rather prefer if OnlyOffice were pushed as the open source standard for office apps instead of Libre. OnlyOffice mirrors everything that MS Office offers, the only difference being the lack of VBA coding (instead replaced by JS coding).

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

#224

Until they switch back 3 years from now. And the circus continues.

I hope they do the same in Germany and then invest some into maintenance and features based on the saved licencing fees. You can only do that if you are able to commit to a plan for more than one legislation.

The German sovereign tech fund gave gnome 1m Euro a year or so ago, so they do seem to be doingsomething.

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

#225
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope so too, but I fear that the implementation is rushed and won't yield the positive results it could have.

That's what the EU OS project is also about! https://eu-os.eu

I could get behind this and contribute if it didn't use a US corporate distro as a base. Ideally it should be something like Nix: non-profit foundation headquartered in the Netherlands. SUSE could work too.

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

#226

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…

What required software will be rendered rendered incompatible after switching to Linux and Libre Office? Perhaps the crisis will be a shot across the bow at how IT systems almost-universally make computing a bad experience. Technical software like SolidWorks sometimes has OS-restrictions, but most of what I can think of that would be useful for school is, or should be OS-agnostic. I suspect that some of the software…

>I suspect I am looking at this through a mix of optimism and naivite.

For sure.

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

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In my past life, we had a mix of Linux users using LibreOffice and MS Windows using Office. It was indeed at times painful, especially when LO content had to be merged into a Word doc. But too often I think people just think of Word vs Writer but we're talking the Office experience here. Calc is a poor man's version of Excel: I've found it slow with many rows of data and crash-prone (Office is surprisingly solid). Th…

>What we ended up doing was giving a Windows VM with Office on it for those Linux users that needed to produce documents and the like.

and at that point, you might as well just use windows, you aren't getting any advantage out of linux and are spending a bunch of overhead managing it.

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

#228
post #135

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

> I cannot stand Word but it's just impossible to find a true replacement for it. As someone who's never used Word: what do you use Word for that it's hard to find a replacement? (For me, the "light" things I want to note down and version, I use one of the lightweight markup languages. The "heavy" things, I either use TeX or something to convert my lightweight markup into a pdf or whatever people want. What am I miss…

>what do you use Word for that it's hard to find a replacement?

Opening files created by other organizations and expecting them to load correctly and accurately, and then editing them and expecting them to load correctly and accurately when I send them back.

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

#229
The nearby german country Schleswig-Holstein also announced the very same plan. https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/themen/...

Other German countries were long advised to stop using illegal propriety cloud providers, such as Microsoft, also, but continue with it. Despite the privacy violations, risk and cost.

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

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? That is really stupid way to think you're better off using Linux Desktop. Plenty of modern malware versions target pretty much every OS, from windows to mac

I disagree

Your opinion has nothing to do with it. Research shows it's true
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