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The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

politiken.dk

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Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#91

Post by pieds »

Jolter wrote: post #71
pieds wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have the capacity. The opinion you present is actually part of the narrative you are seemingly against. That you can compete with big tech if you just want to. And you "can" compete with big tech, but it isn't actually possible. Because the right pre-requisites, environment and priorities doesn't exist. Not in Europe, not in much of the US and not in much of the world. The European companies the would (or…

You say that the priorities are missing, but this article is about just that: this politician is changing the priorities. Admittedly for a rather small number of office workers, but it should be seen as a pilot project. Half the ministry staff will be off MS Office by end of summer, is the plan.

No, they aren't. These things happen all the time. Anyone can install Linux on a few laptops. Heck, 'anyone' can create their own Linux distribution. And plenty do. To make a difference they need to hire staff to actually manage it. And because Linux doesn't have the same facilities they probably need to be developers. Europe doesn't have a track record of hiring developers for government service. As a politician from the "Moderates" she is likely against it. It's now all privatization all the time. The US ironically does. I bet this doesn't last much longer than until there is a new minister for digitalisation.

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#92

Post by 2b3a51 »

fleshmonad wrote: post #73
mmooss wrote: post #65

The issues in this situation are always, 1. How much is compatibility with outside users and past documents necessary? No office application can successfully, reliably convert anything but relatively simple documents (have LLMs done better somehow?). Each conversion reduces fidelity and often integrity; send a few revisions back and forth and it can become a problem. Simply adding a small headache every time an outsi…

What is it with Microsoft shills everywhere? Everytime some subject like this headline comes up, people fetch some kind of dubious arguments like "muh deployment". This is actually trivial in linux, and even if not, the effort to implement a solution will be of use to future parties switching to FOSS. Why is it that people always want change to make something better, but screach when they actually have to improve som…

UK public sector education smallish organisation. All ms365 for doc sharing email and teams. A number of subscription services for other functions. Everybody accessed via chrome/edge.

I've been using chromium on Linux for years and noone has noticed. Could probably move all the endpoints to Linux without too outrageous level of disruption.

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#94

Post by saubeidl »

NexRebular wrote: post #19
decide1000 wrote: post #9

I hope this sets an example for the rest of Europe! Great news.

Linux monoculturalization is not great news. We should deploy e.g. *BSD and illumos as well to prevent having all eggs in one basket.

I think the kernel is really an implementation detail. The user space would be mostly the same between all of the open source posix OSes.

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#95

Post by arghwhat »

kriro wrote: post #80

Usually the biggest hurdles are Active Directory, deep Excel trenches and reliance on Outlook. The OS itself, browsers to get the job done and non-Excel office stuff are usually not an issue. There might also be deep reliance on Acrobat or some digital signature stuff etc. Either way, great news. I hope it works well. How are Danes submitting taxes? That's still Windows only software in many countries (though many ha…

> Usually the biggest hurdles are Active Directory, deep Excel trenches and reliance on Outlook.

It's mostly a mental block for the corporate IT department. People are already familiar with other email and calendar apps (e.g., gmail, apple mail, ...), and Active Directory only matters if you're running a lot of internal infrastructure feeding off it, usually through standard protocols like LDAP or OIDC.

> How are Danes submitting taxes?

Regular people don't submit taxes, they only make changes to the report if necessary once it comes out (e.g., to fix a missing deductible, such as commute distance deductible). Most stuff, including deductibles, are automatically reported.

All tax, including personal corrections and corporate tax, is done through an online web application. We do depend on smartphone apps for Android and iOS, but there's no Windows desktop apps or applets anywhere - at least to the public.

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#96

Post by lukan »

neepi wrote: post #68
mmooss wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand these stories: Do people talk to the maintainer before they work on the change? If not, why not? It seems necessary and obvious to get people on board before you invest in something.

Yes. Lucky if you even get noticed.

I talked once to the OpenOffice maintainers (there was no LibreOffice yet) - they were really open for contributions.

But I still did not contribute, because their understanding of a good UI was not what I had in mind.

They are office people.

(At least at that time, but I don't think that changed)

And I was used to how graphical design software worked. I would have had to fork and that was out of my scope.

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#97

Post by vladvasiliu »

pieds wrote: post #40
lordnacho wrote: post #13

Talking to my Danish friends, and I have a fair few in tech, the country is owned by Microsoft. A lot of code jobs are c# on Azure, and all the office people use Excel. This is a welcome change. I've thought for a long time, why would your average office worker even need to pay MS for their desktop OS when so many things could just be done on the web? And why develop a bunch of stuff on a proprietary platform when yo…

They don't have the capacity. The opinion you present is actually part of the narrative you are seemingly against. That you can compete with big tech if you just want to. And you "can" compete with big tech, but it isn't actually possible. Because the right pre-requisites, environment and priorities doesn't exist. Not in Europe, not in much of the US and not in much of the world. The European companies the would (or…

I think it's a question of habit / inertia. "This is how we've always done things".

In the company I work for, 99% of people spend their days in some combination of teams, outlook, word, excel and chrome. Word is basically for random text which is expected to last longer than an email or for carting around screenshots, Excel is for people who need five lines in a table. All these things work fine in a browser. The other 1% are either accountants who actually use Excel for what it was made, designers, etc.

Among those 99% there are a bunch of people shouting from the rooftops how much security is a priority for the company, so they run around in circles trying to secure a fundamentally insecure OS, while at the same time being scared shitless to update anything for fear of "breaking something". I'm convinced that moving to something like Chrome OS would improve these 99% of people's lives tremendously. But it's not what they're used to, so everybody just keeps on going down the same path.

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#98

Post by vladvasiliu »

forinti wrote: post #59

There is currently a very strong reason to migrate to Open Source: the big tech corps are pushing people into their clouds and this leads to new constraints on your planning because now you are subject to the software company's product lifecycle. So, if before you could run your old version of Oracle or whatever for as long as you wanted (if you could live without the support), now you have no choice. When the suppor…

I'm not convinced this is that strong of a reason for most companies. Pretty much everyone and their dog jumped on the cloud bandwagon without being forced by tech corps. So now, since most clients are already in the cloud, the tech corps might as well stop supporting "legacy" environments.

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#99

Post by nick__m »

Calc was not a great alternative to Desktop Excel but maybe it's better now, my opinion is 8 major version behind. But I remember that in v17 the array functions were a pale imitation of what's possible in Excel.

I also find that there is something wrong with the rendering that made the suite looks dated but again maybe it's better in v25...

I prefer the document model of writer to the word document model but it requires a more cartesian mindset. But then most people don't learn how to effectively use their word processor so maybe Words still have an edge with non technical user.

I asked a few questions to Bing and to my surprise it appears to know Calc as much as it know Excel.

Good luck to the Danish Ministry of Digitalization, we need used alternatives to the Office monopoly.

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#100

Post by Jolter »

pieds wrote: post #91
Jolter wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that the priorities are missing, but this article is about just that: this politician is changing the priorities. Admittedly for a rather small number of office workers, but it should be seen as a pilot project. Half the ministry staff will be off MS Office by end of summer, is the plan.

No, they aren't. These things happen all the time. Anyone can install Linux on a few laptops. Heck, 'anyone' can create their own Linux distribution. And plenty do. To make a difference they need to hire staff to actually manage it. And because Linux doesn't have the same facilities they probably need to be developers. Europe doesn't have a track record of hiring developers for government service. As a politician fro…

You're assuming they don't know how to make this work -- with that assumption, of course you can claim that they won't get it to work.

If you have any evidence that they are have not staffed the IT department with the right people to make this work, yo ucan go right ahead and post it...

I think some careful optimism is warranted here. At least someone is showing some will to change the status quo, which is what I'm missing from the European leadership in general.

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