Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice

heise.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 239 posts

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

#91

Post by ThinkBeat »

How does Linux fit into the eco system that surrounds it? I have no idea what systems the Danish government uses, but being a "Microsoft shop" with Exchange, Active directory, Teams etc is not uncommon.

I hope they will address and fix or have work arounds for all of them.

I feel sorry for the people who work there havin to nmove to LibreOffice. IT is free, and it works, but if you have spent 20 years or more using Microsoft Office, it will feel quite foreign and it is missing a large set of features.

The ministry will slow down considerably for some time while the employees learn how to use LibreOffice in all the ways they are used to.

My experience from a few large companies and government institutions is that a lot of employees do not want to change, or learn a whole different system. Forcing this change upon all is guarateed to create friction.

Much more important than that the change

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

#92

Post by mrweasel »

PcChip wrote: post #81
fock wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yesterday: I saw the weird CVE for M365 which "exploits" some LLM through messaging embedded in emails. today: got a very long email, wanted to search for our department in it. Outlook: "Search is a deprecated feature". Despite all the "but you can't extrapolate to a large org from personal experiences"-FUD around, I think for most orgs (especially governments which are generally far behind on processes) it would be…

Search is a deprecated feature?

I think they may have triggered a wrong search. Smart Lookup in Office is indeed deprecated and labeled Search. So right click on a word in a text, select Search and that will no longer work, but that wasn't searching in your text, but rather online.

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

#93

Post by yummypaint »

rpdillon wrote: post #64
IceDane wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also just absurd in general since no one who has used LibreOffice can seriously think it is a viable replacement. It can do in a pinch but I imagine the file format incompatibility issues between ms and libre are going to cost more in lost productivity than your number above.

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…

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 publication and instill bad habits in students.

I'm convinced the people who insist on "features" in these products don't actually use them, because if they did they would realize they suck and are a distraction from a poor core product. It's like people in the US who live in downtown apartments and insist on driving massive overpriced pickup trucks to commute to work and get groceries, never hauling or towing or leaving the pavement. They would be better served by commuter vehicles, but all they've ever driven is show trucks and learning new things is scary. If they did attempt to do real work, they would quickly realize the bed can't hold a standard sheet of plywood.

The important thing is that they FEEL like they have capability at their fingertips, even if this is obviously an illusion to people who actually use those capabilities.

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

#94

Post by preisschild »

jve wrote: post #45
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…

> Are these Linux machines going to authenticate against the Azure Active Directory... Are they using Intune, if so what's the replacement strategy where? This comes up all the time when we talk about Linux in corporate deployment. As I have only experience in MS word regarding governance, let me ask this: - Is there really no tools for Linux world that allows managing loads of Linux machines in an easy manner as it…

> Is there really no tools for Linux world that allows managing loads of Linux machines in an easy manner as it is in MS word

You can create fedora-based container images with your specific programs and configs included in the rootfs. The newly created container image will then be used as the rootfs for machines when they upgrade.

See https://universal-blue.org/

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

#95

Post by preisschild »

fazza999 wrote: post #2

Gosh. Is Linux now ready for the desktop?

I switched from a Macbook Pro M2 Max to a Fedora Silverblue-based Framework 16 and have been very happy with it for development & sysadmin work.

Wayland is also in quite a good place compared to just a few years ago. Stuff like HDR, VRR, High-Refresh Rates, DisplayPort 2.1 and so on just works.

Flatpak is also great and works really well with many apps when they support XDG Portals properly.

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

#96

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

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…

Why not rework auth?

Why are you stuck on azure AD?

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

#97

Post by maxdamantus »

thyristan wrote: post #34
skinkestek wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm currently working at a large public institution in Norway. 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.) Honestly, everything else runs smoother than what my Windows-using teammates are dealing with.

That is probably just a setting missing from your Firefox profile that allows your company Kerberos realm/domain. If your institution hasn't locked down your Firefox config, you can fix this yourself: https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...

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/password login) and allows you to pass the company device test.

I was able to put together a working ad-hoc extension for Firefox to make the DBus call and pass the header, though I've since come across this extension (haven't tried it myself) which looks like it achieves the same thing (with a lot more features, based on the code size?):

https://github.com/siemens/linux-entra-sso

Edge on Linux seems to have this built in, so if you open any page on login.microsoft.com, you'll see it passing some "x-something" header with a token that it receieved from the identity broker (generated on each page load).

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

#98

Post by clejack »

basisword wrote: post #71
clejack wrote: post #66

I was recently wondering why something of this nature hasn't happened long ago. Governments have to be spending so much money on licensing fees. It seems like you could throw a fraction of that money at open source software, actually make it good and then not be beholden to corporations like Microsoft or Google. Combine this sort push between multiple governments and the world gets good (at least relatively) software…

>> It seems like you could throw a fraction of that money at open source software, actually make it good As much as I love OSS I don't think throwing money at it is what's going to make it rival large closed-source software projects. You need clear direction and goals which won't happen when building by committee.

That's a fair point, but I think it primarily depends on the nature of the committee. I could be wrong because I don't operate in oss spaces, so I'm not sure about their structure.

The first acknowledgement is that ui and design is just as important as technical functionality because a good idea that no one can use is a bad idea.

If we can have a technical team collaborate to design oss code, why can't we have a design team as well that's focused purely on themes, UX, and design philosophy?

Of course this is all prefaced on the idea that the money is there to support such a team. I suspect good designers are less likely to be on the "working for free" bandwagon.

Financial support can bring in better talent, then the oss teams need to structure them selves properly so intransigence doesn't set in.

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

#99

Post by twarge »

clejack wrote: post #66

I was recently wondering why something of this nature hasn't happened long ago. Governments have to be spending so much money on licensing fees. It seems like you could throw a fraction of that money at open source software, actually make it good and then not be beholden to corporations like Microsoft or Google. Combine this sort push between multiple governments and the world gets good (at least relatively) software…

The midpoint constraint you seek in the symmetry constraint that looks like this: ><

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

#100

Post by gizajob »

lionkor wrote: post #84
gizajob wrote: post #36

For any of their finance or planning people using Excel as a daily driver, the productivity lost will far outweigh any financial or ethical gains. We’re also at the cusp of AI getting added throughout MS Office and Windows which will be the next driver of productivity and collaboration, and it’ll be at least a decade before Libreoffice catches up. Saying this as a believer in open source and with no great love for M$…

Why =SUM(A:1;A:24) when you can "Good morning! What is the sum of the rows 1 through 24? Put the result in row 25 in the same column, and format it as a number, pretty please! :)" -- truly the future of productivity

No idea. Ask all your programmer buddies.
Post reply on HN