Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice

https://www.heise.de/en/news/From-Word-and-Excel-to-LibreOffice-Danish-ministry-says-goodbye-to-Microsoft-10438942.html

by jlpcsl • 1 year ago

450 227 1 year ago

heise.de

fazza999• 1 year ago

Gosh. Is Linux now ready for the desktop?

kalaksi2• 1 year ago

You're probably joking but it has been for a long time.

_joel• 1 year ago

Any year now...

dismalaf3• 1 year ago

I went through university only using Ubuntu like 15 years ago... It's been ready a very long time.

exceptione4• 1 year ago

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 the year 1994), lack of document themes in Writer, lack of quick table style in Calc.

The UX/UI is in dire need for attention.

BoxOfRain• 1 year ago

I've been using KDE for years now, I've recently put CachyOS with KDE on the new personal machine I just built and I've not been so impressed with a distro in ages. It's rock solid, minimal faff, very fast, and having got back into PC gaming after a long hiatus the playability of Windows games on Linux is amazing now. Even has a really good looking system theme (in my opinion).

I definitely agree LO and particularly its terribly dated UI is a greater barrier to desktop Linux adoption than the desktop environment itself.

sneak• 1 year ago

…unless you work all day in Excel, which many do.

There is no reasonable substitute or replacement for Excel.

There should be, but there isn’t.

sgt• 1 year ago

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?

a2128• 1 year ago

I've stopped recommending LibreOffice to anyone after I found out about OnlyOffice, its UI/UX is much better and I've personally been using it without running into any issues or limitations. I'm not a super big power user so I don't know if it lacks features that professionals need, but it's been perfect in my case

mxuribe2• 1 year ago

I agree that the UI/UX of libreofice is not the prettiest...but its fine for what i need it for: regular work-related document management, word processing sorts of tasks. But my partner? They LOVE libreoffice specifically BECAUSE its looks like older versions of MS Word! Their needs are basic and are easily met with the functionality of libreoffice and onlyoffice...but they prefer libreoffice especially for the look-and-feel. Caveat: we are of a particularly advanced age, hence we recall many decades of the different versions of MS Office and its app offerings. ;-)

seb1204• 1 year ago

Changing infrastructure and software packages should not fail due to a missing or bad office template. Surely this can be made from scratch to suit the gov org and current standards/legislation within one work month by any skilled consultant. There are challenges yes, an office template should not be on the top list. Maybe I'm totally wrong...

marcosdumay3• 1 year ago

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.

freehorse3• 1 year ago

Linux is better than windows nowadays as an OS to work on (also for non programming stuff), imo. Even the enterprise versions of windows are full of crap. For non-enterprise versions (home and pro) I really don't understand how people can put up with MS's total crap like installing candy crash and a ton of bloatware after each major update.

The problem with Linux is the software ecosystem around it, esp security software, office suits, and tons of various specialised software that often target only windows, or at best also macos. But there has been a lot of improvement to that direction last years. I really hope linux takes over work desktop environments, the degree of slop that MS puts into windows is getting more and more over the years. In linux it is infinitely easier to get a machine do what you want once you get to understand some basics wrt how to configure stuff (and now with llms is much less steep curve to get relevant info). In windows you have to constantly dance around whatever horrible UX each version brings upon you.

dncornholio• 1 year ago

Has Linux... won?

forinti• 1 year ago

In the sense that ordinary users are considering it and no longer gasp in horror at the thought, yes.

preisschild2• 1 year ago

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.

kalaksi2• 1 year ago

Previous post from 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234552

reacharavindh• 1 year ago

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 either use Google docs or Libre Office if it is too complicated for Google Docs.

bryanrasmussen• 1 year ago

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.

Wololooo2• 1 year ago

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.

okanat• 1 year ago

It is not as open. Try building the desktop editors yourself. Some parts of the build system are not documented / not included in the repo.

Moreover it is a rebranding of Russian P7 Office. The company didn't cut ties with Russia and they still sell to the military. The owner created multiple shell companies in Latvia and Singapore to obscure this. I don't think this is something that EU governments trust, unless a deep inspection of the entire source is done and the repo is forked under an EU entity.

https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/serious-claims-made-agai...

freehorse3• 1 year ago

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.

b1122• 1 year ago

It is 2025, couldn’t we get away with using cheaper/even free(and or open source) online versions of office software?

Online?! There should be no usage of anything online to store or work with government data.

rcbdev• 1 year ago

The Austrian Federal Ministry of Justice has been on LibreOffice for many years now, with the Austrian Federal Computing Center developing extensions specifically for their use-cases.

This is a great trend. I wonder how long until Microsoft's Ballmer-type people fly into Munich again to commit corruption / lobbying.

ahartmetz2• 1 year ago

License fees for a few thousand workplaces of Microsoft can pay for a lot of development on FOSS alternatives instead. There is very little overhead there.

Some things take a lot of work, but many changes that would be useful are pretty easy to make. Crash and bug and (some) performance fixes, time-saving automations and integrations with rough and / or minimal user interfaces and so on.

trelane7• 1 year ago

What's more, you can pay for local dev! I imagine not sending money to the US and keeping it local is not a small consideration.

EasyMark2• 1 year ago

That's true but I don't see them taking the "money saved" and sending it to openOffice for software improvement.

UK-Al05• 1 year ago

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

aitchnyu• 1 year ago

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

Spooky23• 1 year ago

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

nasretdinov• 1 year ago

They're surely going to be using SuSe, right?

timbit424• 1 year ago

Linux Mint is based in Ireland.

gggggggoodlord• 1 year ago

Something this article doesn't mention is that this only pertains to the ministry itself, which has like 80 employees, and not its much larger subsidiaries (Digitaliseringsstyrelsen and Danmarks Statistik).

Aarhus and Copenhagen municipalities are planning to do the same, and have around 80000 employees, that's a much bigger deal in my opinion.

whiplash451• 1 year ago

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

notTooFarGone• 1 year ago

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.

abenga• 1 year ago

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

mrweasel7• 1 year ago

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.

decide1000• 1 year ago

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.

mrweasel7• 1 year ago

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

s1mplicissimus• 1 year ago

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

What? This sounds like there is an observable way of telling that there's different levels of data mining going on in these two spaces, mind sharing the evidence?

mrweasel7• 1 year ago

There is no data mining/profiling in Googles educational offering (also no ads, which there is in regular Gmail):

Google Workspace for Education Core Services (like Gmail, Google Calendar, Classroom, and more) have no ads, and student information in Core Services is never used to create profiles for ad targeting, or sold to third parties.[1]

1) https://edu.google.com/intl/ALL_us/our-values/privacy-securi...

skinkestek5• 1 year ago

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.

thyristan2• 1 year ago

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_...

mrweasel7• 1 year ago

using Edge for SSO

May I ask what that SSO solution is? Because it sounds like it might be a Microsoft product.

AdamN• 1 year ago

I feel reasonably confident that if the focus is on open tooling and sovereignty and not saving money then a shift to Linux can 100% work even at large and complex organizations.

eu_os2• 1 year ago

This sounds really interesting. Are you able to share more about this (even in private) for inclusion in https://eu-os.eu/use-cases ?

dusted• 1 year ago

kerberos is sort of magic when/if you finally get it working

heraldgeezer3• 1 year ago

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.

o_m• 1 year ago

I see this as a win. It will hopefully prune the incompetent managers/leaders and all the other incompetent tech workers that don't understand there is a world outside of the Microsoft/Google ecosystem.

freehorse3• 1 year ago

I want to believe that it is not actual incompetence (and nobody will get pruned) but rather laziness/habit/lack of motivation. I have been in a big org where any issues related to how non-windows systems were integrated were, frustratingly, ignored, even if those systems were supposed to be supported and offered as choices (and indeed chosen by many employees). The IT people working on the servers did not care because in windows everything was working fine, and other departments did not have the actual tools to solve anything. They were asking us if we had any spare computer around they could borrow to test things ffs. I hope such changes bring at least the necessary motivation to engage with such issues seriously.

jve2• 1 year ago

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 in MS word (applying GPO policies)? A tool that can be easily set up and managed and doesn't have to always resort to scripting?

- If there is, why people are not using them?

I'm kind of aware some things are that allow managing Linux machines via Windows AD GPO, but that depends on MS domain there.

Seems like a ripe for a startup to provide open source tool(s) with, say, paid support for the enterprises.

powgpu• 1 year ago

well for server is nix, but not sure about desktop.

fock3• 1 year ago

and then most of the places I know happily allow employees admin access for "just that piece of software they need" and simultaneously push for "zero-trust". There's no point in it at all and you can just as well use saltstack to rollout apparmor-policies on your locked-down linux (and suddenly the same people wanting GPOs tell you that linux is untenable because of usage restrictions)

ChocolateGod2• 1 year ago

- 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 (applying GPO policies)? A tool that can be easily set up and managed and doesn't have to always resort to scripting?

Nope, there's no unification in configuration formats (yml, ini etc), locations (/var, /etc, /usr, /opt/etc) or registries (dconf, gconf).

Yes, standards exist, but they are rarely followed to the letter.

bigfatkitten• 1 year ago

I’ve done it with Puppet, mostly dropping config files around the place.

Everything was more work than it would’ve been under Windows, from endpoint configuration enforcement through to things like authentication and PKI.

preisschild2• 1 year ago

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/

trelane7• 1 year ago

If it exists, I expect it would be in Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Ubuntu. Most of us don't use those, though, so I don't expect the knowledge is common.

Propelloni• 1 year ago

That's depends what you want to do. If you want an all-in-one solution you'd go with the solution of your distribution vendor, e.g. Red Hat IPA/Satellite, SUSE Manager, or Ubuntu Landscape. Linux just plays nicer with ADS than MS Windows with any Linux solution, so most fall back to ADS in mixed environments.

If you only want Identity, Policies and Audit trails over several different Linux distributions, FreeIPA is your weapon of choice. It is clicky and requires no scripting. Just like ADS it is a bit of a pain to get into, but easier to run than OpenLDAP ;) If you want OpenID, too, connect FreeIPA and Keycloak, but you will need to dive onto the CLI. For configuration management connect Saltstack, here you have to edit rules files.

sirjaz• 1 year ago

Funny thing is that Ubuntu, Suse, and RedHat support gpos now: https://ubuntu.com/blog/new-active-directory-integration-fea...

msgodel• 1 year ago

As someone who's career has involved managing large numbers of deployed Linux and BSD machines: what's wrong with scripting? It's expressive, debugable, repeatable, easy to communicate about verbally and on wikis. If you want something that's more constrained there are tools like puppet and ansible.

I guess this is another one of those "smalltalk people" vs "unix people" talking past eachother because they have shared vocabulary with different implications kind of situations.

fock3• 1 year ago

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 easy to switch from a feature-perspective. The problem is the army of employees and contractors who are very happy to defend Microsoft for keeping their non-automated thiefdoms (such is non-cloud AD administration at most places I extrapolate ....). There is hardly anyone there to implement the necessary processes and rather than to send out their underlings to FOSDEM, leadership is happy to get an invite by Microsoft (or a cloud-provider...) to an "innovation-summit" instead.

tonyedgecombe• 1 year ago

I was watching my wife navigate Outlook the other day, I can't believe how bad it's got since I last used it. It was completely unresponsive on brand new hardware. The UI was awful.

PcChip• 1 year ago

Search is a deprecated feature?

IceDane• 1 year ago

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.

rpdillon3• 1 year ago

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 complete product, but still serve a huge percentage of the market's needs (maybe 95%+, since most users aren't power users).

So when I see critiques of GIMP versus Photoshop, or Linux versus Windows, or LibreOffice versus Microsoft Office, saying "oh, it has fewer features and therefore nobody can take it seriously" it's just reductive, and provides zero useful insight. It's all about the particular needs of the person or organization and how those intersect with the features of the product they're thinking of adopting.

mrweasel7• 1 year ago

Denmark does have a policy of being able to use either docx or odf, but LibreOffice is also known for being able to open older doc files that modern Word struggle with.

I'm not to worried about the LibreOffice part.

bee_rider• 1 year ago

The only problem I ever had with LibreOffice is that (at the time) there seemed to be some inconsistency when showing some PowerPoint-generated slideshows. I suspect the standard is incomplete and the issue is just a matter of matching the expectations of whatever software was used by the person who generated the slides. So, if the officials switch, it is fine.

Anyway, if the government is generating files that require MS office to open, they are essentially creating an undocumented tax, to be paid to a foreign company. This seems… legally questionable (depending on your local laws of course), and wildly stupid.

firesteelrain• 1 year ago

Why Linux at all in this case if it’s just like RDS?

Honestly just use Azure Virtual Desktops.

belter2• 1 year ago

Or maybe Microsoft is terrified that it will work? Then Bill Gates would not be able to do his 345th pledge of "I will give away all my money..."

https://www.freeipa.org/

"Manage Linux users and client hosts in your realm from one central location with CLI, Web UI or RPC access. Enable Single Sign On authentication for all your systems, services and applications."

https://www.keycloak.org/

"Open Source Identity and Access Management"

linotype• 1 year ago

FYI Bill Gates stepped down as CEO in 2000.

kjellsbells• 1 year ago

They are setting themselves up for complete failure.

Maybe, but as the article states, they already acknowledge the possibility and have a backup plan in place, and, frankly, someone needs to be first.

You could argue that this should not happen on the taxpayers' watch at this department. Yes, maybe some national or EU-level body should actually do the R&D to solve the structural issues around large scale Linux usage so that everyone can benefit. But for now this seems like a reasonable approach for a pretty small organization and a good learning step.

henriquenunez2• 1 year ago

I agree that the planning does not consider a lot of aspects, but this is not the reason to surrender for big tech. We need more experts and a more sensible plan indeed, that considers the infrastructure, authentication, and so on.

croes• 1 year ago

Sorry but if you work with Word you can’t complain about a loss of productivity.

People are just accustomed to pain of working with Word.

The change to LibreOffice is way smaller than MSs switch to Ribbon menus

v5v33• 1 year ago

Yes

2Gkashmiri• 1 year ago

Why not rework auth?

Why are you stuck on azure AD?

udev40965• 1 year ago

Linux desktop has terrible security model. Unless they intend to spend significant amount of time hardening the base distro, which also comes with it's own caveats. Windows, for all it's problems, is still a better choice for an enterprise environment

trelane7• 1 year ago

The companies falling to malware and extortion/ransomware would seem to indicate otherwise

the__alchemist• 1 year ago

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 devs here, especially at small companies, may be insulated from the horror that is government and enterprise computer networks. If that stuff breaks, this will be an improvement for users as long as they can get internet.

I suspect I am looking at this through a mix of optimism and naivite. Or colored by my own experiences.

Suppafly3• 1 year ago

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

For sure.

freeone3000• 1 year ago

Entra (prev AAD) can be replaced by literally any other OAuth provider for SSO - shibboleth is an on-prem option.

Traditional AD is harder to replace, but OpenShift’s IdP has an AD server mode that is capable of many use-cases; the cases it doesn’t do are GPO, Windows Update forcing, and other stuff no longer relevant on linux.

Are they moving away from Exchange Server? I’d hope so, MTAs are a dime a dozen in linux land. There’s a dozen homegrown alternatives for calendar + mail, from ProtonMail to running Exim + caldav.

The rentier companies may have “extended” the open source backing, but you’re not missing much except marketing.

cmilton2• 1 year ago

I have a related experience. Our project was moving from Office 365 to Google Workspace. Lot's of Windows PCs replaced with Chromebooks.

Over a year after completion, many users still have Excel and we do lots more app virtualization. I will say the biggest hurdle that still remains today, users accepting and adjusting to change. The migration also exposed lots of unknown user-created processes that no longer worked as usual, making it difficult for them to transition.

Overall, most users made the necessary adjustments, did the training provided, and are excelling. There's always that subset that can't, or maybe won't.

nradov3• 1 year ago

If those users have to work with large spreadsheets then Google Workspace is simply nonfunctional. I've tried to use Google Sheets but it hangs and never finishes recalculations that Excel completes in seconds.

heraldgeezer3• 1 year ago

This. Didn't Denmark try this before and fail? Didn't some German town do this and went back?

It's also file compatibility.

But yes, the big thing is AD. AD has been out since 2000 and was/is the standard. If you have/had AD and Group policy you move to AAD and Intune for cloud. There is no competitor to this. Zero.

ahartmetz2• 1 year ago

Munich tried this, then MS moved its German office to Munich.

trueismywork• 1 year ago

There are so many better ways to do this right. But they don't make big news.

croemer• 1 year ago

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234290 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234552

henriquenunez2• 1 year ago

LET'S GO DENMARK!!!! LET'S GO!

piker• 1 year ago

Somebody tell the Danish legal team that Tritium (https://tritium.legal) runs on Linux :).

I said it on the prior thread, and I think it's worth reiterating: Politics aside, Microsoft has such a strangle hold on so many industries it's insane. That reach is just extending with copilot + OpenAI and Azure. The next few years could be bleak if it plays the way MSFT is trying to push it. Good for Denmark.

gizajob2• 1 year ago

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$. It’s just not 1997 any more.

lionkor• 1 year ago

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

gizajob2• 1 year ago

No idea. Ask all your programmer buddies.

otabdeveloper4• 1 year ago

What, again?

clejack2• 1 year ago

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 for all of the major office and design concerns.

CAD software is the same. I tried freecad recently after a long hiatus and came back to immediately crashing after trying to make a cube from a sketch and also finding out that there's no midpoint constraint (wtf) if I remember correctly.

basisword• 1 year ago

> 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.

clejack2• 1 year ago

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.

chaosbolt• 1 year ago

If you're a government, it makes more sense to throw the money at creating your own infrastructure than paying to make a foreign company control everything you're running.

Everything is alright until the country with the highest obesity rate in the world chooses not to honor your patent for ozempic for example and makes it for a lot cheaper back home, then you escalate, then they escalate, something something your software stops getting updates or gets locked down.

I obviously don't think this is a likely scenario to happen, but so is getting nuked, yet every government has some sort of bunker command center, but everyone just seems ok with trusting those US companies with everything.

And today you don't even have to recreate the wheel, there are some open source alternatives for almost everything, and as a government if you put in the money you could improve on those, other governments can get inspired and improve on them as well, etc.

datadrivenangel2• 1 year ago

If the US sanctions you, it'll be much much harder for American companies like microsoft to send updates legally...

So it's on the escalation ladder for sure.

twarge• 1 year ago

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

chuckadams• 1 year ago

They're planning the whole migration in less than 6 months. As they say (or at least google translate says), "Held og lykke". A lot of these migration plans strike me as being basically a negotiating tactic with Microsoft.

phkamp• 1 year ago

Please note that only approx 79 employees are affected by this.

mettamage• 1 year ago

Governments should fund more open source projects. Apparently there's a model of governance here that could work. Enough people like writing software. The innate motivation is there. With funding, there could be more of it.

There might be some iffy issues. For example, if a state backs certain open source software too hard, then I'm afraid you get "state backed vaporware" in some cases. I can definitely see where it'll be like "Denmark has start open source initiative xyz" but because it's so externally pushed, from a motivation standpoint, it becomes half baked.

So I'm more advocating for a gentle monetary nudge.

Tangokat• 1 year ago

Americans do not realize how much damage Trump has done to the trust in American services. Europeans used to consider America as an ally the same as other European countries, now it is more like an unreliable trade partner. Microsoft tried to reassure the Europeans [1] but not even a month later they were forced to disable the email account of ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan [2] due to sanctions from Trump voiding their reassurance completely. What happens when Trump gets mad at Denmark for not giving him Greenland and forces Microsoft to turn off Danish services?

Every large European company and all of the governments are now considering how to move away from US services. They may not be able to do it quickly but it is a part of the conversation. Customers specifically request that new systems should be independent from US service providers.

In my view the damage has been done and will not go away even after Trump. The Europeans have realized that their only true allies, that they can trust in terms of critical infrastructure, are other European nations. It used to include America, it no longer does.

[1] https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/04/30/europea...

[2] https://nltimes.nl/2025/05/20/microsofts-icc-email-block-tri...

Herring2• 1 year ago

"We cannot leave the security of Europe in the hands of voters in Wisconsin every 4 years" - French Minister Delegate for European Affairs.

dmix• 1 year ago

Which is what Trump seems to want. A Europe not totally dependent on the American taxpayers for their own self defense and their own global power projection agendas. Many countries like Germany are quite far from that. France is more of a leader in that regard.

Although abandoning commercial American software wholesale would likely degrade their own security and GDPs even further than it already is.

myk9001• 1 year ago

https://x.com/ISEUConcerned

trelane7• 1 year ago

Hopefully they're using Collabora or similar, so they can get support and to help fund the development.

bazoom42• 1 year ago

As far as I can tell, the announcement was only about replacing Microsoft Office 365 with LibreOffice, not about replacing Windows with Linux.

ThinkBeat• 1 year ago

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

mihaaly2• 1 year ago

if you have spent 20 years or more using Microsoft Office, it will feel quite foreign

I am using MS Office for 30 years, and the current MS Office products feel offensively alien. Slown down in workflow.

Meanwhile, in the past 20 years or so, I was affiliated with organizations (plural) having mixed composition of Win/Mac/Linux support throughout.

josefritzishere• 1 year ago

I'm honestly jealous.

mihaaly2• 1 year ago

I am struggling with increasing number of daily (sometimes hourly) annoyances of Windows during my work, distracting me considerably by now, so this news fills me with envy. I have an increasing urge fuelled by this - but not only by this - to switch job/profession.

Some from the top of my head: randomly forcing me to put the window I am moving to the numbered sections of 1-2-3 without the chance of cancel, forcing me to size and position choices mandated; 'update and shut down' actually works as 'update and restart' finding my computer on in the middle of night or in the morning; hibernating while update is available turns on the computer during the night; renaming of OneDrive files clears the name sometimes typing; switching wifi (between previously used ones) on its own, while being in a perfectly working remote desktop connection, breaking it randonly; taskbar buttons loose icons after resuming from hibernation; yes/no message box is transparent through remote desktop; ... some from the past few (less than 4) days.

ngrilly3• 1 year ago

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 calendar (Exchange Online)?

Russia, China, and India have invested a lot in developing their equivalent of 365 and Google Workspace (mainly via Yandex, Alibaba, and Zoho). Europe needs to accelerate on this.

Edit: There is some progress on LibreOffice real-time collaboration:

https://zetaoffice.net/

https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/13/libreoffice_wasm_zeta...

wizzwizz4• 1 year ago

Collabora Office is a (somewhat-proprietary) LibreOffice fork/patchset with that functionality. If you want multiuser support, it exists.

trelane7• 1 year ago

That are also a, if not the, major contributor to LibreOffice.

welshwelsh• 1 year ago

Lack of features is not an excuse for a government to adopt proprietary software.

Surely, the Danish government can figure out how to support real-time collaboration in LibreOffice.

toomuchtodo2• 1 year ago

I believe the Danish gov is roughly spending 50M EUR/year to MS, certainly you can get the features needed paying for dev time for an open source project with some of that spend.

bigstrat20032• 1 year ago

It doesn't need an excuse; it's a fully valid reason. Using proprietary software is a perfectly valid choice to make.

marci• 1 year ago

What about replacing Entra (identity and access management), Intune (endpoint management), file sharing (OneDrive), email and calendar (Exchange Online)?

Simple, switch when they find something that fits their need. They don't have to switch everything at the same time. And it's not just about switching technologies, it's probably also about fighting against pushbacks ("lobbying", etc), dealing with training, and other unforseen (at least to the layman) things that happens when a huge entity starts pulling away from microsoft. I don't think there are degooglify/demicrosoftify-yourself manuals at the state level.

dismalaf3• 1 year ago

Is simultaneous editing really that important? Especially in a government context? My experience with older office workers is that all of them use ancient, offline versions of Word anyway...

ngrilly3• 1 year ago

Not all office workers are old. Some are young and want to use modern collaboration tools. Even government workers. I think real-time collaborative editing is a chicken-and-egg. You don't know you need it until you start using it. I'm using this often in meetings where the participants all work on the same document, usually some notes/memo or spreadsheet. But I agree that for the note taking use case, a full-blown word processor is not necessary.

zevon3• 1 year ago

Live collaboration is not an MS Office native functionality either (needs OneDrive / SharePoint as a backend). If your org uses traditional file shares or some cloud storage/sync tool that is not MS, you're out of luck.

There are tools like Collabora (built on LibreOffice) that work very similar to what you would get from MS. Collabora, for example, can also be integraded with Nextcloud and Owncloud.

fakedang2• 1 year ago

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).

udev40965• 1 year ago

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

tasuki• 1 year ago

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 missing?)

Suppafly3• 1 year ago

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.

v5v33• 1 year ago

LibreOffice does everything I need it to...

Most people only use a small percentage of functionality in any app.

kube-system7• 1 year ago

Individually, sure. But in an organization, the larger it is, the more probability that all of the features are being used approaches 1. Then you don't have a software issue anymore, you have a business workflow, retraining, or retooling issue.

seanw444• 1 year ago

How is it terrible? I keep hearing people say this, but I've never actually experienced any shortcomings personally. Granted, I don't really use word processors much. But when I did, I never had any.

toast0• 1 year ago

Fit and finish aren't there, and have barely improved. It just looks bad. And it starts slowly (but so does Microsoft Office). Having to decide which fork to use is a problem.

Otherwise, I haven't had major issues. Sometime it doesn't work well with complex excel sheets, or complex word docs; create doc in X, edit in Y, view in X is likely to be disappointing if formatting is critical, but I've seen people use a publish to PDF, edit by change requests flow for that instead.

Other than multiplayer support, it's still much nicer than Google Docs, which can look better but likes to get into weird partially loaded states or runs simple spreadsheet tasks very slowly due to mandatory interaction with a server.

tomjuggler• 1 year ago

Yeah I tried so hard to use LibreOffice. OnlyOffice is great

tokai• 1 year ago

Have to see it before I believe it. There is already danish laws, from back in the early 00s, stating that open source software should be used or developed in all cases where it is possible. The public IT provider and supporter Statens IT are so bad at their job that I cannot see how they would carry this out.

timbit424• 1 year ago

Might be worth sending them back to college for upgrading.

m101• 1 year ago

Does the Danish govt fund these open source projects at all?

BobBagwill• 1 year ago

<yawn> Kitchen-sink office suites are dinosaurs. It's like switching from riding an ankylosaurus to riding a glyptodont. Personal computing was and is a tarpit. It was and is used to automate and complicate paper-style processes. Every time I have to fill out a PDF form, I want to scream! <grimace>. Big fat slow 90's-style document-oriented processes have got to go!

dardeaup• 1 year ago

I think the best way to go about these types of efforts is to: (1) build a coalition with agreed upon goals, governance, etc. (2) define the desired systems and architecture for it (3) define the file formats and wire protocols to support the features/functionality (4) start building it

There would need to be conferences every 6 or 12 months. There would also need to be lots of documentation, training, videos, podcasts, etc.

It would be a huge effort but possibly also extremely rewarding.

fefferkorn• 1 year ago

I like cryptpad for shared documents... but it bugs with big files.

a022311• 1 year ago

Honestly, if they manage to make the transition without major problems, it will greatly improve Denmark's sovereignty.

My concern is mostly about the government depending on open source software without contributing in some way. I really hope they fund and/or contribute to both projects.

Another interesting question to consider is whether the likelihood of attacks on these projects will increase. Knowing that government(s) use LibreOffice makes it a much more valuable target for attackers willing to pull of something like xz-utils. Likewise, increasing adoption of Linux for desktop usage could result in more vulnerabilities being discovered and more malware targeting Linux desktops.

I think there's a lot to see in the near future...

miohtama• 1 year ago

Does anyone remember Munich Linux project and how Microsoft eventually bribed Munich to drop it?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

EasyMark2• 1 year ago

Pepperidge Farm erinnert sich

zevon3• 1 year ago

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.

The_suffocated• 1 year ago

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.

chaz6• 1 year ago

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.

Huntsecker• 1 year ago

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.

rurban2• 1 year ago

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.

Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice

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