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The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
- phkamp 1y agoPlease note that only ~79 employees will affected by this decision. A number of circumstantial factors point at this being primarily political posturing.
- Y_Y 1y agoI'm pleased at the overall tide here. I think governments especially ought to use and contribute back to FOSS. When I see announcements like this it does make me worry that MS (or whatever vendor) will try to make an example of them; by submarining stories about how the switchover is hard, non-techie civil servants want to keep what they're "used to", LibreOffice is technically inferior (no comment on that one, I think all office suites I've seen are junk). I have my fingers crossed, but my chickens uncounted.
- forinti 1y agoI know many infrastructure techies that prefer Windows and swear that it's easier to maintain a Windows network. With regards to end users, I think the only office software that still has an undeniable grip is Excel, but as people use Google Sheets more and more, the idea of using something different is becoming less absurd.
- pjc50 1y agoWindows does have better user and device administrators tools. However, this doesn't stop people using Macs, which are absolutely terrible for mass administration.
- angulardragon03 1y agoMacs are fine for mass admin. Companies like Meta, SAP, and IBM have fleets numbering in the 6 figures that they manage with no issue. I manage almost a thousand Macs at a financial institution with ease. If you’re using Intune for Mac management, I would understand your perspective a bit more.
- CamouflagedKiwi 1y agoI've also known some that prefer a Linux network. However one thing that is pretty objective: it will be harder managing a network with both kinds of machines than either one individually, which will inevitably happen for some period during the changeover. Also it's clearly hard to change from one to another when you have a team who only needed skills in one previously - that is one of the things that seems likely to sink an effort like this.
- GardenLetter27 1y agoPerhaps they can start by adding Linux support for MitID - https://www.mitid.dk/en-gb/help/help-universe/platform-support-for-mitid/ https://www.mitid.dk/en-gb/help/help-universe/platform-suppo... Crazy how many critical services are tied to American companies.
- tossandthrow 1y agoMitid fully works under Linux. However, it should be a mandate in the tender that all modern browsers are supported regardless of the operating system.
- GardenLetter27 1y agoOh nice, it seems the Swedish BankID works very differently as it isn't possible here :(
- rubzah 1y agoSweden should start by not using the banks for their national digital ID scheme.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- digitalWestie 1y agoIt's a few times over the years I've read about govs switching to linux like this. Anyone know how they got on?
- hoseyor 1y ago[dead]
- wodenokoto 1y agoUsually they get a good offer from Microsoft and drop the conversation. But this time it is not about pricing, but politics, so maybe they won't budge as easily.
- larodi 1y agois tempting to think they actually choose one of the several providers of office services, based in Europe, not some stupid attempt at moving non-technical people to linux...
- neepi 1y agoI assume it went as well as an acquaintance of mine found out. Wanted to go Linux and open source so dumped O365 and got Fastmail, libreoffice in to start with. His two office staff found rather quickly that they were up shit creek as they didn't know how to do anything and stuff didn't work quite how they expected it to. So they ended up switching back to O365 in under a couple of months. This was for a company that cuts out bits of foam and sells them. A lot of computer users are drones. They have no conceptual idea or care about what they are doing. Moving stuff, even simple things, is crippling for productivity. Now scale that up to hundreds or thousands of people. In local government people don't like to talk about the failures at all because there is fallout so we probably won't find the truth about what really happened but I suspect it wasn't all about politics and cash backhanders and MSFT investment. If you really want to move off MSFT you will probably have to start again and run two completely isolated silos.
- mike_hearn 1y agoThey give up and switch to Windows (again). The highest profile was in Munich where they did migrate >10,000 desktops to Linux and OpenOffice, but eventually they migrated back to Windows and Office: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux Lower Saxony: https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-scores-a-win-over-linux-as-another-state-decides-to-switch/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-scores-a-win-over-linu... Vienna: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wienux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wienux Note that even when these projects succeed, the software users are running is invariably just Firefox, and often users have both a Windows and Linux PC side by side. There are no actual Linux apps being developed or maintained, in the sense of apps that use Linux APIs.
- decide1000 1y agoI hope this sets an example for the rest of Europe! Great news.
- NexRebular 1y agoLinux monoculturalization is not great news. We should deploy e.g. *BSD and illumos as well to prevent having all eggs in one basket.
- apexalpha 1y agoLet's not let perfect become the enemy of better. :)
- johnisgood 1y agoAnything non-Windows would work for the time being. OpenIndiana and FreeBSD / OpenBSD can come later. :D
- simion314 1y agoI think the user space apps will mostly work on BSD, so if somehow in future a BSD distro will be superior to Linux should be easy to move the apps over. I do not think there will be a lot of work put in the Linux kernel and I think KDE still works on BSDs
- lordofgibbons 1y agoI wish there was a fund we could pool money into to make LibreOffice less ugly to look at. I'll happily donate to the cause.
- mikl 1y agoThat’s the nice thing about Open Source. Nothing’s stopping you from organizing this yourself.
- ForHackernews 1y agoHe didn't want to do work himself, he wanted to contribute monetarily and have the desired outcome provided to him. That's the not-nice thing about Open Source.
- WindyMiller 1y agoThe comment said 'organizing this', not doing the development work. That could mean crowdfunding to fund development of the desired outcome. A faff, of course, but perhaps a better deal than contributing monetarily to Microsoft to have Copilot shoved in your face instead of the features you actually want.
- ForHackernews 1y agoorganizing is by far more difficult work than coding.
- WindyMiller 1y agoYou can crowdfund for a project manager!
- neepi 1y agoThis is the standard voice of someone who's never had to deal with a badly maintained or managed open source product or an asshole maintainer or had to run a fork for 6 years because no one will merge a trivial fix in. Or had a LibreOffice bug open for a decade. Yeah I can really get in there and spend 2 years ripping the horrible UI out, then have to run a fork because it's not of interest to the maintainers and will never be merged. At that point I'll just use MS office. Costs me 10 minutes salary a month.
- Andrew_nenakhov 1y agoI used to love LibreOffice when it was OpenOffice.org. When it got unshackled from Oracle, it somehow became kinda uglier, and unfortunately it wasn't able to keep up with the times technology-wise, as all efforts to make it online are a failure of usability and speed. What we, the humanity, need, is a free-as-in-freedom open source set of web applications that work like Google Docs / Spreadsheets / Slides, but can be self-hosted and would natively use OpenDocument file format.
- ktallett 1y agoI found onlyoffice a good replacement. It is certainly better looking.
- jhoho 1y agoIt's really beautiful but I stopped using it because of its opaque ties with Russia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyOffice#Organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyOffice#Organization
- Andrew_nenakhov 1y agoFor me, their grave sin is basing on MSOffice file format. THat way you're destined to always be at a disadvantage when the competitor will want to outdo you.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- adrian_b 1y agoI do not care whether LibreOffice looks ugly or not. What I care is that the documents that I generate with LibreOffice look beautiful and that depends on me choosing beautiful high-quality typefaces (not the default ugly typefaces of LibreOffice) and on choosing adequate formatting of the documents. All that LibreOffice has to do is provide adequate support for all OpenType features and for all formatting options that one might want. LibreOffice does this and at least LibreOffice Writer does it better than MS Word. In LibreOffice one can still discover quickly in which menu or dialog box the desired option can be found. I have been using MS Office for decades, but in recent versions I can spend many minutes searching for some option that has been moved into some random menu/toolbar that has no obvious logical relationship with it. While MS Excel remains much better than LibreOffice Calc (but the latter is adequate for most simple tasks), I would consider as a cruel and unusual punishment to be forced to use MS Word instead of LibreOffice Writer.
- lordnacho 1y agoTalking 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 you can just code it on a Linux platform?
- SideburnsOfDoom 1y agoYou can use c#, even c# on Azure and still be mostly Linux. For many common uses, it just works. And at least it gives a migration path.
- madduci 1y agoSame in Germany
- amiga386 1y agoThe answer is, sadly, still more political than technical. Munich moved to Linux in 2004 and was mostly complete by 2013. Then Microsoft turned up the charm, and moved its headquarters in Germany to Munich, and Munich decided in 2017 to switch back to Windows by 2020: https://fsfe.org/news/2017/news-20170301-01.html https://fsfe.org/news/2017/news-20170301-01.html But then different politicians were elected, and in 2020 it decided to switch back to Linux again: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/20/05/23/238252/munich-says-its-now-shifting-back-from-microsoft-to-open-source-software----again https://linux.slashdot.org/story/20/05/23/238252/munich-says...
- netsharc 1y agoHa, can a city run with a dual-booting system? /s
- sam_lowry_ 1y agoMunich story is one failure among many successes. Ever heard of GendBuntu? [1] Probably not, because it was a successful migration. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu
- yxhuvud 1y agoGood, especially if there are also budgets somewhere to fix issues they have with it.
- user____name 1y agoI recently tried a bunch of Office packages and was surprised by just how bad they've gotten over the years. It just feels like a downgrade from what we had in prior decades. Especially LibreOffice just had the most abysmal performance imaginable. The older versions were much better in my experience.
- adrian_b 1y agoThese might depend on some options chosen by whatever Linux distribution you have used. As always, the behavior seen on some Linux distribution for some application may not match at all the experience on other distributions. I always compile LibreOffice from sources (in Gentoo) and I have not noticed any performance problems, and most of my text documents or spreadsheets are quite large. It is true that currently I use it only on decent computers, but in the past I have used it even on several generations of Atom CPUs, from Pineview to Gemini Lake. Even on those there were no performance problems, at least not with Writer and Calc.
- adornKey 1y agoMost likely it depends on what you want to do. I used LibreOffice a lot (mainly Calc). A lot of areas were surprisingly buggy, but in some important areas it had more advanced features than Excel and performance was great. One thing I learned was, that there is no compatibility. You can load some files from Excel, but to get something done, it's better to start a new file from scratch and import the data from csv. As soon something is more advanced (like configuring an axis of a diagram) it's all different. Most important - CSV-Import in Calc is something that works just fine in LibreOffice, while the CSV-import in Excel has always been hardly bearable.
- grandinj 1y agoIf you have specific performance issues and are able to share the associated documents, please log them at https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/ https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/. Of course, we cannot always help, sometimes the slowdown is due to increased feature or stability or conformance, but often we can improve things greatly.
- KingOfCoders 1y agoMy problem, I tried to switch from PowerPoint to Impress several times, but it's just not working for me (it also crashed). Hope for the best, with more users perhaps I can switch too in the future.
- jamesblonde 1y agoDavid Heinemeir Hansson (ruby-on-rails) writes extensively about the risk to Danish sovereignty if they don't have digital sovereignty. In particular, Microsoft have already shown they will acquiesce to Trump's wishes. Turn off Microsoft in Denmark in the morning, you get Greenland by the afternoon. https://world.hey.com/dhh/denmark-gets-more-serious-about-digital-sovereignty-7736f756 https://world.hey.com/dhh/denmark-gets-more-serious-about-di... P.s. this thread will be gone within 1-2 hrs when the mods on PT time wake back up. Anything about European Digital Sovereignty is killed quietly and quickly here.
- LadyCailin 1y ago> P.s. this thread will be gone within 1-2 hrs when the mods on PT time wake back up. Anything about European Digital Sovereignty is killed quietly and quickly here. No it won’t.
- simongray 1y agoIt's gone from the frontpage now and isn't anywhere in the top 200 either. Hmmm. I guess he was right.
- jamesblonde 1y agoI hate a told you so.
- N19PEDL2 1y agoThis can only work once. Then, when the rest of the world sees that the US government uses US-made software as a blackmail weapon against a (former) ally and friend, no one will want to buy products from Microsoft or other US companies.
- mikl 1y agoWill be interesting to see if they can make it stick. Everyone is used to Windows + Office, so there’ll be a lot of resistance to trying something else, and if their IT department is not ready for it, it can quickly become a shit-show.
- Arch-TK 1y agoYou know, I really do think governments should not be paying into Microsoft's bank accounts. But thinking about this from another perspective, if I was hired as a programmer at a company and told I could use vim on i3 on some Linux distro and then suddenly the company decided that everyone would be switched over to windows machines and forced to use VSCode then I would be rightfully pissed. Just like someone hired to do CAD in solidworks would be rightfully pissed if you told them they had to switch to another equally powerful but different CAD tool. Not sure what the solution is there aside from offering incentives to retrain, offering the option to keep using the proprietary product, and hiring staff specifically advertising that you want people who are happy using libreoffice.
- baobun 1y agoMandating open and interoperable formats would be a good start. Moving off for a department becomes much less of a shift if it doesn't require coordination with everyone you might exchange files with.
- Arch-TK 1y agoI do agree there, although Microsoft will argue till the end of the earth that OOXML are already those formats.
- j7ake 1y agoIt starts early : closed source software offers discounted or free licenses to schools to hook kids in early. This is how matlab continues to have a hold in engineering fields.
- piker 1y agoSomebody tell the Danish legal team that Tritium (https://tritium.legal https://tritium.legal) runs on Linux :). 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.
- mpascale00 1y agoOfc I love this, as a LibreOffice exclusive user Document signing in Libreoffice on Linux has caused me nothing but trouble, and other critical features a government might want to have - any thoughts on this?
- grandinj 1y agoThere is ongoing bugfixing in this area. If you are able to supply the documents associated with broken workflows in this area, it would be helpful to log bugs in our bugtracker at https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/ https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/. Even better would be if your company could sponsor some fixes, of course :-)
- leke 1y agoMaybe they could pay some Danish software dev to improve the product with all the license money they will save.
- TowerTall 1y agoThey are not going to save any money. That wast amount of money goes to Microsoft 365 and everybody still needs a CAL license for that regardless of which client they have installed.
- forinti 1y agoThere 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 support for a product is dropped on the cloud, you have to upgrade whether you are ready for it or not.
- lukan 1y agoThere is another strong reason, Trump recently threatened Denmark militarily to annex greenland and Microsoft is US and allmost any product that is online, could be shut down anytime. It is a move towards independence from US control.
- wongarsu 1y agoNot just planning, also concerns about privacy, data sovereignty and espionage With the CLOUD Act any US company can be compelled to give up data of their EU customers. Fancy government structures like AWS's sovereign cloud are unlikely to solve this. You just can't responsibly store data in a US cloud if you don't want the US to know what's in there. And not storing data in the cloud is getting more and more difficult. The US is not above spying on its allies, and it's questionable if the current administration even sees Europe as allies
- vladvasiliu 1y agoI'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.
- forinti 1y agoI imagine this will be a serious issue for companies with small IT teams and large legacy systems.
- pu_pe 1y agoDenmark is at particular risk because if the US does something concrete against Greenland, they might want to retaliate with sanctions at the very least. Impossible to do that if you have a strong dependency on American tech companies.
- Qem 1y ago> they might want to retaliate with sanctions at the very least. Just like what happened to the International Criminal Court recently, when Microsoft tried to obstruct war crimes investigations by blocking their email: https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Microsofts-ICC-email-block-reignites-European-data-sovereignty-concerns https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Microsofts-ICC-email-...
- jamesblonde 1y agoA precedent was set.
- Symbiote 1y agoThis action made the mainstream Danish press, so it's probably contributed to the decision. https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/penge/microsofts-blokering-af-europaeisk-anklagers-email-efter-trump-ordre-er-et-mareridt https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/penge/microsofts-blokering-af-euro...
- mmooss 1y agoThe 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 outsider emails your users' a document - or vice verssa - becomes a big issue. Regarding past documents, some users create complex applications in Excel, for example. How much of a problem is that for these users? How will those problems be solved? 2. What is the system management story? Essential to IT beyond even 30 users is a way to deploy, administer (including configuring settings), and upgrade/patch applications en masse. Microsoft provides those tools and Office, of course, integrates well with them. There are third party tools, but they need to do much better than exist; they need to function efficiently and reliably - imagine the deployment bug implemented en masse. Are there such tools for Linux and LibreOffice?
- fleshmonad 1y agoWhat 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 something. It's really curious. But I guess shills are gonna shill, or maybe I am just ignorant and or too stupid to see the grave mistake Denmark is committing right now, because they don't use Microsoft® PowerDeploy™ Copilot enabled Decentralized Update Solutions™
- subjectsigma 1y agoHow would you implement the features of Group Policy in Linux? Legitimately asking, I don’t know. I use Ansible when managing multiple Linux servers but I’m by no means a system admin.
- mfarr 1y agoAre these not legitimate questions that need to be asked and problems that need to be solved? Writing them off as shilling and screeching is part of the reason why Microsoft is so dominant. Perhaps education and raising awareness of these trivial solutions in Linux would be more beneficial for the movement than mudslinging.
- 0xTJ 1y agoGreat! We should all be worried when our governments lock themselves into situations with just a single vendor.
- sgt 1y agoIt's a great way for Denmark to negotiate a better deal with Microsoft for the next round of licenses. No way they will stick with Linux. It's just too fiddly, requiring way more "IT people" running around configuring Samba shares and printer drivers. And LibreOffice is many many years behind MS Office, and it'll continue to be that way. Sorry for the pessimism but this was true in 2005, in 2015, and in 2025.
- fragebogen 1y ago>It's just too fiddly, requiring way more "IT people" running around configuring Samba shares and printer drivers. IIRC several German states went with nextcloud to make the transition a bit smoother. No idea about the effort when it comes to print servers, but on the other hand Denmark is quite digitized at this point and I would imagine printing papers is less of a thing there than in Germany. >And LibreOffice is many many years behind MS Office, and it'll continue to be that way. I believe you, but could you elaborate on what's missing?
- sgt 1y agoFortunately I don't spend a lot of time in either of these but what I did notice was just the UI being more difficult - so UI friction makes a big difference, especially across thousands of users in a government department. Also lots of minor bugs, like font kerning looked weird, missing features (one cannot expect it to keep up with MS on this, they've got full time highly paid developers working on MS Office every single day), various incompatibilities... some bizarre crashes.
- raffael_de 1y ago> And LibreOffice is many many years behind MS Office, and it'll continue to be that way. Are you referring to compatibility with MS Office features? Because as far as I can tell Excel/Word/PowerPoint (and its OSS counterparts) are pretty much feature complete since about 10 years.
- buyucu 1y agoMy company has Linux and Windows laptop fleets. Windows requires more work and causes more pain, even though the Linux fleet is larger.
- kriro 1y agoUsually 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 have switched to web portals already).
- arghwhat 1y ago> 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.
- FpUser 1y agoFollowing Trump's threats Danes would do better if they try to keep their vital infrastructure including IT as free as possible from the dependence.
- nick__m 1y agoCalc 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.
- kombine 1y agoLet's not forget about GitHub.
- solarkraft 1y agoThis is great for sovereignty. It’s wonderful that they made the choice (likely exactly for sovereignty reasons). But: IMO (as an infrequent user) LibreOffice is still far behind MS Office in usability. I hope the more big orgs depend on it, the more interest there will be to improve it. This will then hopefully make it easier for others to make the switch.
- bazoom42 1y agoAs far as I can tell, this is only about MS Office, not about operating systems. But I cant read the whole article due to paywall.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- m101 1y agoDoes the EU contribute in a significant way to these open source project development budgets?
- buyucu 1y agophasing out Office and Windows is not hard. the only real difficulty is that corporate IT departs are populated with people who have built their entire careers on the Microsoft ecosystem and can't imagine a world beyond Microsoft.
- tossandthrow 1y agoLuckily this was never counted on the trade deficit. Phew!