7 ms·

Denmark Is Switching to Linux

121 points by ricecat 1y ago

everyone 1y ago
What is the state of games piracy on Linux though? I kind of assume most cracked games are released for Windows, but perhaps they will run just fine on Wine anyway?
- teddyh 1y ago
  The Valve Steam Deck runs SteamOS, which is Linux.
daoboy 1y ago
It looks like they're just dropping Office 365 for Libre office. Not switching the entire operating system.
- kevinherron 1y ago
  > in a move that exchanges Windows and Office 365 for Linux and LibreOffice. > It'll migrate about half of the Ministry of Digital Affairs away from Windows this summer
  - daoboy 1y ago
    The last comment: >The Politiken article has been corrected. They're dropping Microsoft Office but not Windows. They might in the future, that seems to be the general trend, but in this case the minister said they're dropping Microsoft services and interviewer misinterpreted that as including Windows.
    - kevinherron 1y ago
      Ahh, did not see/read the comments on the article.
ifthenelseor 1y ago
Given that the US forced Microsoft to stop providing email services to the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands via sanctions, I expect moves like this to become more common across Europe. Bert Hubert is a Euro blogger who writes more about this.
- cyberpunk 1y ago
  wtf, that happened? :/
  - ifthenelseor 1y ago
    Citation: https://apnews.com/article/icc-trump-sanctions-karim-khan-court-a4b4c02751ab84c09718b1b95cbd5db3 https://apnews.com/article/icc-trump-sanctions-karim-khan-co...
    - mijoharas 1y ago
      Worth noting, there is this follow-up statement from Microsoft, which is frankly as clear as mud. (Essentially Microsoft saying they didn't cut off services, with no explanation of what did happen) https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-services-international-criminal-court-president-american-sanctions-trump-tech-icc-amazon-google/ https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-servic...
      - ifthenelseor 1y ago
        Thank you for the additional context. > A Microsoft spokesperson said that it had been in contact with the court since February “throughout the process that resulted in the disconnection of its sanctioned official from Microsoft services.” The spokesperson added that “at no point did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the ICC.” > Microsoft declined to comment further in response to questions regarding the exact process that led to Khan's email disconnection, and exactly what it meant by “disconnection.” I think you have described it well. Clear as mud. I think the political impact on Open Source going forward may be very interesting.
Hilift 1y ago
Most government positions could use almost anything. The reason many places use Windows is familiarity and cost of government licenses. Also note that modern services may have a term, for example Microsoft has licenses based on a six-year commitment. There are scenarios where Windows may be problematic. Sometimes drivers for odd equipment are not available in Linux, or only some Linux distros due to fragmentation and not maintained very well.
- preisschild 1y ago
  > reason many places use Windows is familiarity And the reason for that is the problem. Too many schools use only Microsoft programs.
  - aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
    Nah most schools use chromebook now. And many schools use libreoffice to save cost.
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      That is a US phenomenon, Chomebooks are a rounding error outside the states.
      - aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
        I'm European.
        pjmlp 1y ago
        Me too, and never seen them elsewhere other than weekly discounts at Media Markt, until the shop finally gets rid of existing stock. Also at least in Southern Europe, if kids use computers at the school at all, they tend to be desktop like deployments, and if families have to buy them, then Windows laptops get mostly acquired, as it is something actually usable, and in their budget.
        1y ago
__natty__ 1y ago
That's good information for the FOSS community. Most people I know could go the same way. They are using an operating system solely to launch a web browser and occasionally office applications.
phtrivier 1y ago
Did I miss the part in the article where they write how many machines (as in, you know, how many real life "computers") are actually being migrated ? (It's not the same newsworthiness if it's 100 thousands thousands, a a few ones in the office of the intern for some underfunded local department.)
- onetoo 1y ago
  IIRC it's a single ministry with not a lot of machines (in the order of 100). Definitely not as newsworthy as it's being made out to be, but viability has to be confirmed before a larger rollout can be done, I suppose.
  - halffullbrain 1y ago
    Exactly, the Ministry of Digitalization barks a lot louder than it bites - context here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44346549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44346549
danielovichdk 1y ago
Ehh...no. The minister of IT and digitalisation has communicated that her department would try to move from windows to FOSS. Look it up. And stop believing these sensational stories.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > Look it up Do you have a better source?
  - halffullbrain 1y ago
    This is the actual source, but it's in Danish: https://www.digmin.dk/digitalisering/nyheder/nyhedsarkiv/2025/jun/digitaliseringsministeriet-saetter-gang-i-pilotprojekt-om-digital-suveraenitet https://www.digmin.dk/digitalisering/nyheder/nyhedsarkiv/202...
  - halffullbrain 1y ago
    Machine-translated from the source (https://www.digmin.dk/digitalisering/nyheder/nyhedsarkiv/2025/jun/digitaliseringsministeriet-saetter-gang-i-pilotprojekt-om-digital-suveraenitet https://www.digmin.dk/digitalisering/nyheder/nyhedsarkiv/202...): Denmark must become less dependent on the major tech giants when it comes to digital solutions in the public sector. Therefore, the Ministry of Digitalization is now starting to test a new open source solution. This week, the Ministry of Digitalization is launching a new pilot project, where a group of employees will begin testing an open source alternative to the Microsoft Office suite. Specifically, the open source platform in question is Collabora, which is based on the open source software LibreOffice. The employees in the Ministry of Digitalization’s department participating in the pilot project will have the Office suite in their case management system replaced with Collabora. "As minister, I’ve spoken about the need to challenge our digital independence. Now we’re taking the first step ourselves in the Ministry of Digitalization with this new pilot project. I don’t delude myself into thinking that this means we’re ready to kick the tech giants out tomorrow, but I see it as a welcome step in the right direction. As politicians, we have an obligation to ensure that our IT systems in the future aren’t dependent on a few large companies," says Minister for Digitalization Caroline Stage. The ministry is beginning tests of a new integrated document editing module in the F2 case management system, based on the open source platform Collabora built on LibreOffice. This means that ministry employees will test an alternative to the Microsoft Office suite and use open source document editing tools instead of Microsoft’s solutions like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The solution will be rolled out for broader testing in the Ministry of Digitalization’s department on June 19, 2025. At that time, a group of departmental employees will have their Office suite in F2 replaced with the open source alternative. In the months that follow, the ministry will monitor and test whether Collabora can support the ministry’s workflows and needs in a satisfactory manner. The upcoming testing work will focus, among other things, on functionality related to the ministry’s templates, formatting for government cases, use of 'track changes', tables, etc., and whether the solution can handle conversion to and from Word format without altering the layout of documents. If the test period proceeds satisfactorily, the next step is expected to be a broader rollout of the open source alternative throughout the department.
halffullbrain 1y ago
Dane here. A lot of debate at the moment about digital sovereignty, with a very trusted ally threatening to annex Greenland while perhaps shifting its internal power structure (courts vs executive powers) while also continuing a trend of increased executive power over private companies (NSL etc.) Meanwhile, EU is apparently way behind both China and US in high-tech industry and digital infrastructure in general and AI technology in particular. So it's a welcome discourse - we really should go through the threat scenarios, in light of the changed parameters. My observations: * Consider: Could the society function if major cloud services (say, Microsoft 365 or Azure's IaaS services) - were suddenly nullrouted from Denmark? (Keep in mind that Denmark is heavily digitalized in both the private and public sectors) * While that not a likely scenario, it's no longer an unthinkable scenario, which it seemed to be in 2024. If it's not unthinkable, it could quickly become a credible threat. "Surrender Greenland, or else..." * Public sector Denmark is very much a "Microsoft first" country, 99.9% of desktops, office networks and productivity. On back-ends, MS is maybe not so big at the state-level systems, but quite dominant at regional and municipal levels. * Due to GDPR (and various related side quests), public Denmark has been slow-ish in moving to cloud infrastructure, but e.g. Microsoft 365 is gaining marketshare over locally or semi centralized hosted Exchange servers. So the blast radius is unclear. * At the same time, Microsoft is taking home quite substantial license fees. The minister's reaction could also play into that. However, the thing to note is that the Ministry of Digital Affairs is a small ministry. While they control some key infrastructure components (few of which run on Windows, AFAIK), they are not at all responsible for choosing other administrative bodies' choice of office suite or the bargaining with Microsoft. In practice, that power is held by the Ministry of Finance, as is so much else. They might be seeing things differently. Interesting times indeed. And certainly long overdue to consider alternatives realistically and reduce vendor lock-in where feasible.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
tossandthrow 1y ago
I am curios on what these developments (obviously the ones that also transcends just Denmark) will do to something like San Fransisco and it's housing market. Could this be a Detroit moment?
donatj 1y ago
There's a big hubbub in my small town about $60k every 4 years the local government could have avoided by moving the date of local elections to align with national elections that failed by one vote. I got curious about what our total budget looked like, so I started digging into the towns official budget which is available online. My small town is somehow paying over $70,000 a year for Office 365 seats! Doing the math even at the more expensive government tiers, that's still ~1,000 seats which I can't believe we have anywhere near that many employees. I'm not close enough to the problem to know if it's practical or not, but it really seems like at the very least we could move the majority of people to LibreOffice and save the town a bit of money.
feverzsj 1y ago
Only China government succeeded in replacing windows with linux. It's actually much more expensive, but their only concern is security.
_9y71 1y ago
Better source; the current one doesn't mention phases: https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/13/danish_department_dump_microsoft https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/13/danish_department_dum...
martinald 1y ago
I do get the political nature for this but this is really easier said than done. Desktop Linux does not have good 'enterprise' group policy support compared to Windows. Neither does Mac. I think ChromeOS comes pretty close though. And to be honest the need for this is as big if not bigger than on Windows. To take a random example - Control + Alt + F[1-6] switches you to a terminal with no explanation of how to get back. If you are a non technical user hitting that by mistake probably means a call to IT Support which is not advantageous to say the least. In Windows you'd set a group policy to disable that kind of thing, but there isn't a clear group policy 'standard' for Linux. You'd have to write a script that patches xorg.conf to disable it. That's just one tiny example, I think there will be thousands of these small things. The other big blocker is support for Word/Excel docs. LibreOffice gets you so far there but I suspect there will be thousands (millions?) of complex docs/excel sheets with macros and what not that tend not to play ball. This is a huge job to migrate them all. Ironically this is a much bigger blocker I suspect than software itself as apart from this nearly everything is web based. It's all very doable but requires a lot of work to get right. Basically someone needs to come along with something like Omakub but for non technical users, with a central server for managing it all. I haven't really seen any polished projects for this, though maybe the 'enterprise' version of Ubuntu has this kind of stuff nailed? And perhaps this Danish project actually ends up with something very usable for this. But it is very far from just installing YOLO installing Ubuntu.
- antihysteresis 1y ago
  Maybe I'm just naive, but... who needs group policy when you have other tools that can accomplish the same goals? With Linux, it's possible to do periodic image-based deployment (ie roll out preconfigured, immutable core OS images to all managed machines) and then set up the FS to "overlay" any per-machine customisations on top of the base image. User files / home directories can be kept in their own partition, entirely separate from the OS image. If desired, one could even set up a system for overlaying generated customization images (based on a template) on user partitions - allowing IT to systematically override particular files in user trees with immutable versions, if they so choose. As for managing subgroups of machines which need different software/settings, or dealing with revisions? Use git to manage everything that goes into the deployed OS images. If a subgroup of machines just needs a few different configs, that can be a patchset. If the changes are more significant, it might make more sense to implement a branch. Then IT gets to control, at a fine-grained level, the update status and configuration of every machine they manage - and easily make organisation-wide changes by pushing new images, while also having the ability to cleanly roll back to an older revision of the image if showstopper regressions are found. Most likely you'd push image deltas (no sense wasting bandwidth routinely sending whole images if it can be avoided) once per diem, in the middle of the night. Once the tooling is in place, I'd imagine a system like that ought to be far slicker / more convenient, not to mention more powerful and (albeit dependent on implementation) secure than Windows' Group Policy could ever hope to be.
Lerc 1y ago
There is a problem that is growing increasingly apparent. Would you use an operating system or cloud services provided by a nation you are at war with? Not long ago there were many countries that would have considered a future where they are at war with the United States to be impossible. A lot of those countries can now see paths to that happening,
mythz 1y ago
Many years ago when I heard Munich City was switching to Linux, I remember thinking it was a reckless decision that was doomed to fail, and turns out it eventually did as they announced in 2020 they were moving back to Windows. Which is in stark contrast to now where it's now my favorite Desktop OS to use, effectively forced into it after switching away from Windows after 25 years after MS EOL'd Windows 10 and started infesting Windows 11 with ads/spyware. Had some issues at the start with Nvidia/Wayland, but that's now all fixed and Fedora has been a rock solid modern distro for use as my primary driver. Software compatibility turned out much better than I thought with all my daily apps being available for Linux thanks to Chromium/Electron, .NET SDK and JetBrains cross-platform tools. Steam compatibility was an expected surprise with most of my flagship titles working on Linux. So after 1.5 years of leaving Windows I can't see myself going back, the disconnect of having a Desktop OS that works for you vs being hostage to an OS that Microsoft is using as a marketing channel for spyware and spamming their cloud services will only get worse over time.
- techjamie 1y ago
  > Had some issues at the start with Nvidia/Wayland I'm not sure if it's just the open source NVIDIA drivers that have improved it, but Wayland works very well on my system now. I tried a move from KDE (x11)->Hyprland last year, and it was not viable. When I upgraded my system to NixOS 25.05 though, I changed a deprecated config option without much consideration, and accidentally migrated myself to KDE (Wayland). It took a little bit to notice anything was really that different. Out of curiosity, I also installed Hyprland again, and none of the issues that I had previously are present. The only hard casualty in the switch has been Flameshot, and I had to switch my rofi package but it works fine.
pentagrama 1y ago
> Looks like Denmark's Ministry for Digitization is not in fact moving to Linux right now. The original interview given by the Danish Ministry said that they planned to move to Linux, but this apparently was a misunderstanding between the Ministry and the outlet. They've since corrected the article, they're moving to just LibreOffice, but not Linux, at least not in the near future. Source for that correction: https://www.computerworld.dk/art/291812/caroline-stage-udfaser-microsoft-i-digitaliseringsministeriet-jeg-glaeder-mig-meget-til-at-se-hvordan-det-fungerer-i-praksis https://www.computerworld.dk/art/291812/caroline-stage-udfas... ----- Source: https://mastodon.social/@thelinuxEXP/114692092674707028 https://mastodon.social/@thelinuxEXP/114692092674707028
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
Previously: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234552 Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44255352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44255352
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
Maybe amend the submission title to match the story: Update: Danish ministry only ditching Microsoft Office, but Windows is staying on their PCs

121 points by ricecat 1y ago

What is the state of games piracy on Linux though? I kind of assume most cracked games are released for Windows, but perhaps they will run just fine on Wine anyway?

teddyh 1y ago
The Valve Steam Deck runs SteamOS, which is Linux.

daoboy 1y ago

It looks like they're just dropping Office 365 for Libre office. Not switching the entire operating system.

kevinherron 1y ago
> in a move that exchanges Windows and Office 365 for Linux and LibreOffice. > It'll migrate about half of the Ministry of Digital Affairs away from Windows this summer
- daoboy 1y ago
  The last comment: >The Politiken article has been corrected. They're dropping Microsoft Office but not Windows. They might in the future, that seems to be the general trend, but in this case the minister said they're dropping Microsoft services and interviewer misinterpreted that as including Windows.
  - kevinherron 1y ago
    Ahh, did not see/read the comments on the article.

ifthenelseor 1y ago

Given that the US forced Microsoft to stop providing email services to the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands via sanctions, I expect moves like this to become more common across Europe. Bert Hubert is a Euro blogger who writes more about this.

cyberpunk 1y ago
wtf, that happened? :/
- ifthenelseor 1y ago
  Citation: https://apnews.com/article/icc-trump-sanctions-karim-khan-court-a4b4c02751ab84c09718b1b95cbd5db3 https://apnews.com/article/icc-trump-sanctions-karim-khan-co...
  - mijoharas 1y ago
    Worth noting, there is this follow-up statement from Microsoft, which is frankly as clear as mud. (Essentially Microsoft saying they didn't cut off services, with no explanation of what did happen) https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-services-international-criminal-court-president-american-sanctions-trump-tech-icc-amazon-google/ https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-servic...
    - ifthenelseor 1y ago
      Thank you for the additional context. > A Microsoft spokesperson said that it had been in contact with the court since February “throughout the process that resulted in the disconnection of its sanctioned official from Microsoft services.” The spokesperson added that “at no point did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the ICC.” > Microsoft declined to comment further in response to questions regarding the exact process that led to Khan's email disconnection, and exactly what it meant by “disconnection.” I think you have described it well. Clear as mud. I think the political impact on Open Source going forward may be very interesting.

Hilift 1y ago

Most government positions could use almost anything. The reason many places use Windows is familiarity and cost of government licenses. Also note that modern services may have a term, for example Microsoft has licenses based on a six-year commitment. There are scenarios where Windows may be problematic. Sometimes drivers for odd equipment are not available in Linux, or only some Linux distros due to fragmentation and not maintained very well.

preisschild 1y ago
> reason many places use Windows is familiarity And the reason for that is the problem. Too many schools use only Microsoft programs.
- aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
  Nah most schools use chromebook now. And many schools use libreoffice to save cost.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    That is a US phenomenon, Chomebooks are a rounding error outside the states.
    - aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
      I'm European.
      - pjmlp 1y ago
        Me too, and never seen them elsewhere other than weekly discounts at Media Markt, until the shop finally gets rid of existing stock. Also at least in Southern Europe, if kids use computers at the school at all, they tend to be desktop like deployments, and if families have to buy them, then Windows laptops get mostly acquired, as it is something actually usable, and in their budget.
      - 1y ago

__natty__ 1y ago

That's good information for the FOSS community. Most people I know could go the same way. They are using an operating system solely to launch a web browser and occasionally office applications.

phtrivier 1y ago

Did I miss the part in the article where they write how many machines (as in, you know, how many real life "computers") are actually being migrated ? (It's not the same newsworthiness if it's 100 thousands thousands, a a few ones in the office of the intern for some underfunded local department.)

onetoo 1y ago
IIRC it's a single ministry with not a lot of machines (in the order of 100). Definitely not as newsworthy as it's being made out to be, but viability has to be confirmed before a larger rollout can be done, I suppose.
- halffullbrain 1y ago
  Exactly, the Ministry of Digitalization barks a lot louder than it bites - context here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44346549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44346549

danielovichdk 1y ago

Ehh...no. The minister of IT and digitalisation has communicated that her department would try to move from windows to FOSS. Look it up. And stop believing these sensational stories.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> Look it up Do you have a better source?
- halffullbrain 1y ago
  This is the actual source, but it's in Danish: https://www.digmin.dk/digitalisering/nyheder/nyhedsarkiv/2025/jun/digitaliseringsministeriet-saetter-gang-i-pilotprojekt-om-digital-suveraenitet https://www.digmin.dk/digitalisering/nyheder/nyhedsarkiv/202...
- halffullbrain 1y ago
  Machine-translated from the source (https://www.digmin.dk/digitalisering/nyheder/nyhedsarkiv/2025/jun/digitaliseringsministeriet-saetter-gang-i-pilotprojekt-om-digital-suveraenitet https://www.digmin.dk/digitalisering/nyheder/nyhedsarkiv/202...): Denmark must become less dependent on the major tech giants when it comes to digital solutions in the public sector. Therefore, the Ministry of Digitalization is now starting to test a new open source solution. This week, the Ministry of Digitalization is launching a new pilot project, where a group of employees will begin testing an open source alternative to the Microsoft Office suite. Specifically, the open source platform in question is Collabora, which is based on the open source software LibreOffice. The employees in the Ministry of Digitalization’s department participating in the pilot project will have the Office suite in their case management system replaced with Collabora. "As minister, I’ve spoken about the need to challenge our digital independence. Now we’re taking the first step ourselves in the Ministry of Digitalization with this new pilot project. I don’t delude myself into thinking that this means we’re ready to kick the tech giants out tomorrow, but I see it as a welcome step in the right direction. As politicians, we have an obligation to ensure that our IT systems in the future aren’t dependent on a few large companies," says Minister for Digitalization Caroline Stage. The ministry is beginning tests of a new integrated document editing module in the F2 case management system, based on the open source platform Collabora built on LibreOffice. This means that ministry employees will test an alternative to the Microsoft Office suite and use open source document editing tools instead of Microsoft’s solutions like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The solution will be rolled out for broader testing in the Ministry of Digitalization’s department on June 19, 2025. At that time, a group of departmental employees will have their Office suite in F2 replaced with the open source alternative. In the months that follow, the ministry will monitor and test whether Collabora can support the ministry’s workflows and needs in a satisfactory manner. The upcoming testing work will focus, among other things, on functionality related to the ministry’s templates, formatting for government cases, use of 'track changes', tables, etc., and whether the solution can handle conversion to and from Word format without altering the layout of documents. If the test period proceeds satisfactorily, the next step is expected to be a broader rollout of the open source alternative throughout the department.

halffullbrain 1y ago

Dane here. A lot of debate at the moment about digital sovereignty, with a very trusted ally threatening to annex Greenland while perhaps shifting its internal power structure (courts vs executive powers) while also continuing a trend of increased executive power over private companies (NSL etc.) Meanwhile, EU is apparently way behind both China and US in high-tech industry and digital infrastructure in general and AI technology in particular. So it's a welcome discourse - we really should go through the threat scenarios, in light of the changed parameters. My observations: * Consider: Could the society function if major cloud services (say, Microsoft 365 or Azure's IaaS services) - were suddenly nullrouted from Denmark? (Keep in mind that Denmark is heavily digitalized in both the private and public sectors) * While that not a likely scenario, it's no longer an unthinkable scenario, which it seemed to be in 2024. If it's not unthinkable, it could quickly become a credible threat. "Surrender Greenland, or else..." * Public sector Denmark is very much a "Microsoft first" country, 99.9% of desktops, office networks and productivity. On back-ends, MS is maybe not so big at the state-level systems, but quite dominant at regional and municipal levels. * Due to GDPR (and various related side quests), public Denmark has been slow-ish in moving to cloud infrastructure, but e.g. Microsoft 365 is gaining marketshare over locally or semi centralized hosted Exchange servers. So the blast radius is unclear. * At the same time, Microsoft is taking home quite substantial license fees. The minister's reaction could also play into that. However, the thing to note is that the Ministry of Digital Affairs is a small ministry. While they control some key infrastructure components (few of which run on Windows, AFAIK), they are not at all responsible for choosing other administrative bodies' choice of office suite or the bargaining with Microsoft. In practice, that power is held by the Ministry of Finance, as is so much else. They might be seeing things differently. Interesting times indeed. And certainly long overdue to consider alternatives realistically and reduce vendor lock-in where feasible.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

tossandthrow 1y ago

I am curios on what these developments (obviously the ones that also transcends just Denmark) will do to something like San Fransisco and it's housing market. Could this be a Detroit moment?

donatj 1y ago

There's a big hubbub in my small town about $60k every 4 years the local government could have avoided by moving the date of local elections to align with national elections that failed by one vote. I got curious about what our total budget looked like, so I started digging into the towns official budget which is available online. My small town is somehow paying over $70,000 a year for Office 365 seats! Doing the math even at the more expensive government tiers, that's still ~1,000 seats which I can't believe we have anywhere near that many employees. I'm not close enough to the problem to know if it's practical or not, but it really seems like at the very least we could move the majority of people to LibreOffice and save the town a bit of money.

feverzsj 1y ago

Only China government succeeded in replacing windows with linux. It's actually much more expensive, but their only concern is security.

_9y71 1y ago

Better source; the current one doesn't mention phases: https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/13/danish_department_dump_microsoft https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/13/danish_department_dum...

martinald 1y ago

I do get the political nature for this but this is really easier said than done. Desktop Linux does not have good 'enterprise' group policy support compared to Windows. Neither does Mac. I think ChromeOS comes pretty close though. And to be honest the need for this is as big if not bigger than on Windows. To take a random example - Control + Alt + F[1-6] switches you to a terminal with no explanation of how to get back. If you are a non technical user hitting that by mistake probably means a call to IT Support which is not advantageous to say the least. In Windows you'd set a group policy to disable that kind of thing, but there isn't a clear group policy 'standard' for Linux. You'd have to write a script that patches xorg.conf to disable it. That's just one tiny example, I think there will be thousands of these small things. The other big blocker is support for Word/Excel docs. LibreOffice gets you so far there but I suspect there will be thousands (millions?) of complex docs/excel sheets with macros and what not that tend not to play ball. This is a huge job to migrate them all. Ironically this is a much bigger blocker I suspect than software itself as apart from this nearly everything is web based. It's all very doable but requires a lot of work to get right. Basically someone needs to come along with something like Omakub but for non technical users, with a central server for managing it all. I haven't really seen any polished projects for this, though maybe the 'enterprise' version of Ubuntu has this kind of stuff nailed? And perhaps this Danish project actually ends up with something very usable for this. But it is very far from just installing YOLO installing Ubuntu.

antihysteresis 1y ago
Maybe I'm just naive, but... who needs group policy when you have other tools that can accomplish the same goals? With Linux, it's possible to do periodic image-based deployment (ie roll out preconfigured, immutable core OS images to all managed machines) and then set up the FS to "overlay" any per-machine customisations on top of the base image. User files / home directories can be kept in their own partition, entirely separate from the OS image. If desired, one could even set up a system for overlaying generated customization images (based on a template) on user partitions - allowing IT to systematically override particular files in user trees with immutable versions, if they so choose. As for managing subgroups of machines which need different software/settings, or dealing with revisions? Use git to manage everything that goes into the deployed OS images. If a subgroup of machines just needs a few different configs, that can be a patchset. If the changes are more significant, it might make more sense to implement a branch. Then IT gets to control, at a fine-grained level, the update status and configuration of every machine they manage - and easily make organisation-wide changes by pushing new images, while also having the ability to cleanly roll back to an older revision of the image if showstopper regressions are found. Most likely you'd push image deltas (no sense wasting bandwidth routinely sending whole images if it can be avoided) once per diem, in the middle of the night. Once the tooling is in place, I'd imagine a system like that ought to be far slicker / more convenient, not to mention more powerful and (albeit dependent on implementation) secure than Windows' Group Policy could ever hope to be.

Lerc 1y ago

There is a problem that is growing increasingly apparent. Would you use an operating system or cloud services provided by a nation you are at war with? Not long ago there were many countries that would have considered a future where they are at war with the United States to be impossible. A lot of those countries can now see paths to that happening,

mythz 1y ago

Many years ago when I heard Munich City was switching to Linux, I remember thinking it was a reckless decision that was doomed to fail, and turns out it eventually did as they announced in 2020 they were moving back to Windows. Which is in stark contrast to now where it's now my favorite Desktop OS to use, effectively forced into it after switching away from Windows after 25 years after MS EOL'd Windows 10 and started infesting Windows 11 with ads/spyware. Had some issues at the start with Nvidia/Wayland, but that's now all fixed and Fedora has been a rock solid modern distro for use as my primary driver. Software compatibility turned out much better than I thought with all my daily apps being available for Linux thanks to Chromium/Electron, .NET SDK and JetBrains cross-platform tools. Steam compatibility was an expected surprise with most of my flagship titles working on Linux. So after 1.5 years of leaving Windows I can't see myself going back, the disconnect of having a Desktop OS that works for you vs being hostage to an OS that Microsoft is using as a marketing channel for spyware and spamming their cloud services will only get worse over time.

techjamie 1y ago
> Had some issues at the start with Nvidia/Wayland I'm not sure if it's just the open source NVIDIA drivers that have improved it, but Wayland works very well on my system now. I tried a move from KDE (x11)->Hyprland last year, and it was not viable. When I upgraded my system to NixOS 25.05 though, I changed a deprecated config option without much consideration, and accidentally migrated myself to KDE (Wayland). It took a little bit to notice anything was really that different. Out of curiosity, I also installed Hyprland again, and none of the issues that I had previously are present. The only hard casualty in the switch has been Flameshot, and I had to switch my rofi package but it works fine.

pentagrama 1y ago

> Looks like Denmark's Ministry for Digitization is not in fact moving to Linux right now. The original interview given by the Danish Ministry said that they planned to move to Linux, but this apparently was a misunderstanding between the Ministry and the outlet. They've since corrected the article, they're moving to just LibreOffice, but not Linux, at least not in the near future. Source for that correction: https://www.computerworld.dk/art/291812/caroline-stage-udfaser-microsoft-i-digitaliseringsministeriet-jeg-glaeder-mig-meget-til-at-se-hvordan-det-fungerer-i-praksis https://www.computerworld.dk/art/291812/caroline-stage-udfas... ----- Source: https://mastodon.social/@thelinuxEXP/114692092674707028 https://mastodon.social/@thelinuxEXP/114692092674707028

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

Previously: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234552 Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44255352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44255352

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

Maybe amend the submission title to match the story: Update: Danish ministry only ditching Microsoft Office, but Windows is staying on their PCs