The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice | Hacker News Reader

The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

politiken.dk

263 pointsnogajun150 comments

Talking to my Danish friends, and I have a fair few in tech, the country is owned by Microsoft. A lot of code jobs are c# on Azure, and all the office people use Excel.

This is a welcome change. I've thought for a long time, why would your average office worker even need to pay MS for their desktop OS when so many things could just be done on the web? And why develop a bunch of stuff on a proprietary platform when you can just code it on a Linux platform?

Same in Germany

The 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

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...

Ha, can a city run with a dual-booting system? /s

Munich 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

I find it puzzling they use OpenOffice instead of LibreOffice.

The project started 6 years before the LibreOffice fork existed.

Yes, but it's been left in the dust since the devs left to fork it as LibreOffice.

Dankse Bank is a synonym for C# dev jobs here

I'm Danish, and yes: I can confirm. Everything is Microsoft. I have talked about this a lot in many years, and I was very (positively) surprised to read about this, as it will be a large job to move everything out of Microsoft. Most companies (both public and private) I have worked for in the last twenty years or so are almost entirely on Microsoft solutions: Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Sharepoint, Teams. You name it. Occasionally you meet something like JIRA or AWS and more technical systems, but the backbone of anything related to management, communications and documentation is based on MS solutions.

They don't have the capacity. The opinion you present is actually part of the narrative you are seemingly against. That you can compete with big tech if you just want to.

And you "can" compete with big tech, but it isn't actually possible. Because the right pre-requisites, environment and priorities doesn't exist. Not in Europe, not in much of the US and not in much of the world.

The European companies the would (or could) prioritize having their own digital infrastructure (mostly research or more industrial companies) are also having lay-offs, or at least not growing close to more service oriented companies that are hooked into big tech.

For the same types of reasons the US also won't bring back manufacturing.

Edit: It also reminds me of a story from some time ago in Sweden. Because of the growing number of fashion designers the press were talking about the growing fashion industry as "the fashion wonder". The then CEO of H&M commented in an interview that most of these brands were making less revenue than just one of their stores. Many of these companies are now dead or irrelevant while H&M, Zara and Shein are still around and more relevant than ever.

If there actually was even more a shift to the web from desktop it would probably benefit Google with ChromeOS. Just like a shift from Windows for software development benefited Apple and their more closed ecosystem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I also think something fundamental is missing in the education of your average office worker.

The reason why people are scared to change software is that they can't actually use any software. They basically don't know how it works and are just cargo culting. They memorize some functions, and they think that is all they need to do their job, which they consider to be some higher level thing like being a bureaucrat.

But it's like literacy. You're not literate when you can only read one book. You're literate when you can read any book.

There are principles in how software works, below the level of the programmer, that everyone can learn. What is running on my machine, what is running on the server, why do I see the things on the screen that I see, what do common GUI elements do, and so on.

I entirely agree with you, but I'm at a loss as to how we might improve things.

People just don't seem to care, just like they didn't seem to care to understand how machinery used to work. They know that they should press this button and expect that outcome.

We teach reading in school. I think the same could be done now for tech literacy.

It was pointless to try something like that before because the older generation was usually less tech literate than the kids. But these days tech literacy is dropping (and with AI, probably even more so), so it might be that the older generation could actually teach it.

As a programmer I fully understand and even support what you suggest, but I’m not sure it will ever work. My mother, wife, good friend, etc - none of them can grok what a computer program is, or the file system. I’ve tried and tried for many years and it just doesn’t click. On the other hand, I’m realizing more and more how ‘blind’ I am when it comes to color, fashion, decorating, shapes, etc. My logical left-brain merges perfectly with computers, but not more squishy things. Many friends and family are the opposite. I don’t think teaching can overcome that basic wiring. We’re just different.

> The other 1% are either accountants who actually use Excel for what it was made, designers, etc.

I, half-jokingly, recommend firing anyone who opens Excel and hasn't entered a formula within 15 minutes.

That alone would solve a lot of problems :)

At the other extreme, also fire anyone who uses Excel as an app development platform or a databse. Fire even faster if its used for something mission critical.

Yes, yes and yes.

Now, i really begin to wonder if that should be some kind of add-in to be sold..

Quick comment regarding the "Swedish fashion wonder": It's definitely a pyramid, but I can for sure name a bunch that definitely makes more than most H&M stores. And they keep popping up, and are definitely not irrelevant.

According to ChatGPT avg revenue of H&M stores in Sweden is 5.4 MEUR. If I remember correctly from my market research (I co-founded a Swedish SaaS targeting fashion brands) there at least 100 with more revenue then that - and they're definitely making most revenue outside of Sweden. To name a few; Djerf Avenue, Filippa K, Stronger, ICIW, Peak Performance, CHIMI eyewear, Tiger of Sweden, J Lindeberg... Heck, I can even name drop a bunch doing footwear more or less only; Axel Arigato, Icebug, Björn Borg, Eytys...

But yeah, most brands are doing less. It's a pyramid. But no, Swedish fashion brands (excl H&M) are definitely not irrelevant.

Same in Sweden :-(

Hundreds of millions of taxpayers money goes to Microsoft licenses for the public sector every year.

Same in Sweden. Everything is azure, office365 and c# (okay not everything but a way higher % than elsewhere)

It’s the same everywhere, that’s why Bill Gates is so rich :)

If you ever tried to use anything else than Word & Excel to interact with people who are using Word & Excel , chances are that you encountered problems like wrong encoding files, that don’t open, files that open, but look incomplete, problems with alignment, etc.

There’s so much friction that it’s not worth bothering.

unfortunately, the proprietary software has become the standard. IMHO the only solution would be to force a large number of people switch to something else and create the new standard, so maybe the Danes can pull it off. Since many years, I keep hearing about countries trying to move away from Microsoft, but I don’t know how much they succeeded.

Fun fact – Steve Ballmer has now made more money from Microsoft than Bill Gates.

I encountered problems where people only accept .docx, not even .pdf

You 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.

There is currently a very strong reason to migrate to Open Source: the big tech corps are pushing people into their clouds and this leads to new constraints on your planning because now you are subject to the software company's product lifecycle.

So, if before you could run your old version of Oracle or whatever for as long as you wanted (if you could live without the support), now you have no choice. When the support for a product is dropped on the cloud, you have to upgrade whether you are ready for it or not.

There 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.

Not 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

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

I imagine this will be a serious issue for companies with small IT teams and large legacy systems.

I'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.

I 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.

Windows does have better user and device administrators tools. However, this doesn't stop people using Macs, which are absolutely terrible for mass administration.

Macs 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.

I'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.

I 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.

That’s the nice thing about Open Source. Nothing’s stopping you from organizing this yourself.

He 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.

The 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.

organizing is by far more difficult work than coding.

You can crowdfund for a project manager!

This 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.

But you can't fix that one either.

I haven't found anything that needs fixing.

Man, I hate how excel behave a lot of times but I thank God everyday that it exists.

On the backend while writing macros you discover a lot of...interesting choices

Like how sometimes my macros failed because it does not interface with the regional formatting of the system (had to take 0.34 and convert it to 0,34 by converting it to string). The reverse is not necessary.

How value and value2 exists as property of a cell (I will bet whatever you want that it was a temporary name) and how the "value" behavior is dogshit.

How stuff is hyper advanced but stuff that SHOULD work does not....

It's an interesting look at it.

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

If you can get a discussion going with the maintainer, which is not a guarantee (cant speak to libre maintainers, but I know other projects like this), then you have to convince them that your change is both valuable and reasonable for them to maintain. The latter part there is key - they are _maintain_ers. You write the code once and then run off. If you write some new UI in some fancy framework then they have to live with it forever and learn a new framework to support it. Its a big cost for them, so on smaller projects maintainers can get defensive/grumpy

As such a maintainer: you hit the nail on the head.

Add to that an infinite stream of bug reports and feature requests, and it gets tiring. I don't even have the time to answer all bug reports...

Yes. Lucky if you even get noticed.

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

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

They are office people.

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

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

Opportunity cost can’t be ignored, and that is absolutely a huge cost.

The converse of this is the bad thing about open source. Although seemingly nothing's stopping people sometimes, somehow stuff still tend not to get done.

Laughs in Wayland.

Sometimes no amount or organising or doing the work yourself can move things forward appreciably.

Not everyone has an extra 20 hours a week to contribute to open source, and I'm assuming a project as big as LibreOffice has a lot of non-technical hurdles in place for anyone new. It's perfectly reasonable to donate to people already working on it tho.

If denmark was to successfully adopt libreoffice they would probably invest in its upkeep aswell

Preventing another migration is a cost reduction in itself

Might not be what you are looking for, but I missed this option for a LONG time, so, in case you don't know, you can enable tabbed ribbon interface in LibreOffice, and I think it looks better. https://itsfoss.com/libreoffice-ribbon-interface/

I've switched to mainly using the onlyoffice suite (AGPL3) a few years ago for UI/UX reasons. Don't know why people act like libreoffice is the only game in town.

You 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.

Mandating 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.

I do agree there, although Microsoft will argue till the end of the earth that OOXML are already those formats.

It 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.

Perhaps they can start by adding Linux support for MitID - https://www.mitid.dk/en-gb/help/help-universe/platform-suppo...

Crazy how many critical services are tied to American companies.

Mitid fully works under Linux.

However, it should be a mandate in the tender that all modern browsers are supported regardless of the operating system.

Oh nice, it seems the Swedish BankID works very differently as it isn't possible here :(

Sweden should start by not using the banks for their national digital ID scheme.

Denmark 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.

> 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-...

A precedent was set.

This action made the mainstream Danish press, so it's probably contributed to the decision.

https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/penge/microsofts-blokering-af-euro...

Somebody tell the Danish legal team that Tritium (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.

This 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.

I 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.

I found onlyoffice a good replacement. It is certainly better looking.

It's really beautiful but I stopped using it because of its opaque ties with Russia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyOffice#Organization

For 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.

I 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.

I'm no Microsoft fanboy but LibreOffice is hideous and the compatibility has not kept up even after the MS Office formats moved to xml. Also, most of my interactions with Office Documents nowadays are through the online tools. I don't even have to install a binary on my computer anymore.

These enterprises should invest a fraction of what they used to spend on Microsoft Office into a development effort to modernize LibreOffice. Last time I tried to use it, it seemed like it was on life support in relation to Microsoft Office.

While LibreOffice has a ton of things that should be improved, I hope that it will never suffer a "modernization" that will make it more similar to the recent versions of MS Office.

In my opinion, MS Office has been improved steadily during the decade ending in 2003/2004, then it has stagnated, then it has been degraded continuously until today.

The UI of LibreOffice is ugly, but it is easy to do with it what you need. The UI of MS Office has become extremely convoluted for any of the more sophisticated tasks.

What I mean by modernization is to have online viewers/editors so I don't have to install a virus delivery vehicle on my computer to create and edit a document. It's not specific to LibreOffice but I'm very hesitant to install binaries on a computer nowadays. Especially ones that open user-created files. These present attack vectors for bad actors.

Also, the content creation is stuck in 2004 as well. It works perfectly fine if you're creating an IEEE-formatted research paper or similar wall of text but if you're creating something you want to give to customers or to look professional and nice, it's literally the last program you'd want to use to accomplish that. There's no nice way to say it.

Hideous? It looks just like any word processor to me. A dated look, yes, but I wouldn't call it ugly.

What needs modernizing precisely? IMHO the UI for most things in libreoffice's word processor is simple and easily found. Can't say the same of word these days.

Unfortunately the LibreOffice Impress is pretty bad. PowerPoint is what keeps me using Office. LibreOffice formatting looks bad on the screen (it resizes bitmaps to make the fuzzy) and the user interface for constructing slides is both clunky, slow and buggy. I don't understand how the UI can be this slow in 2025 on a fast PC. Basic functionality, like resizing an equation, just doesn't work.

> 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.

There's an effort called numerique, out of fr and de governments. It seems to have docs, spreadsheet and meet now, and more on the way.

https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/en

Oh now that is interesting.

Source here as well https://github.com/suitenumerique

What do you mean "keep up with the times technology-wise"? LibreOffice has much better support for MSO formats than OpenOffice.

Also, have you tried enabling the ribbon in LibreOffice? View > User Interface > Tabbed

I don't care for MSO format support, nor ribbon interface. What I lack is capability to collaborate on the documents online, Google Docs-style. Also, OpenOffice.org used to be really stable, and LibreOffice somehow crashes on me every other day while doing nothing special, just editing some simple letter.

I 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.

These 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.

Most 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.

If you have specific performance issues and are able to share the associated documents, please log them at 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.

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

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

Let's not let perfect become the enemy of better. :)

Anything non-Windows would work for the time being. OpenIndiana and FreeBSD / OpenBSD can come later. :D

I 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

KDE still does. GNOME also does, but it basically requires them to compat-shim systemd, which is really unfortunate.

but does a BSD user want GNOME? GNOME target users are more casual, too many options are too much for them.

I don't know, but given that e.g. FreeBSD has an entire team dedicated to keeping GNOME working with whatever hacks are necessary, presumably there are at least enough to volunteer for such work.

Anyway, my point was more broadly that Gnome and its surrounding software ecosystem is explicitly and openly Linux-first and have no qualms introducing dependencies like systemd that make it that much harder to get it working everywhere else. I'm pretty sure I've seen Gnome folk straight up say that they simply don't care about anything other than Linux. So unfortunately it's not always that simple to move the apps over.

(KDE, on the other hand, is pretty BSD-friendly.)

I'm gonna do my part and champion Haiku OS instead.

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

Let's hope they won't just flip-flop like Munich, the poster child for linux adoption.

Usually the biggest hurdles are Active Directory, deep Excel trenches and reliance on Outlook. The OS itself, browsers to get the job done and non-Excel office stuff are usually not an issue. There might also be deep reliance on Acrobat or some digital signature stuff etc.

Either way, great news. I hope it works well.

How are Danes submitting taxes? That's still Windows only software in many countries (though many have switched to web portals already).

> 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.

The issues in this situation are always,

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

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

How 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.

Are 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.

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

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

While I won't comment on whether the move made is smart:

> 1. How much is compatibility with outside users and past documents necessary?

Not an issue, document compatibility is a solved problem and any issues experienced would be minor (e.g., a missing font or broken animation leading to slightly different presentation).

> 2. What is the system management story?

Corporate "system management" solutions are entirely broken on Windows, especially upgrade and software bundle management. It actively causes more harm and security issues than it solves, and needs to die.

It's dumpster fire of technologies that get stitched on top of each other, all conflicting and ultimately training all employees to ignore all signs of malicious intervention: How do you expect a user to sceptical of questionable popups/browser hijacking/similar, when your setup involves training users to ignore cmd.exe windows popping up randomly and to always interact with highly inconsistent, constantly changing and overall questionable popups appearing at any time of day asking you to do weird things (installing apps you didn't ask for, updating, rebooting, upgrading, often with countdown timers for making decisions)?

Should you have the ill-advised desire to bring the worst and most defective parts of Windows IT management to Linux, there's a handful of big vendors providing similar solutions there. So "not an issue", other than it being a terrible idea.

In regards to your first point, I'm actively testing conversion scenarios of .xlsx to .ods (ODF 1.3) with LibreOffice, and depending on what you consider significant properties there's definitely some loss along the way that might hurt. Mostly looking into diagrams at the moment, and some break under conversion (histograms and pareto for example), while others aren't displayed properly (stock charts).

It'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.

>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?

Fortunately 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.

> 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.

My company has Linux and Windows laptop fleets. Windows requires more work and causes more pain, even though the Linux fleet is larger.

What sector and country is that? Or better, which company? How large is the company and how many Linux and Windows machines are there?

I'm also curious to know how they manage their Linux fleet?

Software company in İstanbul. I don't know the exact numbers, but a few thousand machines on each. Linux just works.

Ofc 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?

There 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/.

Even better would be if your company could sponsor some fixes, of course :-)

Following Trump's threats Danes would do better if they try to keep their vital infrastructure including IT as free as possible from the dependence.

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

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

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

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

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

It's a few times over the years I've read about govs switching to linux like this. Anyone know how they got on?

Usually 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.

is 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...

I 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.

They 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

Lower Saxony:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-scores-a-win-over-linu...

Vienna:

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.

Speaking completely off the cuff here, but I suspect that as government applications move to be web-based, perhaps there could be another wave of Linux adoption since all it would take essentially is a functioning browser.

I am puzzled that they not already have moved to the web. Also speaking off the cuff: what are the main reasons for using word documents in government? If it is mostly communication with other parts of the government or the public, shouldn't this be email which requires very little functionality compared to word.

I can see niche cases, like laws where you want change tracking or very long reports but that does not seem to apply to most government employees. Somehow I feel I missing something big, maybe there is a lot of automation built around word documents?

yes, but then what was the point of moving if all functionality was on the web anyway?

Windows just isn't that expensive. If you're paying MS for Office 365 anyway then there's no real point in replacing the set of drivers used by the browser.

Great! We should all be worried when our governments lock themselves into situations with just a single vendor.

Maybe they could pay some Danish software dev to improve the product with all the license money they will save.

They 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.

David 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-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.

> 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.

It's gone from the frontpage now and isn't anywhere in the top 200 either. Hmmm. I guess he was right.

I hate a told you so.

This 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.

Will 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.

Good, especially if there are also budgets somewhere to fix issues they have with it.

My 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.

Please note that only ~79 employees will affected by this decision.

A number of circumstantial factors point at this being primarily political posturing.

Does the EU contribute in a significant way to these open source project development budgets?

phasing 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.

Luckily this was never counted on the trade deficit. Phew!

Let's not forget about GitHub.

As 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.

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