Denmark Is Switching to Linux
pcgamer.com
pcgamer.com
https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-servic...
> 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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44032717 ("Microsoft's ICC blockade: digital dependence comes at a cost (techzine.eu)" (205 comments))
I feel like the infamous "League of nations" keeps repeating itself since nations only act in self interest, and all these intergovernmental organizations, are just temporary gentlemens' agreements, not worth the paper they're written on, and at the end of the day the rules are still decided and enforced by who has the biggest military like in the past infinity years of human history.
So the current Microsoft issue is just the effect, but not the root cause of this. The root cause is US government becoming more and more of an unaccountable bully, and we need to address that instead of Microsoft since if it's not Microsoft who does something, it will be Google, Apple, AWS, Qualcomm, etc. they all do the bidding of the US administration.
The ICC has its roots from the trials of Nazi criminals. The US government and its military has often performed similar unspeakable and inhumane acts abroad (see the war on terror leaks and scandals) without any repercussions due to legislature form George Bush saying the US will invade the Hague if its military personnel are ever trialed for war crimes.
So if one country sees itself above the law, what do you think that does to the other countries?
There's biting hypothetical about it.
Of course it can. During the cold war, most US aligned countries had massive trade restrictions with the USSR. The fix is easy on paper: reduce trade with countries that break the rules. Of course, that's easier said than done, but it is doable and effective.
Imagine what can be achieved if Europe, Canada, UK, AUNZ, Korea, Japan, BRICS, would collectively put restrictions on the US whoever the US decides to fling its dick around the world stage. The problem is getting countries to cooperate so it's never gonna happen. Would make a cool novel though.
You’re mixing up the ICC and ICJ.
The ICC was formed in 2002 [1]. The U.S. is not a treaty party to its founding document, the Rome Statute. The ICJ was founded because of the Nazis; it has jurisdiction over America [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Court_of_Justi...
That’s not what I said. But yes, the opposite of “might is right” is an aberration. The only reason Nuremberg occurred is because it was for the Jews. This is the opposite case.
This is entirely ahistoric.
People don't talk about that because it's been obvious for a long time. How is it surprising a country who invades basically any country on a whim, based on false premises, also sees itself as being above international law?
Meanwhile, the cutting of email access is new, and hasn't happened before, so it is quite literally "news", while the other stuff you mention is basically an opinion-piece and not new information.
One, international law hasn’t ever constrained any of the great powers. (China annexed Tibet in 1951, for example.)
Two, the U.S. isn’t a treaty partner to the Rome Statute [1]. The ICC doesn’t have jurisdiction in America. One of the founding principles of the post-war system was treaty-based law—countries cede their sovereignty by agreement, not force.
America generally sees itself as being above international law. But it is far from alone in this. And the ICC isn’t an example of it.
Nations chose to ally with the US post-WW2 since it was the least worst option at the time. Much better to be a US ally than a USSR ally. The US was a lot more trustworthy at the time and less s.
But this situation has changed now. China is the new second superpower, and trust in the US has hit an all time low. In the past during the cold war, the US would make concessions with its allies so that everyone is happy. Now, the US foreign policy is, "America first, everyone suck our star spangled dick bitches! MAGA!", and has no issues screwing its closest allies and partners over in order to squeeze them, acting more like a mob shakedown.
Given this, it's normal to see the US as much more dangerous ally now than in the past, and try to remove dependency on them.
>Meanwhile, the cutting of email access is new, and hasn't happened before, so it is quite literally "news", while the other stuff you mention is basically an opinion-piece and not new information.
This only happened because the US gov got too comfy doing whatever it wanted and never facing any consequences for it. It's the natural evolution of things. "Spare the rod, spoil the child", as they say.
It was a bad judgement call to indict Israel government after they were attacked. I think we don't see ICC ruling as something to be taken seriously anymore.
Good baking requires exactly: clean water, a good sourdough, some well ground non bleached organic flour and just a pinch of salt!
:)
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-udfas...
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Source: https://mastodon.social/@thelinuxEXP/114692092674707028
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.
Source: worked in government contracting
And the reason for that is the problem. Too many schools use only Microsoft programs.
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.
Sure, schools cannot offer administration for the numerous IT related issues some systems might have. But that is a secondary problem.
Also, the same problem of dependence remains.
My personal kit is linux because it just works and I don't have time to faff around with windows when I'm not being paid. That doesn't work for enterprise though, and the difficulties of using windows are less important than the ease of enforcing policy.
Do Canonical offer a similar solution for identity management - sccm, active directory, intune, end-point-protection, all that sort of stuff? I'm no expert, I don't deal with that at work either, but I do know it's a major consideration.
This isn't the 90s. The problem with linux on the desktop in an enterprise isn't a lack of drivers or even software.
Having worked for several years on bespoke IT for a megacorp, I think this is massively underestimating the challenge. There are literally hundreds of engineers involved and this is in a very well-established context.
Building a reliable, secure and user-friendly platform is a seriously enormous undertaking. I am honestly kinda skeptical that it's feasible for a smaller European nation to do this at an acceptable cost.
It absolutely needs to be done though. But I have a feeling everyone is doomed to fail if they try to do things on a custom basis. I think it has to be centralised one way or another.
Whether that means growing firms like Canonical, or coming up with some EU-level public engineering institutions, I dunno. I guess the best would be a patchwork of several such solutions.
I just don't really see how any of this can be done quickly enough to free us from US tech within 10 years :/
My fear is that people just don't do it properly. Then we end up with governments that are running on nonfunctional or horribly insecure IT. I don't think this is really better than being constantly fucked by Microsoft and the US govt.
Nearly all of state and local administration uses various 3rd party solutions which have bespoke Office add-ins and rely on close integration with the formats (and security models) on the Office suite -- and are likely shifting more heavily into Microsoft 365 specific features.
So it's not as simple as rolling out LibreOffice and calling it a day. Much less Linux.
> It'll migrate about half of the Ministry of Digital Affairs away from Windows this summer
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If the distribution is set, it is easier to distribute group policies. You also might want an identity provider that distributes login configuration to all systems, an equivalent to a windows domain.
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.
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.
The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234552
Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice
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,
Could this be a Detroit moment?
Update: Danish ministry only ditching Microsoft Office, but Windows is staying on their PCs
(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.)
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.
Do you have a better source?
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.