Crazy how many critical services are tied to American companies.
However, it should be a mandate in the tender that all modern browsers are supported regardless of the operating system.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Sometimes no amount or organising or doing the work yourself can move things forward appreciably.
Preventing another migration is a cost reduction in itself
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Source here as well https://github.com/suitenumerique
Also, have you tried enabling the ribbon in LibreOffice? View > User Interface > Tabbed
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?
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...
Ever heard of GendBuntu? [1]
Probably not, because it was a successful migration.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
Now, i really begin to wonder if that should be some kind of add-in to be sold..
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.
Hundreds of millions of taxpayers money goes to Microsoft licenses for the public sector every year.
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.
And at least it gives a migration path.
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.
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.
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.
Hope for the best, with more users perhaps I can switch too in the future.
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.
No it won’t.
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.
This is how matlab continues to have a hold in engineering fields.
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.
Even better would be if your company could sponsor some fixes, of course :-)
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.
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
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-...
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
I'm also curious to know how they manage their Linux fleet?
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).
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.
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 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.
A number of circumstantial factors point at this being primarily political posturing.
Y_Y•18h ago
When I see announcements like this it does make me worry that MS (or whatever vendor) will try to make an example of them; by submarining stories about how the switchover is hard, non-techie civil servants want to keep what they're "used to", LibreOffice is technically inferior (no comment on that one, I think all office suites I've seen are junk).
I have my fingers crossed, but my chickens uncounted.
forinti•17h ago
With regards to end users, I think the only office software that still has an undeniable grip is Excel, but as people use Google Sheets more and more, the idea of using something different is becoming less absurd.
pjc50•17h ago
CamouflagedKiwi•17h ago