Are these Linux machines going to authenticate against the Azure Active Directory, maybe just a local Active Directory, or are the IT department going to run a separate service in parallel? Are they moving away from Exchange Server... probably not, given that it's half of the staff. Are they using Intune, if so what's the replacement strategy where?
My guess is that many of these staff members are going to use webmail and run Windows programs in remote desktop. The investments in the infrastructure isn't high enough, nor have they addressed any of the hard problems and the time frame is rather short. I doubt any significant money and time has been set aside for training.
It is going to end in complete failure, the employees are going to complain about lost productivity and a frustrating work environment. They are setting themselves up for complete failure.
The same is happening in a number of schools, where Linux and LibreOffice is set to replace ChromeBooks for some students. The expectation is that the cost is going to be €2.25M per year, for the next two years, then there will be a cost saving of €4-5M. Again no plans for handling authentication, email, file sharing or provisioning. They'll just force the students out of the relatively protected Google Workspace for Students, into the "real" Google/Gmail ecosystems where they are less protected against data mining.
This will all end badly and it will be because of poor planning. Then the next US president steps in, calms things down and we forget the whole thing in 2 years.
Half the team runs Linux, and the only real constraint is using Edge for SSO. (Firefox works too - you just have to actually log in like it's 2008.)
Honestly, everything else runs smoother than what my Windows-using teammates are dealing with.
So everything in the backend is still MS? Office 365, Intune, the full stack? That is the point of the comment you are rerplying to.
The "terminals" dont matter that much if the goal is to get rid of MS dependancy and they run Office 365... whats the point.
May I ask what that SSO solution is? Because it sounds like it might be a Microsoft product.
Over a year after completion, many users still have Excel and we do lots more app virtualization. I will say the biggest hurdle that still remains today, users accepting and adjusting to change. The migration also exposed lots of unknown user-created processes that no longer worked as usual, making it difficult for them to transition.
Overall, most users made the necessary adjustments, did the training provided, and are excelling. There's always that subset that can't, or maybe won't.
Traditional AD is harder to replace, but OpenShift’s IdP has an AD server mode that is capable of many use-cases; the cases it doesn’t do are GPO, Windows Update forcing, and other stuff no longer relevant on linux.
Are they moving away from Exchange Server? I’d hope so, MTAs are a dime a dozen in linux land. There’s a dozen homegrown alternatives for calendar + mail, from ProtonMail to running Exim + caldav.
The rentier companies may have “extended” the open source backing, but you’re not missing much except marketing.
"Manage Linux users and client hosts in your realm from one central location with CLI, Web UI or RPC access. Enable Single Sign On authentication for all your systems, services and applications."
"Open Source Identity and Access Management"
This comes up all the time when we talk about Linux in corporate deployment. As I have only experience in MS word regarding governance, let me ask this:
- Is there really no tools for Linux world that allows managing loads of Linux machines in an easy manner as it is in MS word (applying GPO policies)? A tool that can be easily set up and managed and doesn't have to always resort to scripting?
- If there is, why people are not using them?
I'm kind of aware some things are that allow managing Linux machines via Windows AD GPO, but that depends on MS domain there.
Seems like a ripe for a startup to provide open source tool(s) with, say, paid support for the enterprises.
If you only want Identity, Policies and Audit trails over several different Linux distributions, FreeIPA is your weapon of choice. It is clicky and requires no scripting. Just like ADS it is a bit of a pain to get into, but easier to run than OpenLDAP ;) If you want OpenID, too, connect FreeIPA and Keycloak, but you will need to dive onto the CLI. For configuration management connect Saltstack, here you have to edit rules files.
You can create fedora-based container images with your specific programs and configs included in the rootfs. The newly created container image will then be used as the rootfs for machines when they upgrade.
I guess this is another one of those "smalltalk people" vs "unix people" talking past eachother because they have shared vocabulary with different implications kind of situations.
Everything was more work than it would’ve been under Windows, from endpoint configuration enforcement through to things like authentication and PKI.
Nope, there's no unification in configuration formats (yml, ini etc), locations (/var, /etc, /usr, /opt/etc) or registries (dconf, gconf).
Yes, standards exist, but they are rarely followed to the letter.
I suspect that some of the software devs here, especially at small companies, may be insulated from the horror that is government and enterprise computer networks. If that stuff breaks, this will be an improvement for users as long as they can get internet.
I suspect I am looking at this through a mix of optimism and naivite. Or colored by my own experiences.
For sure.
Maybe, but as the article states, they already acknowledge the possibility and have a backup plan in place, and, frankly, someone needs to be first.
You could argue that this should not happen on the taxpayers' watch at this department. Yes, maybe some national or EU-level body should actually do the R&D to solve the structural issues around large scale Linux usage so that everyone can benefit. But for now this seems like a reasonable approach for a pretty small organization and a good learning step.
today: got a very long email, wanted to search for our department in it. Outlook: "Search is a deprecated feature".
Despite all the "but you can't extrapolate to a large org from personal experiences"-FUD around, I think for most orgs (especially governments which are generally far behind on processes) it would be easy to switch from a feature-perspective. The problem is the army of employees and contractors who are very happy to defend Microsoft for keeping their non-automated thiefdoms (such is non-cloud AD administration at most places I extrapolate ....). There is hardly anyone there to implement the necessary processes and rather than to send out their underlings to FOSDEM, leadership is happy to get an invite by Microsoft (or a cloud-provider...) to an "innovation-summit" instead.
It's also file compatibility.
But yes, the big thing is AD. AD has been out since 2000 and was/is the standard. If you have/had AD and Group policy you move to AAD and Intune for cloud. There is no competitor to this. Zero.
People are just accustomed to pain of working with Word.
The change to LibreOffice is way smaller than MSs switch to Ribbon menus
Why are you stuck on azure AD?
What? This sounds like there is an observable way of telling that there's different levels of data mining going on in these two spaces, mind sharing the evidence?
> Google Workspace for Education Core Services (like Gmail, Google Calendar, Classroom, and more) have no ads, and student information in Core Services is never used to create profiles for ad targeting, or sold to third parties.[1]
1) https://edu.google.com/intl/ALL_us/our-values/privacy-securi...
Honestly just use Azure Virtual Desktops.
So when I see critiques of GIMP versus Photoshop, or Linux versus Windows, or LibreOffice versus Microsoft Office, saying "oh, it has fewer features and therefore nobody can take it seriously" it's just reductive, and provides zero useful insight. It's all about the particular needs of the person or organization and how those intersect with the features of the product they're thinking of adopting.
Anyway, if the government is generating files that require MS office to open, they are essentially creating an undocumented tax, to be paid to a foreign company. This seems… legally questionable (depending on your local laws of course), and wildly stupid.
I'm not to worried about the LibreOffice part.
Also, replacing Windows by Linux and MS Office by LibreOffice is only the surface of the problem. What about replacing Entra (identity and access management), Intune (endpoint management), file sharing (OneDrive), email and calendar (Exchange Online)?
Russia, China, and India have invested a lot in developing their equivalent of 365 and Google Workspace (mainly via Yandex, Alibaba, and Zoho). Europe needs to accelerate on this.
Edit: There is some progress on LibreOffice real-time collaboration:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/13/libreoffice_wasm_zeta...
There are tools like Collabora (built on LibreOffice) that work very similar to what you would get from MS. Collabora, for example, can also be integraded with Nextcloud and Owncloud.
Surely, the Danish government can figure out how to support real-time collaboration in LibreOffice.
Simple, switch when they find something that fits their need. They don't have to switch everything at the same time. And it's not just about switching technologies, it's probably also about fighting against pushbacks ("lobbying", etc), dealing with training, and other unforseen (at least to the layman) things that happens when a huge entity starts pulling away from microsoft. I don't think there are degooglify/demicrosoftify-yourself manuals at the state level.
This is a great trend. I wonder how long until Microsoft's Ballmer-type people fly into Munich again to commit corruption / lobbying.
Some things take a lot of work, but many changes that would be useful are pretty easy to make. Crash and bug and (some) performance fixes, time-saving automations and integrations with rough and / or minimal user interfaces and so on.
Aarhus and Copenhagen municipalities are planning to do the same, and have around 80000 employees, that's a much bigger deal in my opinion.
It seems like you could throw a fraction of that money at open source software, actually make it good and then not be beholden to corporations like Microsoft or Google. Combine this sort push between multiple governments and the world gets good (at least relatively) software for all of the major office and design concerns.
CAD software is the same. I tried freecad recently after a long hiatus and came back to immediately crashing after trying to make a cube from a sketch and also finding out that there's no midpoint constraint (wtf) if I remember correctly.
As much as I love OSS I don't think throwing money at it is what's going to make it rival large closed-source software projects. You need clear direction and goals which won't happen when building by committee.
The first acknowledgement is that ui and design is just as important as technical functionality because a good idea that no one can use is a bad idea.
If we can have a technical team collaborate to design oss code, why can't we have a design team as well that's focused purely on themes, UX, and design philosophy?
Of course this is all prefaced on the idea that the money is there to support such a team. I suspect good designers are less likely to be on the "working for free" bandwagon.
Financial support can bring in better talent, then the oss teams need to structure them selves properly so intransigence doesn't set in.
Everything is alright until the country with the highest obesity rate in the world chooses not to honor your patent for ozempic for example and makes it for a lot cheaper back home, then you escalate, then they escalate, something something your software stops getting updates or gets locked down.
I obviously don't think this is a likely scenario to happen, but so is getting nuked, yet every government has some sort of bunker command center, but everyone just seems ok with trusting those US companies with everything.
And today you don't even have to recreate the wheel, there are some open source alternatives for almost everything, and as a government if you put in the money you could improve on those, other governments can get inspired and improve on them as well, etc.
So it's on the escalation ladder for sure.
I said it on the prior thread, and I think it's worth reiterating: 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.
It is 2025, couldn’t we get away with using cheaper/even free(and or open source) online versions of office software?
I don’t even have MS Office installed on my personal computer. When I need to deal with .docs or .xlsx files, I either use Google docs or Libre Office if it is too complicated for Google Docs.
I like libre in general but one too many times it just didn't play ball with some random docx documents.
Moreover it is a rebranding of Russian P7 Office. The company didn't cut ties with Russia and they still sell to the military. The owner created multiple shell companies in Latvia and Singapore to obscure this. I don't think this is something that EU governments trust, unless a deep inspection of the entire source is done and the repo is forked under an EU entity.
https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/serious-claims-made-agai...
My colleagues have more problems than me anyway with reading those csv files in excel in a locale that uses "," for decimals. A side effect of avoiding excel is that it is much easier to read csv files for me.
I understand others may make heavier use of more word-excel specific stuff and have more issues, but I never had actual issues with avoiding to install ms office at work, even though everybody here uses it all the time and I have to work together on documents with them.
Online?! There should be no usage of anything online to store or work with government data.
which I am personally looking forward to, not because I think MS is so much worse than Linux, Mac etc. (although haven't really used for some years so I may be wrong) I personally think of OS's as being commodified, and I do like the ability that MS gives you to do globaly hotkeys and hotstrings that you really can't replicate easily, if at all, in other OS's (which security wise is probably a plus, if you can catch keystrokes easily enough you can make keyloggers), nope I have a personal beef here.
Some years ago I was working for the Danish Governmental department of IT and Telephony, later changed to Digitization Department (a department or "styrelse" being a big government agency subsidiary to a ministry) running a project to provide overarching data standardization for the government - mainly providing and hosting XML schemas for data interchange, providing some services etc.
The data interchange repository we were on was provided by Microsoft, which was built on top of some MS product the name of which I can't recall that they were thinking was good for this kind of thing, a glorified file server with some lousy search etc. It was extremely sub-par, so we had a meeting with some MS guys, Jean Paoli etc. where basically they got mad at us for their sub par product and said they couldn't be associated with it, this came about a month after Bill Gates had a meeting the prime minister and talked shit about how Denmark needed MS but MS didn't need Denmark.
So anyway, personally, my spiteful little heart will sing when Denmark no longer "needs" MS.
There might be some iffy issues. For example, if a state backs certain open source software too hard, then I'm afraid you get "state backed vaporware" in some cases. I can definitely see where it'll be like "Denmark has start open source initiative xyz" but because it's so externally pushed, from a motivation standpoint, it becomes half baked.
So I'm more advocating for a gentle monetary nudge.
As someone who's never used Word: what do you use Word for that it's hard to find a replacement?
(For me, the "light" things I want to note down and version, I use one of the lightweight markup languages. The "heavy" things, I either use TeX or something to convert my lightweight markup into a pdf or whatever people want. What am I missing?)
Opening files created by other organizations and expecting them to load correctly and accurately, and then editing them and expecting them to load correctly and accurately when I send them back.
Otherwise, I haven't had major issues. Sometime it doesn't work well with complex excel sheets, or complex word docs; create doc in X, edit in Y, view in X is likely to be disappointing if formatting is critical, but I've seen people use a publish to PDF, edit by change requests flow for that instead.
Other than multiplayer support, it's still much nicer than Google Docs, which can look better but likes to get into weird partially loaded states or runs simple spreadsheet tasks very slowly due to mandatory interaction with a server.
Most people only use a small percentage of functionality in any app.
Every large European company and all of the governments are now considering how to move away from US services. They may not be able to do it quickly but it is a part of the conversation. Customers specifically request that new systems should be independent from US service providers.
In my view the damage has been done and will not go away even after Trump. The Europeans have realized that their only true allies, that they can trust in terms of critical infrastructure, are other European nations. It used to include America, it no longer does.
[1] https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/04/30/europea...
[2] https://nltimes.nl/2025/05/20/microsofts-icc-email-block-tri...
Although abandoning commercial American software wholesale would likely degrade their own security and GDPs even further than it already is.
All hosted and maintained at German universities, with federation between them, with support for guest users and whatnot.
Quite nice and back when it started, it was very important for us because it enabled us to get a huge chunk of sensitive data back from Dropbox, Google Drive and the other cloud providers.
There's not too much English documentation around but https://wwuit-sys.zivgitlabpages.uni-muenster.de/sciebo/docs... is good.
Some from the top of my head: randomly forcing me to put the window I am moving to the numbered sections of 1-2-3 without the chance of cancel, forcing me to size and position choices mandated; 'update and shut down' actually works as 'update and restart' finding my computer on in the middle of night or in the morning; hibernating while update is available turns on the computer during the night; renaming of OneDrive files clears the name sometimes typing; switching wifi (between previously used ones) on its own, while being in a perfectly working remote desktop connection, breaking it randonly; taskbar buttons loose icons after resuming from hibernation; yes/no message box is transparent through remote desktop; ... some from the past few (less than 4) days.
Other German countries were long advised to stop using illegal propriety cloud providers, such as Microsoft, also, but continue with it. Despite the privacy violations, risk and cost.
You can only do that if you are able to commit to a plan for more than one legislation.
I hope they will address and fix or have work arounds for all of them.
I feel sorry for the people who work there havin to nmove to LibreOffice. IT is free, and it works, but if you have spent 20 years or more using Microsoft Office, it will feel quite foreign and it is missing a large set of features.
The ministry will slow down considerably for some time while the employees learn how to use LibreOffice in all the ways they are used to.
My experience from a few large companies and government institutions is that a lot of employees do not want to change, or learn a whole different system. Forcing this change upon all is guarateed to create friction.
Much more important than that the change
I am using MS Office for 30 years, and the current MS Office products feel offensively alien. Slown down in workflow.
Meanwhile, in the past 20 years or so, I was affiliated with organizations (plural) having mixed composition of Win/Mac/Linux support throughout.
There would need to be conferences every 6 or 12 months. There would also need to be lots of documentation, training, videos, podcasts, etc.
It would be a huge effort but possibly also extremely rewarding.
There probably isn’t any huge or complex infrastructure to replace.
My concern is mostly about the government depending on open source software without contributing in some way. I really hope they fund and/or contribute to both projects.
Another interesting question to consider is whether the likelihood of attacks on these projects will increase. Knowing that government(s) use LibreOffice makes it a much more valuable target for attackers willing to pull of something like xz-utils. Likewise, increasing adoption of Linux for desktop usage could result in more vulnerabilities being discovered and more malware targeting Linux desktops.
I think there's a lot to see in the near future...
If you would ask if LibreOffice is ready, I would say: yes and no. The UX of LO is worse than MS Office. LO is more feature rich in certain areas but it lacks the UX if you want to get a well-looking document with a minimum amount of work. Case in point: lack of acceptable Impress templates (they look from the year 1994), lack of document themes in Writer, lack of quick table style in Calc.
The UX/UI is in dire need for attention.
I definitely agree LO and particularly its terribly dated UI is a greater barrier to desktop Linux adoption than the desktop environment itself.
But also, office suites are becoming anachronistic very quickly. Every time you use one nowadays, it's a symptom of some organization failure. (Ok, there are a few reasonable use cases for spreadsheets.) So the entire question is kinda of moot.
There is no reasonable substitute or replacement for Excel.
There should be, but there isn’t.
But what has really happened in the last 2-4 years to make it miles ahead of Windows?
Wayland is also in quite a good place compared to just a few years ago. Stuff like HDR, VRR, High-Refresh Rates, DisplayPort 2.1 and so on just works.
Flatpak is also great and works really well with many apps when they support XDG Portals properly.
The problem with Linux is the software ecosystem around it, esp security software, office suits, and tons of various specialised software that often target only windows, or at best also macos. But there has been a lot of improvement to that direction last years. I really hope linux takes over work desktop environments, the degree of slop that MS puts into windows is getting more and more over the years. In linux it is infinitely easier to get a machine do what you want once you get to understand some basics wrt how to configure stuff (and now with llms is much less steep curve to get relevant info). In windows you have to constantly dance around whatever horrible UX each version brings upon you.
We’re also at the cusp of AI getting added throughout MS Office and Windows which will be the next driver of productivity and collaboration, and it’ll be at least a decade before Libreoffice catches up.
Saying this as a believer in open source and with no great love for M$. It’s just not 1997 any more.
