Denmark Is Dumping Microsoft Office and Windows For LibreOffice and Linux (zdnet.com) 259
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Denmark's Minister of Digitalization, Caroline Stage, has announced that the Danish government will start moving away from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. Why? It's not because open-source is better, although I would argue that it is, but because Denmark wants to claim "digital sovereignty." In the States, you probably haven't heard that phrase, but in the European Union, digital sovereignty is a big deal and getting bigger.
A combination of security, economic, political, and societal imperatives is driving the EU's digital sovereignty moves. EU leaders are seeking to reduce Europe's dependence on foreign technology providers, primarily those from the United States, and to assert greater control over its digital infrastructure, data, and technological future. Why? Because they're concerned about who controls European data, who sets the rules, and who can potentially cut off access to essential services in times of geopolitical tension. "Money issues have also played a decisive role," writes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols. "Copenhagen's Microsoft software bill has soared from 313 million kroner in 2018 to 538 million kroner -- about $53 million in 2023, a 72% increase in just five years.
David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), a Dane, inventor of Ruby on Rails, and co-owner of the software developer company 37Signals, has said: "Denmark is one of the most highly digitalized countries in the world. It's also one of the most Microsoft-dependent. In fact, Microsoft is by far and away the single biggest dependency, so it makes perfect sense to start the quest for digital sovereignty there."
A combination of security, economic, political, and societal imperatives is driving the EU's digital sovereignty moves. EU leaders are seeking to reduce Europe's dependence on foreign technology providers, primarily those from the United States, and to assert greater control over its digital infrastructure, data, and technological future. Why? Because they're concerned about who controls European data, who sets the rules, and who can potentially cut off access to essential services in times of geopolitical tension. "Money issues have also played a decisive role," writes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols. "Copenhagen's Microsoft software bill has soared from 313 million kroner in 2018 to 538 million kroner -- about $53 million in 2023, a 72% increase in just five years.
David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), a Dane, inventor of Ruby on Rails, and co-owner of the software developer company 37Signals, has said: "Denmark is one of the most highly digitalized countries in the world. It's also one of the most Microsoft-dependent. In fact, Microsoft is by far and away the single biggest dependency, so it makes perfect sense to start the quest for digital sovereignty there."
Despite (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, some in here will say how they have a use case that requires that they only use Office 365. My sympathies.
Re:Despite (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been using it pretty much full-time for the last couple of years, and while there's some compatibility oddities, all in all it works and works pretty well, to the point that I find manipulating styles far more coherent than in Word. It's actually opened some docx files that were just outright screwy when I opened them in Word, so I'm baffled at times how such documents get produced.
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One doesn't have to use OpenOffice much to find incompatibilities: I wouldn't say 'power user', just a different UI that makes some steps more difficult.
I prefer the competing products (IE. MS Office clones) that are much more compatible. Doubly so, now that Microsoft Office uses HTML or JPEG, not text or RTF: MS Office has become the enemy, since once-simple editing can no longer be pe
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For me, Outlook was the first to go: It was slow and unstable, with a rigid UI. I'm surprised it's still popular.
They force you onto Outlook - it isn't true popularity. I was forced onto Outlook, and what a mess. I ended up redirecting everything to another address, and only go to Outlook when I'm told my mailbox is getting full.
Re: Despite (Score:5, Informative)
Spot on, IT decides how you can access your mail. Not because they are jerks; it's because of security. M365 is the only viable path for a startup. $20 a month per employee for full office suite with desktop apps, web access, and mobile apps too. No infrastructure needed. Imagine 5 employees in a small company: $150 (fees + ?) and you have a full suite minus a public facing website. There's no other offering close enough to compete.
Hah! I have several different Mail addresses to several different mail systems. Outlook has nothing on them in manner of security, but You need to believe what you need to believe. And oddly enough, the People I've set up on OO variants haven't had any issues yet.
Re:Despite (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been using it pretty much full-time for the last couple of years, and while there's some compatibility oddities, all in all it works and works pretty well, to the point that I find manipulating styles far more coherent than in Word. It's actually opened some docx files that were just outright screwy when I opened them in Word, so I'm baffled at times how such documents get produced.
Yep, biggest issue is learning a new interface. I've already switched to it at home. All the formatting oddities that used to pop up on documents have been sorted, at least on all of my documents.
BTW, I've been using Open and Libre office to fix dodgy MS Office docs for the better part of 20 years. Great when someone hands you their "all important" excel file that they have no backups of and they spent "all week" working on but all of a sudden doesn't work. Usually because of a dodgy macro or formula somewhere, OO/LO usually strips that right out.
Re:Despite (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been using it pretty much full-time for the last couple of years, and while there's some compatibility oddities, all in all it works and works pretty well, to the point that I find manipulating styles far more coherent than in Word. It's actually opened some docx files that were just outright screwy when I opened them in Word, so I'm baffled at times how such documents get produced.
It has been a while since I've used Word, but I remember it was really good at propagating tiny changes through a document that made it important that you keep an extra copy around because some seemed to have no easy way back to what you wanted.
And it was always an adventure opening up a powerpoint on a Mac that was originally done on Windows.
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It has been a while since I've used Word, but I remember it was really good at propagating tiny changes through a document that made it important that you keep an extra copy around because some seemed to have no easy way back to what you wanted.
This "feature" actually saved me quite a bit of work at a job I had a few years back. The documentation people were so afraid that anyone who was not a full-time Word expert would irrecoverably screw up the corporate branding (IOW, formatting) of their docs, they didn't want developers to directly edit them. So I was often able to get away with emailing a quick text summary to them, and they had to do all the fidgety proof reading, formatting, etc.
I don't know how they managed to get their jobs done, given
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And that underlies the reality of WYSIWYG, that there are limits to what any word processor can actually do to guarantee formatting and fixed placement. It's why Tex/LaTeX and PDF were invented to begin with, and why there's really a point at which trying to force any WYSIWYG word processor to behave that way is going to lead to fragile misbehaving documents that fall apart. As a very good example, the use of tables and frames in documents (both docx and odt) to guarantee the positioning of various elements
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The documentation people were so afraid that anyone who was not a full-time Word expert would irrecoverably screw up the corporate branding (IOW, formatting) of their docs, they didn't want developers to directly edit them. So I was often able to get away with emailing a quick text summary to them, and they had to do all the fidgety proof reading, formatting, etc.
Perhaps they should have been using something like Framemaker for stuff like that. Admittedly, I only used it *way* back, before it was bought by Adobe.
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Same. There are edge cases where "power users" of Excel/Word can find short-comings, but for everyday folks there's really no difference. Powerpoint functionality is another story, but it has gotten better.
The only really sticky app left in MSFT's office suite is Outlook and that's mostly because people just don't want to deal with learning a new UI. Perhaps MSFT's latest tweaking of the UI to browbeat people into consuming copilot will get people over that hump.
Best,
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The only really sticky app left in MSFT's office suite is Outlook and that's mostly because ...
IMNSHO, Outlook is barely usable. It's email, FFS, so there's decades of high quality alternatives. People are stuck on it because we stuck them on it. Companies will require its use just to check email, though any IMAP client would work if the Exchange admin allowed it.
FYI, with XOAUTH2 enforced for IMAP authentication, the email program itself has a certificate and the server must allow or deny that client. Exchange can allow any client, or a specific list, and it defaults to allowing only Outlook variant
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> Companies will require its use just to check email, though any IMAP client would work if the Exchange admin allowed it.
Exchange admins are a dying breed because on-prem Exchange is vanishing in favor of M365. Microsoft is slowly making IMAP and POP3 less viable, removing basic authentication a couple of years ago. If your client can't do OAuth 2.0, it can't access M365 over IMAP. It will not be surprising at all to see IMAP and POP3 deprecated entirely in the next few years, requiring all connections t
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Exchange admins are a dying breed because on-prem Exchange is vanishing in favor of M365. Microsoft is slowly making IMAP and POP3 less viable, removing basic authentication a couple of years ago. If your client can't do OAuth 2.0, it can't access M365 over IMAP. It will not be surprising at all to see IMAP and POP3 deprecated entirely in the next few years, requiring all connections to go via API over HTTPS.
Removing basic auth didn't make IMAP and POP3 less viable. However, it does provide another point of access control.
My preferred email client is Alpine, which is a fork of UW's Pine: https://alpineapp.email/ [alpineapp.email]
FYI, it supports XOAUTH2 and can communicate securely with both Google and Microsoft cloud based email services, including Office 365 stuff as well as on prem Exchange... but an admin (either for the on prem exchange or an admin user for the cloud based service) must permit each client application. The s
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Do you really want copies of your emails on many devices?
What are you implying? I don't see the connection.
IMAP clients can (and often do) leave the mail on the server as-is. My client sure does (alpine).
Outlook, the app, will download copies of emails to a local cache. So using it *would* end up in the situation you are implying is a problem.
Re: Despite (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re: Despite (Score:2)
Re: Despite (Score:2)
Re: Despite (Score:3, Insightful)
I've caught and trained quite a few senior federal employees and I can see that many of them really, when you come down to it, only barely understand ANY general principles, and based their entire career on
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My ex GF did not know how to save a file.
She quits word/excel etc. to wait for the "do you want to safe" dialog.
Even telling her to use ctrl-s from time to time was beyond her grasp.
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Ctrl-s is hard, eh? I feel lucky all of a sudden with my big dummy cli
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I get the impression, however, that understanding a file system, as rudimentary as that may be, is something that isn't limited to seniors. We're just talking about plugging in a USB stick and then having to go into long detailed explanations of what a USB stick is, how files are organized into directories, etc... the difference between "move" and "copy". Really how did you get this far in life?
Fake it 'til yo
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Re:Despite (Score:4, Funny)
I found LibreOffice to be ugly, harder to use, and less capable than Office. Every minute I used it I was thinking about how I'd rather be working in Word or Excel. Ick.
You are showing what I called crybragging. But you can collect your check from Microsoft now.
Did you know some people even if they use Microsoft office, keep a copy of Libre or other OpenOffice, because your so called more capable office suite can't open a lot of files, so OO opens, saves it in your very limited file capabilities so you can pretend that Microsoft Office is the only possible Office suite to use.
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Funny. An entire page of "crybragging" Libre fanboys, and you act like I'm the bitch. I didn't like LibreOffice. It's ugly and didn't do what I needed it to do. In my direct personal experience, I found MS Office to be the superior product by far. Do with that what you will.
Triggered y didn't I? Yeah, you are the Microsoft bitch since you chose to use that term, and your crybragging is the proof.
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That's why MS has a subscription just for you. Just keep writing them a check and you can continue to work in Word or Excel.
I don't how people can like and use the ribbon interface in Office myself, but there you go. By the way you can switch LibreOffice from the conventional interface (you know the one that made Office 95 so usable) to a ribbon interface. View->User Interface and select "Tabbed."
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For all the crybragging of the faithful, the open Office suites work just fine.
I'm not faithful to any software, and I use LO for almost everything. But sometimes I try to load a big CSV into Calc for massaging and it crashes. Then I load the same file into Excel and it's fine, and not even slow. They clearly need to do fundamental work on Calc. Writer is already superior to Word in this regard, so this is not a blanket complaint about LO.
Re: Despite (Score:2)
On many occasions I have had to load csv files in Calc with tens of thousands of rows and dozens of columns. Usually on macOS but when I work from home on Linux. I wonder if you are experiencing a Windows specific bug.
Or maybe the new mantra is Windows is not done until Libre will not run.
Re: Despite (Score:2)
I'm on Linux. So, nope.
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We already use Draw instead of $100 a year PDF editing suites like Nitro. Made post-training reference documentation in 1 day (in Libre Writer lol) and nobody has had a single problem with it.
Yup, I do all my work in LO, and even save it for others stuck on or believing that Microsoft's offerings are the only possible solution.
I do the same with spreadsheets, even those that have calculations in them.
I would caution people however, that the more complicated you make spreadsheets, the more likely you'll have issues.m In any Office suite. I've seen utter fails when the math didn't add up, but people were using the spreadsheet to make decisions for years. I triple check mine before release.
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No idea about Denmark, but the UK government are heavily in bed with Microsoft. Lots of sharepoint, MS SSO, MS 2FA, and of course, Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel etc.
Getting the UK off Word and Excel alone is actually a pretty big job - sharepoint suddenly takes on a whole different meaning when you can't open stuff in the browser any longer, and I'd imagine training the tens of thousands of people who use MS Office all the time to use Libreoffice would also take some time.
After all that... you've still got Ou
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It does not work "just fine".
It works and that's it. It is the same mess as office, just without ribbons.
Everything that was straight forward in a "advanced text editor", oh we call it "Word Processor" 30 years ago, is now a complete incomprehensible mess. It requires a training to be able to write document that goes beyond a letter. Ridiculous.
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The few orgs I've seen that have moved to LibreOffice or Google Docs have all still had a ton of business analyst using Office because of Excel.
Re: Despite (Score:2)
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The problem is third party integrations, where for instance an ERP system opens integrates into Word or Office365. All those systems have to reworked by the supplier or replaces. That will be expensive - also because a lot of our IT industry is so Microsoft leaning to begin with. All our engineers are basicly tought Microsoft technologies. So getting IT people knowing Libre Office and Linux to do the integrations will be hard. Even in our pendant to high schools, most use Office365 and integrate in math and science classes with WordMat.
I have a system I set up for a group that used Winbdows, Mac and Linux, they wanted a system that was identical across all of the platforms.
What is Microsoft's offering that provides that?
And despite the admonitions from many that Microsoft Office programs are the only possible thing that will ever work, they haven't looked back.
Anyhow, it's no flex that you are welded into Microsoft Office, and your whole ecosystem system falls apart if you aren't using it.
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Sorry, I gave up on Libre Office because it simply did not work just fine. Many many bugs, and many of those the developers refused to acknowledge.
You apparently forgot about the Office bugs. And Outlook - I deal in real time with emails - Outlook occasionally decides they are spam or malware providers, and hides them for a while before telling me about them. Or maybe that's a feature for me to have plausible deniability when the SHTF?
Hmm. and what about everything else ? (Score:3)
For example, after the EU-based International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallan, for war crimes, President Donald Trump issued ICC sanctions. This order allegedly prompted Microsoft to lock the ICC's Chief Prosecutor, Karim Khan, out of his email accounts, according to reports.
Switching to libre office wont prevent this ?
there a whole on of backend infrastructure here, not just which office suite Sue from accounts uses to open the latest figures for June.
And on the topic of email, Gmail and ms mail have email locked down so hard that it's difficult for any sane person to do email now. ms and google control email to a large extent.
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Please explain what you mean by this. Anyone can set up an email server - there's not much special that Google or MS bring to that - and email clients exist in spades.
Re: Hmm. and what about everything else ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Your private server can receive email, but your replies are blocked. This requires your sendmail to be relayed thru a send server with a "good" reputation. And the fun begins.
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You do know the Danish government actually has enough money to afford to self host its own email server - that is, obtain a /24, have it routed to them, and host the server on that, right? You know, like 99% of businesses that have more than ten employees did until Office 365?
Digital Ocean? Why the hell would the Danish government need a fucking VPS?
(Incidentally I run mine behind two cheap VPSes and have had no problems with either incoming or outgoing email, so not even your complaint would be right, even
Re:Hmm. and what about everything else ? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have been self-hosting my email since 2000. No deliverability issues.
Sure, you have to abide by best practices such as setting up SPF, DKIM and DMARC, but that's generally a set-up-once-and-forget thing. I also enabled DNSSEC for good measure.
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I host a small mail server, just for me.
However, for 19 years, I ran an email security service. We hosted about 100K mailboxes including outbound mail for about 10K of those. Our largest client probably hosted a million or more mailboxes (on its own hardware) and I don't recall them having deliverability problems.
I suspect small mail servers and huge mail servers will have fewer deliverability problems than medium-sized ones. Small ones because you fly under the radar and generally don't have abusive
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Scale isn't the main problem, interoperability is. If you've solved interoperability (i.e. you've got SPF, DKIM, etc working so gmail.com and outlook.com will receive emails sent from your system) then you're in good shape.
Not that running large systems is necessarily easy, but it doesn't have enemies the way interoperability has enemies. Scale is a merely conventional problem that Google and Microsoft aren't making worse for Linux users. Nobody's pushing back, trying to make you fail; your only foe is sava
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Every company I've worked at including my current one run their own smtp servers. Never any delivery issues. I run my own personal email server with no issues.
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Try it and let me know how many people receive your emails.
I have been running my own email servers (both personal and for my micro-company) for 19 years. The biggest problem I've had was figuring out how to configure SPF so Google (and probably others) wouldn't reject my emails. Once I got SPF configured properly, all my outgoing mail flowed freely.
Allstate is the only clusterfuck I've encountered. They can receive all my email, but I get frequent letters via snail mail saying they can't send me email -- even though I get monthly billing emails and other emails fr
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Providing you have control of your DNS, it means using DKIM , SPF or similar measures. I've been self-hosting email for three decades, and it ain't complicated.
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I self host my own email. Have *you* ever tried it?
I'm not saying the situation is great, but even before I set up SPF and DKIM this year (this year!) my emails were going through to everyone I wanted to communicate with.
And organizations like governments tend to have a few people on their staff capable of standing up an email server and keeping it maintained. You do know that until Office 365, virtually every business in the world had an email server, right?
I know I shouldn't expect much from the "I can't
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> Switching to libre office wont prevent this ?
I suspect the thinking is one or both of the following:
1. Switching to LibreOffice and GNU/Linux is part of a general switch away from Microsoft technologies, preventing Microsoft from abusing their power in future. And while neither may be email clients or servers, any move to them is going to imply a move to technologies that work under GNU/Linux - Microsoft Office, including Outlook, only "runs" as a set of web apps. In practice, it implies a switch to ne
Whole EU should do it (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now.
Why paying MS for Windows and M365, and deal with their spying - pardon me - telemetry?
Re: Whole EU should do it (Score:3)
Yes! Yes! Sad stupid governments, grab the steering wheel !
Re: Whole EU should do it (Score:3)
Appeal to popularity is a logical fallacy
Will they contribute back? (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'm sure there would be pain moving to open source, learning new technology, training your folks, etc., but I ca
Ob. Could this be the year... (Score:5, Funny)
seen this movie before (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: seen this movie before (Score:2)
Pretty much what I was going to say
Re:seen this movie before (Score:5, Insightful)
The geopolitical situation is different this time around. Countries rightly see reliance on US-based services and US-based closed-source software as a national security risk. So the amount of inconvenience they're willing to tolerate will likely be much higher than before.
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The geopolitical situation is different this time around. Countries rightly see reliance on US-based services and US-based closed-source software as a national security risk.
You must be new to this. This kind of sentiment has existed since computers have become prominent around the globe.
Re:seen this movie before (Score:4, Insightful)
How is chosing not to be beholden to foreign interests a political statement? We (the US) have made it clear the rules are wildly variable and you can't trust that what we tell you today we will do tomorrow. It would be foolish to depend on us to provide software your government runs on (or cloud etc). This the sovereign movement.
Big providers see this which is why AWS and even MS have sovereign clouds in the EU ran only by citiens of EU nations and seperate from their US counterparts.
Countries shouldn't see using US-based software and services as a national security risk, they should KNOW it is a national security risk. Hell isn't that the point of removing our reliance on other countries in our manufacturing?
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Selecting software that is controlled by a potentially-hostile nation-state is simply poor security practice.
And since January 6, 2025, many US allies have come to see the US as a potentially-hostile nation-state.
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What Europeans and others need to do is seriously consider any alternatives to US software providers. Businesses fully depend on their IT systems nowadays, and operations will grind to a halt due to a technology hiccup. Can you afford to use software (or cloud services or whatever) from the US, when those companies are bending the knee
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Selecting office software so that you aren't held digitally hostage to a government that is, say, threatening to annex a significant proportion of your territory, is both eminently defensible for operational, security AND political reasons.
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That's right, it's not a statement. It's just a position. You either hold the position that it's ok to be dependent on a third party and it's ok to fail if that third party turns against you, or you hold the position that it's not ok and you would prefer to stay up no matter what adversaries want.
It only becomes a statement once you tell someone that security and reliability are among your values. ;-)
Re: seen this movie before (Score:2)
Almost everything has political ramifications.
Choosing to underpin your entire computing infrastructure with systems made by an untrustworthy foreign nation which are well known to be spyware, especially so.
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Staying on Microsoft causes the same problem, though. For the last three years I have worked at a large organization which uses Outlook, and here is what I found out, and had absolutely no clue about prior to taking this job in 2022: THERE ARE AT LEAST THREE OUTLOOKS, with three completely different UIs.
I've seen written-up directions where IT begs people to report phishing attempts, and here's how to report that in Outlook, and the directions are wrong because it's for one of those Outlook UIs instead of f
About (Score:2)
The amount of taxpayer money ... (Score:2)
... my government has spent on shitty proprietary software is patently absurd. This being Germany were people should know better but deciders and their digital culture are still stuck in the steam age. Maddening. Germany and Europe as a whole is way to slow in appointing FOSS as it's primary source of software.
Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Teams (Score:2)
My experience is the first three can easily be replaced by something like Librefoffice, Teams is a different story but although the company I work with uses it extensively I would not miss it.
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Teams is nothing special, you have slack (which is better but still controlled by a foreign corporation) as well as several self hostable options like rocketchat and mattermost.
The only reason people use teams is because it got bundled with other MS services they were already paying for. As an actual product it's not very good.
Early in the process (Score:5, Insightful)
Many people are simply convinced that this shift can't be done, and that it's impossible to do professional work outside the "Office 365 universe" (yes, I've had people tell me this with a straight face). We can hope for the best, but don't expect any revolutions from Denmark.
Re: Early in the process (Score:2)
Maybe not impossible, but there is a learning curve that does make switching office suites (of any type) impractical for most considerations.
Internally, switching probably will not cause any major concerns - but it is the edge cases of dealing with outside entities that carries the most risk. Having to pay 4 people a few days work to figure out why a spreadsheet from a consulting company will not open properly is not a desirable outcome for most.
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Internally, switching probably will not cause any major concerns - but it is the edge cases of dealing with outside entities that carries the most risk. Having to pay 4 people a few days work to figure out why a spreadsheet from a consulting company will not open properly is not a desirable outcome for most.
I'm not sure this will to be the major stumbling block. This is the "Ministry for Digital Government" after all, and some of the interoperability issue can be "dictated away". I'm more concerned by the sheer lack of IT-professionals with relevant experience with open source, so that they simply won't know what to do and how.
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Plus, we've read this story on Slashdot many times before. It usually ends with Microsoft "Generously" offering discounted or free Office licenses to the next IT executive in order to bring them back into the fold.
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It usually ends with Microsoft "Generously" offering discounted or free Office licenses to the next IT executive in order to bring them back into the fold.
True. That is certainly a pattern we've seen a lot. A reason why this may be a bit different (may be. I'm not at all sure how it will pan out), is that this is a very visible organization in the public sector and that we (in Denmark) are in a bit of a squeeze regarding our relationship to the US. Besides the general cost and vendor lock-in considerations, we now have to consider if the US is an adversary, and the dependency on Microsoft as a US company is becoming a national security threat.
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I work for a government agency in Belgium.
If Donald Trump signs a paper that Microsoft and its subsiduaries cannot provide services to us because of sanctions, my agency will not recover. Complete shutdown and rebuild from scratch as if we never existed.
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I'd assume the decision was made after some sort of study. I had a look at https://www.english.digmin.dk/ [digmin.dk] but couldn't find anything relevant. If you happen to come across something I'd grateful for a link (danish is fine).
I guess that the grammar/spell-check in office 365 is better than libreoffice and that this is cause for concern but I'm very happy to be wrong about that.
Why open source is better (Score:2)
The fact of the matter is, open source IS better because it written by people who are doing it for love or reputation, and are motivated to make it as good they possibly can. Commercial software, on the other hand, is driven by the need for profit and so is made as cheaply as possible; they do the least they can that the consumer will tolerate.
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> The fact of the matter is, open source IS better because it written by people who are doing it for love or reputation, and are motivated to make it as good they possibly can.
Maybe it was that way one time, but most of the major projects that we rely on are written more by professional developers with decent to large paychecks that depend on them writing good software. LibreOffice is not immune from this, with Collabora providing a lot of the development output because their business depends on moving L
How about a new phone too (Score:3)
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It's not the first time we've seen this idea. The others all failed for a simple reason: no compatibility with the Google or Apple app stores. Without that, it just won't catch on.
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Theyâ(TM)ll eventually switch back (Score:2)
Countries do this every few years (Score:2)
That said there's a lot of tension between America and the rest of the world right now so who knows maybe it'll stick this time but I'll believe it when I see it. Wake me up they are still using Libre office in a year or two
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The problem is always the training costs because people can't adapt to new software.
Then replace them with AI.
But seriously, I kind of hate this kind of argument. People can learn new things and be trained to use different tools. They either aren't offered the opportunity to learn, through their employer or school. Or choose not to learn. It has nothing to do with "can't"
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The problem is always the training costs because people can't adapt to new software.
Then replace them with AI. But seriously, I kind of hate this kind of argument. People can learn new things and be trained to use different tools. They either aren't offered the opportunity to learn, through their employer or school. Or choose not to learn. It has nothing to do with "can't"
I don't think anyone's arguing that you cannot train people on new software in the sense that it's literally impossible, but that it's time consuming and therefore potentially very expensive to do at scale. More expensive than Microsoft's license fees? I suppose that's the big question.
Re: (Score:2)
The "training costs" are usually an excuse. Shifting between different versions of the same software also incurs significant changes, and yet training is very rarely provided for this - users are expected to just suck it up.
You'll get a few delays, complaints and additional support calls at first as people get used to the new version. Eventually people adapt, and discover workarounds for the inevitable new set of bugs.
Digital Freedom (Score:2)
Look at Windows 11, how many times has Microsoft handicapped that OS? From locking out local accounts on set up, through to enabling bad encryption, forcing TPM, Secure Boot, Recall, Edge restrictions, you name it, it's abus
I wish (Score:2)
I wish my company would do this.
Yes, I realize there are some tiny niche-functions that the open source products don't serve but 99.9% of people probably don't need them anyway and my god I'm sick of MS's constant tweaking of things and now shoveling AI shit at me.
Impress does not compare to PowerPoint (Score:2)
I hate to say it. I have used Linux as my primary desktop for 20+ years. I am using Linux now.
Most of LibreOffice is more than adequate for what I do, but Impress leaves a lot to be desired.
Excel is way better...but it doesn't matter (Score:2)
I used Excel heavily, with longish macros, do be able to program at all (in Engineering, not IT, not allowed any development tools), and was able to write a lot of what (were not then called) "apps" - specialty programs that did one thing. Custom reports and updates, mostly; A button would refresh a pivot table directly from Oracle database; another would put changes back in to Oracle, after data filtration.
Calc is pretty lame at many things that Excel really had nailed down well, 20 years back. Casually
One weird issue with LibreOffice (Score:2)
If I paste an image into Writer, the right and bottom sides of the image have thin gray lines, but not left and top. Can't get rid of them, either.
This does not happen if I paste the same image into Word so it's obviously related to Writer.
The type of image doesn't matter (jpg, png, etc). It happens to all of them.
Even Libre is often overkill (Score:4, Insightful)
For most of what the average person does, even Libre is bringing a nuke to a knife fight. This is especially true for the "word processing" part, to use an old term. I have yet to see anything a coworker has written in Word in the last two decades that, say, Google Docs couldn't have handled just fine. Most people aren't writing documents with indexes or bibliographies, or using things like mail merge.
And really, the blurring of the line between word processing and desktop publishing just encourages people to waste time fiddling with the formatting rather than the actual content. I know that's a "get off my lawn" sort of view, but how often does a document need to have anything fancier than text paragraphs with the occasional bullet list or table?
Nextcloud (Score:4, Interesting)
No regrets. Bye Bye MS (Score:2)
Excellent move by Denmark. They will never regret , no more than i did , to ditch Windows and Office , and get on Linux and Libre Office. Windows free for 22 years now and never regretted it.
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