Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice
212 comments
·June 12, 2025mrweasel
skinkestek
I'm currently working at a large public institution in Norway.
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.
thyristan
That is probably just a setting missing from your Firefox profile that allows your company Kerberos realm/domain. If your institution hasn't locked down your Firefox config, you can fix this yourself: https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...
maxdamantus
I suspect nowadays it's more likely a matter of integrating with Microsoft's "identity broker", part of Intune, aka "Company Portal".
You use Intune to log in and register your device against your Microsoft account, and microsoft-identity-broker is a DBus service that hands out tokens that can be passed to login.microsoft.com (either as a cookie or a special header) which identifies you (skipping the username/password login) and allows you to pass the company device test.
I was able to put together a working ad-hoc extension for Firefox to make the DBus call and pass the header, though I've since come across this extension (haven't tried it myself) which looks like it achieves the same thing (with a lot more features, based on the code size?):
https://github.com/siemens/linux-entra-sso
Edge on Linux seems to have this built in, so if you open any page on login.microsoft.com, you'll see it passing some "x-something" header with a token that it receieved from the identity broker (generated on each page load).
rcarmo
It’s really not. Edge bundles a number of authentication libraries with the Linux version that enable things like remote passkey support.
AdamN
I feel reasonably confident that if the focus is on open tooling and sovereignty and not saving money then a shift to Linux can 100% work even at large and complex organizations.
null
mrweasel
> using Edge for SSO
May I ask what that SSO solution is? Because it sounds like it might be a Microsoft product.
pelagicAustral
Yeah, probably is. I see the same HTTP Auth login when accessing my employers intranet (Sharepoint) from Firefox.
skinkestek
Honestly, I’m not entirely sure.
I’ve seen the name Forgerock pop up occasionally, but I don’t know if that’s just tied to the login component on the web pages. Also, they recommend Mac users stick with Safari, which is puzzling. I mean: if it was a Microsoft product, you’d think they’d lock it down to Edge on Mac too—so that makes me wonder.
Just my thoughts—could be totally off base.
eu_os
This sounds really interesting. Are you able to share more about this (even in private) for inclusion in https://eu-os.eu/use-cases ?
dusted
kerberos is sort of magic when/if you finally get it working
heraldgeezer
>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.)
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.
luuio
Windows licensing cost. They are a pretty penny at large scale.
decide1000
I hope all employees will use their experience to make a success of this project. Switching to Linux and ditching Micro$oft should be priority of each European country.
mrweasel
I hope so too, but I fear that the implementation is rushed and won't yield the positive results it could have.
eu_os
That's what the EU OS project is also about! https://eu-os.eu
freeone3000
Entra (prev AAD) can be replaced by literally any other OAuth provider for SSO - shibboleth is an on-prem option.
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.
cmilton
I have a related experience. Our project was moving from Office 365 to Google Workspace. Lot's of Windows PCs replaced with Chromebooks.
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.
nradov
If those users have to work with large spreadsheets then Google Workspace is simply nonfunctional. I've tried to use Google Sheets but it hangs and never finishes recalculations that Excel completes in seconds.
cmilton
Absolutely have run into that. In those instances they keep excel, or we move that data to a different platform for consumption.
jve
> Are these Linux machines going to authenticate against the Azure Active Directory... Are they using Intune, if so what's the replacement strategy where?
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.
Propelloni
That's depends what you want to do. If you want an all-in-one solution you'd go with the solution of your distribution vendor, e.g. Red Hat IPA/Satellite, SUSE Manager, or Ubuntu Landscape. Linux just plays nicer with ADS than MS Windows with any Linux solution, so most fall back to ADS in mixed environments.
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.
sirjaz
Funny thing is that Ubuntu, Suse, and RedHat support gpos now: https://ubuntu.com/blog/new-active-directory-integration-fea...
bigfatkitten
I’ve done it with Puppet, mostly dropping config files around the place.
Everything was more work than it would’ve been under Windows, from endpoint configuration enforcement through to things like authentication and PKI.
fock
and then most of the places I know happily allow employees admin access for "just that piece of software they need" and simultaneously push for "zero-trust". There's no point in it at all and you can just as well use saltstack to rollout apparmor-policies on your locked-down linux (and suddenly the same people wanting GPOs tell you that linux is untenable because of usage restrictions)
ChocolateGod
> - 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?
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.
trelane
If it exists, I expect it would be in Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Ubuntu. Most of us don't use those, though, so I don't expect the knowledge is common.
preisschild
> 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
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.
powgpu
well for server is nix, but not sure about desktop.
ChocolateGod
I'd say using Nix is bordering on using scripting. Someone still has to write the method that extracts your Nix configuration into a file.
o_m
I see this as a win. It will hopefully prune the incompetent managers/leaders and all the other incompetent tech workers that don't understand there is a world outside of the Microsoft/Google ecosystem.
freehorse
I want to believe that it is not actual incompetence (and nobody will get pruned) but rather laziness/habit/lack of motivation. I have been in a big org where any issues related to how non-windows systems were integrated were, frustratingly, ignored, even if those systems were supposed to be supported and offered as choices (and indeed chosen by many employees). The IT people working on the servers did not care because in windows everything was working fine, and other departments did not have the actual tools to solve anything. They were asking us if we had any spare computer around they could borrow to test things ffs. I hope such changes bring at least the necessary motivation to engage with such issues seriously.
the__alchemist
What required software will be rendered rendered incompatible after switching to Linux and Libre Office? Perhaps the crisis will be a shot across the bow at how IT systems almost-universally make computing a bad experience. Technical software like SolidWorks sometimes has OS-restrictions, but most of what I can think of that would be useful for school is, or should be OS-agnostic.
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.
henriquenunez
I agree that the planning does not consider a lot of aspects, but this is not the reason to surrender for big tech. We need more experts and a more sensible plan indeed, that considers the infrastructure, authentication, and so on.
ngrilly
LibreOffice is great, but not supporting multiple users simultaneously editing the same document is a serious limitation compared to proprietary solutions such as MS Office and Google Workspace.
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...
zevon
Live collaboration is not an MS Office native functionality either (needs OneDrive / SharePoint as a backend). If your org uses traditional file shares or some cloud storage/sync tool that is not MS, you're out of luck.
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.
welshwelsh
Lack of features is not an excuse for a government to adopt proprietary software.
Surely, the Danish government can figure out how to support real-time collaboration in LibreOffice.
bigstrat2003
It doesn't need an excuse; it's a fully valid reason. Using proprietary software is a perfectly valid choice to make.
louiskottmann
Chosing to pay millions when it is not necessary is definitely not a valid choice. It is at best stupidity, at worse corruption.
In my experience in the public sector in France, I have seen these decisions taken to advance someone's career.
For example, a first year free means a purchase person will get their promotion on incredible YoY progress.
mistrial9
In English the word "free" is apparently another difficulty. The technical Four Freedoms are not at all about the money. Money can be exchanged between willing partners of course. That includes government. The means and methods of closed source, and the means and methods of "corruption" are real.
toomuchtodo
I believe the Danish gov is roughly spending 50M EUR/year to MS, certainly you can get the features needed paying for dev time for an open source project with some of that spend.
kube-system
Not that it is insurmountable -- but the difficulty with adopting open source more broadly often isn't a financial issue, but organizational. A successful enterprise software deployment consists of a lot more than simply paying developers. You need the correct management in place to ensure the developers are building the right features, to ensure they meet your organizations needs in terms of compliance, deployment, support, ensure your users understand how to use the product, etc. Organizations that are familiar with software development can often do this, but these types of projects are sometimes beyond the reach of the expertise of other organizations.
dismalaf
Is simultaneous editing really that important? Especially in a government context? My experience with older office workers is that all of them use ancient, offline versions of Word anyway...
ngrilly
Not all office workers are old. Some are young and want to use modern collaboration tools. Even government workers. I think real-time collaborative editing is a chicken-and-egg. You don't know you need it until you start using it. I'm using this often in meetings where the participants all work on the same document, usually some notes/memo or spreadsheet. But I agree that for the note taking use case, a full-blown word processor is not necessary.
wizzwizz4
Collabora Office is a (somewhat-proprietary) LibreOffice fork/patchset with that functionality. If you want multiuser support, it exists.
trelane
That are also a, if not the, major contributor to LibreOffice.
marci
> What about replacing Entra (identity and access management), Intune (endpoint management), file sharing (OneDrive), email and calendar (Exchange Online)?
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.
rcbdev
The Austrian Federal Ministry of Justice has been on LibreOffice for many years now, with the Austrian Federal Computing Center developing extensions specifically for their use-cases.
This is a great trend. I wonder how long until Microsoft's Ballmer-type people fly into Munich again to commit corruption / lobbying.
ahartmetz
License fees for a few thousand workplaces of Microsoft can pay for a lot of development on FOSS alternatives instead. There is very little overhead there.
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.
trelane
What's more, you can pay for local dev! I imagine not sending money to the US and keeping it local is not a small consideration.
EasyMark
That's true but I don't see them taking the "money saved" and sending it to openOffice for software improvement.
gggggggoodlord
Something this article doesn't mention is that this only pertains to the ministry itself, which has like 80 employees, and not its much larger subsidiaries (Digitaliseringsstyrelsen and Danmarks Statistik).
Aarhus and Copenhagen municipalities are planning to do the same, and have around 80000 employees, that's a much bigger deal in my opinion.
clejack
I was recently wondering why something of this nature hasn't happened long ago. Governments have to be spending so much money on licensing fees.
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.
twarge
The midpoint constraint you seek in the symmetry constraint that looks like this: ><
basisword
>> It seems like you could throw a fraction of that money at open source software, actually make it good
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.
clejack
That's a fair point, but I think it primarily depends on the nature of the committee. I could be wrong because I don't operate in oss spaces, so I'm not sure about their structure.
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.
chaosbolt
If you're a government, it makes more sense to throw the money at creating your own infrastructure than paying to make a foreign company control everything you're running.
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.
datadrivenangel
If the US sanctions you, it'll be much much harder for American companies like microsoft to send updates legally...
So it's on the escalation ladder for sure.
reacharavindh
The companies and Government offices in Denmark are heavily entrenched in Microsoft ecosystem as I remember from a few years ago. The amount of money they would be spending in license costs!
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.
Wololooo
Check https://www.onlyoffice.com/ honestly it's pretty good, open source, multiplatform and it opens everything I've thrown at it so far.
I like libre in general but one too many times it just didn't play ball with some random docx documents.
okanat
It is not as open. Try building the desktop editors yourself. Some parts of the build system are not documented / not included in the repo.
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...
Wololooo
Awwww fuck, thanks for the heads up.
freehorse
I don't have ms office installed in my work macbook (it was not pre-installed, they just told me I should install it but I never did). Only once I actually needed access to a computer with ms office installed, because of some horrible word template that should not have existed in the first place. Most of the time microsoft's online suite works just fine, if I cannot do it in pages/numbers. The times I had to use teams (my group hates it and doesn't use it, so only when have to talk with outsiders) running it from the browser worked too.
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.
bryanrasmussen
as I said previously there will be an inflection point and then MS is basically history in the whole country, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44238752 that's the way Denmark works
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.
bbarnett
It is 2025, couldn’t we get away with using cheaper/even free(and or open source) online versions of office software?
Online?! There should be no usage of anything online to store or work with government data.
mettamage
Governments should fund more open source projects. Apparently there's a model of governance here that could work. Enough people like writing software. The innate motivation is there. With funding, there could be more of it.
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.
piker
Somebody tell the Danish legal team that Tritium (https://tritium.legal) runs on Linux :).
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.
udev4096
LibreOffice is terrible. I cannot believe how anyone can do anything with it. I cannot stand Word but it's just impossible to find a true replacement for it. OnlyOffice should get more recognition. It is the closest you can get for Word replacement
tasuki
> I cannot stand Word but it's just impossible to find a true replacement for it.
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?)
seanw444
How is it terrible? I keep hearing people say this, but I've never actually experienced any shortcomings personally. Granted, I don't really use word processors much. But when I did, I never had any.
toast0
Fit and finish aren't there, and have barely improved. It just looks bad. And it starts slowly (but so does Microsoft Office). Having to decide which fork to use is a problem.
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.
v5v3
LibreOffice does everything I need it to...
Most people only use a small percentage of functionality in any app.
kube-system
Individually, sure. But in an organization, the larger it is, the more probability that all of the features are being used approaches 1. Then you don't have a software issue anymore, you have a business workflow, retraining, or retooling issue.
v5v3
Most admin staff don't do anything complex aside from writing letters. They don't create complex docs with table of contents and images and so on.
I have worked for companies prior who gave basic online office 365 to 99% of staff and then more expensive subscriptions on a as needed basis.
tomjuggler
Yeah I tried so hard to use LibreOffice. OnlyOffice is great
chuckadams
They're planning the whole migration in less than 6 months. As they say (or at least google translate says), "Held og lykke". A lot of these migration plans strike me as being basically a negotiating tactic with Microsoft.
Tangokat
Americans do not realize how much damage Trump has done to the trust in American services. Europeans used to consider America as an ally the same as other European countries, now it is more like an unreliable trade partner. Microsoft tried to reassure the Europeans [1] but not even a month later they were forced to disable the email account of ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan [2] due to sanctions from Trump voiding their reassurance completely. What happens when Trump gets mad at Denmark for not giving him Greenland and forces Microsoft to turn off Danish services?
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...
Herring
"We cannot leave the security of Europe in the hands of voters in Wisconsin every 4 years" - French Minister Delegate for European Affairs.
dmix
Which is what Trump seems to want. A Europe not totally dependent on the American taxpayers for their own self defense and their own global power projection agendas. Many countries like Germany are quite far from that. France is more of a leader in that regard.
Although abandoning commercial American software wholesale would likely degrade their own security and GDPs even further than it already is.
Workaccount2
Defence and power projection is extremely expensive and tech is incredibly work demanding. Is the average EU citizen ready for 15 days PTO and 50-60 hour work weeks?
I don't mean this as a slight, but I genuinely do not think the average European worker, who has at this point spent most of their career in a pretty cushy worker friendly environment, is going to be up for American style death-race productivity. Or the European style death-race productivity of centuries past for that matter.
The average American worker works 500 more hours a year than their German counterpart. That is 62.5 more work days annually. Trying to close that gap will have people rioting. Never mind the cuts to social programs and bumping retirement age to boost defense spending. Double never mind avoiding Russian energy. Europe would need a wholesale societal rewrite, not just a few more bonds issued.
Its much less resistance to stick out 4 years and hope the US gets it's sanity back.
Herring
Both the Biden and Trump administrations have generally opposed European efforts to reduce reliance on foreign arms - The "Buy European" strategy.
The Trump administration seems to be pursuing a dual strategy: publicly demanding Europe be more self-sufficient while simultaneously trying to ensure U.S. economic and strategic interests are not sidelined in the process. Basically "Pay us more for less". Let's see how the NATO summit goes at the end of this month.
marcosdumay
I really don't think Trump has run that line with the US weapons manufacturers.
He got the goal of increasing the EU weapons expenses, and entirely monkey-pawed it.
bigstrat2003
> Which is what Trump seems to want. A Europe not totally dependent on the American taxpayers for their own self defense and their own global power projection agendas.
If so, good because that's what I want. I want to have "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none" as Jefferson said. I consider it a great betrayal of the American people that past governments put us in a position where other nations are depending on us for security. Untangling us from that should be done as gently as possible, but IMO it should be done.
As many IT people in Denmark is pointing out, it's not really about replacing Office and Windows, it's all the surrounding infrastructure that will be the main issue.
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.