OpenDesk – a flexible all-in-one office suite for the public sector
21 comments
·November 6, 2025HotGarbage
The system requirements are quite high: https://docs.opendesk.eu/operations/requirements/
Not going to be running this at home any time soon
LaurensBER
Requirements intended for initial evaluation deployment (not production usage!):
- 12 cores
- 32 GB ram
- Kubernetes cluster
Finally a use cases for all those awesome overpowered homelabs I see on Reddit.
For the rest of the world this seems excessive. Even for a small company these are pretty unreasonable requirements. I wonder what their design considerations were?
vineyardmike
Well that’s just the bare-minimum to run it. They said they were targeting like 150k users across the German government, so this is a lot closer to a Google Docs alternative than a home lab use case.
It’s also BYO-database so there is certainly other requirements above and beyond just the stated above when you include running the database clusters.
LaurensBER
Sure and I see that they're fully owned by the German government but getting the entire German government to switch (lots of politics involved even if the product is developed by the government) is a lot harder than starting bottoms-up. Getting some departments/small companies to switch and growing organically from there seems like a better path towards success.
I guess they could offer a hosted solution but that's usually a challenge to get approved in most government agencies (even if the contracting party is also sponsored by the government).
trklausss
This is intended for sysadmins in enterprise environment... You can use other suites for home usage.
graiz
We're open! But you can't just download, please request a demo.
ugh123
Can you help me understand how this compares to Google and Microsoft Suite, both in look and features? The site doesn't show much
jslakro
A good candidate to be in https://european-alternatives.eu/
g-mork
Is this just a rip of Collabora or is it more?
topaz0
The document editing part of it is collabora, and then it has a bunch of extra things around that.
luplex
it's more - it also has email, chat via Matrix, a Wiki, video conferencing and a few other things.
dingnuts
isn't the metadata from Matrix public? at least, if federation is on? seems useful to the OSINT community but I'd think public offices would have an issue with existing metadata about who is talking to who and when.
ranger_danger
Yes it is, but I think you might be assuming that they are even putting their homeserver on the public internet.
But even if it is, then as long as federation is off, nobody else will see any metadata but them.
ksec
So this is basically just LibreOffice? I have yet to see an online office suite that is good enough to rival MS 365.
majorchord
Why would you? I don't think anyone wants to waste millions of dollars to make a competing product that most people will never use.
whalesalad
KDE developers in shambles for having all their app names stolen.
Related ongoing thread:
ICC ditches Microsoft 365 for openDesk - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45837342 - Nov 2025 (77 comments)