41
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Denmark has quietly ended its Collabora pilot, halting a major effort to replace Microsoft software and achieve greater technological independence
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- Title
- Denmark has abandoned plans to ditch Microsoft Office after technical problems
- Authors
- Usama Jawad
- Published
- Oct 25 2026
- Word count
- 384 words
I have a lot more faith in EuroOffice. The technical foundation of OnlyOffice is much better and nicer to use and EuroOffice solves the governance problem.
Is it really? I recently tried it, opened a very basic excel table (my work timetable) and found out that it was broken. Normally I wouldn't want to extrapolate too much from a single experience, but this seems exactly like the dealbreaker that would make non-tech people not use it - a simple, seemingly basic featured table used for a common thing, you open it and see a table half full of hashes.
Ideally the process of adopting it for government work would radically speed up fixing of these issues, but we don't live in an ideal world and i expect the opposite: resistance.
I don’t have the context of what you were doing or how the software was “supposed to” behave but at least in Excel, I often see that exact behaviour when the column isn’t wide enough ti show the value in the cell. Could it be as simple as re-aligning column widths to get it working as intended?
To be fair, most people will never search for a simple answer to their problems. Most people, they'll stop at the first issue, assume the software is wrong or broken, and start complaining loudly rather than attempting to troubleshoot. Ideally, people will push through their ignorance to find knowledge but we don't live in an ideal world and i expect the opposite: resistance.
This is exactly what I meant by that. I definitely could troubleshoot and solve that and the reason why I didn't is that I need actual MS office installed for 100% compatibility anyway, so I decided it's not worth the time. But pushing your average bureaucrat to troubleshoot in any situation is going to be hard.
Yeah, it's frustratingly common to have developers of open source software deprioritize user experience within the development process.
Despite user experience being the single biggest indicator of wider adoption, and the single thing that most closed source software has over open source counterparts, it's NEVER prioritized in the heads of open source developers.
The open source community is getting better but it's still not a priority for most.
Part of the reason Linux is finally growing in market share is that a lot of distro developers, have finally started prioritizing user experience. Now the issue is the uphill battle of convincing people "Linux is easier to use now, this time I promise."
Working in a (non-tech) corporate space has unfortunately broken me a little bit, because I’m absolutely the kind of person who will troubleshoot for a solution, but the environment is so locked down that most solutions I come across are basically non-starters. Can’t install custom software, can’t make changes to half of the settings in any apps or the OS itself, certainly can’t edit the registry.
The organisation is big enough that I probably won’t be able to just make friends with someone in IT to help implement random registry edits to fix a gripe I have. Even if that’s the clear solution to my problem when I’ve searched the internet for a fix. I’m sure in a smaller company, I could totally build trust with IT enough to maybe even get temporary privileges, but with my org as big as it is, I find that deeply unlikely.
No, that's the one thing that I tried before I went back to excel.
I switched to OnlyOffice just last month and found it extremely accessible and similar to MS Office's UX; I haven't observed any behaviour like you've mentioned.
I liked the UX as well, it looks much better than LibreOffice. But this was not a very good first impression.
I don't know tbh. What I was getting at, was that OnlyOffice set out to have good MS Office file support and a familiar interface from the get-go, while for LibreOffice, this was put in later. The same goes for collaborative editing: OnlyOffice supports this natively, Collabora Office was a kind of hack where you kind of wrap the LibreOffice GUI or something but I don't follow that all closely.
Better the technical problems you know I guess… that’s a shame though especially that they’re saying there was no for al evaluation of the experiment’s performance :(
I wonder if the US becomes a dictatorship (not the first time trump threatens to cancel elections), what does depending on US tech imply especially for sovereign governments.
Barring actual US military turning people away at every polling station (something punishable by 5 years in prison for everyone involved), there's no way for Trump to "cancel" an election. The elections aren't administered by the federal government at all. They're administered by the states. Trump would like you to think he could cancel an election, and for you to talk worriedly about his power to do so and what if he does, but unless all the states individually decide to roll over and obey Trump, there's no "cancelling" an election.
If there's one thing that the two Trump admins should teach you, it's that a lack of legal means does not mean he can't do something. It just means he has to cheat. And he has proven very willing to do exactly that.
And while I do believe that elections in the U.S. are a bit more formidable against his cheating for the fact that they're officiated by the states, that doesn't make them immune. Sure, maybe he can't officially cancel them — but what would happen if he were to declare a faux emergency, demand things be "postponed," and then pressure red states into following through?
He doesn't need to formally cancel anything. He just needs enough cronies to toe the line, and we'd have a crisis. The rules don't mean anything if enough people are willing to break them.
In America, you basically just need to commit enough fraud/suppression to keep Texas, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, Ohio, and perhaps 1 or two others to lock in a presidency.
You target a few select cities with "Border Emergencies", and the chilling effect will do the rest.
If republican states cancelled their elections and democratic states didn't, it would mean that there would be no new Republicans in Congress. The terms of the outgoing congresspeople end before the new ones begin. So republican states refusing to hold elections just hands all the power to Democrats.
Sure, it's easy to say "what if he breaks things?" But most of the damage he's done has been with the help of a compliant and passive Republican Congress, and they won't help him strip their own power by cancelling the elections that put them in power.
You're missing the point. Firstly inside the hypothetical by missing the fact that "who's new in Congress" is immaterial when "did an election happen" is a fact that entire states disagree on. And secondly outside the hypothetical, because you're focusing on it too much.
My point is that rules and process do not matter for anything if not followed or enforced. They aren't physical laws. Bad actors just need to find the right way to sidestep them, and our nation has proven susceptible enough to this that a man who should be in prison right now is instead president, and has gotten one of the two parties to absolutely revolve around him.
You can't trust in what he's "allowed" to do in a scenario like that. If you want to say that it's difficult for him to ruin an election, that's fair, but you can't say that it's impossible, and you absolutely cannot rely on the rules alone to stop him. He has broken those countless times and gotten away with it, and he will do so again if not actively prevented.
I'm not saying "it's impossible" and then resting on my laurels. I'm saying that, while he has some power in this situation, he's not the only actor to have desires and preferences, and the incentives of basically everyone else in government push towards having elections.
That's fair then. It didn't come across in your initial comment though, and I felt that the nuance was important. I think there's a lot of folks who haven't fully realized / internalized that "the law says he can't do that" isn't an ironclad guarantee, and it seemed at first that you might've been one. I suppose it might prove informative for someone reading our conversation though, so that's good.
I will say though...
...that it still does seem you've more faith in the systems than I. I feel plenty of Republicans would gladly toss elections if they felt they could gain or maintain power afterwards. Heck, some Democratic politicians would probably go along with it if they felt they had similar guarantees (which would be foolish, because those guarantees would be a lie).
The main thing stopping them seems to just be either a case of figuring out how to do that, or them needing to be convinced that such a plan would work. Many didn't think being flagrantly and openly racist would ever be electable until 2016 happened, but turns out it was, and now entirely too many followed suit.
Absolutely. And notably I think that some on the right would be/are perfectly fine with sham elections, if they can make them turn out how they want them to. I just don't think that we're yet at a point where they can make that work on a national scale. Hopefully the upcoming elections turn out in a way that lets us roll back their influence. Even if there is a "blue tsunami", the next two years will be full of work shoring up the rule of law and making sure that our representatives don't rest on their laurels for even a moment.