Denmark is switching to Linux, says its Ministry of Digital Affairs, in a move that exchanges Windows and Office 365 for Linux and LibreOffice.
Yes, that Danish government. The government of a nation of roughly 6 million people, which is the southernmost Scandinavian nation and/or the northernmost part of Central Europe, comprised of the Jutland peninsula and adjacent islands.
It’ll migrate about half of the Ministry of Digital Affairs away from Windows this summer, reports Danish newspaper Politiken. The move was attributed to a desire for greater digital sovereignty.
“It is not about isolation or digital nationalism … But we must never make ourselves so dependent on so few that we can no longer act freely. Too much public digital infrastructure is currently tied up with very few foreign suppliers. This makes us vulnerable,” said Danish Minister for Digital Affairs Caroline Stage Olsen in a LinkedIn Message translated by Windows Central.
Governments have shifted away from Windows as a default in the past, but this is a pretty high profile one. Denmark is a pretty big economic player in Europe, and often ranks as a top ten nation worldwide when it comes to purchasing power and domestic product per capita.
This is certainly an ontologically good and/or bad thing if you’re part of some kind of Operating System Wars cult. To me, it seems inevitable that the world will move on. In the distant past of computers moving between operating system families was pretty routine, and although it’s true that Windows was so dominant for a time that Linux proponents were frequently laughed off, the tides always change eventually.
One day you’ll probably ditch Windows for some uses, or scenarios, or maybe entirely—heck, if you’ve made the Steam Deck jump you already have done it in part, which might be something you didn’t even think about when you did it.
