In June 2025, headlines around the world said Denmark was dumping Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice. In October 2026, Danish tech reporters found out the country’s open source office pilot was dead. The ministry hadn’t announced it. It hadn’t published a verdict either, because the review meant to produce one never happened.
The pilot put 38 ministry staff on Collabora, an open source office suite built on LibreOffice, in place of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Reports describe formatting trouble within the first hour and a project that ended somewhere around Denmark’s 2026 election. No report followed and no lessons were shared.
So did open source lose on merit, or did it never get a fair trial? The r/linux crowd has been arguing about it, and both camps have a point. The missing paperwork is the real story.
What Denmark tried (the headlines got it wrong)
The June 2025 coverage got the scale wrong. Early reports said half the ministry would move to LibreOffice within a month and everyone by autumn, and many outlets added Linux to the story. Politiken corrected that soon afterward, according to Windows Central: only Office was on the way out, and Windows was staying.
What launched on June 19, 2025 was smaller. Thirty-eight staff at the ministry’s main office began using Collabora, a LibreOffice-based suite from the British company of the same name, inside F2. F2 is the case management system built by Danish company cBrain, and it’s where ministry staff draft and edit official documents. The pilot swapped the editor, not the operating system.
The ministry’s announcement, repeated on cBrain’s site, listed what it wanted to learn: whether Collabora could handle its templates, the format of government case files, tracked changes, tables, and round trips to and from Word without damage. Then-minister Caroline Stage Olsen called it a first step and said she didn’t expect to throw out the tech giants overnight. OSOR reported that the ministry also admitted it might fall back to Microsoft temporarily if serious problems appeared.
The pilot at a glance
- Launch: June 19, 2025
- Participants: 38 staff at the ministry’s main office (Computerworld says almost 40)
- Software: Collabora, built on LibreOffice, embedded in cBrain’s F2 case system
- Backer: Caroline Stage Olsen, then Denmark’s digital minister
- Stated goal: less dependence on American tech companies
- Planned review: an evaluation workshop in October 2025 that never took place
- Status: over, with no evaluation and no announced plan to restart
What broke: blank files, a missing font and tracked changes
The best evidence comes from internal emails that the Danish outlet Ingeniøren obtained through freedom-of-information requests. Several details below come from XenoSpectrum’s summary of that reporting. The story is consistent: Word documents didn’t survive the trip.
- Blank files. Documents sent in from other government bodies, including the Finance Ministry, reportedly opened empty in Collabora.
- Hidden template styles. Styles buried inside Word templates caused trouble within the first hour of the pilot.
- A missing font. The templates used Georgia, which Collabora didn’t have. After cBrain added it, text still turned bold on its own and stray line breaks appeared.
- Printing. Pressing Ctrl+P reportedly printed the whole window instead of the document.
- Tracked changes. Staff also complained about style handling, paragraph formatting and tracked changes, according to Tom’s Hardware.
Tracked changes deserve a closer look. A ministry document passes through many hands, and every hand leaves edits and comments. If tracked changes misbehave, nobody can finish the document, however nice the editor looks. Styles and templates are the same kind of problem. Word keeps a lot of hidden state in both, and that’s where conversion usually goes wrong. Collabora’s native format is ODF, so every Word file gets translated on the way in and again on the way out.
Two vendors, one workflow
Collabora didn’t run alone. It ran inside F2, so the pilot tested Collabora, cBrain’s integration and the ministry’s own templates all at once. The reports don’t say which layer caused which bug, and that matters. A bug in the editor is Collabora’s to fix. A bug in the integration is cBrain’s.
The ministry kept going anyway
Staff were frustrated, and the pilot carried on. In October 2025 the ministry was due to decide what came next, with options ranging from a wider rollout to calling it quits. It wouldn’t tell Ingeniøren which way it leaned. The evaluation workshop never happened. On December 1, 2025, Ingeniøren reported that Stage Olsen had decided to continue, and staff reportedly kept using Collabora into 2026.
The ending nobody can explain
Here’s what the public record supports, and where it runs out.
- February 26, 2026: Denmark’s general election is called. Outlets disagree on whether the pilot ended before or after the vote.
- March 24, 2026: The election takes place.
- June 3, 2026: A new government takes office, and digital affairs merges into a larger ministry that also covers research and education.
- October 19 and 20, 2026: Ingeniøren, Version2 and Computerworld report that the pilot is dead and was never evaluated.
That’s as far as the facts go. The ministry hasn’t published an end date or said who made the call. A spokesperson for the successor ministry confirmed to Ingeniøren that the planned evaluation never took place, and reports say nobody there uses Collabora now or plans to. Some headlines claim the pilot collapsed in under six months. The calendar says otherwise: it launched on June 19, 2025, and staff reportedly kept using Collabora into 2026.
What the sources support is a set of real compatibility problems, an evaluation nobody finished, and a new coalition government around the time it ended. No source ties those facts together as cause and effect, and we won’t either. Mikkel Flyverbom, a professor at Copenhagen Business School, said in an email quoted by Tom’s Hardware that he backs piloting alternatives and would like the ministry to turn the experience into lessons for other agencies.
What r/linux makes of it
The thread drew hundreds of upvotes and the usual arguments. These are the ones worth keeping.
- Blame the users. The top comment, citing a post on a Danish subreddit, says staff found formatting too hard and calls most people stupid about IT. Plenty of replies pushed back. One 60-year-old commenter says he has taught people over 70 to use LibreOffice with little trouble, and others argued the Barb-from-accounting stereotype ignores 30 years of Office redesigns she survived.
- Follow the money. A couple of commenters suspect someone was paid off, and one points to Munich’s LiMux reversal as precedent. Nothing in the reporting supports that. The public money trail is duller: the Danish state buys Microsoft licenses through a joint agreement with the reseller Atea, and Finance Ministry figures given to parliament show spending under it rising from roughly 440 million kroner in 2023 to roughly 527 million in 2024, per XenoSpectrum.
- Macros, not Word. Two commenters said Excel macros, not word processing, killed the Linux migrations they worked on. That’s a real problem, but it wasn’t this pilot’s problem.
- Distro wars. One commenter faulted the choice of distro. There was no distro. The pilot swapped an editor inside a case system, and the operating system wasn’t part of it.
- Pilots as a bargaining chip. One commenter wondered whether pilots like this exist mainly to scare Microsoft into lower prices. It’s a fair thought and an unprovable one.
- No training. A commenter with government experience guessed staff got little training while the in-house Office experts were as lost as everyone else. Nobody has published anything on training either way.
Why only Collabora?
Tom’s Hardware points out that it’s unclear why Collabora was the only candidate, even though OnlyOffice, OpenOffice and Calligra were available. Its suggestion was three teams on three suites, with a review at the end. That would have told Denmark far more than one suite on one team, and it’s hard to argue with.
The suite Denmark did pick sits in the middle of a vendor fight. In spring 2026, the foundation behind LibreOffice removed about 30 people tied to Collabora from its membership, and Collabora said it would focus on its own cut-down Collabora Office and reduce its involvement in LibreOffice. Separately, a group of European organizations forked OnlyOffice into Euro-Office. No source links any of this to Denmark’s decision. It does show how much a government has to weigh before it commits to an open source office suite.
The real Linux experiment is somewhere else
If you came for Linux, the Collabora pilot was never it. Statens IT, the state’s IT agency, runs a separate project called SIA Open that aims to replace Microsoft software on government work PCs with a Linux-based setup. The director of the Danish Road Traffic Authority became its first user on December 15, 2025. According to XenoSpectrum, which cites OSOR, fewer than 10 people use it so far, early feedback is relatively positive, and a third version due in February 2027 would let the 166 agencies Statens IT serves order it. Nobody has committed to rolling it out everywhere.
One r/linux commenter made the same point: the Office trial and the Linux work are separate tracks.
How other governments are doing
- Schleswig-Holstein, Germany: The 2025 switch from Microsoft Office to open source was largely glitch-free, and the state saved about 15 million euros on licenses that year. A data center misconfiguration during the email migration cost almost three weeks, and a police union estimates officers lose two or three hours a week to shortcomings. Windows to Linux is planned for 2026. (Irish Times, via the FT)
- France: The state’s digital directorate announced in April 2026 that it’s leaving Windows for Linux workstations, with a plan to be formalized in the fall of 2026. (Tom’s Hardware)
- Lyon, France: Planned to move about 80 percent of users to OnlyOffice by March 2026 and keep the rest on Microsoft. (Le Monde Informatique)
- Munich, Germany: Dropped a 13-year Linux project in 2017 amid technical problems and fading political support. (Irish Times, via the FT)
What open source should take from this
The pilot is a bad data point for both sides, but it makes a decent checklist.
- Start with the ugliest documents. Test the templates, styles and tracked-change chains staff use every day, not clean samples.
- Run more than one candidate. Three suites on three teams beat one suite on one team.
- Turn every bug into a bug report. A blank file from another ministry is a reproducible bug if somebody strips the secrets and files it upstream.
- Train people and staff a help line. Nobody should discover a missing font alone.
- Publish the result, even a bad one. A public failure teaches the next government something. A silent one teaches it nothing.
FAQ
Why did Denmark end its Collabora pilot?
The ministry hasn’t said. Reports describe blank files, template and font problems and trouble with tracked changes, and the planned evaluation never took place. No source confirms a single cause.
Did Denmark switch to Linux?
No. The pilot replaced Word, Excel and PowerPoint inside the F2 case system with Collabora, and the operating system wasn’t part of it. A separate Statens IT project, SIA Open, is testing a Linux-based work PC with a handful of users.
What is Collabora?
Collabora is a British company that builds commercial office products on top of LibreOffice, including Collabora Online and Collabora Office. Its native format is ODF, so Word files are converted on the way in and out.
Is Denmark still trying to leave Microsoft?
Partly. The state signed a new five-year joint software agreement in 2025 that includes Microsoft products, and the ministry behind the pilot has been merged into a larger one. SIA Open is still running, with a key milestone in February 2027.
The bottom line
The Danish pilot settled nothing. It started small, hit a pile of document problems, skipped its review and ended without an announcement. Supporters of open source in government, the people who most wanted a result, now have the least to point at.
If you want a lesson, take the boring one: test on real work, fix what breaks, and tell everyone what happened.
Sources
- Computerworld Denmark, original report on the dropped pilot (Danish, paywalled)
- Ingeniøren, report on the pilot ending without a proper evaluation (Danish)
- Tom’s Hardware, coverage of the staff complaints
- XenoSpectrum, timeline and SIA Open background
- LAVX News, English summary of the Computerworld report
- Le Monde Informatique, early pilot problems and the October 2025 decision point (French)
- cBrain, pilot announcement
- OSOR (European Commission), June 2025 launch coverage
- The Register, the original June 2025 plan
- Windows Central, the Windows correction
- The Irish Times (FT), Schleswig-Holstein and Munich
