Yet another European government is ditching Microsoft for Linux – here’s why
“We’re done with Teams!” declared Digitalisation Minister Dirk Schrödter, speaking via an open-source video platform, in his announcement that the German state of Schleswig-Holstein will phase out all Microsoft software from government workplaces. The goal is to fully transition from Microsoft programs to Linux and open-source programs within the next three months.
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The decision will affect nearly every civil servant, police officer, and judge, about 30,000 employees. Eventually, the rest of the civil service employees, primarily school teachers, will make the open-source shift. The radical change is being hailed as a major step toward “digital sovereignty” and a signal of growing European resistance to reliance on US tech giants. The move came soon after Danish officials had said they’d be leaving Microsoft behind.
Schleswig-Holstein’s move has been in the works for a while. In April 2024, the state’s cabinet had declared it would make the move. The reason, Schrödter said at the time, was that the government had “no influence on the operating processes of such [proprietary] solutions and the handling of data, including a possible outflow of data to third countries. As a state, we have a great responsibility towards our citizens and companies to ensure that their data is kept safe with us, and we must ensure that we are always in control of the IT solutions we use and that we can act independently as a state.”
On the recent decision, Schrödter added: “The geopolitical developments of the past few months have strengthened interest in the path that we’ve taken. The war in Ukraine revealed our energy dependencies, and now we see there are also digital dependencies.”
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Schleswig-Holstein had other reasons to dump Microsoft as well. By moving away from proprietary software, Schleswig-Holstein wants to ensure that sensitive government and citizen data remains within German jurisdiction and is not subject to potential access by US companies. This means, in addition to dropping Microsoft software, Schrödter said it will move its data from Microsoft Azure to a European-based cloud.
Needless to say, the state expects to save tens of millions of euros by eliminating Microsoft licensing fees and unpredictable costs of mandatory updates. For the latter, it appears Schrödter was referring to the migration from Windows 10 to 11.
The migration to Linux and open-source technology will happen in phases. The first stage, already underway, will replace Word and Excel with LibreOffice. The implementation of Open-Xchange will follow this phase, and Thunderbird will be used to replace Exchange and Outlook.
Finally, Linux is shoving out Windows. While no specific Linux desktop distribution was mentioned, the desktop interface will be KDE Plasma. Possible desktops the government may use include Kubuntu, the official KDE flavor of Ubuntu, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED), or openSUSE Leap. Additional open-source tools, such as Nextcloud, will fill gaps left by other Microsoft products.
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Some will say such moves are doomed to failure. One popular example is Munich, the capital of Bavaria, Germany, which moved away from Windows to Linux in 2004. That move lasted for a decade before Munich returned to Windows — in no small part because the mayor wanted Microsoft to move its European headquarters to Munich. However, a closer look reveals that, although LiMux was unsuccessful, today Munich still uses open-source software and, in particular, relies heavily on LibreOffice.
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Other European Linux programs, such as France’s Gendarmerie, which switched to Ubuntu Linux over a decade ago, have proven successful. As of June 2024, 97% of its workstations, over 103,000 computers, are running GendBuntu, the Gendarmerie’s custom Ubuntu-based Linux distribution. The project continues to be actively maintained and updated, with the latest upgrade to GendBuntu 24.04 LTS completed in December 2024.
In other words, as I’ve been telling you all along, you can move from Windows to Linux successfully. Now, with the EU’s growing distrust of the US and its technology companies, we can expect to see more such moves.
