Not a silver bullet. This is a deep rabbit hole.

What do you think about Collabora?

I would guess that they, as everyone else, have worked with MS Office all their lives and can do whatever they need without thinking much in there. But libreoffice has some small differences that will break their workflow and will spend time learning how to workaround those instead of doing what they need. For example, my grip is that in MS I can redo the last operation with ctrl+y, where in libre it's ctrl+shift+y. They could very likely allow the former to behave like the latter when redo buffet is empty, but they don't.

Wouldn't it be easier to strike a support deal with the libre office developers and just give them the money to do it?

Never heard of it. Only Office was decent though, the couple of times I used it.

Sure. That is assuming that someone is available on the LibreOffice side to support the ministry for a particular amount, and that the policy related to government procedures can be followed under this agreement.

If you're open to it, would you mind checking it out and share what you think

The Document Foundation doesn't actually employ developers. They just oversee and manage the development and direction of LibreOffice.

The dream here, in FOSS terms, is that governments see the massive potential value in using FOSS, and start actively contributing to it.

Imagine if the German or Danish government puts the people on their IT payroll (who are now maintaining Microsoft systems) to maintain FOSS systems. This would be a huge benefit for everyone, if enough big actors do it, it may be what pushes stuff like Microsoft into being a niche service.

People in government IT jobs who maintain Microsoft systems aren’t going to be contributing to FOSS codebases. They’re not developers.

Nextcloud Office is just Libre Office via Collabora though...

I did this in my personal usage 20 years ago. I even was demonstrating to colleagues at work in 2005 how Open Office was better at integrating large numbers of digital photos into documents than Word was.

Probably just to save money really.

That always helps. It also helps politically that M$ is based in a country that's outraging the Danish people on a fairly regular basis...

same thing with 365 but we do a lot of traveling

Back in 1990-something, I got our office using Ami Pro - it was a vastly superior word processor to anything else available at the time. Then, a couple of years later, we started sharing documents back and forth with business partners via dial-up internet and that was the end of Ami Pro, all our partners used M$ and file format translation / import / export was nigh impossible in those days.

They can report unusual bugs though and SHOULD be competent enough to write good bug reports

Pretty sure Collabora (company) offers such services.

Calc has loads of small papercuts (tiny usability issues) which added together make it quite horrible to use. It's not polished.

Yeah same. I respect the huge amount of work it takes to make a suite like that, but... I'm lucky I've worked with Blender a lot to give me a good impression of open source software. If Libre was my first thing I experimented with in the open source world (and I think for many, many people it probably is), I would probably think "wow open source software is a joke, I guess you get what you pay for after all". It really makes a horrible impression. I wonder why LibreOffice has so many usability pains vs Blender, despite the fact that both applications have very high demand. Maybe it's just that LibreOffice seems really dull to contribute to?

What I hate about Calc is how it scrolls horizontally, it can't show half a column, it's the whole column or it doesn't scroll, which is pretty fucking annoying when you have large columns.

What I love about Calc is how it handles data imports. So much better than Excel, which usually turns it into garbage or adds things that aren't there.

I don’t know how many government workers you’ve met, but I wouldn’t have much hope of that haha

I love the idea of LibreOffice but it really needs to get collaborative features sorted via cloud storage providers or even network shares.