Requirements intended for initial evaluation deployment (not production usage!):
- 12 cores
- 32 GB ram
- Kubernetes cluster
Finally a use cases for all those awesome overpowered homelabs I see on Reddit.
For the rest of the world this seems excessive. Even for a small company these are pretty unreasonable requirements. I wonder what their design considerations were?
Well that’s just the bare-minimum to run it. They said they were targeting like 150k users across the German government, so this is a lot closer to a Google Docs alternative than a home lab use case.
It’s also BYO-database so there is certainly other requirements above and beyond just the stated above when you include running the database clusters.
Sure and I see that they're fully owned by the German government but getting the entire German government to switch (lots of politics involved even if the product is developed by the government) is a lot harder than starting bottoms-up. Getting some departments/small companies to switch and growing organically from there seems like a better path towards success.
I guess they could offer a hosted solution but that's usually a challenge to get approved in most government agencies (even if the contracting party is also sponsored by the government).
isn't the metadata from Matrix public? at least, if federation is on? seems useful to the OSINT community but I'd think public offices would have an issue with existing metadata about who is talking to who and when.
metadata from Matrix is never 'public' (i.e. visible to the public). It's visible to only the admins of the servers participating in a given conversation.
It does illustrate that the EU has started to understand something that S/W devs seem to have totally forgotten: dependencies are bad, use as few as possible.
The rest of the world has not yet caught on. When I was in Japan this past summer, I was shocked at how dependent business, government and individuals are on US internet infrastructure.
I tried describing the ICC situation, and most people (even s/w devs) stared with a blank face.
The main thing I wonder about the opendesk project in general is, why do they think it's only for the "public sector"?
Do government employees use email differently from other people? Does their calendar s/w need some special features?
To me this just seems like an office productivity suite, for everyone.
The opendesk project should expand the concept of who they intend to serve...
Me personally I consider EVERY office suite legacy crap, no one should use.
Unfortunately, even if it's entirely possible to imagine an office world built like what we can have today in org-mode/Emacs, e.g. https://youtu.be/u44X_th6_oY rather than Positron (R Studio's successor) for most people it's still a taboo; there's a significant reactionary attitude even in IT.
The system requirements are quite high: https://docs.opendesk.eu/operations/requirements/
Not going to be running this at home any time soon
This is intended for sysadmins in enterprise environment... You can use other suites for home usage.
Requirements intended for initial evaluation deployment (not production usage!):
- 12 cores
- 32 GB ram
- Kubernetes cluster
Finally a use cases for all those awesome overpowered homelabs I see on Reddit.
For the rest of the world this seems excessive. Even for a small company these are pretty unreasonable requirements. I wonder what their design considerations were?
Well that’s just the bare-minimum to run it. They said they were targeting like 150k users across the German government, so this is a lot closer to a Google Docs alternative than a home lab use case.
It’s also BYO-database so there is certainly other requirements above and beyond just the stated above when you include running the database clusters.
Sure and I see that they're fully owned by the German government but getting the entire German government to switch (lots of politics involved even if the product is developed by the government) is a lot harder than starting bottoms-up. Getting some departments/small companies to switch and growing organically from there seems like a better path towards success.
I guess they could offer a hosted solution but that's usually a challenge to get approved in most government agencies (even if the contracting party is also sponsored by the government).
We're open! But you can't just download, please request a demo.
https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk
Someone should host a demo instance. Ideally they themselves.
Can you help me understand how this compares to Google and Microsoft Suite, both in look and features? The site doesn't show much
A good candidate to be in https://european-alternatives.eu/
Is this just a rip of Collabora or is it more?
The document editing part of it is collabora, and then it has a bunch of extra things around that.
it's more - it also has email, chat via Matrix, a Wiki, video conferencing and a few other things.
isn't the metadata from Matrix public? at least, if federation is on? seems useful to the OSINT community but I'd think public offices would have an issue with existing metadata about who is talking to who and when.
metadata from Matrix is never 'public' (i.e. visible to the public). It's visible to only the admins of the servers participating in a given conversation.
Yes it is, but I think you might be assuming that they are even putting their homeserver on the public internet.
But even if it is, then as long as federation is off, nobody else will see any metadata but them.
Related ongoing thread:
ICC ditches Microsoft 365 for openDesk - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45837342 - Nov 2025 (77 comments)
I think this is a great development!
It does illustrate that the EU has started to understand something that S/W devs seem to have totally forgotten: dependencies are bad, use as few as possible.
The rest of the world has not yet caught on. When I was in Japan this past summer, I was shocked at how dependent business, government and individuals are on US internet infrastructure.
I tried describing the ICC situation, and most people (even s/w devs) stared with a blank face.
The main thing I wonder about the opendesk project in general is, why do they think it's only for the "public sector"?
Do government employees use email differently from other people? Does their calendar s/w need some special features?
To me this just seems like an office productivity suite, for everyone.
The opendesk project should expand the concept of who they intend to serve...
Related:
ICC ditches Microsoft 365 for openDesk
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45837342
Me personally I consider EVERY office suite legacy crap, no one should use.
Unfortunately, even if it's entirely possible to imagine an office world built like what we can have today in org-mode/Emacs, e.g. https://youtu.be/u44X_th6_oY rather than Positron (R Studio's successor) for most people it's still a taboo; there's a significant reactionary attitude even in IT.
KDE developers in shambles for having all their app names stolen.
Another office suite. Check
No, its Collabora just rebranded :)
And Collabora is LibreOffice just rebranded.
So this is basically just LibreOffice? I have yet to see an online office suite that is good enough to rival MS 365.
Why would you? I don't think anyone wants to waste millions of dollars to make a competing product that most people will never use.
If you NEED excel or office specific formats, run 365.
If you DON'T, Google Sheets, Google Docs, OpenOffice etc. work fine.