They learnt to deal with the terrible UX in Windows, no reason they can’t on Linux. :-)

> it might not be much better but she's used to it.

It’s her work, she better get used to it too keep working; That’s a pretty compelling reason to get used to Linux, right?

Linux's terrible UIs change pretty much every month as Linux GUI devs get bored and decide to reinvent everything for no reason. Microsoft has only recently started doing that and it's still at a much slower pace.

But you know, there are versions with commercial support out there. And governments could have the budget to actually maintain their own version. (they do btw.)

They could, but they won’t.

They want Outlook and Word and Excel, and they’ll exhibit a mule-like stubbornness to budge.

I’ve mentioned that we don’t use Word, (BTW, seriously, is there anyone who uses Outlook anymore?) and the dominant word processor used in South Korea had a port to Linux that is fully featured and has a very high compatibility since 2008.

Outlook is still huge amongst professions that have to deal with people a lot. The calendaring is better than online solutions (by a lot) and the plugins, I am told, for stuff like Salesforce are awesome.

They are redesigned every version though, there's nothing fixed to want from them.

Linux has an upper hand in terms of UX since Windows Vista, and the gap widened greatly since then, go read what people think about metro.

A little hard to complain when we can take dlls that are 10-12 years old shove them into something like server 2019/SQL 2019, and not think about compatibility.

Same goes for client apps, was your app shit 10 years ago? It's not going to change 10 years later. Did it work in word 10 years ago, it will most likely work 10 years later with zero changes.

See other comments here

Of course not! :-) I don’t run Linux myself for these reasons... but the government agency PCs has no requirement to run these. The officials shouldn’t run useless programs on work, right? :-)

Also, as a side point, AFAIK all of the operating systems that are mentioned in the article has native support for executing Windows applications using Wine - as there are still programs that only support Windows. Unlike other Linux distributions where Wine is a second level citizen, the distributions have preinstalled Wine wrappers for the dominant IM in South Korea so if the government wants it, wrapping up a version of Photoshop that works on Wine won't be that hard.