> no one in South Korea uses Photoshop, InDesign, professional video editing software or generally any kind of pro software that doesn't run on Linux

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? :-)

You mean that no one in the South Korean government does any kind of professional photo editing (or any other kind of high level professional desktop work)? It could make sense if they outsource all of that. But I doubt that out of millions of people, 100% are just low level clerks typing in forms receive from the public.

There must be people doing that, but it's not the majority. Which means that the majority of the people can just go along with Linux without Photoshop. If there are people who need them, they can use a Windows PC.

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.

Those people that require adobe shit are probably very rare and can still just use windows, mac a VM, Wine or an alternative like krita, inkscape or what have you. And there's probably more work like that for local governments and smaller agencies but then those either already make do with some "marta from accounting made a poster in word" type of design or outsource it since it doesn't make sense to keep someone around permanently.