What "enterprise software" is needed at a public administration? Almost all of it is custom ordered, so Linux compatibility can be a part of the requirements.

Outlook is a dumpster fire, and there are perfectly fine alternatives. Very few people actually need the full might of Excel, and you can always RemoteApp it to them, and have the rest use Libre Office. Or heck, provide them with actual tooling better fit for their requirements than Excel.

And in any case, IMHO, "public money, public code". Nothing should be paid for with public money without it being publicly accessible afterwards ( excluding weaponry of course).

> Very few people actually need the full might of Excel

How's the groupware situation on Linux? Mail, calendars, adding shared meeting rooms, etc.

On Linux you can use a number of thick or web clients for any sort of groupware - Exchange, Office 365, OnlyOffice, Nextcloud, Collabora, Zoho something?

I used Evolution for years, and it worked really well.

Anymore I just keep Outlook web open in a web browser though. Not because Evolution is lacking, I just didn't really see the point in setting it up anymore.

KMail, Kalendar, Thunderbird, Nextcloud Groupware are all open source groupware solution what works on Linux.

KMail was actually financed for some time by the german gouvernment.

you have web portals for outlook at least (doesn't make it usable though, my daily struggles!)

Then there's MS teams. I'd rather it just not run anywhere (die) instead of being a "good enough" solution bundled in to the suite. At least if it weren't there we could use something usable like slack instead.

I haven't used OS X in awhile, but IM clients should just copy Adium. It is (was?) so simple and light and easy to use, it integrated perfectly with OS X's Contacts app, and it was also being easily themed and styled by users. Also its dock icon showed the last few people who had messaged you in the background, rather than just the count of how many messages you had missed.

Strange that so much of it moved to the web then, isn’t it?

funny, the users didn't mind.