Digital sovereignty. Even Europe is looking at replacing Windows now. I know that attempts have been made before, but there are stronger pressures now and there are better alternatives for Windows-only workflows.

Most new apps are web based nowadays. Many companies are even ditching the desktop Office apps now (which is insane for its own reasons, but still). Engineers under 40 prefer Python over Excel. Word is good for WYSIWYG printing, but with a small government program it should be possible to make that irrelevant quickly and ditch PDFs along with it.

I'm hopeful.

It’s a massive initiative. Entire staff must be retraining. IT infrastructure has to be replaced.

Worst of all, it will face a lot of resistance from stubborn people with a ”if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” mentality. The public sector has a tendency to be quite slow moving.

I would suggest that the vast, vast majority of companies that use Windows do so for two reasons

1: Because the software is (mostly) interchangeable with what their customers use. Office docs can be opened in any Office application without any formatting errors. Generally speaking. Open an .odt in Word and it could (will probably) end up buggering up the formatting.

2: Because most business owners don't want to go to the expense of hiring a dedicated IT guy to manage a bunch of computers that their staff don't know how to operate.

In the public sector in a few fields Linux just isn't an option at all, full stop, because of key pieces of software that are industry standards/straight up required for that field. CAD programs for example just makes linux a no go. Any fields that are dependant on Adobe products is another one.

I mean there are some work arounds. Winboat is promising. I've tried it with a few things but it's still buggy here and there i.e. sometimes it insists on launching the full VM for whatever reason. Bottles is just...I don't know it's not there yet and can be frustrating. Honestly I've had more success running non-gaming windows applications through Steam than anything else.

Plus as others have said the public sector can be...very slow when switching to new things. Look at how long companies held on to XP and Vista to the point they had to be forced to upgrade while kicking and screaming. Hell I buddy of mine is an IT consultant, runs his own business, and he's had new clients that were STILL on Vista and it took A LOT of convincing and work just to upgrade them to something slightly more modern.

I wonder what must happen to roll out more Linux in the public sector

Management tools. There's barely any IAM, DLP or MDM available for Linux, and whatever there is requires tremendous effort to manage compared to... just registering with Entra ID and Intune.

An Outlook replacement. The new web Outlook is absolute garbage with zero addin api like the old one had

Make a replacement Outlook that connect to imap service or something that's close to feature matching (calendaring ect) and its game over for two huge revenue streams. it's a cornerstone of Enterprise 365 and they refuse to listen to clients.

Everything else is "good enough" in FOSS but nothing gets close to Outlook functionally.

I wonder what must happen to roll out more Linux in the public sector.

Endpoint (device) management is mostly a solved a problem, the challenge lies in integrated systems that allow secured, controlled, and constant access to data in a way that is manageable at scale by hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of users.

That is where it gets wicked difficult and is what @Alaknar@sopuli.xyz is referencing. To my knowledge there is no real F/OSS equivalent to the tooling that MS Entra provides for IAM, DLP and MDM. You can maybe get close with a full deployment of NextCloud but that's really only replicating M365 functionality from 15 years ago.

Is it ultimately possible if you piece enough packages and systems together? Probably but it would be a massive plate of spaghetti that only a team of highly experienced *nix managers could hope to properly support.

You can definitely use a full F/OSS stack to replicate the functionality of a Windows Active Directory network but that's so last century. Today's organizations, no matter their type or size, demand more and they won't move to F/OSS unless they can get it.

Speaking from personal experience with family? Quicken. Yes you CAN get it running in Wine but not everything works. Also I could get it running in exactly one distro and then I could never seem to get it installed again, even following advice from someone on WineHQ.