> the government thought that this was a good time to remove much of the legacy that enforces Windows, and is considering Linux for one of its options.
Microsoft will just offer Windows for free and Office at a steep discount and nothing will change. Mark my words :-)
Which... doesn’t have a really incentive now in because all of the legacy components that required Windows in the first place are all broken on Win10...
> Office at a steep discount
... and we don’t really rely on Microsoft Office that much (compared to other countries). The dominant word processor is from a local company (side note: Word is just awful... seriously. Maybe it’s due to no competition., and the local company has viable solutions that provide very high compatibility (seriously, l just can’t believe how they did it, it’s super compatible) with Word, Excel & Powerpoint. (AFAIK they export them to other countries governments as well.)
But how will Martha in Accounting (or whatever the Korean equivalent of Martha in Accounting is) learn how to deal with the UX terribleness that is most of Linux? Windows she's been using all of her life, it might not be much better but she's used to it.
> They learnt to deal with the terrible UX in Windows, no reason they can’t on Linux. :-)
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.
If you pick some random community version, then yes.
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.)
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.
> (BTW, seriously, is there anyone who uses Outlook anymore?)
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.
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.
Are you telling me 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?
> 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.
Microsoft will just offer Windows for free and Office at a steep discount and nothing will change. Mark my words :-)