Also note that government NEEDS stability, which Linux very much wasn’t until recently (and arguably still isnt); this is why Windows has starting becoming a liability.
I was using Linux in the late 90s when my Linux machine would run for months, only being rebooted when I decided to do a kernel upgrade, and meanwhile everybody was running Windows 95, one of the least stable OSes that I’ve ever used. It literally had a counter baked into the OS that caused a crash if you ran it for a certain amount of days, I think 30. If stability was so important, they’d have switched to Linux back then.
Even in the late 90s, the UI was decent enough as long as you had a decent administrator. I don’t think casual users could be expected to set up Linux back then, but that’s not a government type of use case.
I was using Linux in the late 90s when my Linux machine would run for months, only being rebooted when I decided to do a kernel upgrade, and meanwhile everybody was running Windows 95, one of the least stable OSes that I’ve ever used. It literally had a counter baked into the OS that caused a crash if you ran it for a certain amount of days, I think 30. If stability was so important, they’d have switched to Linux back then.
Even in the late 90s, the UI was decent enough as long as you had a decent administrator. I don’t think casual users could be expected to set up Linux back then, but that’s not a government type of use case.