Not just that, it's also beneficial to the organization because that can just.. implement it themselves, and then do a pull request, instead of being reliant upon a corporation to care about your desires. Literally a win-win. I hope state actors come to realize that sooner rather than later, it only makes sense

They actually seem to run into it pretty quickly. The 20% have not switched, because LibreOffice seems to lack features.

Didn't that one just "accidentally" happen when München started building their LiMux distribution, and after Steve Ballmer went to visit them personally?

Minister presidents do decide such a thing. They can say which system the state administration uses. See Schleswig-Hollstein, NRW

Ehhhh this time might be different. The shift seems to be cultural across European country's leaderships.

They're seeing Trump's actions, they're seeing the repeated failures by Microsoft and the repeated monopolistic abuses by Microsoft and Silicon Valley as a whole (which, that's a term that's seemed to entirely fall off now that I think of it!) they're finally seeing what the Linux evangelists have been saying, as well as seeing the potential money to be made by nurturing their own European tech industry

I think it's the right storm of the Trump administration coinciding with Microsoft's sketchy Windows 11 migration (with at least half a billion devices being sent to the ewaste pile early) also coinciding with the very visible alignment of large tech platforms with Trump. Its also been a solid 30 years (give or take) of Microsoft dominating the desktop landscape and the last 15 years (give or take) of Microsoft consuming more and more of the server and cloud landscape, so individual decision makers have had plenty of time to get more and more fed up with Microsoft

The only question is if there's enough negative sentiment and distrust towards Microsoft and other American tech companies to push through the growing pains of scaling these open source solutions to entire countries, which we may well have given we're still in the first of 4 years of another Trump administration (especially if the Republican party remains as far out of alignment with Europe as they have been)

If external professional support is needed they could just buy it too. One of the bigger Linux companies, SUSE, is even from Germany, and still operates out of Nürnberg (or "Nuremberg" for people who are more familiar with the anglicized name).

RHEL exists... linux isnt just for sweaty nerds in basements, it's also for sweaty enterprise desktop end users....

That’s nonsense. Just because something is open source, doesn’t mean that support doesn’t exist.

What? There are many companies supporting Linux commercially: Collabora (Who support specifically Libre office etc, Igalia)

Another European country tried that switch but found that retraining employees was too expensive and inefficient.

It's not one that you previously bought, it just appears as an option in the software manager.