Having dealt with this: There are actually very strong arguments for MS being the responsible decision.

For all its MANY flaws if you are doing anything more complex than “browsing the internet”, it is “stable” with a 206.2 billion USD company focused on making it work(-ish) for what governments actually need: A locked down environment where employees run 1-10 apps.

And with it being the industry/consumer standard: Your staff likely know enough that they can debug trivial problems (yeah… about that). But, more importantly, smaller orgs (county office, for example) can just rely on the service contract with whatever prebuilt vendor they went with. Paying for priority access to a call center is a lot cheaper than paying to keep Moss and Roy in the basement. And, for the on site IT, you have a much larger applicant pool.

Linux’s main advantages are

1. It is more secure/a smaller target attack wise. For government customers, that doesn’t really matter. Because… you are now a decent enough target that bad actors will put in the work to target your specific configurations
2. It is cheaper: Not at the enterprise level. You are either paying for a windows license (trivial) and a support contract or you are paying for RHEL or whatever… and a support contract. And even if you decide that kubuntu is what your entire government should run on: You are paying for a support contract
3. It is easier to remote manage. I hear this pretty often and… it really isn’t. Shit like Jumpcloud and GCP are insane.

Some governments make the transition (I think a few german states use linux?). But the vast majority end up rolling back because the benefits actually aren’t there at their scale and use case.

That said, I am REALLY interested what happens in ten or so years when the majority of new hires are used to working with cloud software and the like.

Seriously, this is a pretty common misconception. As a consumer, Linux is awesome and a lot cheaper. But for a company (especially one with expectations and oversights like a government org), you aren’t really saving much money. Windows licenses are fairly cheap. The real cost is the support contract and overhead. And you are almost definitely getting that contract from the folk who sell you computers and possibly also keeping staff on site. Which are a LOT more expensive than the windows license you may or may not need. Which further gets negated because you are now in the realm where getting RHEL over Rocky matters (… assuming Rocky exists in a few months) or Ubuntu Pro over free (which, admittedly, is more about the online support and patching tools).

This change is driven more by defense personnel than it is by corrupt politician. I am less hopeful for parliament and other govt services switching.