I'd be very interested in hearing how much training they had to do for people to learn to use Linux and OpenOffice. If German office workers are like the ones I've met in the U.S., any slight change to their computers will result in a lot of questions.
Having tried to use OpenOffice for my office needs, I'd be curious to see how this works out for them. Needless to say, I haven't used OpenOffice in years and have no desire to try again. If I were going with a Linux solution, I'd try to get as many workers using cloud-based apps as possible.
Not every worker could do this, but from my experience with ChromeOS, the majority of general office workers could get their work done with it, and it's a cheap, secure and stable solution. But a lot of governments may not want to touch cloud services and may not know how to develop their own.
That's like eons in actively developed software. I believe giving LibreOffice a spin may change your notion of the quality of the OS alternative. As an anecdote, Excel 2003 has 65K row limit. In current LO it's ~ 1M rows if I remember correctly. I will admit that it is a bit apples to oranges, since Excel 2003 was created way back, but in practical terms, that is what I get on my office desktop. Being able to run LO as an alternative can be a life saver...
Do offices actually have anything you could really call "training" for this sort of thing? The way I see it working is they come into the office one day, an IT guy swaps out their computer, and they flounder for a few days. One person figures out a few things and they become a crutch for everyone else a few more days until everyone has the new sequences of keys/buttons memorized (as that seems to be the common way of using computers). That's how the Office/Ribbon rollout seems to have worked anyway.
You lose productivity, which can be converted into dollars in the case of a business (not so easy with a non-profit generating government I think), but that's about it.
Having tried to use OpenOffice for my office needs, I'd be curious to see how this works out for them. Needless to say, I haven't used OpenOffice in years and have no desire to try again. If I were going with a Linux solution, I'd try to get as many workers using cloud-based apps as possible.
Not every worker could do this, but from my experience with ChromeOS, the majority of general office workers could get their work done with it, and it's a cheap, secure and stable solution. But a lot of governments may not want to touch cloud services and may not know how to develop their own.