Outside of the HN echo chamber there are thousands of companies building native applications, which are used by millions of organisations around the world. Not everything is delivered via the web.
If you include all civil servants (which the definition listed by wikipedia does) you will find police officers, national economists, sociologists, intelligence officers, surgeons, traders and many many more professionals there.
All the specialists will of course require domain specific software. In anything involving economics or statistics you will probably find SAS or R, someone tasked with planning mobile spectrum would have GIS applications etc.
For instance, even most police officers in the area where I live don't need special software. Some do, but most use a few web apps and java apps to do their paper work.
It's like a non-tech mid-sized business, really. All the management and many of the employees don't need anything more than word processing. And then there are people in technical roles whose needs are served on an individual basis (or, in good environments, their manager is handed a budget and told "have you people get what they need")
I know that it has its problems if you want to use it with Word generated documents, and it obviously has problems with add-ons developed for Word.
But I could really think that it works quite nice, if all your documents are generated for LibreOffice.
I am using Open / LibreOffice since nearly 10 years exclusively at home and I don't have any problems using it - but my needs are VERY modest. Basically I am using it as an WYSIWYG typewriter.
Most of the problems come from, I think, unnecessary features. For example a footer for the author's name on each page.
I found that move to decentralization and the availability of compilers and tools and dev. environments and easy ways to get admin privileges, well I credit that with my learning how to code/admin/... and to my succes later in life. These computers, I've heard from a friend, are LOCKED down. As in, try to compile anything against a GUI library is a complete non-starter. Compiling anything under linux without root is almost impossible.
Add to that that even the development environments that do exist on linux are ... well sorry to say but let's be honest here ... far inferior for learning to code and to writing simple games than the ones available on windows.
Nobody's going to learn how to use computers, how to program and how to improve their situation on these linux machines. And that sucks.
But hey, easier on the admins !
(not that it's anywhere near as bad as SAAS though)
This is bizarre, and very much not true. If you have a C compiler and sufficient disk space you can build whatever you want in your home directory. It might take a while, but most things that use autoconf will accept `--prefix=/home/user/stuff/` and target that location.
Not having a C compiler is rare as it tends to be deep in the requirements chain of other packages. For other languages, I believe Python is mandatory on Redhat and Perl on Debian, if you don't mind old versions.
nano awesomewebglgame.htmlThe technical lead of the LiMux project told a story once about a German federal agency that required documents to be submitted in a very specific, unusual font that basically everybody had to buy first.