> But for typical government workers? I imagine the differences are going to be pretty significant. They're not programmers or "devops" people.

How much retraining do you need for "click on the orange and blue spinny fox thingy and wait for your email to come up"?

> because the GUI has its own file manager program and no matter which one you choose (and they will choose exactly one) it is not Explorer

Nobody is ever going to use it. They're going to use a web browser.

> There's no telling what idiosyncrasies people depend on.

Funny way of spelling "Firefox bugs", but whatever.

> In organizations like this I really doubt you can count on everyone being generically computer literate

Basic adult literacy is computer literacy. If you can read you can use a computer.

I get the sense you haven't worked with many non-technical people in government or enterprise contexts. I've seen people struggle with their workflows after upgrading to a newer version of Windows, to the point where company wide training sessions have had to be held.