A few years later, he still complains about it. I still haven't found any of his colleagues happy of the change.
The huge majority of those guys are not technical, and as pragmatic as the change may be; it is quite hard for the people impacted :).
In the end, every single guy I know now has bought a laptop with Win 7, brings it to work and works on it. Ubuntu is not used.
People don't want to change.
Did your father have to configure his access to the (probably) Samba based file shares, set up his own account on the network, map all of the printers, configure his own email client etc?
Part of a large enterprise roll-out is pre-configuration. I can't imagine the Gendarmerie IT dept. appreciating all of this extra configuration for "every single guy" with a Win 7 laptop.
How does it work? With a cracked version of Office and a USB key that is passed from hands to hands. The email client? A web based interface.
For gendarmerie based stuff that requires special software (taking depositions for example), of course it is handled on Ubuntu because they have no choice.
But a lot of their paperwark time is spent filling word documents and excel spreadsheets, something that can be done on any computer.
Gendarmerie IT dept, lawl? They changed the computer and gave them one phone number for support, of a guy that is located 200 km away :).
IT support don't want to put LibreOffice on the desktops in case it confuses users being similar but different to MS Office.
Was doing exactly the same when I was working for the government as a student a while back. There was no internet access, for security reasons.
Good lesson on how to learn about debugging and reading manuals though