As an Austrian, if you asked me what language I speak I'd probably either say Austrian or German with a Viennese accent. The differences in pronunciation and vocabulary compared to regular German (as well as pretty much all accents spoken in Germany and Switzerland) are large enough that our language seems to be an important part of our national identity.
And honestly, there's quite the language barrier between Austrians and Germans and communicating might take a conscious effort on both sides to speak the agreed-upon "standard German". And even then you might find out that regular words you use all the time are unknown to the other party.
Hell, even some friends and I sometimes have trouble understanding each other because of differences in dialects, and we only live 200km (~120 miles) apart. Never mind weird parts of the country like Vorarlberg where even a friend who's into linguistics couldn't understand any freaking thing they were saying.
Students and staff have an LDAP account. All mails go to your
Local WLAN offers 802.1x authentication, VPN and IPSec and unencrypted access with a web-based authentication gateway. To remotely access resources, you can either use VPN and mount your home directory via NFS or ssh to a public student server and do ssh forwarding from there or use X11 forwarding.
Pretty much all operating systems are supported. Detailed instructions and support are provided for Windows, Linux, OS X.
I am aware that this setup is not very common, but it does prove that it is indeed possible to run the IT of an entire university with thousands of students on Linux and support every major operating system.
I'm also sure that you university could easily support Linux if they only wanted to. Linux already supports nearly every protocol you could throw at it and most Linux users know what they are doing. Just enable some non-proprietary protocol, post an example configuration file and you should be good to go.
Some examples of how good Linux support looks like can be found here and here.
The moon is made of green cheese. -- John Heywood