France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech

https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/10/france-to-ditch-windows-for-linux-to-reduce-reliance-on-us-tech/

by Teever • 3 months ago

641 695 3 months ago

sgt2• 3 months ago

That might work for government employees using webapps all day. But for power users it is unlikely to be friction free.

It doesn't have to be friction-free. The rough edges can be sanded down with government investment that addresses the needs of citizen-users.

cududa• 3 months ago

“Well, did it work for those people?”

“No, it never does. I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but……

…But it might work for us!”

deaux• 3 months ago

Unlike modern Windows, known for its lack of friction.

raverbashing• 3 months ago

"We have two versions of Outlook and none of them are working"

AussieWog93• 3 months ago

I feel like this is perfect being the enemy of good. So lets say only 80% of their staff can get off Windows and the remaining 20% need to remain on it. That's a great start!

Vespasian• 3 months ago

And you can require new custom software to be compatible and guarantee an initial market.

It's a strategic decision and of course it's not financially optimal.

And if in 20 years thered still a few windows computers around in their org that doesn't matter

jmclnx• 3 months ago

And a recipe for failure. All 100% of their staff needs to be moved off of Windows at the same time.

A few years ago, IBM tried to move everyone to LibreOffice from M/S Office. It failed, the reason why was top level execs and some others were allowed to stay on M/S Office. As time went on, M/S Windows became a Status Symbol. So people went begging and as time went on exceptions were granted. A few even went so far as to buy their own copy, which was allowed.

After 8 months IBM gave up. If you want things like this to succeed, you must be 100% in.

iso1631• 3 months ago

I'm a power user and I've used linux for over 25 years. My corporate windows machine is total trash and completely unsuitable for any power users, either because its windows or because corporate locks it down so much it's barely more functional than a chromebook, I don't really care.

realusername• 3 months ago

That's also what Microsoft 365 is, a webapp, even the latest Outlook is a webapp.

sgt2• 3 months ago

Nobody in their right mind prefer the web apps over the native apps if they sit all day doing e.g spreadsheets. I tried the M365 web app for Word the other day and it's sluggish.

Topfi3• 3 months ago

Respectfully, so what? There have always be specific use cases and user bases requiring a specific OS. No one ever considered OpenBSD interchangeable with Windows, few see Linux distros as a 100% drop in replacement for someone relying on Logic Pro.

Thing is, I really don't get this knee jerk "but what about INSERT_RARE_EDGECASE". It isn't helpful and argues something no one actually working on these projects ever proposed. Even if MSFT software remains in use, any gained alternative is a win, license costs and strategic autonomy both being valuable.

And yes, as you hinted, a large contingent of clerical work may already happen in a browser, with any found exceptions potentially addressable in the coming years, especially as older implementation may be updated anyways.

Let's be honest, we all underestimate how much we (can) do solely inside the browser anyways and even more so severely misgauge how few people are reliant on any native (none Electron) software at all outside gaming.

Power user is such a nebulous term anyway. To me, someone spending hours on end in Confluence can be a power user, having never left the browser. The same for a designer using Figma. Course, if one truly requires native only software, they may more likely fall under the umbrella power user, but again, few are seriously discussing just forcing those over since, reasonably, one must presume they have a reason for doing what they are doing.

dubcanada2• 3 months ago

What is a power user in this context? Someone deeply familiar with Windows and has tons of Windows related setup/applications?

That doesn't sound like a government worker... They rely on Microsoft Office, but the actual operating system could be anything. The only non-portable application is video games really. While LibreOffice may not have complete excel functionality, the vast majority of functionality can be replicated in web apps/libreoffice. And frankly most of this work can be migrated to AI.

You can even skin Linux to look exactly like Windows if you want, or use Mint or something. But really all people need is to be able to open up Chrome and Excel.

Topfi3• 3 months ago

In fairness, the transition away from MSFT 365 Copilot (as we all of course call Office now) might include more friction. Mountainous VBasic monstrosities are sometimes the way things get done in orgs I am personally familiar with and that can be hard to switch away from. In general though, I consider this focusing on edge cases as just not helpful, especially as one must start a transition to fully uncover them and get to addressing them too. I also don't think that ancient Excel scripts are an unsolvable problem, but one that needs to be very carefully handled.

robertlagrant3• 3 months ago

I imagine the biggest thing they need to open up is Outlook.

einr4• 3 months ago

Sometimes organizations need to undertake work that is not friction free to achieve longer term goals.

teekert2• 3 months ago

I consider myself a Power User, use of Windows is not friction free :)

Over the years I've come to believe that there is only one thing important: What you are used to. The friction is in the change process. Not in the destination.

As an independent, I have several customers on MS365, you know what my super power is? FireFox cookie containers. One for each org, and I switch with 0 effort between the orgs. No need for Windows in that workflow at all. In fact, using Windows and the native apps would probably give me a lot more friction.

Yes, sometimes I have issues. I.e. yesterday Word kept deleting my last 1-2 sentences for some reason, even though hitting ctrl-s tells everytime: "I should not worry". but in general it's fine.

My business is on Proton, and I love that MS365 AND Google workspace calender invites go right into my agenda with no effort. There is nice stuff out there. Especially now we have Proton Meet, I can take some ownership over videocalls in Teams and Google Meet finally.

ghaff4• 3 months ago

What you are used to.

Absolutely. I've given using a tablet (with keyboard) as an alternative to a laptop when traveling and it sort of frustrates me for a lot of things. But talking to people I know who have largely switched over, my conclusion is that, in general, I probably mostly just haven't put the effort and commitment to make it worth it for me. And I'm not sure, not spending nearly as much time on planes as I used to, it's worth it relative to getting a laptop that is even lighter than the combination.

croes2• 3 months ago

Power Users faced the same problems when Office changed to ribbon menus. It doesn't has to be friction free.

palata4• 3 months ago

Can you call yourself "power user" when your point is that switching away from Windows is too hard for you?

onraglanroad2• 3 months ago

Windows power users are the ones who have the greatest difficulty switching.

Basic users just want a web browser and need instructions for anything else anyway.

Hardcore geeks have tried everything going and have no problems with Cisco IOS.

It's the folk in the middle who struggle.

Just kidding about Cisco: it sucks.

astrobe_• 3 months ago

There's a negligible amount of "power users" among government employees; I think the majority of them are trained in reading and applying laws, and given the strong scientific/literary divide in the French culture, they usually think of themselves as inapt with computers (and the erratic behavior of MS products didn't help, if you ask me).

But knowing France, what to really worry about is execution, in particular for administrations. Probably people working there who read the TFA already think "oh, big mess incoming" even though they don't know what this "Linux" thing is.

I think standard IT/sysadmin training focuses mainly on Windows server etc., Linux being a second class citizen (because that's what the vast majority of small/mid sized businesses use). So recruiting good Linux sysadmins could be an issue, especially since the wages in government agencies are not exactly attractive.

onraglanroad2• 3 months ago

85% of cloud servers are Linux. It's not a niche product for people who work with servers.

Latitude7973• 3 months ago

France has been making good moves to achieve software independence from the US. It would be an even better move to allow those in Europe or indeed the rest of the world to also benefit.

rvnx3• 3 months ago

It's good to differentiate truly independent tech from the unfortunately common government-pushed French-tech that are US-tech rewrapped.

e.g. Qwant is a re-skin of Microsoft Bing

It's a great move overall.

Pay08• 3 months ago

Ok? You could make the same argument about Chinese tech, German tech, or American tech.

cybrox• 3 months ago

As far as I know, Qwant indexes itself and substitute with existing crawler results, which seems a reasonable compromise.

SyneRyder• 3 months ago

Qwant is working on that. Together with Ecosia they're building their own index called the European Search Perspective:

"Today, Europe receives 99% of the answers to search queries from external infrastructures. We believe, however, that a higher level of digital sovereignty is essential for a functioning democracy and economy. With our new web index, we are creating a European perspective on politics, culture and values. This is a long overdue step towards more plurality in the digital world, which is also being called for by our society."

https://www.eu-searchperspective.com

brnt• 3 months ago

They do: https://github.com/suitenumerique It's used by, among others, the Dutch government: https://github.com/MinBZK/mijn-bureau

vrganj• 3 months ago

France and Germany are actually cooperating on most of these, like the word processor: https://www.techspot.com/news/107225-france-germany-unveil-d...

Plus, it's all open source, so the rest of the world is free to use it as well!

kombine3• 3 months ago

This is great! Any plans to add spreadsheets to the suite?

palata4• 3 months ago

It would be an even better move to allow those in Europe or indeed the rest of the world to also benefit.

Those initiatives are usually open source. It's just that many times, each country wants to make their own. But it's still better than staying with the TooBigTech monopolies.

mickael-kerjean5• 3 months ago

It's just that many times, each country wants to make their own

This hits hard. I'm a French citizen who made an open source alternative to Dropbox [1], I would have never thought my own government to attempt competing in my niche. I did contact the people at DINUM and it seems they are more interested in making their own than contributing to existing projects they don't fully control

[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

kergonath2• 3 months ago

France is funding a lot of open source projects. They may not be very sexy or trendy, but they are there.

mrjay422• 3 months ago

There's been some 'back and forth' or "progress and regress' about this.

Adoption of Free Software:

2012 Prime Minister circular — the most important formal turning point: Orientations pour l'usage des logiciels libres dans l'administration, signed on 19 September 2012. It explicitly gave guidance to public administrations on free software use.

2016 Digital Republic Law — reinforced the direction by encouraging public administrations to use free software and open formats.

2021 action plan for Free Software and Digital Commons — launched after the Prime Minister’s circular of 27 April 2021, with goals to increase awareness, use, publication of source code, and reuse across administrations.

2024–2026 LaSuite / Suite Numérique — current state-led open-source collaboration suite, presented by DINUM as a coherent set of open-source tools for public agents and positioned as part of the state’s sovereignty strategy

Rollbacks and proprietary deals

Microsoft “Open Bar” contract with the Ministry of Defence / Armed Forces — a major counterexample. The Senate records say the framework agreement started in 2009 and was renewed for 2013–2017 and 2017–2021, without publicity or competition, giving the ministry broad access to Microsoft’s catalog.

Criticism and replacement with UGAP purchasing — later reporting says the open-bar arrangement ended in February 2021 and was replaced by a convention via UGAP, but the ministry still relied on broad Microsoft licensing and associated services.

2025 education procurement for Microsoft — a public tender worth 74 million euros for the Ministry of Education and higher education services was attributed to Microsoft, showing that proprietary dependence continued alongside open-source policy.

2025–2026 public-private partnerships in sovereignty language — France and Germany announced a partnership with Mistral AI and SAP for sovereign AI in public administration, which is not a free-software rollback in the strict sense, but it is a clear example of the state pursuing sovereignty through private-sector partnerships rather than purely internal open-source development.

---

Conclusion:

Like anything in capitalism: it's a constant fight, permanent struggle. The big private companies will try to massively impact political life.

So, there IS in France this 'feeling', this consciousness, throughout the political landscape (mostly on the left and also a little bit on the right) that we need to have some sovereignty over our data, services, software, etc.

Every once in a while, a right-side political figure, who are basically ruling since 2000, (except from 2012-2017 where France had a social-democratic government and president) has a sparkle of dignity, decency, logic, and honesty towards the best interests of the country and leans towards Free Software adoption. But...the lobbies are always there to rollback each decision, or part of each decision, and gradually gain back their influence.

hootz3• 3 months ago

This permanent struggle is so tiresome. Makes me feel powerless and depressed.

mickael-kerjean5• 3 months ago

As a French citizen who spent almost a decade building an alternative to Dropbox that's libre software [1] I was very disappointed my own country decided to build a product competing with mine when French companies are about 1% of the existing customer base. I would have never thought my own government would be competing on my niche

[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

Zababa2• 3 months ago

a right-side political figure, who are basically ruling since 2000, (except from 2012-2017 where France had a social-democratic government and president)

This is not really true, since 2017 we have a centrist president. For the legal power, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Assembly_(France)#Fif....

esskay4• 3 months ago

Yeah good on them, everyone needs to do this. It's nuts Windows is still the go-to for anything these days despite everyone knowing what a parasitic, buggy mess it is. "Easy" shouldn't be the excuse in this day and age. Big orgs and especially government entities should be hiring the people that know what they're doing and get off that crummy platform.

polski-g• 3 months ago

It makes sense that everyone uses Windows for gaming, because you can't run games in your browser.

It makes zero sense for businesses to use Windows if they're only doing PowerPoint and video conferences.

embedding-shape10• 3 months ago

It's almost like Microsoft might be offering something on top of businesses using Windows, that isn't as commonly available for other platforms.

Or businesses are just clueless face-less entities who have no idea what they're doing. Probably the truth is a little bit of both.

Gud• 3 months ago

No it makes no sense at all. I do my gaming on Arch.

Windows sucks and I hope to see the demise of Microsoft during my lifetime(crosses fingers).

klabb32• 3 months ago

1. total abandonment of desktop as a platform, and the massive hurdles to distribute desktop software

2. move to Cloud and use electron wrappers because not even MS can bother making native apps on their shitty platform

3. Make Windows so shit that even hardcore power users can’t debloat it.

The moat of Windows is gone. Games, office work, all the classic arguments, have basically vanished in the last 5-10 years. The only surprise is why more people don’t get in the life rafts, when the ship is listing at 45 degrees. Is it because there’s still an army of workers and institutional inertia trained in Active Directory?

bergheim• 3 months ago

This comment was wildly invalid even years ago.

See proton, heroic launcher, etc, etc.

Cyberpunks own benchmarking suite runs 30% faster (for whatever reason; my wintendo install is stock and nothing but nvidia drivers) on the ntfs windows partition on Arch.

zecg• 3 months ago

Except today games all work and invariably markedly better on Linux. Even the games that stopped working on Windows for me work great, like https://www.protondb.com/app/2008510

kombine3• 3 months ago

Actually, it's the exact opposite. There is really no alternative to PowerPoint on Linux, unfortunately. I'm saying this as someone who's used Linux for 20 years now.

drooopy• 3 months ago

My Linux computer now is my main gaming machine. I purged my Windows partition a couple of years ago and haven't had the need to look back yet.

surgical_fire• 3 months ago

The vast majority of my Steam library runs on Mint without issues (and some older games run actually smoother on Linux than they did on Windows).

Not to mention my very large emulation library.

I have no idea what you are talking about.

breve• 3 months ago

Run your Windows games on Linux: https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/nearly-90-percen...

ChocolateGod• 3 months ago

It's nuts Windows is still the go-to for anything these days despite everyone knowing what a parasitic

Linux still doesn't have anywhere near as nice and cohesive as Group Policy, Active Directory etc.

Plus you can pay Microsoft to host it all for you on Azure.

forinti• 3 months ago

Yes, liberty comes at a cost. It seems that convenience is no longer the main motivator for many people.

llarsson• 3 months ago

Imagine what can happen if the French and other governments would start pouring all the money into developing that further in the open, rather than just giving it all to Microsoft instead?

hug2• 3 months ago

Group Policy and Active Directory are dead, for all intents and purposes.

It's now Intune (via OMA-DM), and Entra. Both of those products are about as bad as you might imagine the "cloud" versions of GP & AD might be.

They are better, in ways -- no longer having to care and feed for domain controllers is nice, and there's no longer an overhead for additive policy processing, so endpoints only get a single set of policy and log on much quicker -- but for the most part, enterprise management of Windows devices is in a worse place than it was ten years ago.

Try to figure out how long it will take an online Intune device to discover a new policy: As far as I can tell the answer is "eventually". There are bandaids for this, because of how infuriating it is, of course, but all time guarantees are basically gone.

Ask me a decade ago what an enterprise should do, and my answer would be straightforward: AD, GPO, Exchange.

The answer now is not simple.

ndriscoll• 3 months ago

I've never understood the management thing. People manage fleets of Linux machines all the time. What does group policy do that e.g. nix or ansible don't?

pjc504• 3 months ago

Linux still doesn't have anywhere near as nice and cohesive as Group Policy, Active Directory etc.

Isn't it about time someone developed one?

The foundations are there; you can imagine an organization deploying laptops with, say, Ansible, and not giving users root on them. LDAP sort of matches the old capabilities of AD, but not completely. There's even a "SAMBA as fake domain controller" mode.

Ironically what it needs is a product or service which organizations can pay to take the problem off their hands. But then people get stuck in never paying for anything in the open source world.

Levitating2• 3 months ago

Linux still doesn't have anywhere near as nice and cohesive as Group Policy, Active Directory etc.

I am sure that's something the Gnome Foundation could figure out if they had a grant to do so.

kgwxd3• 3 months ago

Even the old companies have moved away from that nonsense. Huge waste of resources.

Bayart2• 3 months ago

The primitives are there and they're solid, beyond that it's "just" architecture and integration work. Hopefully the French government will be rational with this (I believe the time and financial constraints will for it to be, we're broke and we lack time) and they won't fall into the trap of trying to internalize every bit of the platform.

A good example of that would be what happened with Docker. Off the top of my head cgroups, namespaces, seccomp, overlays and capabilities had been around for a while before it got rolled up in a nice utility in 2013 and opensourced in 2015. Hence the containerization movement. Solaris zones and FreeBSD jails were nice but they always were let's say a bit too bearded.

ninjagoo• 3 months ago

Linux still doesn't have anywhere near as nice and cohesive as Group Policy, Active Directory etc.

Enterprise environments use a number of tools like Powerbroker, UCS, Centrify/Delinea etc to bind linux machines to active directory and manage identity and access through active directory. This is for mixed environments with both Windows and Linux machines.

For pure linux environments, there are a number of tools like FreeIPA/IdM, Samba AD/DC (for A/D like management), and OpenText's eDirectory for the current version of Novell's eDirectory counterpart to A/D. They all provide centralized user/host/policy/access management.

Since Entra+Intune are the recent MS products, cloud-based equivalents are Jumpcloud+Fleet, Okta PAM, FreeIPA/IdM.

Zigurd2• 3 months ago

Personal computers were used in office environments long before the technologies to make them administer-able as if they were a mainframe. Before blindly jumping in and reproducing those technologies, better to ask why they emerged in the first place.

Most workplaces don't have strict bans on personal mobile devices, and some of the ones that do, don't have the kind of physical perimeter defense that can detect people getting lazy about whether or not they carry their personal mobile devices into the workplace. That makes perimeter defense into security theater anyway. We need a rethink about what we are guarding against and how we're doing it.

oneplane• 3 months ago

It does, it's called FreeIPA (or RedHat IdM). The only GPO parts it doesn't do are those that are not related to policy in the IAM sense (i.e. configuring some application related thing). There's other systems for that, just like on Windows you practically never run GPO without anything else. On top of that, you can pay RedHat or Canonical to host it all for you on any cloud or non-cloud.

Lihh272• 3 months ago

that's the catch with gp/ad. for a lot of orgs the hard part is intune/entra now. swapping the desktop is easy. replacing identity and device management is the real migration

XorNot• 3 months ago

Honestly as wide spread as it is, managing group policy sanely is still a challenge I've found - it's very resistant to configuration as code.

Linux has a lot of the pieces but is principally lacking a solid distribution system - in particular a big missing component is the network-based SELinux policy distribution system which you can see some hooks in for the concept of a "policy server" which never eventuated.

SELinux would be a lot more viable if it had a solid way to federate and distribute policy and has some nice features in that regard (i.e. the notion that networked systems can exchange policy tags to preserve tagging across network connections).

otikik2• 3 months ago

Must be the only nice and cohesive parts left. Perhaps they have not figured out how to put ads on AI on it because it doesn't have many users.

Spooky23• 3 months ago

This is actually a good time to disrupt that, as Microsoft’s attention is not on windows and Active Directory is slowly moving to Entra, although big enterprises are mostly hybrid.

Some places are using Okta for many of those functions too. Trump’s instinctive parasitic slumlord behavior may be enough for the sleepy Europeans to get their shit together.

kakacik2• 3 months ago

No non-US government should host anything on azure, or any other US-owned cloud. Thats security and sovereignity 101, or more like 100. Reality with hostile US being as it is.

What you list are no showstoppers, and since its a well known topic I cant imagine why some EU-funded effort in say 2 billions over next 3-5 years shouldnt reaolve it once and for all, for entire world. Well invested money.

guenthert2• 3 months ago

Linux still doesn't have anywhere near as nice and cohesive as Group Policy, Active Directory etc.

I take your word for it (I know of Kerberos and LDAP and Netscape and Sun trying to make such palatable, but clearly haven't followed that in the last quarter-century).

That assumes however the server to be currently MS Windows. For government agencies, I'd rather expect some Mainframe to be (and remain) in place. Surely IBM (or here rather Groupe Bull) has user authentication/authorization figured out (more than half a century ago, methinks).

franktankbank• 3 months ago

I'm sorry, but how hard is that? Seriously.

radiator2• 3 months ago

But isn't that the whole point, that foreign governments perhaps do not want Microsoft to host all their data, users, groups, software on Azure, because then the CIA also might obtain access?

andrepd3• 3 months ago

The money governments sink into Microsoft could have funded a sovereign OSS ecosystem many times over.

booleandilemma2• 3 months ago

"Easy" shouldn't be the excuse in this day and age.

I think "Easy" has been the excuse for everything humans do in every day and age.

derangedHorse• 3 months ago

Problem is that people like having a similar interface for both work and non-work things, and Linux doesn’t have enough penetration into the consumer market to influence stakeholders. The first step is making Linux the default choice for hardware providers. Framework was one of those pioneering this but was underfunded imo

port115• 3 months ago

I don’t think a lot of people still go home and use their computer for stuff. Most of my family will either rely on a phone or tablet to get anything done at home.

I doubt they’d care about which OS they’re on. Corporate tightens their laptops beyond belief, so all they’re really running is Teams and Excel. This seems to be the case for a lot of friends I talk to, no one gives a damn about Windows anymore. Heck, my sister-in-law moved to Ubuntu of her own choices, despite having low tech literacy.

blitzar2• 3 months ago

The first step is making Linux the default choice for schools, the rest will take care of itself in 10-20 years

snowstorm82• 3 months ago

I am skeptical about there is such "people that know what they are doing", nor would I trust such a claims. But with little twist I think I could onboard the idea with, "people who aim for analytical and open approach and reports". Thus opening the decision making under post analysis and future improvements so research body of knowledge would eventually turn the tide.

I haven't installed or used windows much for last decade, but still I'm bit a shamed that each time I install Linux on some computer I live existing windows drive untouched and available for backup in case I need it for some reason.

JaggerJo• 3 months ago

Hope we’ll do the same in germany.

Propelloni• 3 months ago

There were and are initiatives. Of course, they were and are ridiculed all the time. Who can't recall LiMuX or check out ZenDIS (Zentrum für Digitale Souveränität in der öffentlichen Verwaltung). Read up on the current migration away from MS Office in Schleswig-Holstein.

newqer• 3 months ago

They tried it a long time ago, but it seems to be rolled back to Windows again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

I hope our French friends can learn from this initiative during the adoption phase.

mijoharas• 3 months ago

I seem to remember many people saying it was done by the mayor because Microsoft moved their German headquarters

Reiter denied that he had initiated the reversal in gratitude for Microsoft moving its German headquarters from Unterschleißheim back to Munich

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

spacechild1• 3 months ago

but it seems to be rolled back to Windows again.

Apparently it was a decision by mayor Dieter Reiter after excessive lobbying by Microsoft. At roughly the same time, Microsoft moved their German headquarter back to Munich. What a coincidence...

lonelyasacloud• 3 months ago

I hope our French friends can learn from this initiative during the adoption phase.

The apps are available now, so reasons to be optimistic.

When LiMux and similar efforts happened around 2004 most business applications were Windows only. Even the ones that purported to be web used windows only technology and required IE and Windows.

Now with years of business budget controlling types using their Macs and smart phones and wanting access to the their apps the majority - even MS's stuff - can be run well in a browser on almost any OS.

tcfhgj• 3 months ago

"they" is a German city, not Germany

raincole• 3 months ago

You did, and you'll do again. Just like quitting smoking.

spiderfarmer4• 3 months ago

Being dependent on US tech feels the same as when we were dependent on Russian energy: strategically unwise and avoidable. We have alternatives, they just need work.

carlosjobim6• 3 months ago

Like last time, I ask again: Which are the European made computers?

sph4• 3 months ago

No European made computers today doesn't preclude the possibility that there will be one tomorrow. RISC-V is the way out, and there are a number of European initiatives (though nothing serious just yet, I admit)

As a European dev, because I like RISC-V and because of the geopolitical situation I wouldn't bet on x86 in the long term.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 3 months ago

What are the American-made computers? The Apple macbook assembled in China with Korean displays and Taiwanese chips?

GJim• 3 months ago

Being independent of Chinese manufacturing is a tougher challenge for anybody.

Though at least the Chinese are predictable, unlike dealing with the USA.

samus6• 3 months ago

Achieving redundancy from China is likely not possible in the near future. Meanwhile, the risk emanating from a rugpull or from deliberate sabotage by the USA is very concrete.

cromka• 3 months ago

"Like last time"

I am perplexed by people who use condescending phrases like this. You think we track what you said before?

edg50002• 3 months ago

Interestingly, there are zero non-US powerful laptops. The closest option is the Moore Threads MTT AI Book (12-core 2.65Ghz, 32GB DDR5, 1TB SSD, 14 inch). It cannot reach a modern Ryzen in performance though. It's fascinating that only the US can make good computers. I'm not from/in the US so I'm not saying that from a patriotic point of view. How hard can it be to pop a good ARM chip in a laptop and compete with HP, Apple and the likes?

embedding-shape10• 3 months ago

Which are the European made computers?

Recently, not so many I suppose. But many of the earliest computers were European, so surely we could get there again at one point, hardly impossible.

croes2• 3 months ago

Given that most chips use photolithography machines by ASML: nearly all of them

Snafuh• 3 months ago

I use an European made computer from Schenker (their XMG subbrand actually).

Of course the components are not European made. But Dell's components are not US made either.

I can also buy a Japanese or Korean (or Chinese) computer. There is no dependency on a single country.

kergonath2• 3 months ago

It’s all about risk management. No solution is ever perfect, and that works for the US as well.

Also, some partners are more reliable than others. If China becomes as volatile as the US, it would change the risk assessment and stimulate other parts of the industry.

DrBazza• 3 months ago

Which are the US made computers? Start by excluding all the ones with Korean LCD panels, and Taiwanese motherboards, and Chinese parts.

If you mean assembled then there are lots of very small European companies that make custom build PCs.

Economies of scale in the US, a single language, and cheap transport, mean that the US companies grow very big internally, very easily. And then go international without much effort. The same is not true in Europe, so there's not a huge Dell, HP, or IBM equivalent.

In 2026, the only country on the entire planet that can likely make their own computer with 100% their parts and labour, and is actively trying, is China.

blitzar2• 3 months ago

The goal isnt to become independent of China / Taiwan / the rest of Asia. The goal is to become independent of America.

Lihh272• 3 months ago

the license was never the real bill. the control plane was

specproc• 3 months ago

This is so utterly urgent. The US is an increasingly-deranged, hostile actor, which is able to cripple our tech at will.

I think we've been far too complacent about the direction of travel across the Atlantic. Trump and his crew are the new normal, and the key players in Silicon Valley are on board.

Any European government not currently working towards independence from US tech is being almost criminally neglectful.

spiderfarmer4• 3 months ago

Steps are being taken. This week two big announcements in The Netherlands as well, one for a replacement to AWS and one for taking US tech out of state secrets, which weirdly enough wasn’t already a thing.

Jyaif• 3 months ago

Unless you need some windows-only software, using windows at this point is masochism. I was never a fan of Linux, but the Microsoft driven enshitification is so strong that Linux is now a better option. To win, all Linux had to do is stand still, and that's exactly what it did! Ubuntu in 2026 is pretty much the same as Ubuntu from 2006.

master-lincoln2• 3 months ago

WINE has come a long way. Most Windows software now just works on Linux.

I don't know why you believe Ubuntu stood still. Looking at the history that does not seem to be the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_version_history

embedding-shape10• 3 months ago

Personally, the last holdover is Ableton. Last time this came up, bunch of people pointed me to https://github.com/BEEFY-JOE/AbletonLiveOnLinux which has since then been marked as archived, and I'm still unable to run Ableton 12 properly on Linux via WINE, even though I've probably spent too many man-hours on getting it to work...

I'm still eagerly awaiting the day though, any day now surely.

carlosjobim6• 3 months ago

You forget about MacOS. And Apple are making some very aggressive moves as of lately to capture users.

schnitzelstoat2• 3 months ago

MacOS is the same sort of walled garden as Windows though. It has plenty of dark patterns in stuff like iCloud too, I imagine with some more years of enshittification it will be in a similar state to Windows today.

esskay4• 3 months ago

Unless you need some windows-only software

In many cases even if you do though, its possible to run it on WINE pretty well these days. It's insane how good it's become in the last few years (partly thanks to proton and Valves investment in it all really)

ghaff4• 3 months ago

"Pretty well" is doing a lot of work. I have no horse in the race. I just run native on MacOS or Linux. Haven't run any Windows in a number of years. (I don't really game much and would just use my Xbox if I really wanted to--though that mostly functions as a DVD player these days.)

But if "pretty well" causes the random administrative person to have issues with doing their job or increases IT support costs, it will be off the menu pretty quickly. We'll see. A lot of things are different from the last round of we're going to Linux in Europe.

stratts• 3 months ago

Ubuntu in 2026 is pretty much the same as Ubuntu from 2006.

Well, Ubuntu MATE perhaps :)

Windows LTSC I find comes pretty close to the less intrusive Windows I remember from the XP/7 era.

lunar_rover• 3 months ago

To win, all Linux had to do is stand still, and that's exactly what it did!

It is moving? Red Hat has been investing in containised apps and image based distros for years, Valve single handedly made Linux gaming viable. HDR development is mostly driven by Valve and Red Hat customers.

And no Linux isn't good enough yet. UX is all over the place.

embedding-shape10• 3 months ago

And no Linux isn't good enough yet. UX is all over the place.

Of course you'd think the UX is messy if you only look at the kernel ;)

It's up to the distributions and desktop/window managers to handle the UX, and the experience varies as much as there are desktop/window managers. Some of them are fairly internally consistent, like KDE and Gnome, and at least they're currently more internally consistent than Windows and macOS. I use macOS, Windows and Gnome daily, and the only one that doesn't give me daily grief in some manner, is Gnome.

WhyNotHugo5• 3 months ago

And no Linux isn't good enough yet. UX is all over the place.

Sure, the UX for Linux desktop is all over the place, and a lot of software is messy and untidy. But Windows isn't any better in that sense. It doesn't have a clear, cohesive design style either. Its selling point used to be that users were familiar with the UI, but it seems to change so much that users can't really leverage that much either.

internet_points• 3 months ago

a Windows license is only cheap if your time has negative value

tom-blk• 3 months ago

Got my full support, go go go!!!

UK-Al052• 3 months ago

These are almost always negation strategies rather than serious initiatives.

bayindirh• 3 months ago

I don't think so. Having worked on a similar thing in my country, and the effort is monumental.

When doing this in a company, making technical people appreciate free software and making lasting changes is hard enough. When doing this with non-technical people, everything becomes exponentially harder.

embedding-shape10• 3 months ago

Sometimes yeah, but clearly not in this case, if you took the time to actually read the article.

You don't ask entire ministries and public operators to formulate a migration plan from Windows to Linux with a relatively short deadline just for negotiation purposes or just for the fun of it, you do that once you're committed to actually migrating.

This is not just a pilot project or some local administration doing an experiment, it's new country-wide policy enforced from the top, hardly a "negotiation strategy".

UK-Al052• 3 months ago

I've seen multiple countries do exactly that, then quietly drop it after a few years. If it doesn't look serious that doesn't actually help negotiate.

schnitzelstoat2• 3 months ago

It's a good move. Hopefully, they stick with it. I remember some cases in Germany where they switched and then later switched back.

It's a shame that we have no equivalent to Google or AWS in Europe and now that it seems LLMs might eat search, we don't have any of those either.

faccacta• 3 months ago

It seems like what Europe really needs to do this is a viable mobile OS. It's been true for a while that Linux + LibreOffice is plenty to handle most government workers' needs on the desktop, but that's only good for when they are at their desks. Are there any viable alternatives to iOS and Android that are totally free of "dépendances extra-européennes"? What's the plan?

samus6• 3 months ago

Android Open Source is good enough. The tough part are device-specific drivers that never make it upstream and are eventually abandoned by the vendor, making upgrade past specific kernel versions very troublesome.

notrealyme123• 3 months ago

It is controlled by Google so it not. As long as Google is setting the roadmap for android it is not a viable option.

embedding-shape10• 3 months ago

The Finns, as always, continue to develop mobile phones, Jolla is back from the dead and supposedly starts shipping sometime in 2026 with a new iteration on the hardware and the OS, time will tell if it'll have any impact.

Might not be 100% Europe-made from the get go, but good ideas and executions often start with small steps and iterate rather than having something groundbreaking out of the gate.

WhyNotHugo5• 3 months ago

I'm not convinced that replacing one proprietary OS with another is the solution.

That said, I won't deny that Jolla is much more trustworthy than Google or Apple.

WhyNotHugo5• 3 months ago

Linux on Mobile has been progressing steadily in recent years, and is in a state suitable for very early adopters and tech enthusiasts. Definitely not for the general population IMHO.

See: https://postmarketos.org/

FWIW, it's not just the EU that needs this urgently: most of humanity sorely needs a trustworthy mobile OS that's not designed against their interests.

Garlef2• 3 months ago

Linux on the desktop has been progressing for many many years... and a lot of stuff still doesn't work out of the box

I've recently had some fun at the intersection of "moving windows between screens" vs "ui scaling" vs "ambient system is wayland but the snap uses x11 internally".

dackdel• 3 months ago

remind me of firefox os https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/firefox-os

apatheticonion3• 3 months ago

A big hurdle to this is hardware vendors locking bootloaders and making it impossible (or impractical) to write or use existing drivers.

Manufacturers maintain long running forks of Android (often very old Linux kernels) with their drivers hidden in their fork's source.

I'm a firm believer in the right to repair software - and the fact that it's illegal to reverse engineer binary blob drivers (or proprietary software at all) is a shame (not that you could even untangle a driver from a binary blob of a Linux fork). I'd go as far as feeling strongly that drivers should be open source, and if they aren't, documentation sufficient for the community to write drivers should be made available by manufacturers.

Linux on M5? Should be easy

Linux on an X Elite Surface Book? Should be easy

Ubuntu Touch on my Pixel 9? Should be easy

Android TV on my TV? Should be easy

Proxmox on my 5g mobile router? Should be easy

No drivers / locked bootloaders = not possible

opan• 3 months ago

the fact that it's illegal to reverse engineer binary blob drivers (or proprietary software at all) is a shame

Where? I don't think it's illegal in the US at least. The only things I'm aware of that may have legal issues are related to radios, specifically modem/baseband stuff, and maybe WLAN cards.

benrutter• 3 months ago

Might be more google dependent than you're looking for, but I've been using Murena's /e/os (based in France) and it's working great for me.

cynicalsecurity• 3 months ago

Vive la France !

simmerup• 3 months ago

Switched to Nobara after getting fed up with one too many Windows bugs. Been a really pleasant experience to be honest

21asdffdsa12• 3 months ago

There should be a chapter in economic books on how entrenched monopoly companies become on the inside, like small states where little companies (called departments) play freemarket for promotion points, the outside forces completely suspended while the endoplasmic reticulum of the monopoly company lasts.

harlequinetcie• 3 months ago

I find fascinating how so many people are moving away from Microsoft decades after they should have because of simply the inertia that large organizations have on adoption.

Above all, I'm also surprised on how those same organization are using Anthropic or OpenAI or other close source solutions for their agent harnesses instead of going for Open Source.

Malte just yesterday showed how powerful innovation with small teams can be achieved particularly in EU.

I hope they start looking for those alternatives too for their agentic systems, beyond using pi-mono.

Bayart2• 3 months ago

I find fascinating how so many people are moving away from Microsoft decades after they should have because of simply the inertia that large organizations have on adoption.

That should be a good lesson in anthropology : the delta between knowing something and acting upon it tends to be immediate necessity. We're still an immature species as we haven't learned to be lazy at scale, that is putting the right amount of work early on to do the least overall. But I'm optimistic we'll get there.

port115• 3 months ago

The Trump administration has shown how many US corporations are willing to bend the knee. Perhaps that was the slap in the face we needed in Europe. It’s shown us that “oh, but they’re just a service provider” wasn’t that truthful, and their neutrality should be questioned.

morog2• 3 months ago

I used Linux 10 years ago, but then due to job or corp. and needing Teams and Outlook I was forced to uses Windows. Now with corp job over I was finally able to switch to Linux this week (Fedora + KDE). Loving improvements made in the last 10 years, KDE will always have its quirks, but it is fast and smooth with no crashes yet. I got Claude to make me a migration script which worked brilliantly, haven't needed to boot Windows yet. Browser sessions and everything worked like nothing had changed. All my various ssh / putty configs migrated to Konsole, Thunderbird carries on like nothing has changed. Ahhhh freedom!

shevy-java2• 3 months ago

Strange. I switched to Linux +25 years ago. My setup became quite minimal; right now I use IceWM for the most part. GNOME3 was always useless; KDE also changed since Nate "I need more moneys!" took over (see his donation daemon or the more recent "systemd-only" tied with wayland-only garbage that KDE succumbed to).

Linux is good in that you can combine things that work, so it is more flexible than windows. But desktop wise I don't see it becoming really dominant; GTK is now a GNOMEy-only toolkit. Qt is too busy focusing on their own business model. Desktop Linux is not useless, but it is really just sub-par compared to Windows. I also use Win10 on a second computer; I don't like it but I use it for testing. Linux lacks decision-making power focus (and corporations such as IBM/Red Hat are selfish, so these will never reach any "breakthrough" like the infamous Desktop of the Year, which I heard will come next year together with GNU Hurd ... I think).

kalaksi2• 3 months ago

Desktop Linux is not useless, but it is really just sub-par compared to Windows.

Each to their own. My experience is the opposite (I use KDE). I have to use Windows at work and it's always such a pain. At least Windows 10/11 finally has multiple workspaces natively and some keyboard shortcuts for managing windows (ironic), but I would have preferred to stay in Windows 10.

Now Windows doesn't even support proper suspend anymore and it won't stay in the "modern standby" either. Constantly waking up and doing god knows what with fans screaming. When I take a look what it's doing, task manager claims that nothing resource intensive is going on. I'm guessing it's hiding some internal processes. It calms down when I put it to sleep again. Sorry for the rant, I better stop before I start.

a-dub• 3 months ago

hmm. hoping that all the weird business requirements get confined to a specific distro with careful gating prior to upstreaming. it would be bad if they were allowed to pollute the ecosystem more generally (which one could argue is why windows is the way it is).

shevy-java2• 3 months ago

At the least the french government has a plan. Now please have a look at Germany - the current leading guy is absolutely clueless as to what he wants to do. From appeasing Trump to ... actually doing what else? Germany with regards to its politicians is a problem for the EU. Yes, we also have Hungary etc... but it's a small country that is over-hyped by the media due to its intrinsic corruption in the leadership; the real problem really is Germany. In the past it always was "too much bureaucracy" - the problem goes much deeper. The THINKING process in Germany is broken. France, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Finland, Norway (not EU but clever nonetheless) and so forth, are much better at THINKING. Something is broken in Germany and Merz is the showcase of cluenessness here.

LightBug1• 3 months ago

Excellent move. Hopefully these moves continue the trend spreading through Europe.

With another 3 or so years with the Orange Dildo in charge, there's a decent chance the momentum will turn into something tangible.

VadimPR• 3 months ago

Anyone here familiar with the details of GendBuntu[1], the Ubuntu distro used by the French Gendarmerie? I'd love to hear what is working and what isn't on the ground.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu?useskin=vector

motbus3• 3 months ago

This should have been done years ago. This will certainly drive bad actors to harm Linux too unfortunately

enoint• 3 months ago

France and Germany have endemic malware. Reacting defensively to it might be easier with Claude on the OS source code.

bloqs• 3 months ago

Fantastic news

self_awareness• 3 months ago

It's kind of good news, but it's also bad news -- with Linux popularity, crapware will be more popular. I kind of liked times when Linux was used only by power users. Today it's slightly different, and with more popularity... we get things like age verification in systemd.

But well, I can always switch to FreeBSD I guess. And that's my plan B.

kuon• 3 months ago

I am very happy that Linux is becoming main stream but I share your sentiment. FreeBSD is a nice alternative if you want to stay on the edge.

Eldodi• 3 months ago

French administration is about to become even more inefficient it was!

nxm• 3 months ago

It’s getting downvoted, but I agree it’ll become a bureaucratic mess.

zoobab• 3 months ago

What they should launch is an abuse of dominant position on the desktop/laptop market, with appropriate remedies such as fines.

Frieren• 3 months ago

Europe in general have great software engineers. What it lacks is investment. To see the goverment serving its own country instead of foreign billionaire interests is good change of pace.

And Linux development and adoption helps everybody not just France. A win win.

benterix2• 3 months ago

At this point I wouldn't be surprised if American companies started using it if the French get it right. The instability of the current administration is one thing, but Microsoft disregard for its user deserves an appropriate response that will actually hit them where they care.

BirAdam• 3 months ago

I would love to self-host France's "La Suite" to keep myself out of Google and MS... but for many companies, it will not matter how much you tell them there are options that are both cheaper and better. They will believe that paying someone tons of money is better because others cannot afford it. That inherently makes it superior... for some reason... you see?

mickael-kerjean5• 3 months ago

I wouldn't be surprised if American companies started using it if the French get it right

As a French citizen who own a business [1] that is in direct competition with this incentive from my very own government, I'm happy to disclose more than 50% of my customer base is already in America and France represent about 1%.

[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

dkga• 3 months ago

de Gaule v2.0 :)

sylens• 3 months ago

Many government orgs have spent the last decade and a half slowly transitioning old legacy applications and platforms to browser-based alternatives. That old ERP software that used to require a thick client? Now it runs in Chrome. Microsoft recognized this and smartly moved to keep these customers locked in via an ever growing Microsoft Office bundle - subscription based, with Teams for their chat and then building up additional capabilities to extend the dependency, like InTune.

Where we are at now is that the pain of moving away from Windows is acceptable for many larger organizations and governments, especially those with flat or decreasing budgets. You can just swap out the OS layer and keep other processes the same - keep using Office with just the browser versions if you want, or move to an alternative (like EU-based). Teams works on Linux. There is no moat on Windows anymore

alper• 3 months ago

to browser-based alternatives

And many of those tool providers could see for 10-20 years now that if they didn't provide a web based version sometime soon, they would go out of business sooner or later.

There are almost no applications that a government employee should be running natively on their machine anyway.

eviks2• 3 months ago

Except for any application you want a government employee to use efficiently

port115• 3 months ago

A bigger blocker I see in Belgium is all the corporate and government software written in Java or .NET-with-Angular and that has to be deployed via Azure because… compliance.

HumblyTossed• 3 months ago

This is traditionally how you renegotiate with MS.

But seriously, how long before MS offers them a deal they would rather not refuse?

perarneng• 3 months ago

It's different this time. It's a geopolitical safety move. You know why it happened and who is responsible for this. Never would have happened otherwise.

mrtksn4• 3 months ago

Prediction: If USA ends up attacking EU, EU will freeze all the US tech company money and compel them to open their platforms and move all the backend services to EU soil in exchange of unfreezing it and continue operating in a free but regulated market.

For example locked communication devices are huge national security risk, so Apple will have their money frozen and given two options:

1) Open up iOS etc, bring all the servers to EU. Continue business as usual, EU financial institutions may choose to use Apple services as Apple pay but they may choose to bypass it. EU developers may choose to use Apple App Store services and pay the Apple's fees or they may choose to bypass it. Apple may chose to make Xcode a paid software, developers may choose not to purchase Xcode and use other non-Apple tools and pay nothing to Apple.

2) Use credit against the frozen money to refund your users if they bring their devices to you. All the Apple devices will be locked out from EU mobile providers(technically very easy for iPhone, simply by blocking devices with Apple IMEI on EU networks) and any remaining devices of the users will be refunded with the Apple's money. After some grace period, any money remaining in Apple's account will be transferred to Apple and if Apple wants to do business in EU again will have to do the option 1.

I'm bit on the doomer side of things, so I think that if Trump keeps his current course and power, at the end of the term American software industry will shrink by %90 as it will be expelled from most of the world and will be serving to 350M people instead of 8B people. Its amazing how US is screwing up its dominant position in this incredibly lucrative industry that lets them serve a market of 8B people and accumulate huge wealth in the process.

microtonal7• 3 months ago

Open up iOS etc, bring all the servers to EU.

How is that going to work? Apple will still be under the CLOUD Act, so Europe would still be vulnerable. The only solution would be for Apple to fork into two completely separate companies, which is unlikely to happen.

Most likely there will initially just be a lot of chaos, because nobody is prepared for this scenario. There will be huge supply issues, COVID will look like nothing (both in terms of groceries, etc. and getting replacement hardware). Then Europe will on the short term rebase to Chinese/Korean/Taiwanese hardware, with probably an AOSP fork on the mobile side and Linux on the desktop/server side.

But it will be terribly messy. Nobody seems to prepare, because everyone thinks this scenario is unthinkable or they just don't want to put in the effort. Even all the people that I know that are talking about digital sovereignty are still using their iPhones, MacBooks, or GMS Android phones.

I am trying to tell tech people that the time to start switching is to alternatives is now, since tech people are usually early adopters and can help other people. But most switch from GMail to Proton Mail and proclaim victory. January 2026 (remember the good ol' days when the US wanted to take Greenland with force if necessary?) was already forgotten after 4 weeks or so.

mrtksn4• 3 months ago

If Apple can't work out a legal structure that works, it will be forced to refund for the devices then so the consumer can use the money to buy compliant devices probably from Korea or China. EU can work out special deal with the Asian manufacturers as there will be hundreds of millions of people with cash in hand looking to buy a high end smartphone.

Being messy isn't a worse outcome than US invasion. Europeans aren't rooting to live like Americans or go to wars for America and the tech thingy will be a nuisance at most.

gib4443• 3 months ago

Efforts like this are good for people to realise there is a lot of talent in Europe that just gets overshadowed by USA's dominance.

USAians tend think everything is less popular in Europe simply because it is inferior and fails purely on its technical merits. I know nothing will ever change their minds, but at least non-European non-USAians might recognise the efforts a bit more.

We are also willing to accept 'good but not perfect' and understand tradeoffs.

drstewart2• 3 months ago

USAians

The word you're looking for is Americans, despite whatever preconceived notion you think the word "Americans" actually should mean in English. I know nothing will ever change European minds, but at least understand what the correct form is.

everything is less popular in Europe simply because it is inferior and fails purely on its technical merits

So everything is less popular in Europe because it fails on many other points? Big applause to you, I guess. Are you looking for a participation award?

gib4443• 3 months ago

As an Englishman, I don't need lectures on my language.

English isn't controlled by a central authority. If a new word takes hold, it takes hold, that's it.

The way the USA thinks it has an absolute right to decimate central and South America disgusts me to the core and I'm tired of those poor people being lumped in with the term "Americans". It's offensive to them. The USA does not own the continent as much as the CIA tries.

Just as we received lectures on our declining power, it's time for the USA to suffer the same.

apatheticonion3• 3 months ago

Hopefully this results in investment in desktop environments and Wine!

master-lincoln2• 3 months ago

Why? We have plenty of well working Desktop Managers and WINE is doing better than ever. I'd argue there are bigger issues in Linux like default process isolation and access authorization per program being behind other OSes

haritha-j• 3 months ago

Ah Windows. The Temu wine.

ngomez• 3 months ago

Interestingly, Microsoft has been trying to get ahead of this for a couple of years now with their National Partner Clouds program [0], which they describe as:

designed for scenarios where full ownership and operational independence from Microsoft is required

In France's case, Capgemini and Orange have a joint venture to operate datacenters that Microsoft runs Azure and Office on top of [1]. Moving away from Windows and Teams would still reduce their dependence on Microsoft substantially. But if the core goal is to reduce dependence on non-European suppliers, I would be wary of the French government buying services from "Bleu" when it's mainly Microsoft and a couple of consultancies in a trenchcoat.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sovereign-clou...

[1] https://www.capgemini.com/news/press-releases/capgemini-and-...

w4yai• 3 months ago

Vive la France !

looksjjhg• 3 months ago

It’s quite remarkable what the current administration have “achieved” in a year or so

CalRobert4• 3 months ago

But will they use azure?

sph4• 3 months ago

I've been on a contract for a multinational European company that's in partnership with ESA for the past 18 months, and I've seen a lot of money and effort spent to move out of the US cloud to OVH. After the US decided to go rogue, this project became even more urgent.

My job is basically recreating a small part of the infrastructure that was designed for AWS, while patching some shortcomings of the OVH offerings which are not as featureful.

derfurth• 3 months ago

It would be great, however the title is misleading: the only announcement regarding linux desktop is that the DINUM - a relatively small but perhaps influential government agency pledges to leave Windows.

I believe the largest Linux Desktop initiative in France is GendBuntu[1] for the National Gendarmerie

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu

embedding-shape10• 3 months ago

How is it misleading? While DINUM might be a smaller directorate, they're also asking all related ministries, including public operators, to put together a plan for how they'll migrate from Windows to Linux by autumn 2026. France has a relatively broad "digital sovereignty strategy" that this is a part of, but it's bigger than just DINUM moving to Linux.

michaelashley29• 3 months ago

been a long time coming for windows. wonder who else will follow suit

soggybread• 3 months ago

Honestly the only thing keeping me from bringing up the idea of moving to linux is that Windows has active directory and domain wide group policies - if linux had something similar that was easy to manage I'm sure a lot more corporations would move to linux. The ease at which I can adjust system settings throughout the company or within each department such as disabling/enabling features, mapping drives or printers. I haven't found a better alternative than active directory

sneak• 3 months ago

Next up: governments rejecting use of AWS.

lionkor9• 3 months ago

All the comments about Linux gaming make me want to give my $0.02. I've been gaming on Linux, with no Windows installed anywhere, for around 6 years. In the first 3 years, it was a massive pain. Games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. would consistently have issues with mouse input, weird acceleration, a lot of games wouldn't run at all. This is NO LONGER the case at all. Things run very well out of the box.

All games I want to play run very well and mostly the process is just "install -> play".

If a game has an aggressive anticheat, like Battlefield 6 or Valorant, it will not work and you can forget about it.

Controllers work fine, so do some wheels and other peripherals, but a good number of wheels, pedals, joysticks, VR headsets, and other wild and wacky input devices might not work that well or not at all. It mostly depends on whether the software for them runs on Linux, runs in Wine, or is needed at all. Not sure about VR, but I know it was a bit dire 1-2 years ago.

If you don't play hardcore simulator games, and don't play one of the competitive shooters with aggressive anticheat (e.g. CS2 and other competitive shooters run perfectly well), you can just install Linux, install Steam or one of the other launchers, and just hit play.

If you're not sure, you can check the status on https://protondb.com.

Levitating2• 3 months ago

Games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

The old stalker games run on the X-Ray engine (the mods on a modified OSS version of it). In my experience they've always worked pretty well, though the games are quirky in general.

Good hunting stalker.

lionkor9• 3 months ago

Time is money, get talking!

Yes, last time (recently) I tried, the original games ran very well, with no (Linux specific) issues!

oceansky2• 3 months ago

No wonder it's classified informally as "eurojank".

LorenDB• 3 months ago

VR works quite well these days.

otikik2• 3 months ago

I have been a happy user of the Bazzite distro (which used proton) for several years at this point. Very happy as well.

3form• 3 months ago

And importantly, older games now tend to work better in Linux than they do in Windows.

fauzanhilmi• 3 months ago

Related: Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47507150

himata41135• 3 months ago

Well actually I've been technically playing all the games that are protected by these aggressive anticheats on linux since I've decided to switch.

My setup is a custom version of the linux kernel that 'backdoors' itself and exposes host information to the windows vm making all the anticheats happy enough to work out of the box. Have not gotten banned in any of the games either. Custom VMM and EDK builds are required to block blanket detections of virtualized hardware.

I repurposed lookingglass to instead stream all the wdm buffers as seperate applications that I can open directly in linux like they're native applications. The neat part is that I forward all the installed applications to KRunner which talks to the windows vm and launches the application there and spawns a looking glass instance for that applications assigned path.

The only downside that this is a two GPU solution and you have to run any GPU intensive applications in windows.

progforlyfe• 3 months ago

That is honestly amazing and impressive. Probably a bit too much tweaking for the common gamer though, but glad it is possible!

senko• 3 months ago

Care to write it up somewhere? Would be a fascinating read!

fluoridation4• 3 months ago

If you have to run a Windows VM anyway, why not just reboot into Windows?

TheLegace• 3 months ago

With the Windows VM are you doing GPU pass through to get native performance? Is there still a relatively minimal overhead doing it that way? I would be interested in running applications in their own Windows VM(one at a time at least) but the VM is essentially invisible and only application window is available?

robinwhg• 3 months ago

Is there a performance hit for cs 2 compared to windows with an rtx card? That‘s pretty much the only thing holding me back.

sdrm• 3 months ago

CS2 has first class linux support. I'm on cachyos specifically, and on my machine it has better performance than on Windows (I made the comparison a couple of months ago, so pretty recent)

andrepd3• 3 months ago

It works better lol.

That being said CS2 runs substantially worse than CSGO. It at least kicked my addiction when it released, since it no longer ran at acceptable framerates on my laptop ahaha

LollipopYakuza• 3 months ago

It depends what are your expectations.

I thought it was fine, until a competitive player, friend of mine who has a machine comparable to mine saw the game running on mine and noticed a lot of stuttering and framerate loss. I don't believe it is a machine performance issue (Threadripper Pro 3XXX with a 3080p), and I was running a pretty standard Gnome Fedora 43 with NVIDIA drivers.

So if you are into competitive gaming, I guess it is debatable.

dminik• 3 months ago

This is a pretty interesting topic.

For GO, switching to Linux (with an AMD card) was a free performance boost. I gained like 30fps.

For early CS2, the performance on Linux was terrible.

Now, the peak fps is slightly worse, but the frame pacing is much more stable. Eg: you get less fps, but also less fps drops.

nwallin• 3 months ago

Within the past month or so there was a fix for rtx cards that should unlock a massive performance increase for certain games. Only applies to rtx 30xx, 40xx, and 50xx. Search terms are "vulkan descriptor heap" if you would like to know more. It's very fresh so you'll need an up to date distro.

sorbusherra• 3 months ago

For me the biggest surprise was that old ps2 usb racing sim wheel+pedals just worked instantly with linux, and I could use it in dirt rally without any pains. It felt amazing. oculus quest 2 also works very well with alvr, even wirelessly.

vinc• 3 months ago

I got a Quest 2 recently and Steam Link would not connect, ALVR would crash after a while, but WiVRn work perfectly on my Arch Linux with a AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT. It's nice that we have multiple options.

I assembled a PC last year from used parts specifically to try gaming on Linux after two decades with only the occasional FreeCiv or MineTest, and the experience with Steam is mostly painless. Impressive!

pjmlp2• 3 months ago

Playing Linux or Windows native games, because that is the whole issue, it is hardly any different than asserting there are Linux games when they are actually Amiga games running with UAE.

Those games running on Proton are still produced on a Windows factory.

satvikpendem7• 3 months ago

I wonder if there actually are any native modern Linux games, I don't recall any.

Goronmon5• 3 months ago

All games I want to play run very well and mostly the process is just "install -> play".

This is largely true for games running directly through Steam, it can get pretty annoying for games that exist outside Steam.

Especially when you have to do things like apply an ".msi" style patch to a game .

It's doable, but the number of steps and tools you may have to pull in (such as protontricks) does get to be a bit of a pain at times.

andrepd3• 3 months ago

Lutris recipes often work out of the box as well. It's as simple as hitting "install" on the Lutris app.

freedomben7• 3 months ago

Agreed, but people should definitely try Lutris. It's nearly as painless as Steam now for GOG and many other stores.

ecshafer• 3 months ago

The trick I have is that I add the game and all related windows exes to steam in the same file system. When you run a game on proton through steam, it makes this virtual file system thats matches a game appid, or a uuid. So youll get a folder somewhere thats like 12345566778. You can add that file to an override for a different application, and have it run on that application file system. So if you add a patcher, mod tool etc, you can use it just like its in windows.

For example: Add Diablo 2 exe to Steam. Run Diablo 2 in proton. This creates a folder like 123455 /home/user/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/123455/. Then Add LOD to Steam, add this to the system launch STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH=/home/user/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/123455/ and you can run the installer on the older file data. Do the same for a mod patcher, etc.

franczesko• 3 months ago

No issues with other stores. Gog, Epic, etc

lionkor9• 3 months ago

Lutris solves that

bcjdjsndon2• 3 months ago

Things run very well out of the box.
a good number of wheels, pedals, joysticks, VR headsets, and other wild and wacky input devices might not work that well or not at all
If a game has an aggressive anticheat, like Battlefield 6 or Valorant, it will not work and you can forget about it
Not sure about VR, but I know it was a bit dire 1-2 years ago

The determination of the average Linux user to ignore the faults of Linux is something to behold

craftkiller4• 3 months ago

Aggressive anticheat not supporting Linux is not a fault of Linux. It is a fault of the aggressive anticheat and the games that decide to use it.

dryarzeg• 3 months ago

to ignore the faults of Linux

When someone brings up issues related to Linux themselves, that’s clearly not “ignoring” them. It would be a true case of ignoring them if they simply kept quiet about them.

> If a game has an aggressive anticheat
the faults of Linux

And besides, as far as I know (well, maybe I'm missing something?), anti-cheat issues aren’t a fault of Linux itself.

chocochunks4• 3 months ago

There's Windows games that don't work on Windows 11 but do on Linux (e.g., Red Alert 2). There's wacky gaming peripherals that work on Linux but not on Windows 11 (Try an OG Xbox controller for example). Hell, MS has even removed support for a bunch of VR headsets when they nixed support for Windows Mixed Reality.

Why do Windows users ignore the faults of Windows?

freedomben7• 3 months ago

The deterimination of some people to hate on Linux is also something to behold. It's not perfect (nothing is, not even Windows), but it's a lot better than most people (who I don't think have actually tried) seem to think it is.

The majority of people don't use fancy wheels that require custom software to work. Many people do use anti-cheat, but plenty of people don't need it.

tapia• 3 months ago

How is Linux fault that some strange peripherals/input devices don't work?

lionkor9• 3 months ago

These aren't faults of Linux, they are faults of hardware vendors. There is nothing(!!) Linux or the community can do if the hardware vendors decide to not support Linux at all.

I know that's not what you meant, but to less technical folks, it will read like you meant that it's somehow something Linux can fix.

satvikpendem7• 3 months ago

If a game has an aggressive anticheat, like Battlefield 6 or Valorant, it will not work and you can forget about it.

Yeah this is why I stick with Windows. Unlike it seems a lot of people on HN I don't really see any issues with it that would want to make me move away, especially as I already have WSL if I do need Linux, as WSL has GPU passthrough.

freedomben7• 3 months ago

I don't really see any issues with it that would want to make me move away

If you don't care about privacy issues or ads in your face, then yeah Windows is pretty good. I care a lot about that (and open source in general) so for me it's way worth it. But everyone is different and that's ok

embeng40962• 3 months ago

Yep, my casual Steam games run well out of the box. I don’t even use a gaming-focused distro like Bazzite, just EndeavourOS. Helldivers 2, No Rest For The Wicked, Slay The Spire 2, even modded Lethal Company with friends using r2modman (also worked OOTB). And of course Discord works, including streaming when friends want to watch

If I really want to play Apex or Battlefield I’ll fire up my dual drive dual boot Windows, and in the meantime, no more Microsoft spying on me, forced Windows updates and reboots at random times, ads in my Start menu, Xbox apps and other bloatware, etc

red-iron-pine• 3 months ago

why even use custom ones like Endeavor? steam works fine on basic fedora and arch -- have tried on both.

Farox• 3 months ago

I have 3 4k monitors. Windows drives them without a problem. Linux still can't. I tried for a whole day and eventually gave up.

smusamashah• 3 months ago

The DB lists popular games, what about indie games coming out every day?

ahartmetz• 3 months ago

These are often in the database as well. Indie games also have a very good chance of working without any changes in Proton, IME. They usually aren't very "high tech" and I suspect that at least some of their creators test them with Proton.

lionkor9• 3 months ago

If they are built on Godot, Unity, Unreal, or are built with SDL+OpenGL or SDL+DirectX or C# MonoGame any kind of combination that is reasonably common in the last 20 years, it'll run well

exiguus• 3 months ago

I have been running Steam on a Fedora Sway spin on a ThinkCentre M75q Gen 5 for nearly two years now, playing Hades or Hollow Knight. Before that, I ran Steam on Debian on a ThinkPad T14/P14s to play Cities Skylines. I usually use an Xbox or PlayStation 3 controller. It works great!

Wowfunhappy• 3 months ago

My concern has long been, what happens when I want to do something weird?

I have a projector that supports stereoscopic 3D. Sometimes I use things like HelixMod to add 3D to games. What would that look like on Linux?

Sometimes I use GPU driver settings to force games to use higher render resolutions (above my monitor's resolution), or better anisotropic filtering. What does that look like?

mastermage2• 3 months ago

I think Marvel Rivals works fine so its not all Competitive Shooters ä.

sjdv1982• 3 months ago

I am actually a research engineer paid by the French government. They take digital sovereignty pretty serious over here, which is sometimes good, sometimes less so.

Definitely the right call on Windows, though. Even my parents (in their mid-seventies) moved to Linux this year.

mickael-kerjean5• 3 months ago

I am a counter example of that take. As a French citizen, I have spent a decade building an open alternative Dropbox [1] that is I believe miles ahead of even Dropbox itself. In practice, France represents about 1% of the customer base. I've tried reaching out to the people who talk loud about sovereignty. Turns out it's just something they say at conferences to entertain each other as they have no power to actually make it happen.

[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

OtomotO2• 3 months ago

France is doing many thinks way better than Germany.

This is one of them.

OtomotO2• 3 months ago

I've been on Linux (I use Arch btw) since 2011.

I've been dual booting the first couple of years, then dumped Windows completely in 2016.

Since then I am on Linux only. Private and corporate.

Yes, sometimes I need to access a Windows machine or do work in one (I am my own boss), but then the client pays a "pain tax" as I call it.

There are some games I can't play I would've played in the past. Mostly competitive online games.

Technically that's annoying, but for me personally it's not a problem as I am not in my teens of twenties anymore and I have other hobbies and obligations.

xandrius• 3 months ago

My main reasons not to be able to fully switch 100% to Linux are the following:

1. Graphic design software is subpar (expecially when compared to mac) and very often under supported. And GIMP has absolutely the worst UX of any program I've ever seen for such a widely recommended software. 2. Gamedev (i.e. Unity) is much less stable and annoying to work with (mac is much better but Windows still wins) 3. Older hardware support, most of the times you can use a super old software (say a printer) and it works. Linux much better than mac for this, from my experience 4. Lots of things on Win are plug and play, Linux is a pain of custom drivers from dead githubs. Mac slightly better or worse, it might either exist as a stupidly expensive application or have to jump hoops to get a driver in.

And I know people say "just use Wine" or "GIMP is actually great and free" but at the end of the day, I want my main driver to be stable and good to use. If anytime I save a project running via Wine has a non 0% chance of it crashing and bringing down my entire work, it's not going to happen.

I do use and recommend Linux quite extensively but that's why I always have 3 different systems at any given time:

1. Win: gamedev, hardware stuff or bigger games, some design, GPU heavy work. 2. Mac: design, light GPU work, browsing and portability (battery life and cooling is fantastic) 3. Linux: everything else

This hasn't changed in the past 10+ years, even though now I can see much more gaming happening on Linux, which is very nice.

hereme888• 3 months ago

Hopefully the rest of the world can benefit from their efforts. I hope the whole EU starts moving to Linux.

dude250711• 3 months ago

One cautionary tale will be enough. No need to sacrifice the whole EU.

throw88555• 3 months ago

Every nations should avoid US based products and services. USA, China and Russia are rogue states. they pose a great risk to every other nation

fHr• 3 months ago

Holy based

cicko• 3 months ago

About f'ing time.

buttersicle• 3 months ago

Government is the perfect place to do this. It doesn't matter if it craters productivity because the organization's budget is not conditioned on delivering impact.

carlosjobim6• 3 months ago

Why not go the full mile and put up cardboard panels with printed screenshots of MS Word glued on, which government workers can sit in front of to collect their salary?

wslh• 3 months ago

I hope they also help in improving battery management on Linux notebooks, even pressing vendors via regulations.

vfclists• 3 months ago

Will the French government view open source software as software which should be well-funded and well structured, ie Blender level quality and organization, or are they going to underfund it and thus have it succumb to the shenanigans of Redhat, aka IBM, the infamous pushers of Gnome and Wayland?

socketcluster• 3 months ago

Great to see France purging itself of corruption. Why did they pay for an inferior product for so many decades when a superior free alternative was available? It was regulatory capture; corruption.

guenthert2• 3 months ago

I puzzles me to no end why the typical office clerk should care about the OS at all. I understand that secretaries will be trained on MS Word and will then have a strong preference to use such (or at least something which very closely resembles it). Same for accountants with Excel. But clerks in e.g. Revenue Service? Those I expect to interact (perhaps these days via a Web interface) with custom software. Why would those ever see a 'Start' button or somesuch?

booleandilemma2• 3 months ago

That hasn't been my experience working in Corporate America at all. Everyone gets a company laptop and they use it for whatever they want. Whether that's Excel, Google Sheets, or Netflix at home.

People think company hardware is their personal hardware and they have preferences.

I had a company phone once (terrible experience) and I'd routinely get txts from random services and people outside our company thinking it was the previous owner. The last employee who had used it mixed company use and personal use.

LtWorf5• 3 months ago

People just hate imposed changes.

supliminal• 3 months ago

I think the commentary here is mostly in agreement, we are just debating the finer points.

This should have happened already, is the general theme. I still have my Shrike CDs around and the modern-day Fedora (I think 44 is about to launch next week?) is more than sufficient for many, many use cases within the government, regardless of which distro they end up with.

My hope is that the backing of EU software development teams to open source will lift all boats and in addition to Linux, BSD may get some fruits of labor out of it.

9front as always is to be strictly forbidden without a security clearance.

999900000999• 3 months ago

What are my options if I want an independent phone OS ? Can I go into a store in Paris and buy an independent phone ?

josefritzishere• 3 months ago

We're going to keep seeing this due to destabilization and political changes in the US. It drives nationalization elsewhere, even among allies.

_verandaguy• 3 months ago

It doesn't help that Microsoft seems to be doing everything in its power to alienate Windows users.

recursivegirth• 3 months ago

This, I've officially been off Windows for a few months and will not be looking back. Microsoft has put a bad taste in my mouth as a developer.

By luck and happenstance, I tuned into the Omacon conference this morning and my perspective on personal computing very much aligns with theirs. Would encourage a least watch the kickoff keynote if the VODs drop.

htx80nerd• 3 months ago

this has been happening on and off for ~10+ yrs. MS cost are too high and you need more expensive computers to have the MS sub-par experience.

the main thing that keeps people locked in is (a) "Im use to windows" and (b) MS gives them some special contract to keep them.

stldev• 3 months ago

This is exactly what I'm seeing in working with companies in Belgium, Germany and France.

It's not just about costs- managers are actively seeking to distance themselves from everything US.

We've stopped treating them like allies. Who's to blame them?

shafiemoji• 3 months ago

Wish the Bangladeshi government did this instead of relying on pirated copies of Windows 7

BLKNSLVR3• 3 months ago

At least they know enough to have stuck with the outright best version of Windows.

BLKNSLVR3• 3 months ago

I hope it succeeds and I hope they document the experience and invite interested parties to see how it was setup and how (well) it works in order to encourage as many governments and organisations as possible to do the same.

1234letshaveatw• 3 months ago

For sure, I would love for this approach to spill over to the US and cause them to sever any contracts they have with the EU member nations

Teever2• 3 months ago

I’ve commented on this before but you’ll know France is serious when there are Linux ports of Solidworks and Catia.

France has a real edge over American companies by being the dominant player in the CAD world, it’s always surprised me that they nerfed that advantage by tying to an American operating system.

carefree-bob2• 3 months ago

Autocad has 39% market share in CAD, Solidworks has 14% market share, and Fusion 360 has 9%.

None of this is a major national advantage for any side. It's bizarre to think that the US or France would treat this as some kind of mark of national influence, since if anything happens to these top three vendors, there are lots of other vendors waiting in the wings. It's not like a national oil reserve, where it's important that you have a reserve of CAD software available for your engineers.

Teever2• 3 months ago

But what kind of projects are people using these different pieces of software for?

Are people designing aircraft carriers in Fusion?

Don't get me wrong, I understand that AutoCAD is extremely important for architecture and the death grip that AutoDesk has over that industry needs to be broken for the benefit of all of us, but from my understanding Dessault Systems makes software that is used for totally different purposes and is of vital strategic importance for a nation that wants an independent MIC which France obviously does.

So it seems foolish to me for them to have their own CAD software that can and is used to design weapons but be dependent on an American operating system produced by a particularly unscrupulous company who is obsessed with tighter and tigher control and has definite ties to the US intelligence apparatus.

abe_m2• 3 months ago

I'm curious where those number come from. Within the mechanical CAD world where Solidworks is used, I suspect the AutoCAD market share is very close to 0%. I haven't seen any company from small tool shops to major US defense contractors and automotive companies using AutoCAD for any significant mechanical design work.

ezst• 3 months ago

Wasn't CATIA running on unix even before it ran on Windows?

abe_m2• 3 months ago

Yes, all the way up to Version 5.

otabdeveloper4• 3 months ago

What? Again?

I lost count, it's how many attempts again? Fill me in.

icfly2• 3 months ago

The gendarmerie already switched.

Only place I know that went back to MS is Munich city council. After MS put a big research office in the town.

forty• 3 months ago

As far as I know it was successful for the gendarmerie and assemblée nationale for exemple. There are many public entities and apparently each migration is news worthy

mrheosuper• 3 months ago

It needs just 1 successful attemp.

moron4hire• 3 months ago

I wish the US Government would do the same

markhahn4• 3 months ago

I wonder if anyone in trumpland has thought of a T-branded distro.

Considering that most distros are basically just a new set of desktop backgrounds, this seems like a sure thing!

heyflyguy• 3 months ago

man, that's great - but can you imagine some bureaucrat lifer having to adapt to this?

MegagramEnjoyer2• 3 months ago

we need more tech literacy overall, so this might help with that also

sometimes_all• 3 months ago

There are few things in life more satisfying than forcing bureaucrat lifers to expand their minds.

yorwba• 3 months ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716043 (764 points 5 hours ago, 384 comments)

ChrisArchitect• 3 months ago

[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716043

sherburt3• 3 months ago

I'm sure there's a barely functioning business critical app that runs exclusively on Windows NT in their administration that would beg to differ

psychoslave• 3 months ago

It can be ported to React under a single prompt by now, don’t you know?

But certainly we are already at stage where Windows NT can be regenerated on the fly from a prompt anyway, aren’t we?

Otherwise, there is also ReactOS that could be leveraged on for that kind of scenario. I wonder where it would stand by now if all the money that governments around the world spent in Microsoft license would have been invested in it instead.

justinclift• 3 months ago

Sure. But if they can successfully convert 99% of their computers to non-Windows and non-Mac, that'd still be a massive win.

BLKNSLVR3• 3 months ago

Ideology may actually be the best way to cut off legacy bullshit like this. There's passion-energy, which really gets the creative problem-solving juices flowing.

ang_cire• 3 months ago

If it only runs on NT, it'll work better under WINE than on Win10/11.

Legacy app compat is actually an argument for moving to Linux.

yibers2• 3 months ago

I am saying this as a very long time Windows user, and it saddens me. Politics aside, from a pure technichal, functional, privacy and UX perspective, the case for changing over from Windows to Linux is getting stronger by the day.

lithos2• 3 months ago

If you picked XFCE as your front end you get WinXP functionality, with the nice things from win10/11 (start menu search that's actually local only, multiple desktop workspaces, and graphical settings/updates I've only needed to go to command line twice in four years).

yibers2• 3 months ago

How does XFCE compare to KDE and GNOME? Also, does it has all the nice window snapping features that I'm used to fron Windows?

cheesecakegood• 3 months ago

Except when I recently put XFCE on my old macbook air laptop as a trial run, within the first day I found it nearly impossible to do something so simple as add an application to the taskbar/dock. Something about AppPkg's not showing up by default in the taskbar adder? I finally figured it out, but no icon - just an invisible square. And guess what? If I decide the update the app, the whole thing breaks again.

I have a degree in a tech-related field. I do things on the command line on purpose every week. It should not be this hard even for me to so something so simple. It is not even remotely ready for regular joe end users.

PaulDavisThe1st• 3 months ago

I am saying this as a very long time Linux user, and it saddens me. Politics aside, from a pure technical, functional, privacy and UX perspective, the case for changing over from Windows has been apparent for several decades.

lousken• 3 months ago

Now nextcloud and libreoffice should give up the stupid drama and focus on beating microsoft.

dleslie2• 3 months ago

Canada has been using and developing FOSS for a while now.

0: https://www.canada.ca/en/government/system/digital-governmen...

1: https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...

2: https://github.com/canada-ca/

There's still a great deal of Windows usage, but hopefully that will phase out with the passage of time. Canada's bureaucracy moves slowly, at the pace of generational attrition. It won't be until the last GenX retires that they could even meaningfully begin transitioning the average office worker away from Windows.

realo• 3 months ago

Apparently not everyone got the memo...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/federal-phoenix-pay-sy...

dleslie2• 3 months ago

The Phoenix contract predates the more recent efforts to switch to FOSS.

But also, Canada loves to burn money on American suppliers. It's probably why the recent interest in _Buy Canadian_ has the American administration annoyed.

unfocused• 3 months ago

I work in government. Link 1 (2018) is essentially a dream. All of government got forced to use MS Dynamics CRM. Basically, anybody with a software requirement for case management, had to use MS Dynamics. I recommended we use Drupal in 2011. That was killed because everything had to be MS. I'm kind of surprised that it is in there given that nobody was allowed to use.

Link 0 and 2 are essentially from TBS and CDS. They coexist together. They are essentially working at the very top as entities that gather information from other departments. They can do whatever they want because they help write the rules.

I'm not trying to discredit your post, just saying that as someone who has brought OSS tools to development at the government and tried to use OSS tools for client (I failed at that), it is nearly impossible at the moment. We are married to Microsoft and its cloud.

I do agree, that it may take an entire generation because right now, 190+ departments are not exactly jumping to FOSS, and in many situations, they are down right told you are not allowed.

In addition, the current de facto document management system is from OpenText. Although many just use Sharepoint Online.

Ironically, as everything moves to the cloud, it would be easier to move to a solution that is FOSS based, and based in the cloud. Technology has matured enough that you don't need executables on a desktop, you just need a browser pointing to a website.

sexy_seedbox• 3 months ago

We use Microsoft Dynamics 365 (model-driven app) at work, it's rarely mentioned on HN and people don't know how insanely bad this P.O.S. software is.

From the botched implementations of AG Grid to their crippled version of CKEditor (with Copilot forced in of course), the daily bugs are an absolute nightmare.

And then most support tickets (if you can even open one after a forced chat session with Copilot), get handled by a third-party, most likely in India with different timezones than you and the support calls are a crapshoot.

robocat• 3 months ago

won't be until the last GenX retires

I was part of a SaaS company of diehard GenX Windows fans.

Decades of abuse by Microsoft has definitely hurt them: they have lost hope and are cynical about the future of Windows. I reckon they would switch away if they could afford to.

Every year Microsoft does something to make you feel like you're being screwed over.

We only just missed taking a silverlight bullet. Windows phone wasted over a year of development. Internet Explorer doubled development costs. The OS version churn is expensive. However SQL server has been a good foundation.

Microsoft used to love developers. They just abuse them now. Even Apple is nicer to developers!

AtlasBarfed• 3 months ago

The fact that open source is a national security concern should have been something that a crazy orange man should have triggered.

Thus was obvious decades ago. And open source is the key model for collective development in a secure manner for disparate countries to secure their software base.

Alas, I fear they will only concentrate on the server side. The securing of the desktop should be a parallel concern as well, to help prevent your citizenry from becoming DDOS slaves.

1970-01-012• 3 months ago

The French government did not provide a specific timeline for the switchover, or which distributions it was considering.

Do they realize they need to pick a LTS distro now? You can't mix and match distros without having a massive IT and user retraining budgets.

_blk• 3 months ago

They likely don't. It's a purely political move not a technical move. With the average length of the French work week, this will take a while to implement anyway. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great thought but I don't think it's more than a short-sighted reaction. Munich unfortunately faltered after a few years.

hirako2000• 3 months ago

The french Gendarmerie already migrated to GendBunto, their own distribution. It took a while but it's now running on 97% of all workstations. I wouldn't call this just political fluff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu

yoyohello13• 3 months ago

With the average length of the French work week, this will take a while to implement anyway.

35 instead of 40? I don't think an extra 5 hours a week is really going to move the needle in a meaningful way.

taskforcegemini2• 3 months ago

microsoft bribed them to come back

ErroneousBosh6• 3 months ago

Why would you need any user retraining?

All distros are basically identical. The only real difference is whether you spell "package manager" as apt, yum, or dnf.

soiltype• 3 months ago

This comment is completely out of touch with how typical office workers use their computers. "Package manager" is your feldspars. But it's even worse than that, because you don't train for the typical employee, you train for the least-technical employee lest they become completely useless overnight.

1970-01-012• 3 months ago

All distros are basically identical.

Have you ever used the Linux OS??

zahlman2• 3 months ago

For people with a level of technical literacy that has them interested in posting on HN, sure. But for typical government workers? I imagine the differences are going to be pretty significant. They're not programmers or "devops" people.

We're talking about users who are going to do almost everything through the GUI, and who will associate the "distro" with the default choice of DE/WM/etc. stack in whichever flavour of whichever distro it is. Understanding what a "package manager" even is, will be the responsibility of "IT" specialists. Assuming they don't decide that only, say, Flatpak-installable software can be approved.

We're talking about massively bureaucratic institutions that have been steeped in Windows orthodoxy for decades. That's the administration policy they know, so it's what they will forcibly adapt to Linux.

You're going to need user retraining 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. Because LibreOffice is not the Microsoft Office suite, and neither is any of its FOSS competitors. And so on and so forth. There's no telling what idiosyncrasies people depend on. In organizations like this I really doubt you can count on everyone being generically computer literate. I really doubt that generic computer literacy (as opposed to demonstrated competence with specific applications) was ever part of the hiring requirements.

markhahn4• 3 months ago

Yes. Noting that yum and dnf are basically the same.

0x4572• 3 months ago

Just pick nixOS and provide base nixosConfiguration. tada.

localuser13• 3 months ago

Reality more surprising than HN quips: https://github.com/cloud-gouv/securix

WaryByDesign8• 3 months ago

It's... an admirable goal, but it pretty much remains to be seen if "France"[1] follows through.

Previous attempts to "ditch Windows" have not ended that well. Munich in 2003, the entire Federal German government in 2009, Munich again in 2013, Munich again in 2021, and so on. Most common end-result: back to Windows.

Breaking points are typically the lack of an "Office 2016" compatible suite, lack of "Adobe PDF" tooling, and a mishmash of legacy apps. The latter seems trivially addressable by a "Remote Desktop/RemoteApps" environment, but there are definitely issues, mostly surrounding printing and clipboard handling.

All of that can be solved, but definitely requires more funding and, crucially, coordination, beyond "Open Source Cures All."

[1] Oh, I just love it when an entire culturally-diverse region gets lumped in together, or, when, as in this case, ~6M French government employees are treated as a homogeneous group.

mixmastamyk6• 3 months ago

If they only diverted 10% of the budget from MS to solving issues they’d have had a solution a decade or two ago.

WaryByDesign8• 3 months ago

I'm... not so sure? The French government has, widely seen, 6M employees. Given retail pricing of EUR200/seat/year (and they definitely have a better arrangement), that's 1.2B, and I'm not sure that's enough to provide an identity management plus office apps plus file storage solution? And at 10% of that? Absolutely forget it...

Akronymus• 3 months ago

Werent the munich government employees quite happy with linux, but microsofts lobbying with their headquarters got them to switch back?

WaryByDesign8• 3 months ago

I'm not aware of Microsoft's economic footprint in the Munich region, but I doubt it's significant.

The complaints that lead to the several-reversions-to-Windows at the time, as I recall, were all around "citizen sent me X, can't open X"

And those are all addressable issues, but not without significant know-how and funding.

Slothrop99• 3 months ago

Were they? Sounded like they stuck with some terrible old version of OpenOffice ("brokenoffice"). Users don't really care about the OS, its the apps.

bornfreddy2• 3 months ago

Motivation matters.

samsk• 3 months ago

Earlier attempts were mostly about money and ideology. Now its a question of security, thanks to one 'clever' 'businessman'. So thanks to his _great_ efforts, it might actually work out this time.

ricw• 3 months ago

Munich is a bad example - they were effectively „bought out“ by Microsoft by investing hugely into the local economy in the form of offices and employees. It was also two parties that kept flip flopping with different priorities. Linux itself had some hiccups but was fine from what I recall.

WaryByDesign8• 3 months ago

they were effectively "bought out" by Microsoft

Yeah, let me dispute that. They were, at least on three occasions, forced to roll back due to "citizen sent me X and can't open it" and/or "sent Y to citizen and they can't open it" concerns.

Mind you: these issues still persist in a fully Microsoft/Adobe "solution environment", but less so than in the "disregard all and move to Linux" situation.

And to be perfectly clear: that's all unacceptable. But it adds another, say, EUR 2B to the equation.

fxtentacle2• 3 months ago

Munich led to "all of Schleswig-Holstein" in Germany. 44,000 Exchange mailboxes replaced with Open-Xchange. 25,000 Windows+Office desktops replaced with Linux+OpenOffice.

WaryByDesign8• 3 months ago

Nope. That was rolled back: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...

And, again, I'd very much like Microsoft to lose here, but, there are real issues here

atherton940272• 3 months ago

You must be German — the French state is a lot more top down than Germany with its regions, so generally these kinds of mandates get applied broadly

WaryByDesign8• 3 months ago

You must be German

Oof, that's just offensive!

Anyway, most German Linux 'mandates' were indeed regional, and (for good reasons!) failed to migrate 'upstream'.

Whether the French mandate takes hold remains to be seen. "We're not Germany" is not the end-all argument it might seem to be to you.

MegagramEnjoyer2• 3 months ago

I applaud France for this decision. Windows is basically legal spyware and adware at this point

tombert3• 3 months ago

Like most Microsoft products, Windows is a tool that benefits mostly from aggressive early marketing and successfully convincing everyone that they need this product, and by the time everyone realizes how terrible the product is it's too late because everything already depends on it.

They have done this everywhere; Microsoft Office is everywhere and terrible. Sharepoint used to be everywhere and is terrible. I know they bought it, but LinkedIn is nearly required everywhere and terrible. Teams seems to be increasingly used everywhere and terrible. And of course Windows is everywhere and terrible.

As far as I can tell, there is not a single thing that Microsoft does not half-ass. They're not a software company, they're a marketing company that sells software.

hinata08• 3 months ago

Now they somehow got the management of large companies to also push to adopt Azure, with an aggressive "no capex" / "you pay for what you use" campaign when everyone knows their offering work terribly and are overpriced.

if Home Depot were to make an exam to pass a certification over their catalog, that would seem ridiculous. But when Microsoft does this, management ppl are happy and feel like they manage when they sign up everyone for AZ900 "certification"

Microsoft saw that users, power users and admins who are from the jobs are not making purchases, so you no longer need to design products for them

somat• 3 months ago

I understand what they mean, linux offers freedom, enough that it divorces your tech stack from any one company.

But isn't linux US tech? The blueprint, UNIX was a US project, torvolds works from the US. the original userland GNU was a US based project. The new userland systemd is a US based project.

benterix2• 3 months ago

But isn't linux US tech?

If you want to discuss it on that level, it if Finnish tech imported to the USA, inspired by a Dutch implementation of a research OS.

On a more serious note, Linux has been developed by many individuals all over the world, you can't put a nationality stamp on it.

nix0n• 3 months ago

Linux is a global project, and open source more broadly is also of course global.

Linux Mint (the distro I use) was started and is led by French developer Clement Lefebvre.

QEMU and FFmpeg are among the notable projects started by French developer Fabrice Bellard.

VLC was started by students of École Centrale Paris.

These are just the things that I know about as an American, so I'm sure there are more.

tensor• 3 months ago

The difference, of course, is that they can inspect the source, and should the US try to use it as leverage they can just fork and continue on.

markhahn4• 3 months ago

GNU was never anything but a flag-of-convenience. The number of people who take RMS seriously was and is small.

simonask• 3 months ago

Please tell me this also means that they are redirecting the expenses currently going to Microsoft into funding open source development?

sega_sai• 3 months ago

I think France seem serious in actually switching to open source/EU software. I recently had a telecon on Visio (France's Teams/Zoom substitute) and it worked well in a browser with ~ 10 participants.

charcircuit4• 3 months ago

Desktop Linux's security and antimalware solutions are not ready for government usage. This is a cyber attack waiting to happen if they go through with this. They should at least switch to ChromeOS if they want to use Linux.

bornfreddy2• 3 months ago

You mean switch Windows by Microsoft for ChromeOS by Google? Weird suggestion.

As for "security" and "antimalware" solutions being ready, I don't think there is much difference between the OSs there. Windows is no candyland either.

As always, they will need competent people in the right places to pull this through. Tech is just an enabler.

charcircuit4• 3 months ago

Yes I do mean that. Google is one of the only companies in the Linux space who takes security seriously.

kpw94• 3 months ago

Some might be tempted to brush aside that Server Linux threat model is very different from Desktop Linux (to snarkily reply "we'll it's powering a vast majority of GDP via all of AWS, Azure, etc.").

However comparing apples to apples, what makes you say this isn't ready for government usage, when it's ready for trillion dollar big tech companies' majority of their workforce? (Aside from Microsoft, Apple obviously). Large employers like IBM etc also must be using red hat or some other distro

charcircuit4• 3 months ago

Google for example uses a fork of Ubuntu. When someone decided to compromise Google employees machines via a fake npm package they were able to do so successfully. When they reported this to Google they said it was okay for employee machines to be compromised and that it was part of Google's threat model. While this may be true for large companies I don't think the French government is ready to handle such a security model.

Melatonic• 3 months ago

The age of the Linux desktop might actually finally be coming

Personally I think we are at an interim period for a big player to emerge and take over this space. If enough governments in the EU start switching over to customized linux distros theres a big chance for someone like Nokia to come in and develop their own approved distro with proper MDM and GPO-like management functionality baked in .

On top of that it could be great to see SteamOS continue to gain share and become more than just something people run on gaming purpose hardware.

And thirdly would love to see a more simplistic but super lean and functional OS built on something like the BSD.

upcoming-sesame• 3 months ago

honestly since the browser has more or less become the real operating system the host OS doesn't matter so much anymore. most people do 90% of their work in the browser anyway

red_admiral3• 3 months ago

There's an xkcd for that ;) https://xkcd.com/934/

jodrellblank3• 3 months ago

"theres a big chance for someone like Nokia to come in and develop their own approved distro"

Microsoft bought Nokia's devices and services division for Windows Mobile in 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Mobile

bostik2• 3 months ago

They killed any Linux device development at Nokia in 2011. Still salty about Elop shooting down a project we had spent 5 years working towards.

The holistic platform security for a combined phone/tablet base system would have been really interesting.

TacticalCoder• 3 months ago

Personally I think we are at an interim period for a big player to emerge and take over this space...

And even without a big player, the number of people who are entirely operational with just a browser at work is huge.

Many SMEs already realized they can switch seamlessly between Windows and OS X / MacOS and I see people working on either one or the other. For example a desktop PC running Windows and a Mac laptop is not uncommon.

I switched an employee at my wife's SME to... Debian! And the transition has been more than fine: they live in the browser (Google Workspace, paid company subscription). Unattended-upgrades, a user account that cannot sudo, and that's it.

The number of desktop PC running Windows that are actually glorified browsers has to be through the roof.

Once people realize there's no need to pay the double-whammy Microsoft tax (pay for a new Windows / also pay for a new PC), suddenly installing Linux becomes an option.

Now I know: using Linux and Google is not "getting rid of US tech". But it's "getting of Microsoft" and that is fine with me. I'll never ever forgive the mediocrity this company has brought onto the world.

jjcm• 3 months ago

I've been using linux as a daily driver since the start of the year.

There's still a long ways to go before things "just work". It's about equivalent to windows right now in terms of frustrations, it's just that frustrations are more along the lines of "this is a bit wonky" instead of "this is malicious / was their intended behavior". It's gotten a LOT better, don't get me wrong, but it's still far off from what a typical user would need.

I'd love to see either Valve or Nvidia really put in effort into creating their own hardware/software integration on a level that Apple does. I think it'd go a long way to legitimizing it.

Terr_• 3 months ago

Yeah, for example a bunch of my system updates began showing scary error notes because somehow there is a header inconsistency between the amdgpu driver and the kernel.

I'm not regretting my choice, but it's also something where the average user can't just call Linux Support and get a "run X and it'll fix it" solution.

olivierestsage• 3 months ago

Do typical users care that much about a bit of jank, though? All the “typical users” I know are on spyware infested Windows laptops and just interpret the horrible shabbiness of the whole experience as being normal.

tombert3• 3 months ago

Thank you for saying something I've been saying for awhile: Linux definitely has jank, but I'm not convinced it's more janky than Windows.

I think people are so used to Windows' awfulness that they kind of forget about how much bullshit is associated with it. Linux has bullshit too, though it's getting better, but when people talk about Linux jank they're always smuggling in an implication of Windows having less jank, which I don't concede at all.

boznz2• 3 months ago

Me too, I was a 30 year Windows developer and Electronics Engineer so I went pretty conservative with Kubuntu LTS and it's been a pretty slick experience. Gemini has been great tech support for all the CLI stuff and getting all of my weirder hardware projects interfaced (100% success rate to date). Just considering whether to delete my windows partition to put my MP3's on, as realistically I'm not going to get any more Windows Programming gigs.

psadauskas• 3 months ago

I've been using Linux on the desktop off-and-on for 20 years. I used OSX for awhile 2008-2015 when they clearly had the best hardware, and the OS was pretty nice. I've been using KDE since then, and I recently installed Bazzite (Fedora+KDE-based) on my sans-windows gaming PC. I also started a new job this year, where I have to use the company-provided MBP for compliance reasons, after having not used MacOS since 2015. So all this is pretty fresh in my mind, and I'll say that 2025+ KDE is by far the best out-of-box experience for power users. It mostly just works, and anything you want to tweak is easy to find in the settings. Setting up modern MacOS with things like more keyboard shortcuts for window management, focus-follows-mouse or even remembering where windows where after waking up from sleep requires you to buy an app or pay a subscription.

Linux may break more often, but you can almost always fix it with a quick google search. If it doesn't do what you want, there's certainly a setting or config or free app you can install that does.

MacOS may break less often, but when it does you're mostly out of luck. It may do what you want more often, but if it doesn't you have to buy an app, if its even possible at all.

BobbyTables2• 3 months ago

If you’re using Fedora or Ubuntu, there may be some bumps.

Use Debian or AlmaLinux and the ride is smoother.

red_admiral3• 3 months ago

big player + (standard) linux desktop may well be coming, but that means losing the semi-anarchist bazaar mentality. Will the standard be gnome or KDE or XFCE or ...? If gnome, version 2 or 3? Firefox or chrome as the default browser (or derivatives like waterfox or plain chromium ...)? AI integration?

The moment you're developing for people with no IT experience and no CS degree, you're going to have to make tradeoffs like Microsoft or Google or Apple have to make today, and somehow deal with the "curl ... |sh" problem.

fao_2• 3 months ago

but that means losing the semi-anarchist bazaar mentality.

The places you mention are already receiving huge doses of industry funding funnelled through the Linux Foundation. Honestly, it looks like the standard is going to be KDE. Even microsoft is copying it for their next DE: https://www.webpronews.com/microsoft-windows-ripping-off-kde...

17186274402• 3 months ago

Why does there need to be a standard application for everything? Is there a default pencil vendor? A default printer vendor? Paper? Car manufacturer? Taxi company? Just let people buy/get whatever vendor/application they like. I rather see more interoperational standards.

cineticdaffodil2• 3 months ago

Personally i think there is a huge innovationspace for pipe connected agents doing work for the user.. a example:

A firefox agent downloading pictures of cats.. piping them to a graphics program drawing mustaches on them piping them to a moviemaker piping them to a firefox video uploading "the longest catswithmustaches" shorts compilation ever.. all clicked together in a "incredibble machine" like explorer by a user who doesent even know how to code..

tim-projects• 3 months ago

But you can do that already with bash pipes. Doing it through the GUI just adds mega complexity

dschep• 3 months ago

"theres a big chance for someone like Nokia to come in and develop their own approved distro"

SUSE is a German company, so probably nothing to even develop.

SoftTalker• 3 months ago

Does SUSE normally come up in conversations about "easy to use" linux distros for "normal" users?

I'm not in that world, so this is a genuine question. The last time I looked at SUSE it seemed typically German in being uniquely complicated for no good reason, but that was years ago.

nonameiguess• 3 months ago

It was a pretty amusing comment to me. Not only has SUSE been around for over 30 years, it was the very first enterprise Linux and it already has MDM tooling in the multi-Linux manager, repository mirroring tool, open-build system, Kiwi, edge image builder. Everything to build out a full enterprise suite of servers, workstations, customized kiosk OSes, already there. I'm more of the "give me my terminal or give me death" crowd, but it even has YaST and JeOS for the GUI-driven installation and config management that is seemingly what the non-tech crowd wants. A world apart from what the "solo indie devs" of Hacker News are paying attention to, especially in the US, but if Euro governments don't know about this already, that's on them. France doesn't need to roll its own shit unless it just wants to for the hell of it.

krsw• 3 months ago

Yeah, I think if Windows 11 is going subscription based (plus all the copilot pushing garbage and even more baked in ads) that will be a strong incentive to switch to Linux or SteamOS. I barely even play games enough anymore to make a desktop worthwhile. Might just jump to Mac only.

wolvoleo2• 3 months ago

They can't do that, when they've already sold you lifetime licenses.

They could however introduce a subscription-only windows 12 and have harsh cut-off requirements like they did with windows 11.

jaspanglia• 3 months ago

Wish it would succeed, other day was reading about stuff and figure out, how much European Tech is actually controlled by American/Israeli Hegemony.

frugalmail• 3 months ago

Any closed source, centralized system is going to be higher risk than an open source distributed system that can be independently verified and audited by multiple parties.

You just have to be willing to put in the investment to verify/review with parties that meet your needs.

oscord• 3 months ago

Ditch iOS and Android for a Blackberry OS / Nokia ? Really, are there any alternatives?

amarant• 3 months ago

SailfishOS, Ubuntu touch, and postmarketOS to name a few from the top of my dome.

Nokia isn't really an alternative at all since M$ bought it.

unethical_ban2• 3 months ago

Motorola and grapheneos? If only the French government weren't attacking Graphene.

As for desktop, I suppose the only major European options are Ubuntu and SUSE with corporate backing.

microtonal7• 3 months ago

The French government and Murena (makers of /e/OS). They are spouting nonsense that security hardening is only for pedophiles and spies:

https://mastodon.social/@GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social/116353...

https://www.clubic.com/actualite-604786-murena-e-os-intervie...

It's ironic that a company that pretends to be for privacy is using the same think of the children argument as those pushing Chat Control, age verification, etc. Of course, their privacy is mostly a farce, since they have also been caught uploading data to OpenAI for text-to-speechi

I hope that more European governments will start supporting GrapheneOS, since it can compete with Apple on security and is better than Apple and GMS Android when it comes to privacy.

selectively• 3 months ago

Political posturing that will never actually occur.

DeathArrow• 3 months ago

So did the Great Country of North Korea.

idoubtit• 3 months ago

The title is very far from the actual public statement that is linked in the article.

The French government announced that its digital agency will switch to Linux during this year. This is about a few hundreds of computers owned by the agency.

The second statement is that this agency is expected to publish, by the end of the year, a plan to reduce the digital dependency on the US. It's not "France to ditch Windows", it should be "French government promises to plan soon for possible ways to decrease digital dependencies, but calendar unknown". Also note that the government (and president) will change next year, so even if the present drive was real, a political u-turn could come soon.

Overall, this statement could be the presage of a major upturn in a few years, but I think it far more probable that the policy change will be minor. There's already a small tendency toward Linux and Free Software in the public sector.

PoignardAzur• 3 months ago

Uh, TIL the DINUM still used Windows. I wonder what held them, it's certainly not a lack of familiarity with Linux.

I feel you're underselling the second statement a bit:

Each ministry (including operators) will be required to finalize its own [migration] plan by fall

This sounds like there's actual pressure to start moving soon, especially for adopting existing DINUM solutions.

(I agree the title is clickbait.)

Chance-Device• 3 months ago

Who do they think writes Linux? The European Commission? They’re on the US tech stack whether they want to be or not, and nobody in Europe has the will or resources to pull a China and make their own alternative. More’s the pity.

alecsm2• 3 months ago

Linux was created by an European. And there are many European distros. Even Canonical is European.

But that's besides the point. The point is no company owns linux so you're not tied to big tech even if they are the biggest contributors to the kernel.

pragma_x• 3 months ago

Moreover for the folks in the back row...

We may see Canonical or other commercial Linux vendors come forward with a government or enterprise-flavored solution for all this. But the important thing to keep in mind is that they're not selling Linux per-se. As the GPL prohibits this, these companies sell support for their Linux distro instead. That revenue goes into improving Linux and maintaining their distro (e.g. Ubuntu). But even with all that money changing hands, that they do not own Linux, the Linux kernel, or any other shred of GPL licensed stuff.

dismalaf3• 3 months ago

2/3 major commercial Linux vendors are European, the author and BDFL of the Kernel is European and a ton of contributors of many projects are European (Qt and KDE come to mind). Yes IBM Hat has a lot of influence but they're not the only ones developing Linux.

afewquarks• 3 months ago

I know this might be a controversial take but nevertheless I will state my opinion: I do not think "the year of the Linux desktop" is the good idea that most people seem to think. Everything that gets the eye of Sauron on it proceeds to become a complete mess.

Resources always win. All that is needed to ruin an open project is dump money into heavy development up to the point where it becomes impossible to do without it. Plenty such cases already.

This also ruins the development of the project akin to feeding wild life, you get them dependent on you, and if you stop feeding them they lose the ability to feed themselves in the wild. Such is the Linux ecosystem, based on a type of work that so far made a great project for people who have a bit of technical skills. Making it more accessible to the masses only brings that kind of bullshit into it. Inevitably. There is no way something of such importance, to the masses, won't get corrupted in one way or another. That never happens, if there is too much interest there will be funds dumped into corrupting it, one way or another.

The best path forward for Linux was as before, to fly just under the radar, to bee a bit too complicated for most people. This is what protects it. Most, if anyone, don't seem to understand this very simple fact. No older Linux user gets anything worthwhile out of this deal, nothing relevant, just inevitable enshitification of it. Historically proven over and over again. I find "the year of the Linux desktop" to be a childish take in a world that functions on completely different principles.

edit: To add a bit more context, Windows is not the mess that it is today because of evil Microsoft, it is a reflection of its user-base. Same with Linux. They did that to Windows, with their behavior, with accepting all that nonsense.

You want to bring the very same type of people, with that kind of attitude, in Linux, what exactly do you thing is going to happen? They will adapt to Linux mentality or they'll proceed to ruin Linux with their behavior? I can take a good guess on what will happen. People will people, and corpos will corpo to milk them.

phainopepla22• 3 months ago

Linux is already integral to the tech and enterprise worlds, which have a lot more money to throw around the consumer desktop space. I'm having trouble seeing how Linux becoming a more popular consumer OS would lead to the types of problems you're talking about, if being a leader in the server space hasn't already led to them.

Also, Linux has a built-in mechanism against enshittification, which is its open source and multiple flavors. Ubuntu becomes enshittified? Move to Fedora. You can have a dumbed down consumer-friendly distro without affecting Arch.

aucisson_masque2• 3 months ago

The best path forward for Linux was as before, to fly just under the radar, to bee a bit too complicated for most people.

Obviously with people like you, Linux would never be popular. Personally I’m fine with that, Linux is just too damn buggy and inconsistent for my usage, but I’m pretty sure that it could benefits people. Think of students or people in low income countries.

And then, what prevents you from having a mainstream friendly distribution that just work, and another for the nerd who want to spend their day in the terminal ?

Linux isn’t just one distribution, one doesn’t prevent the other but currently it sure isn’t for mainstream usage.

hackerbeat• 3 months ago

Good. The US is gone.

tsoukase• 3 months ago

It's extremely difficult to compete with the US SW companies. Their products are so engaging and attractive that anyone till up to the leaders are tempted to use. It's not surprising that EU's attempt to de-USAisation happens with Linux/OSS and not with an in-house prop SW because it's unable to write one. Also it doesn't happen without cries and pain. We speak for an endeavour to bring a 90% share of a beloved product to 3% and vice versa for a nerdy "cold" one. I keep a long lasting pop corn bag to follow the numbers.

LtWorf5• 3 months ago

It's not the products, it's the army threatening you if you don't use them. But France has nukes so if anyone can pull it off in Europe it's them.

aucisson_masque2• 3 months ago

Side note but I had absolutely no idea that the USA sanctioned international justice court judges because they had put an arrest warrant on Benjamin Netanyahu.

Its not a surprise from Russia but the USA. I guess we’re right to cut all bridges as fast as possible with the USA.

liendolucas• 3 months ago

All countries should follow suit.

Nations and individuals can't depend or be held hostages of a handful of companies on the other side of the Atlantic that have the will to do whatever they want with their customers data.

This is the right path to follow and wish that in upcoming years this initiative becomes a reality across the globe. Long success for Linux and all BSDs!

tedggh• 3 months ago

I think this has been attempted many times before by other nations including Brazil without success. It’s one thing to replace a few hundred workstations in a non critical governmental office, another to replace the entire infrastructure of a government which also collaborates with the private sector. Usually these projects start with a lot of passion then die off when can’t justify the investment.

Refreeze5224• 3 months ago

This time there are serious national security and sovereignty issues driving the change though, which are much more powerful motivations to succeed.

diogenes_atx• 3 months ago

From the perspective of systems administration for large enterprise networks, it seems unlikely that Linux desktops could replace Windows PC's without a domain controller like Microsoft Active Directory. Am I missing something here? How is it possible to manage a large enterprise network with hundreds, or even thousands, of desktop workstations without a domain controller?

gengstrand• 3 months ago

From the article.

The French government did not provide a specific timeline for the switchover, or which distributions it was considering.

Got to be Mandrake right?

laughing_man2• 3 months ago

I don't know why any state or large company would tie itself to Windows. All the applications that used to justify just getting whatever Microsoft produced next are web based now.

ksec• 3 months ago

Rust + Linux. It is brewing, and that is what Government around the world wants.

But not FreeBSD, C, Go, or others.

Basically Government doesn't want MIT / BSD, they want GPL and AGPL.

France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech

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