France's government is ditching Windows for Linux, says US tech a strategic risk

https://www.xda-developers.com/frances-government-ditching-windows-for-linux/

by pabs3 • 3 months ago

511 298 3 months ago

xda-developers.com

BLKNSLVR• 3 months ago

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47719486

ArtTimeInvestor• 3 months ago

It is a step into the right direction.

Over time, more and more work is going to be done by AI though. At some point, it will be unthinkably slow and expensive to let humans work on anything.

To do *that* locally, you need GPUs and LLMs.

How will Europe solve these two?

ErroneousBosh6• 3 months ago

No-one needs LLMs.

AI has no value.

7bit• 3 months ago

The chariot was superior! Who needs them darn cars

corndoge• 3 months ago

At this point in the broader dialogue your position is roughly as interesting as flat earth. Only bored people are going to bother replying and no one is taking you seriously. Don't do yourself a disservice by clinging to this.

samrus5• 3 months ago

Im skeptical of the AGI claims but this is a bit too far in the toher direction. I use it to turn designs to code all the time

m_mueller• 3 months ago

I think it depends on how strong the compression advancements are going to be, such that much can be done locally in the future. I'd be interested in experiences of others here in using Gemma4, which is at the forefront of "intelligence per gigabyte" atm. (according to benches).

Joeri• 3 months ago

The EU chips act is subsidizing new fab construction in Europe.

Meanwhile the french Mistral is partnering with Nvidia to build an AI data center near Paris on which their LLMs will run.

But I agree this is not enough to make the EU a contender in the race with the US and China. The EU still has not seriously considered decoupling from American big tech.

tonyedgecombe• 3 months ago

Do you people have to squeeze a comment about AI into every post?

arter45• 3 months ago

Not all AI uses LLM, and for some common LLM applications like summarization and translation you can already use CPU only models. The government, or even your average employer, is not going to need a lot of AI video generation or other really GPU intensive tasks. Prompt processing is currently more GPU oriented, but I don't see it as an impossible challenge given, say, 10-15 years.

Also, CPU-only doesn't necessarily mean "on your own computer". You can easily have 100 TB RAM in a couple of racks.

casey2• 3 months ago

But Linux is US tech? Isn't the main guy American?

boomskats• 3 months ago

No, and no?

...what?

redat00• 3 months ago

GardenLetter27• 3 months ago

Yeah, he became American, just like Einstein, Fermi, Von Neumann, etc.

There's a big lesson for Europe there, everyone super productive and able to move to the US does so at the first opportunity.

bogeholm2• 3 months ago

Yeah, um…

That might have changed somewhat, recently.

skillina• 3 months ago

You might want to do a bit more reading on why European intellectuals migrated en masse to the US in the 1930s.

drivingmenuts• 3 months ago

When the US is being run by relatively sane people, it's great.

That is not the situation at the moment.

bogeholm2• 3 months ago

Just Wiki Linus Torvalds my friend:

Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland
In 2004, Torvalds moved with his family from Silicon Valley to Portland, Oregon.

jll29• 3 months ago

Linus Torvalds created Linux as a student in Helsinki, Finnland. He later took U.S. citizenship and lives in Portland, Oregon, TTBOMK.

Now on some level, the question makes less sense, because Linux as we know it now is an international proejct that thousands of developers from dozens of countries collaborated on. But perhaps most would agree that Torvalds, who serves as main integrator, has more say than others regarding the directions of Linux, as long as he is alive.

The open source property of Linux is more important to the question which OS a country's government should adopt: corporate systems are hard to scrutinize, whereas open source systems you can inspect and compile yourself, and it is a wise move of the French government to go in that direction. It will also save a lot of money, but that should not be the primary motive.

mirpa• 3 months ago

It is open source. Many companies which contribute to it are American, but nobody from America can tell you what you can or cannot do with it - unlike Microsoft or Apple with their proprietary OS being forced by US government.

rzerowan• 3 months ago

Funnily enough there is some level of control that can be exerted by the US gov via the distros (at least the major ones - see legalese restrictions on Redhat/Ubuntu etc when you want to download , stating the various US gov laws/sanctions that they follow) and also via the kernel - i think some time back Russian kernel maintainers were removed.

So Open source it may be , however there are still pressure points that can be used. I believe this is one of the main reasons RISCV foundation moved to Europe.

hdgvhicv4• 3 months ago

The “main guy” is Finnish. He also got American citizenship recently, but given the US has increased attacks on naturalised citizens [0] and has a history of this [1] it’s not a solid foundation.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2026/01/16/nx-s1-5677685/as-focus-shifts...

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

drstewart4• 3 months ago

If Japanese internment worried you, you should see Europe's treatment of perceived outsiders [0] and get reallyyyy worried about the ongoing attacks [1] and rhetoric [2]. I would urge extreme caution to anyone in Europe that is at risk.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Jews_from_Spain

[1] https://www.ein.org.uk/news/home-office-remove-euss-pre-sett...

[2] https://www.ft.com/content/0e29224f-9d06-4315-a89f-e334ffbc6...

Also, what nationality do you say Elon Musk is, out of curiosity? Let's test your consistency :)

gsky• 3 months ago

Finally Europe grew a spine

bpavuk• 3 months ago

still growing, you mean. France is, however significant, just one country. and then there is broader push to FOSS inside Europe, as well as Europe's own sovereign solutions. some attempts were failed, some were successful, but everything is still in progress

EDIT: on a second read, this sounded too diminishing of this achievement than I intended. the point is that it's not fully done yet, although it is remarkable that there is, finally, a political will for such actions

sdoering• 3 months ago

Sadly back in the day the city of Munich caved in (hosting Germany's MS headquarter). They had a good good run with their Linux. But the state of Schleswig-Holstein is pushing for more open source and switching to Libre Office (80% or so done). They talk about that on their Open Source Initiative page [1].

[1] https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/themen/... (German only)

breppp4• 3 months ago

Less so against China or Iran, presumably Europe will find itself on the "right side of history" yet again soon enough

embedding-shape6• 3 months ago

At least so against Israel and other countries actively engaging in open warfare against sovereign nations, as a European I'm very happy we're not getting pulled into those senseless conflicts.

watwut3• 3 months ago

Europe does not need to join war of the Trumps whim just because king demands it.

anon2912• 3 months ago

They have a committee to decide whether to plan to grow one. Maybe once they're done funding the war in Ukraine, they'll make a decision.

Leomuck6• 3 months ago

Europe as a whole doesn't have or not have a spine.. it'a a huge, complicated accumulation of interests with an insane bureaucratic apparatus behind it.

bigfudge10• 3 months ago

The bureaucratic apparatus in the EU has a reputation for being complex, but a lot of that seems to be bullshit stories written by people like Johnson in the 20 years leading up to Brexit. I've yet to see much evidence it's more complex or corrupt than Federal government in the US, for example.

drstewart4• 3 months ago

Is this the daily thread on this topic?

Astroturfing around this is getting suspicious.

Mashimo5• 3 months ago

Astroturfing around this is getting suspicious.

Nah, linux and "$curreant_year is the year of the linux desktop" is just something the hacker / maker / nerd scene is passionate about.

e2le• 3 months ago

Astroturfing around this is getting suspicious.

It's perfectly possible for people to be passionate about the subject.

drstewart4• 3 months ago

I've never met a real human that was passionate about what OS a government worker in some local French commune uses, but it's the hottest topic on HN behind AI

bombcar• 3 months ago

I remember similar articles being posted 20+ years ago on Slashdot. And as we’ve seen, it’s often less of a “use Linux” and more of a “we have an alternate vendor” and there’s often suspicious lock-in (see the case in the EU or some similar country where the vendor was reading emails).

dbdr4• 3 months ago

At least in some cases, it's actually using Linux and open document format, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu

selfsigned2• 3 months ago

Really proud as a French, I think the government has had some success with moving to something matrix based for the public sector too. https://tchap.numerique.gouv.fr

I just hope we end up having more wins at the EU-level, instead of massive fails like GAIA-X...

Toine• 3 months ago

"As a French" ne veut rien dire en anglais. Il faut rajouter man, person ou quelquechose. Frenchman, French person, French citizen.

Mindless2112• 3 months ago

The demonym for France is "French," so it's not wrong (even if it doesn't sound right.)

gib4443• 3 months ago

Nor "Frenchie" while we're on the topic. It sounds really weird. It's also commonly used to refer to a french bulldog !

Mainan_Tagonist2• 3 months ago

Pedantry attracts dislike. One may be right to state something, yet wrong to call it out in public.

pablomalo• 3 months ago

"Quelquechose" doesn't mean anything in French. It's written "quelque chose".

dbdr4• 3 months ago

Also GendBuntu, a custom version of Ubuntu used by 100 000 stations (almost all) of the national gendarmerie.

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

peter-m80• 3 months ago

should be done at EU level and make it mandatory for all members

harvey92• 3 months ago

France has been doing this in parts of its government functions for years, building expertise and learning what works. What do you imagine the EU institutions would bring to the table?

dbdr4• 3 months ago

Good on France for doing that work.

More countries and/or EU involvement could bring economies of scale: apart from translation, a lot of work on fixing bugs and adding features to the relevant open source projects can be done once and benefit all. So either get the same results faster, more cheaply per country, or both. Sure, that adds some bureaucracy and coordination cost too, but should be worth it overall.

roysting2• 3 months ago

[flagged]

EinigeKreise2• 3 months ago

You forgot the part where the countries voluntarily join the organisation. By the way, the commission is subject to a vote of confidence by the parliament, which is directly elected. I'm pretty sure you don't get to directly vote for your cabinet members either, wherever you are.

dang2• 3 months ago

Could you please stop posting personal attacks and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

Comments like these, and you've unfortunately posted many others like them, are not ok here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47612036

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47580543

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47561644

We ban accounts that keep doing this, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

pixel_popping• 3 months ago

It sounds actually nutts that governments are allowed to run unknown and uncheckable binaries as their(our?) infrastructure.

e-dant• 3 months ago

Microsoft is a strategic risk for the US, too

trinsic2• 3 months ago

Exactly. I have been thinking about using this migration articles as a way to convince my customers to switch.

Leomuck6• 3 months ago

Microsoft is a strategic risk for everybody, looking at their track records the last few years.. I don't love Linux, but I like it. It's no-bullshit. It doesn't always do everything perfectly, but it has the right mindset. It doesn't want to screw me over.

clickety_clack• 3 months ago

Even the US government should be considering this.

_ink_• 3 months ago

Glad that France takes the lead, that Germany fumbled. Allez Les Blues!

mrits• 3 months ago

France hasn't taken the lead. They haven't done anything. This will be abandoned by this time next year.

M95D4• 3 months ago

I fear this might be just license costs cutting and not something that Linux and FOSS will benefit from.

ur-whale• 3 months ago

I fear this might be just license costs cutting and not something that Linux and FOSS will benefit from.

yup, at this point, nothing but cobwebs and IOU's left in the coffers over there and every little bit of saving helps.

samrus5• 3 months ago

Why wouldnt linux and FOSS benefit from usage? At the least it result in social validation, if not bug reports

M95D4• 3 months ago

Social validation brings incompetent users expecting something like Windows that "just works".

Even if they could bring some bug reports... We have lots of those already! We have decades of ignored bug reports.

tjarjoura• 3 months ago

This sounds interesting on paper but I wonder how likely it is they actually pull it off. Even putting aside the logistics of installing new oses across a bunch of workstations, migrating from legacy Active Directory domains is something even small enterprises struggle with.

idoubtit• 3 months ago

The chain of facts makes me sad:

1. The French government announces its digital agency is to write a plan, by the end of the year, so that France could reduce its extra-European dependencies. The communiqué is wrapped up with minor facts (e.g. the digital agency is to switch to Linux on dozens of computers) and big promises from Ministers.

2. Various news sites state that "France is ditching Windows", at least in their titles.

3. On new aggregators, most people react to the titles. Some do read the articles. Very few realize it's about promises to act toward a vague goal, with an unknown calendar, and many political uncertainties.

I would have hoped for more cautious reactions. It's not a leading act, not a reason to be proud, not a example to follow. It's just words.

The French government already made similar promises in the past. Sometimes, it did happen, like the Gendarmerie (rural police) switching to a Linux distribution. Sometimes, it didn't, like the pact signed by the Army Ministry with Microsoft in 2022: many clauses are still secret, even the prices.

raincole• 3 months ago

This is EU, what else do you expect? European officials saying they're ditching Windows has become a ritual:

https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/german-open-source-expe...:

The German Foreign Office first moved over to Linux as a server platform in 2001... the Foreign Office of Germany made the announcement (translated news report) that it is migrating away from Linux back to Windows as its desktop solution.

https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-so...:

By December 2013, the city concluded the migration, with over 14,800 desktops running on LiMux... In November 2017, nearly four years after the conclusion of the migration, the Munich city council adopted a decision overhauling the move. All equipment was to be refitted with Windows 10 counterparts by 2020

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

WIENUX[2] is a Debian-based Linux distribution developed by the City of Vienna in Austria... until 2008 when the download page was taken offline.

https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/POST...:

Birmingham City Council piloted OSS on hundreds of desktops in its public libraries in 2005-6. It originally planned to install Linux ... but this was over-ambitious for the time frame of the project and compatibility problems meant that the open source OpenOffice (office suite) and Firefox (web browser) were eventually run on Windows XP

AlotOfReading• 3 months ago

The LiMux/Munich saga was actually successful to a large degree. What happened is that Microsoft put enormous efforts into killing it. High level people like Steve ballmer and Bill Gates made personal visits to Munich officials to win them back, Microsoft put a headquarters in Bavaria, and there were huge concessions. It's about as far as you can get from the image of empty promises and no action.

bigfudge10• 3 months ago

Those attempts happened before the US really made such a concrete demonstration it was a security and strategic risk though. That was back in the good old days where they at least pretended to be strategic partners.

It's good to be sceptical, but the US really does present a clear danger to the EU and UK now (and the rest of the world). I'm hopeful that this will actually materialise this time, and that Munich and Birmingham and the others will have paved the way and built some expertise.

icar• 3 months ago

What about https://github.com/cloud-gouv/securix, though?

slibhb5• 3 months ago

Performative anti-Americanism has become one of the major features of European culture (and especially French culture).

x3ro2• 3 months ago

What's performative about not wanting to go down with a sinking ship? Or are you under the illusion that the U.S. is doing particularly well right now? It appears that the "we have the bigger stick" strategy is finally meeting some resistance, and I am happy to see it.

dopidopHN23• 3 months ago

Its moving the needle. There is a lot to be done but its moving

bigfudge10• 3 months ago

The French are just (wonderfully) arrogant enough to say what everyone else is thinking. The UK will likely be too spineless to actually follow through, but the Germans and Eastern Europeans are not going to tolerate the level of exposure we all have to US craziness any longer.

vrganj8• 3 months ago

As a European, the Anti-Americanism is not performative.

It's a deep disconnect in values, brought to the forefront by the current administration and the oligarchs running wild.

America used to be seen as an example, the big brother watching out for us.

Now it's a cautionary tale of greed, hubris and societal decay, as well as an increasingly antagonistic actor of global instability.

Y'all ruined your reputation and the fact you're trying to pin that on us is just another example of said hubris. Until you at least own up to it, there's no viable path to recovery.

bertil3• 3 months ago

Some big moneyed interests are trying to split Europe and the US.

The current US administration is definitely not helping, but every ad I see on the Reddit main feed is a blatant attack on the relation, from brand new subreddits, pointing at magazines I’ve never heard about before. I’ve been reporting them, but it keeps coming, from constantly different sources, different names, subreddits, but always the same vague but incredible incredibly provocative titles

I suspect that some social-media-addled senior US officials are being fed the same crap because their reactions to non-existent European reaction are not grounded in reality.

dopidopHN23• 3 months ago

You could be more pointed than that. French secret service "leveraging" Palantir is a disgrace , we all know who is leveraging who and its a plain shame.

mytailorisrich• 3 months ago

It is always easy to make big announcements but harder to follow through.

They'd need a strong software and tech industry and ecosystem but in general business and economic policy, especially in France, is as hostile as possible and harder to change politically.

jrm42• 3 months ago

It shouldn't make you sad, it should make you curious.

Broadly, I've observed that there's way way way too little discussion of the extent to which money and power, somewhat behind the scenes, can be thrown at what feels like "tech decisions."

A while back, here in Florida, a state representative had a relative who was kind of into open source and had it explained to him. Representative was like "oh interesting idea, Florida should look into doing more of this"

And the suits from Microsoft came down swiftly to "correct" matters.

Departed74052• 3 months ago

France'a Gendarmerie (one of two branch of law-enforcement) has switched to linux for more than a decade. There is little reason to think they are bluffing. Furthermore, the groundwork has been laid for months, with forks being worked on.

I understand your take generally, but here I don't understand the skepticism.

oaiey5• 3 months ago

Not only that, they already built up Matrix for messaging which is already adopted elsewhere. They are doing the steps

wolvoleo5• 3 months ago

They are already part of the way. They use "la suite" pretty extensively, it's an office suite based on open source components.

Migrating from windows as an OS is a logical next step.

Also the gendarmerie has their own dedicated Linux distribution for all their workstations as you mentioned. The French certainly have put in the work. It's not just talk.

jlnthws• 3 months ago

Nice! Now moving from Windows to Linux is the "easy", visible part. Replacing US cloud + US AI dependence end to end is much harder, and that’s the real deal today.

Leomuck6• 3 months ago

I think you're right. Even though France might not have done much yet, it's a sign many people will read about and maybe think Linux is a good alternative. That's a win in my book.

AI and cloud are another thing altogether. Mistral is alright, open-source AI models are alright, but overall I think they can't compete yet. And I don't think there are fully capable cloud alternatives to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud yet. EU pushing Nextcloud-based alternatives really doesn't fuel confidence honestly. I mean Nextcloud is fine, but that's not the big alternative push we need here.

bigfudge10• 3 months ago

Really though, how many companies actually need Azure, AWS? In my experience in SME's there is _so_ much overcomplication, over-provisioning and overspending going on because there has been a default assumption that US cloud==lower risk.

Governments properly mandating that data be held in the EU, or even in orgs with proper EU entities and checks and balances against US interference in time of conflict would change the game. This is what the EU should be working on... a data residency regime that allows us to use AWS but creates a firewall that allows us to take operational control of the servers if the US continues on it's current path.

cmiles8• 3 months ago

They’re still going the almost certainly end up running this on US designed chips, with US designed networking equipment and a bunch of other assets tied back to US companies. They should do what they want, but it’s “sovereignty theater” at best.

ghighi7878• 3 months ago

You always have to start somewhere. Whether this will succeed or not is not known, but you do have to start somewhere.

pessimizer4• 3 months ago

Start with not antagonizing China, and you'll have other vendors to chose from.

omgwtfbyobbq2• 3 months ago

I wouldn't say that. I think it's a proportional response to US tarriffs/changes in foreign policy under the current administration, just like the cancellation of defence contracts/orders.

It's unrealistic for any nation to do everything themselves, but they can make some changes in response to the US starting trade wars, ditching foreign policy/climate objectives, etc...

znnajdla• 3 months ago

The US or Trump can’t switch off your chips or your networking equipment on a whim - and if they ever designed hardware that could do that, no one would buy such hardware as soon as that capability became known. Using cloud software is a much bigger risk - your access can be turned off anytime and data access is part of the deal.

Sovereignty is not about building everything yourself. Division of labor advances civilization, but it doesn’t have to come at the cost of sovereignty. Sovereignty is about designing the work contract such that you don’t become entirely beholden to another party. You build hardware for me, but after that it’s mine, not yours. I trust you to build the hardware to fulfill that contract, and if you ever break that trust I’ll find someone else to build that hardware. That’s sovereignty. I don’t have to build everything myself.

MaxPock• 3 months ago

Trump just needs to ask them to jump and they will ask how high.

Leomuck6• 3 months ago

Maybe, but chips cannot hold you hostage during work. I don't care where things are built (except when they are built somewhere where human rights are being treated like shit), software is what locks you into whatever bullshit the company decides on, not chips. So it is a good step I think. We don't have to be all "we don't use anything from outside the EU" - why? Some countries are better than others at stuff. Fair enough. The movement is about moving away from software monopolies that decide on what you can and can't do, not about having everything inside a certain geographical location.

anigbrowl• 3 months ago

Rome wasn't built in a day, and its computing and networking technology wasn't replaced in a day either.

jhawk28• 3 months ago

AI finding vulnerabilities in open source software is going to make it super unpleasant for a time. I expect there to be a shift back to closed source until we get through that period.

omgwtfbyobbq2• 3 months ago

That's also a benefit to some degree. Closed source likely has as many vulnerabilities and bugs, but if AI can't find them it'll progressively become less secure.

swiftcoder5• 3 months ago

Is there any evidence that GenAI is incapable of redteam'ing proprietary software? This seems like the sort of thing an agent with suitable tooling would be quite good at - I see someone already made an MCP for ghidra...

Leomuck6• 3 months ago

Fair. But also I look at it as a chance. We get to fix lots of bugs. Bugs that bad actors can't use anymore.

pessimizer4• 3 months ago

A million eyes makes no difference when it comes to AI, they're all going to find the same vulnerabilities. Which means that one guy running AI against your closed source software is just about the same as 1000 guys running AI against your FOSS, but most of the people running against your FOSS are going to be doing it to help you, and the people who ran against your closed codebase are never going to tell you about it.

AI finding vulnerabilities and cleaning them up is going to be a budget problem for closed-source software, who have gotten used to ignoring vulnerabilities until somebody screams at them.

Closed source software isn't kept in a magical safe in a cavern deep beneath the earth, guarded by dragons. Half the people in your company touch it every day, and probably plenty of contractors.

Rustwerks• 3 months ago

I suspect that the same AI trick works with binaries if you run them through a decompiler first. It would be interesting to try if I had time.

anon2912• 3 months ago

Linux is also written by American companies at the end of the day. Most linux devs are supported by American companies and Linux's benevolent dictator for life, Linus Torvalds, lives in Portland, Oregon and is an American citizen.

There's literally no non-American general-purpose operating system.

etchalon• 3 months ago

They're not wrong.

ChrisArchitect• 3 months ago

Again? what was wrong with the previous two discussions about this OP? with 1400+ upvotes

[dupe]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47719486

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716043

mancerayder• 3 months ago

Has anyone noticed an increased of one-liner controversial commentary, usually assertions, with a bunch of replies, sometimes, "No and no" or something like "this is the right answer" or a bunch of greyed comments?

HN is not Reddit, and that's a Reddit pattern. It's an anti-intellectual pattern because it's a popularity/anger contest and there's nothing of substance.

I'd love to hear the pros and cons and even likelihood of Linux in government, but I'm having trouble finding the smart commentary from the grey noise.

Help!

ddtaylor2• 3 months ago

The amount of money and time wasted because people want to run Windows is staggering. There are organizations and governments running tens of thousands of machines, having highly sensitive data stolen, and much worse and paying for that "privilege."

That's bad enough, but then you get to play the "tick tock" release game of a normal quality release, followed by whatever bizarre experiment comes after. Vista, Metro, and now 11. Features come and go, layers of complexity are added, abandoned, etc. You and your organization are a helpless passenger in a drunk drivers car.

But hey, they'll throw you a few credits sometimes or introduce you to a new predatory side hustle of theirs with a rebranded flavor of vendor lock-in. Maybe they'll help you take something you own and lease it back to you via a subscription.

Yes, I'm the Linux person. Yes, I've been saying these same things for decades. Yes, our system has flaws and could be better. But, what I have been learning that is new over the last few years is that when centralized and crappy systems are a combination of cheap and simple, people don't care about alternatives. Then once people are dug into a hole that only gets deeper it begins to be a much easier sell to just be at ground level looking down asking "You okay there buddy?"

Virtually every problem I read about or hear people complaining about has a direct and simple solution that we in the FOSS community are already doing. Use free and open source software from the repository. Use sandboxing techniques like Flatpak. If you have the need, use something like Qubes. For most cases qemu is so good you can run a separate VM per task! KVM is very good. There are so many solutions and the landscape is wide open.

jrm42• 3 months ago

Linus Torvalds. Richard Stallman. GNU and the GPL.

As a bit of an old-timer, I literally don't know exactly where to start a new conversation on this in a place like this; for me the obviousness of the theoretical and practical superiority of free and open source software principles are just always there for me; and it's quite obvious here that it's different for younger people.

So I'm dropping the names and the concepts. Perhaps someone else knows how to get this going?

bhayanisumit06• 3 months ago

I totally agree, this was long time coming.

jim33442• 3 months ago

I don't see how this strategy can work without the EU basically having a counterpart to Microsoft. You can't beat Windows just uniting around the Linux kernel, it needs to be a whole OS plus an entire ecosystem including cloud.

flossly• 3 months ago

I prefer this reason, "risk", from the "cost savings" reasons we've seen in Germany, Russia, Germany (Munich at first) and Spain (Extremadura at first)

bigfatkitten• 3 months ago

Even if you don’t view the US as a strategic risk, it is wise to have a plan to not be in Microsoft’s ecosystem.

Microsoft has all but abandoned their self hosted products in favour of cloud, and their cloud services are a security dumpster fire.

Microsoft’s cloud was described as a “pile of shit” but it achieved FedRAMP ATO only because so many agencies were already using their services.

https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-cloud-fedramp-c...

Entra ID is full of disastrous design-level bugs like this one.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/19/microsoft_entra_id_bu...

Microsoft has deep rooted cultural problems that make the company structurally incapable of fixing their platform.

https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...

ddtaylor2• 3 months ago

The negative view of this and framing that it will be abandoned is interesting. France has already transitioned over 100,000 of their machines from Windows to Linux for their police force. They run a modified version of Ubuntu. Yes, it took them near a decade to do it.

There are roughly 80,000 more systems currently in transition at varying levels of complete.

Yes, this new directive is to move towards a goal of 2.5M systems. Yes, that's a lot more than their current number. They are making progress and now have a clear directive that guides them.

jurschreuder• 3 months ago

We also migrated from Windows to Linux and Mac.

We also migrated from AWS and Azure to European cloud.

But as you can see Mac is still from the USA so although the making things European sounds nice, it's only part of the reason.

Mac has greatly improved with the M chip line. Windows has greatly degraded over time.

AWS and Azure are by now something like 10x the price per year of just buying the hardware yourselves. They always compare the price to the salary of a senior engineer in San Francisco if you include vested stocks.

However installing a database with the correct security settings has also become a lot easier since AWS started.

spwa46• 3 months ago

Now that on-chip silicon radios have been invented, using anything but home-designed cpus, and in general all chips, is lunacy from a nation-state security standpoint.

France's government is ditching Windows for Linux, says US tech a strategic risk

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