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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Good. The US is gone.

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.

>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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

I wish the US Government would do the same

Political posturing that will never actually occur.

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.

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

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

So did the Great Country of North Korea.

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.

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

What? Again?

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

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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.

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.