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

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

#101

Post by notrealyme123 »

samus wrote: post #61
faccacta wrote: post #56

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?

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.

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

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

#102

Post by embedding-shape »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #82
embedding-shape wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, as I'm not super familiar with Jolla's/Sailfish's architecture, but isn't most of the OS actually FOSS, while there is a thin proprietary compatibility layer, and that's about it? Was some months ago I last read about it so could be misremembering, but seems like a good first step at the very least.

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

#103

Post by mickael-kerjean »

rvnx wrote: post #14
Pay08 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Still less, there is a lot of sovereignty-washing in EU, and specifically in France because this gives you access to grants and public markets. Bpifrance, the Caisse des Dépôts, France 2030, Horizon Europe, etc. To access that money, you need the right narrative. So companies learn to wrap their pitch in sovereignty language, get the grants, and then quietly build on top of AWS, Azure or GCP. Not that it's dramatic,…

As a French citizen who's been building an open source Dropbox alternative for almost a decade [1], the sovereignty talk in France makes me cringe. Everyone has the word in their mouth, but nobody bothers to even search for alternatives, let alone give them a chance. France represents about 1% of my customer base with only a single customer: LVMH. I've had a whole bunch of French universities contacting me, nobody was willing to contribute toward the development because culturally we assume libre software must be free of charge so you'd better either beg for grants or have a rich uncle to sponsor your life. 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, and don't even get me started on public markets.

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

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

#104

Post by astrobe_ »

sgt wrote: post #2

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

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.

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

#105

Post by dackdel »

faccacta wrote: post #56

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?

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

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

#106

Post by tcfhgj »

newqer wrote: post #40
JaggerJo wrote: post #13

Hope we’ll do the same in germany.

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.

"they" is a German city, not Germany

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

#107

Post by halapro »

SyneRyder wrote: post #9
rvnx wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 va…

> a European perspective on politics, culture and values

To be honest this does not sound much better. 40 years ago maybe I would have preferred EU values over the US' puritan values. Nowadays I'd just expect a different flavor of poison.

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

#109

Post by zecg »

polski-g wrote: post #57
esskay wrote: post #12

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.

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.

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
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