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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

#191
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.

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

#192

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.

Consumer don't care if the OS is proprietary, as long as it works and there is a responsible party they can trust to serve them the offering.

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

#193
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'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.

> 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.

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

#194

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

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.

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

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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?

Why haven’t they done it yet? I just think they’re incentivized enough for it.

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

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it is a lot more, as far as I understand, most of the UI is proprietary:

https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/sailfish-os-clarifying-claims...

https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/sailfish-os-clarifying-claims...

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

#198
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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 poli…

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

That was also the answer two decades ago. But if AD and GPO are now dead, what killed them and what are the options? Is the problem mobile and BYOD?

I’ve been primarily on Macs since that time where endpoint management isn’t much, so there are fewer knobs to fiddle with. In some ways it’s nice in that admins can’t screw around too much with my system. In other ways, I’m sure Macs feel limiting for those in charge of enterprise security. However, most endpoint management feels like it’s written for Windows with Macs as an afterthought for checklist security. Knowing that, I’m happy there are fewer places for dodgy software to be able to interface with the OS.

(Edit: added quote to top)

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

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was under the impression anticheat is the only thing stopping linux gaming from taking over

Anticheat and support for joysticks, steering wheels, VR, etc. is one factor for sure. I would say almost all games people play, which dont fall in the above categories, run out of the box with no or very minor tweaks needed (no terminal).

[deleted]

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

#200

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 pl…

> 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.

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