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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

#201

Post by ano-ther »

stunseed wrote: post #123
Gud wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Most of their revenue is tied to other stuff though 1. Productivity / Business (~43%) Includes: Microsoft 365 (Office, Teams) - these can be likely ported to Linux if they're not already since they also work on MacOS? LinkedIn Dynamics (ERP/CRM) ~$120.8B 2. Cloud (~38%) Includes: Azure (runs on mostly linux, and moving cloud provider as a big corp is expensive, I don't see massive companies stuck in azure infra movin…

The French move will hit the Productivity/ Business segment. Their motivation is to limit extra-European dependence so they will look elsewhere for this.

Similar to Germany with its DeutschlandStack and some migrations already ongoing.

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

#202

Post by microtonal »

notrealyme123 wrote: post #101
samus wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why not? GrapheneOS and others show that it is possible to make viable operating systems on top of AOSP, which also have their own useful extensions.

It seems like a waste not to use an existing, well-developed, hardened, open source base, that at the same time provides great compatibility with most existing apps.

Since it is open source, it would always be possible to fork if AOSP goes off the rails.

I think the primary issue is that it is currently hard to get embargoed security patches, unless you have some partnership with an OEM.

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

#203

Post by sjdv1982 »

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.

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

#204

Post by einr »

carlosjobim wrote: post #172
einr wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't mentioned America or any other continent. It is the Europeans who are shouting about sovereignty right now. Well, no one has mentioned computer hardware until you did. Surely you understand how "all the motherboards are made in Taiwan" is less of an immediate risk to sovereignty than "all of our business and personal data is stored on American servers and subject to US law" It would be nice if Europe could…

Computing is the software and the hardware. So you're right, I feel that it is futile. Well, you can use the old hardware which you've already got if you get cut off from foreign suppliers. But the same is true for software. It's even more true for software. If the French government and other Europeans were serious about reducing or eliminating dependency on American cloud services, they should switch to older versio…

Unfortunately that’s an unacceptable security risk, especially for a government.

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

#205

Post by morog »

kalaksi wrote: post #185
shevy-java wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 deskto…

> 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 sus…

yes the flaky sleep is what did it for me - laptop would randomly boot up at 2am, bright lights and whirring fans. Thought it was a virus! Seems like Fedora has cracked the hibernate/sleep issue, possibly due to good intel driver support for my Dell and finally Linux has better hibernate, sleep and wake than Windows 11 (ymmv!)

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

#206

Post by sph »

orochimaaru wrote: post #195
llarsson wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because until literally a year ago, the country that hosted Microsoft was one of France's most trusted allies.

It takes time to find a suitable replacement to a global monopoly.

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

#207

Post by robertlagrant »

dubcanada wrote: post #24
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.

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 repl…

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

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

#208

Post by close04 »

mickael-kerjean wrote: post #126
mrjay42 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 publi…

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

It makes sense a government will want to take full charge of the strategically important software they will run on especially when they try to establish it as a new standard in a challenging transition. One day when it's fully established they could still spin it off and some other entity takes point.

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

#209

Post by kgwxd »

ChocolateGod wrote: post #120
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'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.

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

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

#210

Post by xorcist »

pjc50 wrote: post #188
ChocolateGod wrote: post #120

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.

> 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 n…

> Isn't it about time someone developed one?

Honest question: Why? If you want a Windows-like environment, run Windows.

I get this all the time when people ask about a Linux equivalent for something, and aren't really satistied when it doesn't work or look the same. Linux isn't a clone of Windows. Linux comes from an older heritage, and has a unique culture. You are in for a hard time if you want to use Linux like you would use Windows. That's a suboptimal experience, at best.

That said, of course Linux should be easy to manage. But Windows is from a single corporate entity, of course their management tools will be different. It used to be unix admins that laughed about people using Windows as servers. The culture around Linux is one of scriptabiliy where even the user interface, the basic shell, is one where every command is inherently a script. That's why management on Linux looks like Ansible and OpenSSH, not like Remote Desktop and Group Policies.

You could write something like Group Policies for Linux of course, but it wouldn't be a complete solution so people would just continue using Ansible, OpenSSH, and the respective package managers.

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