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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

#211

Post by ethbr1 »

llarsson wrote: post #159
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.

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?

> Imagine what can happen if the French and other governments would start pouring all the money into developing that further in the open

You'd get a clusterfuck of a consensus spec, then they'd all get pissed off and develop their own incompatible versions anyway?

Have you seen international projects without strong, centralized leadership?

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

#212

Post by microtonal »

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…

they should switch to older versions of MS Office and MS Windows be done with it

That does not make any sense at all. These are full of known security vulnerabilities.

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

#213

Post by alper »

sylens wrote: post #117

Many government orgs have spent the last decade and a half slowly transitioning old legacy applications and platforms to browser-based alternatives. That old ERP software that used to require a thick client? Now it runs in Chrome. Microsoft recognized this and smartly moved to keep these customers locked in via an ever growing Microsoft Office bundle - subscription based, with Teams for their chat and then building u…

> to browser-based alternatives

And many of those tool providers could see for 10-20 years now that if they didn't provide a web based version sometime soon, they would go out of business sooner or later.

There are almost no applications that a government employee should be running natively on their machine anyway.

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

#214

Post by kgwxd »

mbreese wrote: post #198
hug wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No alternative, you can't realistically fully control everything everyone does on every device in their possession. It was job security for useless control freaks, the products never should have existed.

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

#215

Post by Bayart »

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.

The primitives are there and they're solid, beyond that it's "just" architecture and integration work. Hopefully the French government will be rational with this (I believe the time and financial constraints will for it to be, we're broke and we lack time) and they won't fall into the trap of trying to internalize every bit of the platform.

A good example of that would be what happened with Docker. Off the top of my head cgroups, namespaces, seccomp, overlays and capabilities had been around for a while before it got rolled up in a nice utility in 2013 and opensourced in 2015. Hence the containerization movement. Solaris zones and FreeBSD jails were nice but they always were let's say a bit too bearded.

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

#217

Post by sph »

CalRobert wrote: post #163

But will they use azure?

I've been on a contract for a multinational European company that's in partnership with ESA for the past 18 months, and I've seen a lot of money and effort spent to move out of the US cloud to OVH. After the US decided to go rogue, this project became even more urgent.

My job is basically recreating a small part of the infrastructure that was designed for AWS, while patching some shortcomings of the OVH offerings which are not as featureful.

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

#218

Post by specproc »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #17

Being dependent on US tech feels the same as when we were dependent on Russian energy: strategically unwise and avoidable. We have alternatives, they just need work.

This is so utterly urgent. The US is an increasingly-deranged, hostile actor, which is able to cripple our tech at will.

I think we've been far too complacent about the direction of travel across the Atlantic. Trump and his crew are the new normal, and the key players in Silicon Valley are on board.

Any European government not currently working towards independence from US tech is being almost criminally neglectful.

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

#219

Post by ninjagoo »

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.

> Linux still doesn't have anywhere near as nice and cohesive as Group Policy, Active Directory etc.

Enterprise environments use a number of tools like Powerbroker, UCS, Centrify/Delinea etc to bind linux machines to active directory and manage identity and access through active directory. This is for mixed environments with both Windows and Linux machines.

For pure linux environments, there are a number of tools like FreeIPA/IdM, Samba AD/DC (for A/D like management), and OpenText's eDirectory for the current version of Novell's eDirectory counterpart to A/D. They all provide centralized user/host/policy/access management.

Since Entra+Intune are the recent MS products, cloud-based equivalents are Jumpcloud+Fleet, Okta PAM, FreeIPA/IdM.

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

#220

Post by lionkor »

Levitating wrote: post #200
lionkor wrote: post #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 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.

Time is money, get talking!

Yes, last time (recently) I tried, the original games ran very well, with no (Linux specific) issues!

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