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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

#241

Post by ethbr1 »

Zigurd wrote: post #221
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.

Personal computers were used in office environments long before the technologies to make them administer-able as if they were a mainframe. Before blindly jumping in and reproducing those technologies, better to ask why they emerged in the first place. Most workplaces don't have strict bans on personal mobile devices, and some of the ones that do, don't have the kind of physical perimeter defense that can detect peopl…

> Most workplaces don't have strict bans on personal mobile devices

If you're talking about select work apps on your mobile device, sure, but that's limited attack surface.

If you're talking about employers who let unmanaged mobile devices hop on their internal network... I've never seen that. Maybe at a hypothetically perfect zero-trust shop?

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

#242

Post by Zababa »

halapro wrote: post #107
SyneRyder wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At least when you have a few different values you can pick and compare but yeah.

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

#243

Post by hug »

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…

It was absolutely not the case two decades ago. There were no other options for an enterprise fleet, 20 years ago, if the question was asked. If you weren't Google (who never asked the question anyway), the answer for managing 25,000 endpoints was to use Windows devices with Active Directory as the management plane. Anyone doing anything else was in for a world of hurt... and that's why every enterprise ended up on Windows, and why everyone targeting enterprise management targeted Windows -- because that's what the endpoints were already running.

What killed AD & GPO was Microsoft, in their bullheaded push toward Azure everything. Instead of listening to what it was that the enterprise customers actually wanted, they designed a system that made sense to them, but to no one else. The original UI was written in Silverlight. It was horrific.

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

#244

Post by microtonal »

mrtksn wrote: post #127

Prediction: If USA ends up attacking EU, EU will freeze all the US tech company money and compel them to open their platforms and move all the backend services to EU soil in exchange of unfreezing it and continue operating in a free but regulated market. For example locked communication devices are huge national security risk, so Apple will have their money frozen and given two options: 1) Open up iOS etc, bring all…

Open up iOS etc, bring all the servers to EU.

How is that going to work? Apple will still be under the CLOUD Act, so Europe would still be vulnerable. The only solution would be for Apple to fork into two completely separate companies, which is unlikely to happen.

Most likely there will initially just be a lot of chaos, because nobody is prepared for this scenario. There will be huge supply issues, COVID will look like nothing (both in terms of groceries, etc. and getting replacement hardware). Then Europe will on the short term rebase to Chinese/Korean/Taiwanese hardware, with probably an AOSP fork on the mobile side and Linux on the desktop/server side.

But it will be terribly messy. Nobody seems to prepare, because everyone thinks this scenario is unthinkable or they just don't want to put in the effort. Even all the people that I know that are talking about digital sovereignty are still using their iPhones, MacBooks, or GMS Android phones.

I am trying to tell tech people that the time to start switching is to alternatives is now, since tech people are usually early adopters and can help other people. But most switch from GMail to Proton Mail and proclaim victory. January 2026 (remember the good ol' days when the US wanted to take Greenland with force if necessary?) was already forgotten after 4 weeks or so.

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

#245

Post by pulse7 »

sph wrote: post #206
orochimaaru wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It looks like the president - which was a businessman - will make a huge damage to American IT businesses. And IT stocks dominate the S&P 500, comprising roughly 1/3 of the index's total market capitalization... Good luck America!

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

#246

Post by opan »

apatheticonion wrote: post #149
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?

A big hurdle to this is hardware vendors locking bootloaders and making it impossible (or impractical) to write or use existing drivers. Manufacturers maintain long running forks of Android (often very old Linux kernels) with their drivers hidden in their fork's source. I'm a firm believer in the right to repair software - and the fact that it's illegal to reverse engineer binary blob drivers (or proprietary software…

>the fact that it's illegal to reverse engineer binary blob drivers (or proprietary software at all) is a shame

Where? I don't think it's illegal in the US at least. The only things I'm aware of that may have legal issues are related to radios, specifically modem/baseband stuff, and maybe WLAN cards.

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

#248

Post by Bayart »

harlequinetcie wrote: post #76

I find fascinating how so many people are moving away from Microsoft decades after they should have because of simply the inertia that large organizations have on adoption. Above all, I'm also surprised on how those same organization are using Anthropic or OpenAI or other close source solutions for their agent harnesses instead of going for Open Source. Malte just yesterday showed how powerful innovation with small t…

> I find fascinating how so many people are moving away from Microsoft decades after they should have because of simply the inertia that large organizations have on adoption.

That should be a good lesson in anthropology : the delta between knowing something and acting upon it tends to be immediate necessity. We're still an immature species as we haven't learned to be lazy at scale, that is putting the right amount of work early on to do the least overall. But I'm optimistic we'll get there.

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

#250

Post by tremon »

Levitating wrote: post #193
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. I am sure that's something the Gnome Foundation could figure out if they had a grant to do so.

Putting it in the hands on the GNOME foundation will just result in a lot of new soon-to-be-mandatory APIs and numerous configuration variables with only one allowed value.
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