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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

#251

Post by Zababa »

mrjay42 wrote: post #70
Latitude7973 wrote: post #3

France has been making good moves to achieve software independence from the US. It would be an even better move to allow those in Europe or indeed the rest of the world to also benefit.

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…

>a right-side political figure, who are basically ruling since 2000, (except from 2012-2017 where France had a social-democratic government and president)

This is not really true, since 2017 we have a centrist president. For the legal power, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Assembly_(France)#Fif....

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

#252

Post by pjc50 »

mbreese wrote: post #230
pjc50 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Well AD is just a really opinionated LDAP/Kerberos setup, so you’d think that there would be something that Linux could do. But when you’re talking about enterprise management of thousands of devices, you need some kind of consistent security policy management. That requires running OS software that accepts remote policy management, which is a very specialized configuration and not just “vanilla Linux”. You can get r…

> That requires running OS software that accepts remote policy management

Every Linux system that supports SSH potentially "accepts" remote management! The challenge is just putting it into a framework.

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

#253

Post by everdrive »

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?

They'll start pulling Linux in a direction that suites them, which will potentially be at odds with the preferences of open source software enthusiasts.

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

#254

Post by xorcist »

ethbr1 wrote: post #222
xorcist wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 yo…

What's the Linux version of AD and group policies? (honestly curious; linux sysadmin at scale not my day job)

I don't know. What's the Windows equivalent of dpkg (from 1993) and ssh (from 1995)?

Still nothing, three decades later. Not because Microsoft engineers couldn't do it, of course, but becasue they didn't want to. It doesn't fit the Windows model. They did recently adopt SSH, but that was because they want to use Windows in cloud-like environments, where expectations are set by Linux-style tools.

By the time Windows got to the point where it even could be centrally managed in any reasonable fashion, Linux environments was routinely run an order of magnitude larger still.

There is a reason why the whole cloud runs Linux. Anything else is a rounding error. That's because Linux is inherently so much less work to manage at scale.

If something like Group Policies would somehow be accepted by the Linux community, that could only be a step backwards. A well run Ansible or Puppet or similar environment works on a completely different scale.

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

#255

Post by Spooky23 »

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.

This is actually a good time to disrupt that, as Microsoft’s attention is not on windows and Active Directory is slowly moving to Entra, although big enterprises are mostly hybrid.

Some places are using Okta for many of those functions too. Trump’s instinctive parasitic slumlord behavior may be enough for the sleepy Europeans to get their shit together.

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

#256

Post by everdrive »

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…

Group policy is an annoying pain. Yes, there aren't many better options out there, but it's not as if group policy is _good_.

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

#257

Post by CalRobert »

tekla wrote: post #152
CalRobert wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven’t seen power point used professionally for over a decade. All google (though I’ve made the odd prezi)

I continue to be impressed as to how much of a bubble HN people reside in. A very small bubble.

Perhaps! I’m not in the US for what it’s worth

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

#258

Post by fauzanhilmi »

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…

Related: Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47507150

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

#259

Post by himata4113 »

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…

Well actually I've been technically playing all the games that are protected by these aggressive anticheats on linux since I've decided to switch.

My setup is a custom version of the linux kernel that 'backdoors' itself and exposes host information to the windows vm making all the anticheats happy enough to work out of the box. Have not gotten banned in any of the games either. Custom VMM and EDK builds are required to block blanket detections of virtualized hardware.

I repurposed lookingglass to instead stream all the wdm buffers as seperate applications that I can open directly in linux like they're native applications. The neat part is that I forward all the installed applications to KRunner which talks to the windows vm and launches the application there and spawns a looking glass instance for that applications assigned path.

The only downside that this is a two GPU solution and you have to run any GPU intensive applications in windows.

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

#260

Post by BirAdam »

benterix wrote: post #113

At this point I wouldn't be surprised if American companies started using it if the French get it right. The instability of the current administration is one thing, but Microsoft disregard for its user deserves an appropriate response that will actually hit them where they care.

I would love to self-host France's "La Suite" to keep myself out of Google and MS... but for many companies, it will not matter how much you tell them there are options that are both cheaper and better. They will believe that paying someone tons of money is better because others cannot afford it. That inherently makes it superior... for some reason... you see?
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