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've worked in academia for years (in computer vision labs) and I can confidently say that PowerPoint is the best tool to prepare research presentations.
France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech
301–310 of 729 posts
Re: France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech
#302Earlier 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.
Re: France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It would be an even better move to allow those in Europe or indeed the rest of the world to also benefit. Those initiatives are usually open source. It's just that many times, each country wants to make their own. But it's still better than staying with the TooBigTech monopolies.
> It's just that many times, each country wants to make their own This hits hard. I'm a French citizen who made an open source alternative to Dropbox [1], I would have never thought my own government to attempt competing in my niche. I did contact the people at DINUM and it seems they are more interested in making their own than contributing to existing projects they don't fully control [1] https://github.com/mickael…
Re: France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech
#304Earlier 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.
Honestly as wide spread as it is, managing group policy sanely is still a challenge I've found - it's very resistant to configuration as code. Linux has a lot of the pieces but is principally lacking a solid distribution system - in particular a big missing component is the network-based SELinux policy distribution system which you can see some hooks in for the concept of a "policy server" which never eventuated. SEL…
Imho, this was historically (and continues to be) Microsoft's Achilles heel.
Large parts of the company reflexively wrote features / tooling as manual-first, code-second (or never).
In hindsight, what was missing was a Gates-level memo circa 2000 similar to Amazon's API one: all teams are required to build their configurators to be programmatically exposed.
Unfortunately, I don't think Ballmer was enough of a technologist (and was likely too distracted) to intuit that path not taken.
Re: France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the cost (to the government) for Windows is "support" (in a very general sense) and that cost isn't disappearing with Linux. Especially since it is easier to find badly underpaid (and not particularly competent) Windows sysadmins than it is to find badly underpaid Linux admins.
Ok but the license fees are, what, 50 quid? times say, 3k or 30k people? A 150k or 1.5m injection into the linux ecosystem to develop those would pay for a _lot_ of developers and a _lot_ of developer time.
Re: France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the cost (to the government) for Windows is "support" (in a very general sense) and that cost isn't disappearing with Linux. Especially since it is easier to find badly underpaid (and not particularly competent) Windows sysadmins than it is to find badly underpaid Linux admins.
Ok but the license fees are, what, 50 quid? times say, 3k or 30k people? A 150k or 1.5m injection into the linux ecosystem to develop those would pay for a _lot_ of developers and a _lot_ of developer time.
Re: France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech
#307I 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
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
No wonder it's classified informally as "eurojank".
Re: France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech
#309All 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…
All games I want to play run very well and mostly the process is just "install -> play". This is largely true for games running directly through Steam, it can get pretty annoying for games that exist outside Steam. Especially when you have to do things like apply an ".msi" style patch to a game . It's doable, but the number of steps and tools you may have to pull in (such as protontricks) does get to be a bit of a pa…
Re: France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech
#310All 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…