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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

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aggressive anticheat not supporting Linux is not a fault of Linux. It is a fault of the aggressive anticheat and the games that decide to use it.

It doesn't matter whose fault it is, I go where the games actually work and are playable, which is still Windows today for many games.

It doesn't matter to you, but other people care about false accusations.

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

#342
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.

I take your word for it (I know of Kerberos and LDAP and Netscape and Sun trying to make such palatable, but clearly haven't followed that in the last quarter-century).

That assumes however the server to be currently MS Windows. For government agencies, I'd rather expect some Mainframe to be (and remain) in place. Surely IBM (or here rather Groupe Bull) has user authentication/authorization figured out (more than half a century ago, methinks).

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

#343
post #213
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.

Except for any application you want a government employee to use efficiently

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

#344
post #135
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. total abandonment of desktop as a platform, and the massive hurdles to distribute desktop software 2. move to Cloud and use electron wrappers because not even MS can bother making native apps on their shitty platform 3. Make Windows so shit that even hardcore power users can’t debloat it. The moat of Windows is gone. Games, office work, all the classic arguments, have basically vanished in the last 5-10 years. The…

4. putting Mac users in charge of the UI who are genuinely incapable of understanding how they are breaking continuity. That's like staffing a neurosurgery department with dentists. Or a dental clinic with neurosurgeons, it does not matter, you can have decades of experience working with a drill in the head area and still be the wrong person for the job.

Continuity with what exactly? IME Windows has been a mish mash of GUI frameworks to the point you teleport through time whenever you click around in control panel, since.. the XP era? I mean, I don’t disagree with you in principle, but the timing is like saying horse carriages aren’t keeping up with cars because they’re designed by car users. The Satya era can be good or bad depending on who you ask, but that’s for Microsoft as a company – windows as a product has had no coherence for a decade+, and that’s generous.

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

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is honestly amazing and impressive. Probably a bit too much tweaking for the common gamer though, but glad it is possible!

I've been messing with kernel-mode anticheats for 3 to 4 years so yah, not something a typical gamer can do. But I have been contempating on making this publically available for everyone to use wrapped in a neat little package!

You definitely should! Even just a blog post about it would be great. I won't be doing it myself, but my son would for sure.

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

#346

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 wouldn't be surprised if American companies started using it if the French get it right

As a French citizen who own a business [1] that is in direct competition with this incentive from my very own government, I'm happy to disclose more than 50% of my customer base is already in America and France represent about 1%.

[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

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

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is honestly amazing and impressive. Probably a bit too much tweaking for the common gamer though, but glad it is possible!

I've been messing with kernel-mode anticheats for 3 to 4 years so yah, not something a typical gamer can do. But I have been contempating on making this publically available for everyone to use wrapped in a neat little package!

Out of curiosity do you run the backdoored kernel in your day to day computing or only when gaming? Any concerns about incidental security issues?

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

#348

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…

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…

Agreed, but people should definitely try Lutris. It's nearly as painless as Steam now for GOG and many other stores.

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

#349
post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Care to write it up somewhere? Would be a fascinating read!

Unfortunately doing something like that will simply make anticheats respond as they have in the past and make it increasingly difficult to do so.

I did contemplate playing this cat and mouse game and making anticheats accept that it's easier to just support linux instead of fighting it.

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

#350

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…

> If a game has an aggressive anticheat, like Battlefield 6 or Valorant, it will not work and you can forget about it. Yeah this is why I stick with Windows. Unlike it seems a lot of people on HN I don't really see any issues with it that would want to make me move away, especially as I already have WSL if I do need Linux, as WSL has GPU passthrough.

> I don't really see any issues with it that would want to make me move away

If you don't care about privacy issues or ads in your face, then yeah Windows is pretty good. I care a lot about that (and open source in general) so for me it's way worth it. But everyone is different and that's ok

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