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

I would say that's kind of a conspiracy-y explanation. Big companies in Munich either have their campuses on the outskirts of the city so that people can commute and park without flooding the city or they have it in the heart of the city as that is seen as more prestigious.

Lots of companies have flip flopped based on this, and that's what happened in MS case.

Tbh not saying MS didn't play dirty in general, but not necessarily in this.

AD is LDAP+Kerberos, which has existed in the Unix/Linux world long before Microsoft bastardized it. So pick any of half a dozen LDAP server implementations and any of 3 or 4 Kerberos implementations and use those. If you want point-and-click/drool interfaces, use FreeIPA. If you really want it to look like AD, use Samba 4. Even Windows boxes will hardly know the difference.

Group policies don't exist and won't ever exist on Linux. Group policies are LDAP entries that are copied on system boot and user login into their respective parts of the local registry. Software may then read, interpret and use those registry entries. On Linux that wouldn't work for numerous reasons. First, on a multiuser system rebooting to apply configuration changes is not viable. On windows that's apparently fine because its single-user anyways, and reboots are an accepted fact of life. Also, to apply a system policy that is intended to limit what a user could do, asking the user's software nicely via registry entries is stupid and insecure. Lots of software won't even read the registry and have group policies that it will obey. Want to get around an Internet Explorer Group policy? Use Chrome or Firefox!

So what you do instead on Linux is: If it's just configuration, just copy it over, using the usual text configuration formats that are common on Linux. There are lots of tools to do this, starting from simple hack jobs like using scp to full configuration management systems like ansible or puppet. The "group" part is handled by those systems as part of their function, you can easily group/subgroup/discover/inventory/parameterize. If it's policy, so you want to restrict what a user can do, you use the higher-privileged layers of the system to put in actual restrictions, not just "group policy" suggestions. You can configure the user's home directory to be mounted noexec, so software execution after an unauthorized installation is impossible. You can put them in containers, namespaces, limit their resources and system access using cgroups, filesystem permissions, and more fine-grained permission systems like SELinux. If you are so inclined, you can forbid the user from opening files starting with the letter 'f', using eBPF syscall filters (this will of course break everything, but I needed a stupid example ;). All those can also be configured with your configuration management system of choice.

Just as a comparison: Our windows team needs 3h just to re-image a laptop, just for windows. After that, all the software needs to be reinstalled, all the data copied over. Then, after 2 days and 10 reboots or something, it will have picked up all the policies, updates and things and maybe be usable. Our Linux installation takes 45 minutes. Including all the software that was previously assigned to this system, including all the settings. It will be fully updated, configured and usable after the first reboot.

I don't, no (otherwise I wouldn't use Google and their ecosystem either). I also don't see any ads people talk about either, I run ad blockers everywhere so maybe that's why.

Vague concerns about privacy are not strong enough reasons for me and most others, based on OS market share, to move away when the concrete reality is we can simply play more games on Windows. The only reason Linux gaming is getting good is because of Valve funding it heavily in the past few years for their own products like the Steam Deck, and to move away from an OS they have no control over in Windows, not because of privacy concerns which I guarantee you 99% of Steam Deck users don't give a shit about, they just want to play their games.

And if the decision away from Windows is an indicator, they will likely be moving email clients as well

> "if AD and GPO are now dead, what killed them and what are the options?"

The changing world. AD and GPO come from the mid 1990s before pervasive internet, before WiFi, before Cloud computing, before people had multiple computers, before iPhones, before AWS cloud infrastructure, before Kubernetes, before cheap fast hardware for virtualization, before cheap bulk storage, before BYOD and WFH and everything-as-web-app. Before that was the world of isolated 8-bit machines, expensive Solaris workstations and Unix mainframes with expensive admins, and after say 1998 the world was cheap Compaq/HP/IBM hardware running Windows server and Windows 9x desktop, and after about 2003 it was Windows Small Business Server (AD, GPO, SQL, Exchange, SharePoint) and XP Pro desktops.

Cracks started showing when people wanted to logon to a laptop away from the office when it couldn't refresh policies, run logon scripts, talk to domain controllers; when people wanted 'offline files' from a company file share while away from the office, but wanted their corporate email to work when their laptop was online but not pull down company settings over a dialup modem. More cracks when they got a Blackberry or iPhone, more when AppStores appeared and people expect to be able to install whatever they like, more with the rise of Apple Macbooks, with the growth of website based services people can use from anywhere, more with Amazon AWS where company infrastructure is on someone else's premises, more with BYOD and WFH, more with people expecting software to be cost-free, being trivially able to spin up Linux web and database servers because there was plenty of CPU/RAM/Disk and no worries about licensing costs.

> "it’s nice in that admins can’t screw around too much with my system"

If it's a company device, it isn't your system. The company has legal oblications and practical concerns that conflict with your desires as an individual. That might be pushing full-disk encryption or updates, or auto-locking, or restricting use of USB or websites to block potential customer information leak points, or trying to stop you saving work locally that might be lost if the device fails, or trying to stop your device being an entry point for malware or ransomware, or trying to stop you screwing around with their system which costs them employee time to fix and your downtime while it's broken.