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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

#404

We're going to keep seeing this due to destabilization and political changes in the US. It drives nationalization elsewhere, even among allies.

It doesn't help that Microsoft seems to be doing everything in its power to alienate Windows users.

This, I've officially been off Windows for a few months and will not be looking back. Microsoft has put a bad taste in my mouth as a developer.

By luck and happenstance, I tuned into the Omacon conference this morning and my perspective on personal computing very much aligns with theirs. Would encourage a least watch the kickoff keynote if the VODs drop.

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

#406
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.

Problem is that people like having a similar interface for both work and non-work things, and Linux doesn’t have enough penetration into the consumer market to influence stakeholders. The first step is making Linux the default choice for hardware providers. Framework was one of those pioneering this but was underfunded imo

I don’t think a lot of people still go home and use their computer for stuff. Most of my family will either rely on a phone or tablet to get anything done at home.

I doubt they’d care about which OS they’re on. Corporate tightens their laptops beyond belief, so all they’re really running is Teams and Excel. This seems to be the case for a lot of friends I talk to, no one gives a damn about Windows anymore. Heck, my sister-in-law moved to Ubuntu of her own choices, despite having low tech literacy.

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

#407

What? Again? I lost count, it's how many attempts again? Fill me in.

As far as I know it was successful for the gendarmerie and assemblée nationale for exemple. There are many public entities and apparently each migration is news worthy

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

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

Isn't WinRM/PowerShell/RDP equivalent of SSH, and dpdk/apt-get is basically .msi with group policies for installation? This has been there for decades probably? Group Policies also allow you to enforce things like browser configuration (proxy, homepage, search engine etc.) wallpapers, screen locks etc. Can this be done on Linux? Honestly, I have no idea - I think gnome with gsettings/dconf can do that, but can KDE?

Firefox has /usr/lib/firefox/distribution/policies.json which lets the sysadmin lock down what users can do with the browser. Example: If you wanted to block all extensions except for a whitelist, you could control that via that file.

There's a bazillion tools that let you manage files like that across thousands of servers/desktops but the hot one right now in enterprises is Ansible (which would make it trivial to push out an update to such a configuration).

Chrome has a similar file: /etc/opt/chrome/policies/managed/lockdown.json

"Ah yes, but what stops the user from downloading the portable version of a browser and using that?"

You can mount all user directories with +noexec. Also, Apparmor lets you control which applications can make network connections if you want to get really fine-grained.

Other applications have similar policy files. For example, Visual Studio Code has /etc/code/policy.json which—for example—would let your company lock down which extensions are allowed to be used/installed.

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

#410
Canada has been using and developing FOSS for a while now.

0: https://www.canada.ca/en/government/system/digital-governmen...

1: https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...

2: https://github.com/canada-ca/

There's still a great deal of Windows usage, but hopefully that will phase out with the passage of time. Canada's bureaucracy moves slowly, at the pace of generational attrition. It won't be until the last GenX retires that they could even meaningfully begin transitioning the average office worker away from Windows.

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