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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

#431

Post by ghaff »

teekert wrote: post #131
ghaff wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What you are used to. Absolutely. I've given using a tablet (with keyboard) as an alternative to a laptop when traveling and it sort of frustrates me for a lot of things. But talking to people I know who have largely switched over, my conclusion is that, in general, I probably mostly just haven't put the effort and commitment to make it worth it for me. And I'm not sure, not spending nearly as much time on planes as…

As part of the human species, which has conquered our planet's poles, its deserts and its jungles, I believe we are in a unique position to adapt to many -if not most- circumstances thrown our way, and flourish.

You hopefully can adapt to what you need to. That's not the same things as switching to something you find awkward and you don't find to have a particular, if any advantage.

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

#432

Post by WaryByDesign »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #424
WaryByDesign wrote: post #420

It's... an admirable goal, but it pretty much remains to be seen if "France"[1] follows through. Previous attempts to "ditch Windows" have not ended that well. Munich in 2003, the entire Federal German government in 2009, Munich again in 2013, Munich again in 2021, and so on. Most common end-result: back to Windows. Breaking points are typically the lack of an "Office 2016" compatible suite, lack of "Adobe PDF" tooli…

If they only diverted 10% of the budget from MS to solving issues they’d have had a solution a decade or two ago.

I'm... not so sure? The French government has, widely seen, 6M employees. Given retail pricing of EUR200/seat/year (and they definitely have a better arrangement), that's 1.2B, and I'm not sure that's enough to provide an identity management plus office apps plus file storage solution? And at 10% of that? Absolutely forget it...

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

#433

Post by Goronmon »

chocochunks wrote: post #340
bcjdjsndon wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Things run very well out of the box. > a good number of wheels, pedals, joysticks, VR headsets, and other wild and wacky input devices might not work that well or not at all > If a game has an aggressive anticheat, like Battlefield 6 or Valorant, it will not work and you can forget about it > Not sure about VR, but I know it was a bit dire 1-2 years ago The determination of the average Linux user to ignore the faul…

There's Windows games that don't work on Windows 11 but do on Linux (e.g., Red Alert 2). There's wacky gaming peripherals that work on Linux but not on Windows 11 (Try an OG Xbox controller for example). Hell, MS has even removed support for a bunch of VR headsets when they nixed support for Windows Mixed Reality. Why do Windows users ignore the faults of Windows?

Why do Windows users ignore the faults of Windows?

How many people care about support for Red Alert 2 and OG Xbox controllers on Windows 11 (assuming either of these truly don't work) versus people who care about the ability to play games like Fortnite?

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

#434

Post by riskable »

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…

Windows uses Group Policy (which isn't particularly secure for many reasons) while Linux uses configuration files (e.g. udev, AppArmor, stuff in /etc like fstab) in conjunction with file permissions. However, you can go way farther by compiling your own kernel that has certain functionality removed (e.g. USB mass storage).

Managing lots of configuration files/scripts across many thousands of servers, desktops, devices, etc is a long-solved problem. Most enterprises use Ansible or similar.

In almost every way, managing many thousands of Linux desktops is much simpler and more straightforward than Windows. If you're using Ansible playbooks, you can keep everything nice and tidy in a single place and everything you'd ever want to customize is managed via a plaintext file you can modify with your editor of choice.

You can organize them however you want or even use a GUI to change stuff (if you pay for Ansible Enterprise or whatever it's called... Or use one of the FOSS alternatives).

Managing Linux desktops at scale really isn't much different than managing Linux servers at scale.

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

#435

Post by Akronymus »

WaryByDesign wrote: post #420

It's... an admirable goal, but it pretty much remains to be seen if "France"[1] follows through. Previous attempts to "ditch Windows" have not ended that well. Munich in 2003, the entire Federal German government in 2009, Munich again in 2013, Munich again in 2021, and so on. Most common end-result: back to Windows. Breaking points are typically the lack of an "Office 2016" compatible suite, lack of "Adobe PDF" tooli…

Werent the munich government employees quite happy with linux, but microsofts lobbying with their headquarters got them to switch back?

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

#436

Post by Teever »

carefree-bob wrote: post #415
Teever wrote: post #394

I’ve commented on this before but you’ll know France is serious when there are Linux ports of Solidworks and Catia. France has a real edge over American companies by being the dominant player in the CAD world, it’s always surprised me that they nerfed that advantage by tying to an American operating system.

Autocad has 39% market share in CAD, Solidworks has 14% market share, and Fusion 360 has 9%. None of this is a major national advantage for any side. It's bizarre to think that the US or France would treat this as some kind of mark of national influence, since if anything happens to these top three vendors, there are lots of other vendors waiting in the wings. It's not like a national oil reserve, where it's importan…

But what kind of projects are people using these different pieces of software for?

Are people designing aircraft carriers in Fusion?

Don't get me wrong, I understand that AutoCAD is extremely important for architecture and the death grip that AutoDesk has over that industry needs to be broken for the benefit of all of us, but from my understanding Dessault Systems makes software that is used for totally different purposes and is of vital strategic importance for a nation that wants an independent MIC which France obviously does.

So it seems foolish to me for them to have their own CAD software that can and is used to design weapons but be dependent on an American operating system produced by a particularly unscrupulous company who is obsessed with tighter and tigher control and has definite ties to the US intelligence apparatus.

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

#437

Post by bigyabai »

satvikpendem wrote: post #425
bigyabai wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the concrete reality is we can simply play more games on Windows If you play older games, particularly DOS/Win95 era titles, the concrete reality is that DOSBox and Wine have better compatibility. Even some recent games, eg. Elden Ring , have unfixed stuttering issues on Windows that were fixed on-release in Proton. I'm willing to give Windows it's due because I don't think it's a terrible gaming environment, but i…

I should've said games which came out this century, perhaps I thought that was implied when we're discussing modern anti-cheat. The number of games which work better on Linux over Windows is small.

I'll take your word for it. I haven't used Windows since Windows 10, maybe Win11 fixed Bethesda's alt-tab crashing errors and reduced memory consumption - I'd never know.

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

#438

Post by ang_cire »

sherburt3 wrote: post #403

I'm sure there's a barely functioning business critical app that runs exclusively on Windows NT in their administration that would beg to differ

If it only runs on NT, it'll work better under WINE than on Win10/11.

Legacy app compat is actually an argument for moving to Linux.

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