France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech • Hacker News Board

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

#461

Post by danny_codes » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 4:37 PM UTC

WaryByDesign wrote: post #432

mixmastamyk wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You’re saying a government couldn’t take open source building blocks and run.. office apps with basic security and.. file storage? For $100M a year? This could be done with a 30 person team

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

#462

Post by ThePowerOfFuet » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 4:37 PM UTC

Teever wrote: post #436

carefree-bob wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pur…

>Are people designing aircraft carriers in Fusion?

I don't know, but I have watched people designing high-speed trains in CATIA.

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

#463

Post by atherton94027 » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 4:42 PM UTC

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…

You must be German — the French state is a lot more top down than Germany with its regions, so generally these kinds of mandates get applied broadly

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

#464

Post by sega_sai » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 4:44 PM UTC

I think France seem serious in actually switching to open source/EU software. I recently had a telecon on Visio (France's Teams/Zoom substitute) and it worked well in a browser with ~ 10 participants.

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

#465

Post by WaryByDesign » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 4:44 PM UTC

danny_codes wrote: post #461

WaryByDesign wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You’re saying a government couldn’t take open source building blocks and run.. office apps with basic security and.. file storage? For $100M a year? This could be done with a 30 person team

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying, If your mythical 30-person teams were achievable, a lot of major US 'cyber'security firms would be in major trouble. Pop-quiz, hotshot: what does Citrix (market valuation: USD 16.5B), technically, have over your team (market valuation: USD 0B)?

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

#466

Post by nix0n » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 4:45 PM UTC

somat wrote: post #455

I understand what they mean, linux offers freedom, enough that it divorces your tech stack from any one company. But isn't linux US tech? The blueprint, UNIX was a US project, torvolds works from the US. the original userland GNU was a US based project. The new userland systemd is a US based project.

Linux is a global project, and open source more broadly is also of course global.

Linux Mint (the distro I use) was started and is led by French developer Clement Lefebvre.

QEMU and FFmpeg are among the notable projects started by French developer Fabrice Bellard.

VLC was started by students of École Centrale Paris.

These are just the things that I know about as an American, so I'm sure there are more.

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

#467

Post by cwillu » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 4:45 PM UTC

yibers wrote: post #443

lithos wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you picked XFCE as your front end you get WinXP functionality, with the nice things from win10/11 (start menu search that's actually local only, multiple desktop workspaces, and graphical settings/updates I've only needed to go to command line twice in four years).

How does XFCE compare to KDE and GNOME? Also, does it has all the nice window snapping features that I'm used to fron Windows?

I don't think all the same shortcuts exist out of the box, although win-drag/win-right-drag to move and resize windows (might be alt by default) is _so_ much more convenient than the usual border/title dragging that you might find you don't miss them.

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

#468

Post by charcircuit » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 4:49 PM UTC

Desktop Linux's security and antimalware solutions are not ready for government usage. This is a cyber attack waiting to happen if they go through with this. They should at least switch to ChromeOS if they want to use Linux.

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

#469

Post by WaryByDesign » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 4:50 PM UTC

atherton94027 wrote: post #463

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…

You must be German — the French state is a lot more top down than Germany with its regions, so generally these kinds of mandates get applied broadly

> You must be German

Oof, that's just offensive!

Anyway, most German Linux 'mandates' were indeed regional, and (for good reasons!) failed to migrate 'upstream'.

Whether the French mandate takes hold remains to be seen. "We're not Germany" is not the end-all argument it might seem to be to you.

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

#470

Post by ErroneousBosh » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 4:50 PM UTC

1970-01-01 wrote: post #416

>The French government did not provide a specific timeline for the switchover, or which distributions it was considering. Do they realize they need to pick a LTS distro now? You can't mix and match distros without having a massive IT and user retraining budgets.

Why would you need any user retraining?

All distros are basically identical. The only real difference is whether you spell "package manager" as apt, yum, or dnf.