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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

#491

Post by upcoming-sesame »

Melatonic wrote: post #472

The age of the Linux desktop might actually finally be coming Personally I think we are at an interim period for a big player to emerge and take over this space. If enough governments in the EU start switching over to customized linux distros theres a big chance for someone like Nokia to come in and develop their own approved distro with proper MDM and GPO-like management functionality baked in . On top of that it co…

honestly since the browser has more or less become the real operating system the host OS doesn't matter so much anymore. most people do 90% of their work in the browser anyway

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

#492

Post by mrj »

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?

As a long time Linux user, this comment makes me sad since many of those features were copied from Linux (many from Unity) :)

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

#493

Post by jodrellblank »

Melatonic wrote: post #472

The age of the Linux desktop might actually finally be coming Personally I think we are at an interim period for a big player to emerge and take over this space. If enough governments in the EU start switching over to customized linux distros theres a big chance for someone like Nokia to come in and develop their own approved distro with proper MDM and GPO-like management functionality baked in . On top of that it co…

> "theres a big chance for someone like Nokia to come in and develop their own approved distro"

Microsoft bought Nokia's devices and services division for Windows Mobile in 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Mobile

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

#494

Post by charcircuit »

bornfreddy wrote: post #484
charcircuit wrote: post #468

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.

You mean switch Windows by Microsoft for ChromeOS by Google? Weird suggestion. As for "security" and "antimalware" solutions being ready, I don't think there is much difference between the OSs there. Windows is no candyland either. As always, they will need competent people in the right places to pull this through. Tech is just an enabler.

Yes I do mean that. Google is one of the only companies in the Linux space who takes security seriously.

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

#495

Post by 2000UltraDeluxe »

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

30 people managing the hardware? Sure, if you get good deals on the hardware itself, the employees stay healthy, and you have everything so centralised you don't need multiple people on call.

Centralising things to that level and supporting the users of the entire government structure of a country the size of France -- one of the countries the sun _never_ sets on -- while it's transitioning from decades of Microsoft dependency to an open source ecosystem? Heh, no.

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

#496

Post by TacticalCoder »

Melatonic wrote: post #472

The age of the Linux desktop might actually finally be coming Personally I think we are at an interim period for a big player to emerge and take over this space. If enough governments in the EU start switching over to customized linux distros theres a big chance for someone like Nokia to come in and develop their own approved distro with proper MDM and GPO-like management functionality baked in . On top of that it co…

> Personally I think we are at an interim period for a big player to emerge and take over this space...

And even without a big player, the number of people who are entirely operational with just a browser at work is huge.

Many SMEs already realized they can switch seamlessly between Windows and OS X / MacOS and I see people working on either one or the other. For example a desktop PC running Windows and a Mac laptop is not uncommon.

I switched an employee at my wife's SME to... Debian! And the transition has been more than fine: they live in the browser (Google Workspace, paid company subscription). Unattended-upgrades, a user account that cannot sudo, and that's it.

The number of desktop PC running Windows that are actually glorified browsers has to be through the roof.

Once people realize there's no need to pay the double-whammy Microsoft tax (pay for a new Windows / also pay for a new PC), suddenly installing Linux becomes an option.

Now I know: using Linux and Google is not "getting rid of US tech". But it's "getting of Microsoft" and that is fine with me. I'll never ever forgive the mediocrity this company has brought onto the world.

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

#497

Post by drstewart »

gib444 wrote: post #478
drstewart wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>USAians The word you're looking for is Americans, despite whatever preconceived notion you think the word "Americans" actually should mean in English. I know nothing will ever change European minds, but at least understand what the correct form is. >everything is less popular in Europe simply because it is inferior and fails purely on its technical merits So everything is less popular in Europe because it fails on m…

As an Englishman, I don't need lectures on my language. English isn't controlled by a central authority. If a new word takes hold, it takes hold, that's it. The way the USA thinks it has an absolute right to decimate central and South America disgusts me to the core and I'm tired of those poor people being lumped in with the term "Americans". It's offensive to them. The USA does not own the continent as much as the C…

>As an Englishman, I don't need lectures on my language.

An Englishman? You mean Englandian. English is a language, you can't lump everyone who speaks it into one category.

>English isn't controlled by a central authority

Exactly. And the Englandian usage has no superiority over any other.

>The USA does not own the continent as much as the CIA tries.

Maybe not, but we do own the UK (:

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

#498

Post by hirako2000 »

_blk wrote: post #451
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.

They likely don't. It's a purely political move not a technical move. With the average length of the French work week, this will take a while to implement anyway. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great thought but I don't think it's more than a short-sighted reaction. Munich unfortunately faltered after a few years.

The french Gendarmerie already migrated to GendBunto, their own distribution. It took a while but it's now running on 97% of all workstations. I wouldn't call this just political fluff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu

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

#499

Post by kpw94 »

charcircuit wrote: post #468

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.

Some might be tempted to brush aside that Server Linux threat model is very different from Desktop Linux (to snarkily reply "we'll it's powering a vast majority of GDP via all of AWS, Azure, etc.").

However comparing apples to apples, what makes you say this isn't ready for government usage, when it's ready for trillion dollar big tech companies' majority of their workforce? (Aside from Microsoft, Apple obviously). Large employers like IBM etc also must be using red hat or some other distro

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

#500

Post by unfocused »

dleslie wrote: post #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 unt…

I work in government. Link 1 (2018) is essentially a dream. All of government got forced to use MS Dynamics CRM. Basically, anybody with a software requirement for case management, had to use MS Dynamics. I recommended we use Drupal in 2011. That was killed because everything had to be MS. I'm kind of surprised that it is in there given that nobody was allowed to use.

Link 0 and 2 are essentially from TBS and CDS. They coexist together. They are essentially working at the very top as entities that gather information from other departments. They can do whatever they want because they help write the rules.

I'm not trying to discredit your post, just saying that as someone who has brought OSS tools to development at the government and tried to use OSS tools for client (I failed at that), it is nearly impossible at the moment. We are married to Microsoft and its cloud.

I do agree, that it may take an entire generation because right now, 190+ departments are not exactly jumping to FOSS, and in many situations, they are down right told you are not allowed.

In addition, the current de facto document management system is from OpenText. Although many just use Sharepoint Online.

Ironically, as everything moves to the cloud, it would be easier to move to a solution that is FOSS based, and based in the cloud. Technology has matured enough that you don't need executables on a desktop, you just need a browser pointing to a website.

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