Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

521–530 of 729 posts

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

#521

Post by mixmastamyk »

2000UltraDeluxe wrote: post #495
danny_codes wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hetzner exists.

The claim above of 30 is not particularly important, the point is to lean on the community. Millions a year would get you incredibly far. Many are already helping for free.

24/7 linux webservers existed already by the late nineties.

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

#522

Post by carlosjobim »

buttersicle wrote: post #292

Government is the perfect place to do this. It doesn't matter if it craters productivity because the organization's budget is not conditioned on delivering impact.

Why not go the full mile and put up cardboard panels with printed screenshots of MS Word glued on, which government workers can sit in front of to collect their salary?

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

#523

Post by idoubtit »

The title is very far from the actual public statement that is linked in the article.

The French government announced that its digital agency will switch to Linux during this year. This is about a few hundreds of computers owned by the agency.

The second statement is that this agency is expected to publish, by the end of the year, a plan to reduce the digital dependency on the US. It's not "France to ditch Windows", it should be "French government promises to plan soon for possible ways to decrease digital dependencies, but calendar unknown". Also note that the government (and president) will change next year, so even if the present drive was real, a political u-turn could come soon.

Overall, this statement could be the presage of a major upturn in a few years, but I think it far more probable that the policy change will be minor. There's already a small tendency toward Linux and Free Software in the public sector.

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

#524

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#525

Post by atherton94027 »

earthnail wrote: post #502
WaryByDesign wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I've never seen a user replace all their comments with "[Yeah, if I'm just gonna be down-voted to oblivion regardless of my participation in the comments, good luck with your 'meaningful discussion'}" making it impossible for others to read their original comments. If this now becomes a trend I feel like there may be a need to change the rules around editing.

@dang is it something on your radar? Lots of people do this on Reddit and it makes some threads unusable.

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

#526

Post by dschep »

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"

SUSE is a German company, so probably nothing to even develop.

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

#527

Post by fao_ »

red_admiral wrote: post #514
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…

big player + (standard) linux desktop may well be coming, but that means losing the semi-anarchist bazaar mentality. Will the standard be gnome or KDE or XFCE or ...? If gnome, version 2 or 3? Firefox or chrome as the default browser (or derivatives like waterfox or plain chromium ...)? AI integration? The moment you're developing for people with no IT experience and no CS degree, you're going to have to make tradeof…

> but that means losing the semi-anarchist bazaar mentality.

The places you mention are already receiving huge doses of industry funding funnelled through the Linux Foundation. Honestly, it looks like the standard is going to be KDE. Even microsoft is copying it for their next DE: https://www.webpronews.com/microsoft-windows-ripping-off-kde...

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

#528

Post by 1718627440 »

red_admiral wrote: post #514
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…

big player + (standard) linux desktop may well be coming, but that means losing the semi-anarchist bazaar mentality. Will the standard be gnome or KDE or XFCE or ...? If gnome, version 2 or 3? Firefox or chrome as the default browser (or derivatives like waterfox or plain chromium ...)? AI integration? The moment you're developing for people with no IT experience and no CS degree, you're going to have to make tradeof…

Why does there need to be a standard application for everything? Is there a default pencil vendor? A default printer vendor? Paper? Car manufacturer? Taxi company? Just let people buy/get whatever vendor/application they like. I rather see more interoperational standards.

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

#529

Post by ErroneousBosh »

zahlman wrote: post #507
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For people with a level of technical literacy that has them interested in posting on HN, sure. But for typical government workers? I imagine the differences are going to be pretty significant. They're not programmers or "devops" people. We're talking about users who are going to do almost everything through the GUI, and who will associate the "distro" with the default choice of DE/WM/etc. stack in whichever flavour o…

> But for typical government workers? I imagine the differences are going to be pretty significant. They're not programmers or "devops" people.

How much retraining do you need for "click on the orange and blue spinny fox thingy and wait for your email to come up"?

> because the GUI has its own file manager program and no matter which one you choose (and they will choose exactly one) it is not Explorer

Nobody is ever going to use it. They're going to use a web browser.

> There's no telling what idiosyncrasies people depend on.

Funny way of spelling "Firefox bugs", but whatever.

> In organizations like this I really doubt you can count on everyone being generically computer literate

Basic adult literacy is computer literacy. If you can read you can use a computer.

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

#530

Post by ErroneousBosh »

soiltype wrote: post #501
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This comment is completely out of touch with how typical office workers use their computers. "Package manager" is your feldspars. But it's even worse than that, because you don't train for the typical employee, you train for the least-technical employee lest they become completely useless overnight.

> because you don't train for the typical employee, you train for the least-technical employee lest they become completely useless overnight.

"Click on the blue and orange spinny fox thingy" is easy for even the thickest user.

Post reply on HN