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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

#581

Post by DanielHB »

psadauskas wrote: post #573
jjcm wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using linux as a daily driver since the start of the year. There's still a long ways to go before things "just work". It's about equivalent to windows right now in terms of frustrations, it's just that frustrations are more along the lines of "this is a bit wonky" instead of "this is malicious / was their intended behavior". It's gotten a LOT better, don't get me wrong, but it's still far off from what a ty…

I've been using Linux on the desktop off-and-on for 20 years. I used OSX for awhile 2008-2015 when they clearly had the best hardware, and the OS was pretty nice. I've been using KDE since then, and I recently installed Bazzite (Fedora+KDE-based) on my sans-windows gaming PC. I also started a new job this year, where I have to use the company-provided MBP for compliance reasons, after having not used MacOS since 2015…

Have also been using Bazzite since march on my home desktop and you are spot on. I think the main reason for average person linux being difficult these days are laptops with weird hardware configurations.

I use MacOS at work and although it is miles better than windows, if I had a choice, I would also use Linux for work.

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

#582

Post by 0x457 »

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.

Just pick nixOS and provide base nixosConfiguration. tada.

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

#583

Post by dismalaf »

barney54 wrote: post #554
tombert wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for saying something I've been saying for awhile: Linux definitely has jank, but I'm not convinced it's more janky than Windows. I think people are so used to Windows' awfulness that they kind of forget about how much bullshit is associated with it. Linux has bullshit too, though it's getting better, but when people talk about Linux jank they're always smuggling in an implication of Windows having less jank…

I don’t think it’s a question that Linux has more jank. I recently installed a fedora spin on a laptop that came with regular Fedora installed originally and the WiFi didn’t work. That’s some janky stuff right there.

> fedora spin

Installing the equivalent of OS "slop" isn't Linux's fault... For better or worse the choice that is afforded by OSS licenses means that many of those choices will be bad.

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

#584

Post by sph »

barney54 wrote: post #554
tombert wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for saying something I've been saying for awhile: Linux definitely has jank, but I'm not convinced it's more janky than Windows. I think people are so used to Windows' awfulness that they kind of forget about how much bullshit is associated with it. Linux has bullshit too, though it's getting better, but when people talk about Linux jank they're always smuggling in an implication of Windows having less jank…

I don’t think it’s a question that Linux has more jank. I recently installed a fedora spin on a laptop that came with regular Fedora installed originally and the WiFi didn’t work. That’s some janky stuff right there.

Meanwhile I haven’t had a wireless issue on Linux since 2010 or so.

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

#585

Post by pragma_x »

alecsm wrote: post #565
Chance-Device wrote: post #543

Who do they think writes Linux? The European Commission? They’re on the US tech stack whether they want to be or not, and nobody in Europe has the will or resources to pull a China and make their own alternative. More’s the pity.

Linux was created by an European. And there are many European distros. Even Canonical is European. But that's besides the point. The point is no company owns linux so you're not tied to big tech even if they are the biggest contributors to the kernel.

Moreover for the folks in the back row...

We may see Canonical or other commercial Linux vendors come forward with a government or enterprise-flavored solution for all this. But the important thing to keep in mind is that they're not selling Linux per-se. As the GPL prohibits this, these companies sell support for their Linux distro instead. That revenue goes into improving Linux and maintaining their distro (e.g. Ubuntu). But even with all that money changing hands, that they do not own Linux, the Linux kernel, or any other shred of GPL licensed stuff.

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

#586

Post by dismalaf »

SoftTalker wrote: post #546
dschep wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

Does SUSE normally come up in conversations about "easy to use" linux distros for "normal" users? I'm not in that world, so this is a genuine question. The last time I looked at SUSE it seemed typically German in being uniquely complicated for no good reason, but that was years ago.

Yes. It was as easy to use as Windows was like 30 years ago. It's still easy to use.

The only difficult part about Linux is the fact that people can't learn, so absolutely anything being different from Windows is a roadblock to the average person (I still remember the societal meltdown when MS changed the interface in their Office apps, or Windows 8...)

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

#587

Post by kayodelycaon »

psadauskas wrote: post #573
jjcm wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using linux as a daily driver since the start of the year. There's still a long ways to go before things "just work". It's about equivalent to windows right now in terms of frustrations, it's just that frustrations are more along the lines of "this is a bit wonky" instead of "this is malicious / was their intended behavior". It's gotten a LOT better, don't get me wrong, but it's still far off from what a ty…

I've been using Linux on the desktop off-and-on for 20 years. I used OSX for awhile 2008-2015 when they clearly had the best hardware, and the OS was pretty nice. I've been using KDE since then, and I recently installed Bazzite (Fedora+KDE-based) on my sans-windows gaming PC. I also started a new job this year, where I have to use the company-provided MBP for compliance reasons, after having not used MacOS since 2015…

> Linux may break more often, but you can almost always fix it with a quick google search.

And that’s where the problem is: a quick google search. Laughably trivial for technical users. Non-trivial for the majority of the population.

I love Linux and it is completely viable as a desktop operating system, but it’s far from ready for mainstream without better support.

For a rough analogy, I’d compare it to an old car before electronics. An old car is easy to work on and reliable if you do the maintenance. But an old car wouldn’t be reliable for somebody who doesn’t do any work on a car and outsources the maintenance.

Linux excels when things go right. The failure modes are substantially worse and far more likely to occur. It doesn’t matter if they’re rare. They’re not rare enough. And there isn’t support when things go wrong.

For example: It’s difficult to make the macOS UI fail to start through configuration. You never need to directly touch configuration. (And you can’t modify or delete macOS system files.)

With Linux, some normal problems just have to be solved in the terminal. This allows you to put the system into a configuration where the GUI does not start.

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

#588

Post by tim-projects »

cineticdaffodil wrote: post #519
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 there is a huge innovationspace for pipe connected agents doing work for the user.. a example: A firefox agent downloading pictures of cats.. piping them to a graphics program drawing mustaches on them piping them to a moviemaker piping them to a firefox video uploading "the longest catswithmustaches" shorts compilation ever.. all clicked together in a "incredibble machine" like explorer by a user…

But you can do that already with bash pipes. Doing it through the GUI just adds mega complexity

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

#589

Post by tombert »

barney54 wrote: post #554
tombert wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for saying something I've been saying for awhile: Linux definitely has jank, but I'm not convinced it's more janky than Windows. I think people are so used to Windows' awfulness that they kind of forget about how much bullshit is associated with it. Linux has bullshit too, though it's getting better, but when people talk about Linux jank they're always smuggling in an implication of Windows having less jank…

I don’t think it’s a question that Linux has more jank. I recently installed a fedora spin on a laptop that came with regular Fedora installed originally and the WiFi didn’t work. That’s some janky stuff right there.

I've had wifi drivers not work with fresh installs of Windows as well, so that's hardly a unique Linux thing. I've also had to reboot Windows into special modes because apparently a driver from a Broadcom WiFi card was "unsigned", so I had to disable the check for that.

I've also had registry corruptions, and I've had unprompted updates brick my hard drive because Windows Update is a terrible piece of software, because as far as I can tell the Windows "repair tools" have never worked for any human in history, and neither has System Restore.

I've had updates in Linux break things but never so thoroughly as the time my mom got an automatic update where she literally could not boot in at all (because I think that the automatic update to Windows 11 that she did not want or ask for screwed up the boot keys).

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