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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

#601

Post by hinata08 »

tombert wrote: post #540
MegagramEnjoyer wrote: post #439

I applaud France for this decision. Windows is basically legal spyware and adware at this point

Like most Microsoft products, Windows is a tool that benefits mostly from aggressive early marketing and successfully convincing everyone that they need this product, and by the time everyone realizes how terrible the product is it's too late because everything already depends on it. They have done this everywhere; Microsoft Office is everywhere and terrible. Sharepoint used to be everywhere and is terrible. I know t…

Now they somehow got the management of large companies to also push to adopt Azure, with an aggressive "no capex" / "you pay for what you use" campaign when everyone knows their offering work terribly and are overpriced.

if Home Depot were to make an exam to pass a certification over their catalog, that would seem ridiculous. But when Microsoft does this, management ppl are happy and feel like they manage when they sign up everyone for AZ900 "certification"

Microsoft saw that users, power users and admins who are from the jobs are not making purchases, so you no longer need to design products for them

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

#603

Post by chopin »

Terr_ wrote: post #532
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…

Yeah, for example a bunch of my system updates began showing scary error notes because somehow there is a header inconsistency between the amdgpu driver and the kernel. I'm not regretting my choice, but it's also something where the average user can't just call Linux Support and get a "run X and it'll fix it" solution.

One can call Windows support? And get help?

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

#604

Post by theshackleford »

esskay wrote: post #385
theshackleford wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> See Windows games running faster on Linux through Wine. Let’s not leave out all the ones that don’t. Which is in fact, the majority of them. Strange how that’s always left out, we wouldn’t want to mislead people now would we?

It's not a majority of them. Hasn't been for some time now. https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/nearly-90-percen... The 10% that has issues is normally down to kernel level anti-cheat and denuvo. Go back 5 years and you'd be right. But it's a totally different situation now.

> It's not a majority of them.

It in fact is.

> Go back 5 years and you'd be right.

I’m right now.

I’ve done the testing myself, and the testing has been done by others. The vast majority of titles, especially modern titles still work better on windows. Linux only users got excited and make the claim otherwise based off a handful of cherry picked and poorly performed benchmarks and now repeat this claim endlessly despite in every sense of the word it being entirely false.

Is the situation improved? Vastly. Viable for many? Completely. I’m not saying more games dont run better on today on Linux than they used too, but this idea the majority now run better on Linux is a complete fallacy and that’s before getting into things like perhaps daring to want to use the ray tracing features you may enjoy or you in fact may not want to deal with compatibility issues which in fact very much still exist outside of kernel level anti cheat and denuvo.

From your very own link:

> There are different degrees of compatibility gamers must consider when checking if their favorite Windows games work on Linux distros like Mint, Zorin, Bazzite, or even SteamOS.

This != The majority of games now run better on Linux, it only equals that they will run in some capacity.

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

#605

Post by cineticdaffodil »

tim-projects wrote: post #588
cineticdaffodil wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can. I can. But with ai writing the glue code from a visible editor everyone can.

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

#606

Post by tsoukase »

It's extremely difficult to compete with the US SW companies. Their products are so engaging and attractive that anyone till up to the leaders are tempted to use. It's not surprising that EU's attempt to de-USAisation happens with Linux/OSS and not with an in-house prop SW because it's unable to write one. Also it doesn't happen without cries and pain. We speak for an endeavour to bring a 90% share of a beloved product to 3% and vice versa for a nerdy "cold" one. I keep a long lasting pop corn bag to follow the numbers.

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

#607

Post by nonameiguess »

dschep wrote: post #526
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.

It was a pretty amusing comment to me. Not only has SUSE been around for over 30 years, it was the very first enterprise Linux and it already has MDM tooling in the multi-Linux manager, repository mirroring tool, open-build system, Kiwi, edge image builder. Everything to build out a full enterprise suite of servers, workstations, customized kiosk OSes, already there. I'm more of the "give me my terminal or give me death" crowd, but it even has YaST and JeOS for the GUI-driven installation and config management that is seemingly what the non-tech crowd wants. A world apart from what the "solo indie devs" of Hacker News are paying attention to, especially in the US, but if Euro governments don't know about this already, that's on them. France doesn't need to roll its own shit unless it just wants to for the hell of it.

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

#608

Post by dubcanada »

robertlagrant wrote: post #207
dubcanada wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a power user in this context? Someone deeply familiar with Windows and has tons of Windows related setup/applications? That doesn't sound like a government worker... They rely on Microsoft Office, but the actual operating system could be anything. The only non-portable application is video games really. While LibreOffice may not have complete excel functionality, the vast majority of functionality can be repl…

I imagine the biggest thing they need to open up is Outlook.

Outlook has never been a requirement for work, you can very easily use any email client or outlook.com web app. Outlook is arguably the easiest to replace.

Excel is the only thing holding Office 365 together.

Word, Outlook, OneDrive, Teams, SharePoint are all very easy to replace

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

#609

Post by babypuncher »

estimator7292 wrote: post #578
wolvoleo wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't do that, when they've already sold you lifetime licenses. They could however introduce a subscription-only windows 12 and have harsh cut-off requirements like they did with windows 11.

They also "can't" screengrab your credit card numbers or upload all your private data to their cloud for inspection, or steal your email password and download all your mail to a Microsoft server, or send fake emails about full OneDrive to trick you into subscribing. "Can't" only applies when someone is willing to stop them, and nobody is. Microsoft can do pretty much anything they want and there's basically nothing y…

I'm pretty sure "can't" in this context is legally binding. Windows licenses up to this point have been sold without expiration dates. If Microsoft suddenly started charging a subscription to keep using the same copy of Windows, evey law firm on the planet would jump on that in an instant.

What GP proposed is the much more likely avenue they would take: New version of Windows with a new licensing model. It would probably kill their consumer business overnight, but at least it wouldn't get their lawyers laughed out of a courtroom.

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

#610

Post by aaron695 »

idoubtit wrote: post #523

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",…

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