Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716043 (764 points 5 hours ago, 384 comments)
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France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech
641–650 of 729 posts
Re: France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech
#642>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.
microsoft bribed them to come back
Re: France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech
#643Earlier 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…
Do typical users care that much about a bit of jank, though? All the “typical users” I know are on spyware infested Windows laptops and just interpret the horrible shabbiness of the whole experience as being normal.
To add. It is jarring for me when I occasionally get to use someone's browser that does not have an ad blocker. It is indeed surprising what users have accepted as the norm.
Re: France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech
#644All the comments about Linux gaming make me want to give my $0.02. I've been gaming on Linux, with no Windows installed anywhere, for around 6 years. In the first 3 years, it was a massive pain. Games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. would consistently have issues with mouse input, weird acceleration, a lot of games wouldn't run at all. This is NO LONGER the case at all. Things run very well out of the box. All games I want to pl…
All games I want to play run very well and mostly the process is just "install -> play". This is largely true for games running directly through Steam, it can get pretty annoying for games that exist outside Steam. Especially when you have to do things like apply an ".msi" style patch to a game . It's doable, but the number of steps and tools you may have to pull in (such as protontricks) does get to be a bit of a pa…
No issues with other stores. Gog, Epic, etc
Re: France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech
#645Yeah good on them, everyone needs to do this. It's nuts Windows is still the go-to for anything these days despite everyone knowing what a parasitic, buggy mess it is. "Easy" shouldn't be the excuse in this day and age. Big orgs and especially government entities should be hiring the people that know what they're doing and get off that crummy platform.
Problem is that people like having a similar interface for both work and non-work things, and Linux doesn’t have enough penetration into the consumer market to influence stakeholders. The first step is making Linux the default choice for hardware providers. Framework was one of those pioneering this but was underfunded imo
The first step is making Linux the default choice for schools, the rest will take care of itself in 10-20 years
Re: France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech
#646I puzzles me to no end why the typical office clerk should care about the OS at all. I understand that secretaries will be trained on MS Word and will then have a strong preference to use such (or at least something which very closely resembles it). Same for accountants with Excel. But clerks in e.g. Revenue Service? Those I expect to interact (perhaps these days via a Web interface) with custom software. Why would t…
People just hate imposed changes.
Re: France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech
#647It'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 produ…
It's not the products, it's the army threatening you if you don't use them. But France has nukes so if anyone can pull it off in Europe it's them.
Re: France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech
#648Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, but people should definitely try Lutris. It's nearly as painless as Steam now for GOG and many other stores.
I haven't tried out Lutris yet as I'm trying to avoid having too many layers of platform dependencies just to get games to run, but I'm sure I will at some point.
I recently switched to Lutris, so my son can install games without me. It just works. Great stuff.
Re: France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech
#649Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"Helping for free" doesn't cut it when dealing with governments. Even if everyone had gone the Linux route 20 years ago we'd still have an entire ecosystem of commercial businesses selling and operating it; imagine what Red Hat would look like with Microsoft actually out of the picture.
We'd have just as many consultancy firms and layers of beuraucracy without Microsoft, and France wouldn't be operating their entire government IT stack, all the way down to individual workstations, that much cheaper than it is now.
Re: France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech
#650Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).…
Google for example uses a fork of Ubuntu. When someone decided to compromise Google employees machines via a fake npm package they were able to do so successfully. When they reported this to Google they said it was okay for employee machines to be compromised and that it was part of Google's threat model. While this may be true for large companies I don't think the French government is ready to handle such a security…
> that it was part of Google's threat model
That's just PR to avoid stocks going down.