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

691–700 of 729 posts

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

#691

Post by benj111 »

bulbar wrote: post #677
benj111 wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand in 2018 Europe managed to sort out LNG etc pretty quick. I'm kind of surprised it hasn't been louder and faster after the tariffs came in, but we've already had investigation after investigation into monopoly practices, the EU is working on domestic payment processing. So the political will is there. I assume they're just quietly getting on with sorting it out.

Exactly. They know there's nothing to win by being vocal about it. But it's obvious that there has been a general shift within all of EU.

Is slightly disagree. Trump brought in the tariffs based on trade imbalances. Bringing services into the conversation would highlight that there isn't a trade imbalance. But then I'm not trying to guess what trump might do with any given input.

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

#692

Post by fluoridation »

davkan wrote: post #659
fluoridation wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More work than using custom builds of everything on the Linux host?

It’s just the kernel and virtualization stack that are custom. Dual booting is annoying as you lose access to your entire desktop environment. Want to tab out of your game and check your email client? Well you can’t unless you maintain another email on the Windows partition that you only want to use for running a game anyway. If you spend any significant amount of time gaming you just end up getting dragged away from…

>It’s just the kernel and virtualization stack that are custom.

That "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Maintaining a customized system is hardly zero effort. Speaking for myself, there's no way I'd ever consider something like this, because I know sooner or later a system update is going to do something weird that I'll have to figure out how to fix. I'd rather just buy a second computer just to run those specific games. The other person admits they need a second GPU to support this use case anyway, so it's not even like you're saving that much money.

>Want to tab out of your game and check your email client?

I have a phone, and a tablet, and a laptop (besides the desktop). I'm not exactly hurting for ways to check my messages or look something up quickly.

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

#693

Post by fluoridation »

ekianjo wrote: post #667
fluoridation wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have to run a Windows VM anyway, why not just reboot into Windows?

So you dont need to run Windows all the time, I guess?

If you reboot you don't need to run Windows all the time, either.

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

#694

Post by fph »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #82
embedding-shape wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Finns, as always, continue to develop mobile phones, Jolla is back from the dead and supposedly starts shipping sometime in 2026 with a new iteration on the hardware and the OS, time will tell if it'll have any impact. Might not be 100% Europe-made from the get go, but good ideas and executions often start with small steps and iterate rather than having something groundbreaking out of the gate.

I'm not convinced that replacing one proprietary OS with another is the solution. That said, I won't deny that Jolla is much more trustworthy than Google or Apple.

Jolla had ties with Russian state companies, I wouldn't be surprised if they planted backdoors all over the place.

And in any case if you use Jolla without the Android emulation layer (so Google again), the app ecosystem is as barren as the Siberian wasteland.

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

#695

Post by p_ing »

benj111 wrote: post #688
p_ing wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NT was designed as a multi-user system from the ground up.

Right but windows also aims to be backwards compatible which means it was trying to run things designed for a single user system undermining protections.

That makes absolutely no sense.

'vim' wasn't designed for multi-user use. Nor was emacs.

Applications don't need to somehow be "designed" for multi-user systems. It's up to the underlying system to enforce application isolation in various ways, which NT has and does.

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

#696

Post by davkan »

pizza234 wrote: post #680
davkan wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s just the kernel and virtualization stack that are custom. Dual booting is annoying as you lose access to your entire desktop environment. Want to tab out of your game and check your email client? Well you can’t unless you maintain another email on the Windows partition that you only want to use for running a game anyway. If you spend any significant amount of time gaming you just end up getting dragged away from…

I used vfio in the past, and it's not true that setups like vfio or custom kernel/virtualization "just" work. For starters, custom setups need management. There are even latest generation GPUs whose drivers are not fully VFIO compatible. VFIO had a host of problems that are rarely mentioned, because VFIO "just" works: power management, card driver, compatibility, audio passthrough or maybe not, USB passthrough or may…

VFIO is in a significantly better place than it was 10 years ago though. Proper IOMMU groups are more common on motherboards, flashing gpu bios less necessary, etc. and most importantly the community is bigger and older so there is a more knowledge about parts compatibility and vfio setup.

That said it’s almost entirely unnecessary with the state of Linux gaming now.

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

#697

Post by davkan »

fluoridation wrote: post #692
davkan wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s just the kernel and virtualization stack that are custom. Dual booting is annoying as you lose access to your entire desktop environment. Want to tab out of your game and check your email client? Well you can’t unless you maintain another email on the Windows partition that you only want to use for running a game anyway. If you spend any significant amount of time gaming you just end up getting dragged away from…

>It’s just the kernel and virtualization stack that are custom. That "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Maintaining a customized system is hardly zero effort. Speaking for myself, there's no way I'd ever consider something like this, because I know sooner or later a system update is going to do something weird that I'll have to figure out how to fix. I'd rather just buy a second computer just to run those specif…

Yeah that’s fine, i personally didn’t spend many hours tweaking my dotfiles in Linux just to spend half my time in an operating system that i hate that spies on me and doesnt have my stuff in it. I wouldn’t maintain my own custom kernel either just to bypass anticheat, i don’t buy those games.

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

#698

Post by radiator »

ChocolateGod wrote: post #120
esskay wrote: post #12

Yeah 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.

> It's nuts Windows is still the go-to for anything these days despite everyone knowing what a parasitic Linux still doesn't have anywhere near as nice and cohesive as Group Policy, Active Directory etc. Plus you can pay Microsoft to host it all for you on Azure.

But isn't that the whole point, that foreign governments perhaps do not want Microsoft to host all their data, users, groups, software on Azure, because then the CIA also might obtain access?

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

#699

Post by wolvoleo »

babypuncher wrote: post #609
estimator7292 wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prob…

Yes exactly. People have bought a license with certain conditions with legalese attached.

If they go and change it like that they will be begging for a big class-action suit.

However when they introduce a "new product" then all bets are off. Hence Windows 12.

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

#700

Post by localuser13 »

0x457 wrote: post #582
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.

Reality more surprising than HN quips: https://github.com/cloud-gouv/securix
Post reply on HN