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

josefritzishere

We're going to keep seeing this due to destabilization and political changes in the US. It drives nationalization elsewhere, even among allies.

shafiemoji

Wish the Bangladeshi government did this instead of relying on pirated copies of Windows 7

BLKNSLVR

I hope it succeeds and I hope they document the experience and invite interested parties to see how it was setup and how (well) it works in order to encourage as many governments and organisations as possible to do the same.

Teever

I’ve commented on this before but you’ll know France is serious when there are Linux ports of Solidworks and Catia. France has a real edge over American companies by being the dominant player in the CAD world, it’s always surprised me that they nerfed that advantage by tying to an American operating system.

otabdeveloper4

What? Again? I lost count, it's how many attempts again? Fill me in.

moron4hire

I wish the US Government would do the same

heyflyguy

man, that's great - but can you imagine some bureaucrat lifer having to adapt to this?

yorwba

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716043 (764 points 5 hours ago, 384 comments)

ChrisArchitect

[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716043

sherburt3

I'm sure there's a barely functioning business critical app that runs exclusively on Windows NT in their administration that would beg to differ

yibers

I am saying this as a very long time Windows user, and it saddens me. Politics aside, from a pure technichal, functional, privacy and UX perspective, the case for changing over from Windows to Linux is getting stronger by the day.

lousken

Now nextcloud and libreoffice should give up the stupid drama and focus on beating microsoft.

dleslie

Canada has been using and developing FOSS for a while now. 0: https://www.canada.ca/en/government/system/digital-governmen... 1: https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017... 2: https://github.com/canada-ca/ There's still a great deal of Windows usage, but hopefully that will phase out with the passage of time. Canada's bureaucracy moves slowly, at the pace of generational attrition. It won't be until the last GenX retires that they could even meaningfully begin transitioning the average office worker away from Windows.

AtlasBarfed

The fact that open source is a national security concern should have been something that a crazy orange man should have triggered. Thus was obvious decades ago. And open source is the key model for collective development in a secure manner for disparate countries to secure their software base. Alas, I fear they will only concentrate on the server side. The securing of the desktop should be a parallel concern as well, to help prevent your citizenry from becoming DDOS slaves.

1970-01-01

>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.

WaryByDesign

It's... an admirable goal, but it pretty much remains to be seen if "France"[1] follows through. Previous attempts to "ditch Windows" have not ended that well. Munich in 2003, the entire Federal German government in 2009, Munich again in 2013, Munich again in 2021, and so on. Most common end-result: back to Windows. Breaking points are typically the lack of an "Office 2016" compatible suite, lack of "Adobe PDF" tooling, and a mishmash of legacy apps. The latter seems trivially addressable by a "Remote Desktop/RemoteApps" environment, but there are definitely issues, mostly surrounding printing and clipboard handling. All of that can be solved, but definitely requires more funding and, crucially, coordination, beyond "Open Source Cures All." [1] Oh, I just love it when an entire culturally-diverse region gets lumped in together, or, when, as in this case, ~6M French government employees are treated as a homogeneous group.

MegagramEnjoyer

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

somat

I understand what they mean, linux offers freedom, enough that it divorces your tech stack from any one company. But isn't linux US tech? The blueprint, UNIX was a US project, torvolds works from the US. the original userland GNU was a US based project. The new userland systemd is a US based project.

simonask

Please tell me this also means that they are redirecting the expenses currently going to Microsoft into funding open source development?

sega_sai

I think France seem serious in actually switching to open source/EU software. I recently had a telecon on Visio (France's Teams/Zoom substitute) and it worked well in a browser with ~ 10 participants.