Discussion
France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech
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.
shafiemoji: Wish the Bangladeshi government did this instead of relying on pirated copies of Windows 7
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.
carefree-bob: Autocad has 39% market share in CAD, Solidworks has 14% market share, and Fusion 360 has 9%.None of this is a major national advantage for any side. It's bizarre to think that the US or France would treat this as some kind of mark of national influence, since if anything happens to these top three vendors, there are lots of other vendors waiting in the wings. It's not like a national oil reserve, where it's important that you have a reserve of CAD software available for your engineers.
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.
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.
lousken: Now nextcloud and libreoffice should give up the stupid drama and focus on beating microsoft.
otabdeveloper4: What? Again?I lost count, it's how many attempts again? Fill me in.
forty: As far as I know it was successful for the gendarmerie and assemblée nationale for exemple. There are many public entities and apparently each migration is news worthy
realo: Apparently not everyone got the memo...https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/federal-phoenix-pay-sy...
dleslie: The Phoenix contract predates the more recent efforts to switch to FOSS.But also, Canada loves to burn money on American suppliers. It's probably why the recent interest in _Buy Canadian_ has the American administration annoyed.
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
BLKNSLVR: Ideology may actually be the best way to cut off legacy bullshit like this. There's passion-energy, which really gets the creative problem-solving juices flowing.
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.
bornfreddy: Motivation matters.
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.
lithos: If you picked XFCE as your front end you get WinXP functionality, with the nice things from win10/11 (start menu search that's actually local only, multiple desktop workspaces, and graphical settings/updates I've only needed to go to command line twice in four years).
yibers: How does XFCE compare to KDE and GNOME? Also, does it has all the nice window snapping features that I'm used to fron Windows?
ezst: Wasn't CATIA running on unix even before it ran on Windows?
mixmastamyk: If they only diverted 10% of the budget from MS to solving issues they’d have had a solution a decade or two ago.
WaryByDesign: I'm... not so sure? The French government has, widely seen, 6M employees. Given retail pricing of EUR200/seat/year (and they definitely have a better arrangement), that's 1.2B, and I'm not sure that's enough to provide an identity management plus office apps plus file storage solution? And at 10% of that? Absolutely forget it...
mixmastamyk: All of that came about without them spending anything. So the extra is just to fix bugs and do integration work. StarOffice (LibreOffice ancestor) existed in the 90s—I used it and it was fine for government work.
heyflyguy: man, that's great - but can you imagine some bureaucrat lifer having to adapt to this?
MegagramEnjoyer: we need more tech literacy overall, so this might help with that also
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.
_blk: 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.
fxtentacle: Munich led to "all of Schleswig-Holstein" in Germany. 44,000 Exchange mailboxes replaced with Open-Xchange. 25,000 Windows+Office desktops replaced with Linux+OpenOffice.
ricw: Munich is a bad example - they were effectively „bought out“ by Microsoft by investing hugely into the local economy in the form of offices and employees. It was also two parties that kept flip flopping with different priorities. Linux itself had some hiccups but was fine from what I recall.
lithos: My personal PCs have enough screens that I haven't tried. Though I do really like Windows snapping features on my work laptop (can't change OS there).I haven't played with other windowing systems to judge too much. And just picked right from screen shots/gifs to not need to try.
cwillu: I don't think all the same shortcuts exist out of the box, although win-drag/win-right-drag to move and resize windows (might be alt by default) is _so_ much more convenient than the usual border/title dragging that you might find you don't miss them.
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.
nix0n: Linux is a global project, and open source more broadly is also of course global.Linux Mint (the distro I use) was started and is led by French developer Clement Lefebvre.QEMU and FFmpeg are among the notable projects started by French developer Fabrice Bellard.VLC was started by students of École Centrale Paris.These are just the things that I know about as an American, so I'm sure there are more.
danny_codes: You’re saying a government couldn’t take open source building blocks and run.. office apps with basic security and.. file storage? For $100M a year? This could be done with a 30 person team
WaryByDesign: Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying, If your mythical 30-person teams were achievable, a lot of major US 'cyber'security firms would be in major trouble. Pop-quiz, hotshot: what does Citrix (market valuation: USD 16.5B), technically, have over your team (market valuation: USD 0B)?
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.
atherton94027: You must be German — the French state is a lot more top down than Germany with its regions, so generally these kinds of mandates get applied broadly
Melatonic: The age of the Linux desktop might actually finally be comingPersonally 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 could be great to see SteamOS continue to gain share and become more than just something people run on gaming purpose hardware.And thirdly would love to see a more simplistic but super lean and functional OS built on something like the BSD.
tensor: The difference, of course, is that they can inspect the source, and should the US try to use it as leverage they can just fork and continue on.
ErroneousBosh: Why would you need any user retraining?All distros are basically identical. The only real difference is whether you spell "package manager" as apt, yum, or dnf.
WaryByDesign: > You must be GermanOof, that's just offensive!Anyway, most German Linux 'mandates' were indeed regional, and (for good reasons!) failed to migrate 'upstream'.Whether the French mandate takes hold remains to be seen. "We're not Germany" is not the end-all argument it might seem to be to you.
jaspanglia: Wish it would succeed, other day was reading about stuff and figure out, how much European Tech is actually controlled by American/Israeli Hegemony.
mrheosuper: It needs just 1 successful attemp.
WaryByDesign: [Yeah, if I'm just gonna be down-voted to oblivion regardless of my participation in the comments, good luck with your 'meaningful discussion'}
gus_: https://itsfoss.com/munich-linux-failure/It doesn't matter if this or that doesn't work. Or if Microslop pressures to continue using Winslop.Now the reasons are geopolitical.
charcircuit: Desktop Linux's security and antimalware solutions are not ready for government usage. This is a cyber attack waiting to happen if they go through with this. They should at least switch to ChromeOS if they want to use Linux.
bornfreddy: You mean switch Windows by Microsoft for ChromeOS by Google? Weird suggestion.As for "security" and "antimalware" solutions being ready, I don't think there is much difference between the OSs there. Windows is no candyland either.As always, they will need competent people in the right places to pull this through. Tech is just an enabler.
charcircuit: Yes I do mean that. Google is one of the only companies in the Linux space who takes security seriously.
jodrellblank: > "theres a big chance for someone like Nokia to come in and develop their own approved distro"Microsoft bought Nokia's devices and services division for Windows Mobile in 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Mobile
mrj: As a long time Linux user, this comment makes me sad since many of those features were copied from Linux (many from Unity) :)
upcoming-sesame: honestly since the browser has more or less become the real operating system the host OS doesn't matter so much anymore. most people do 90% of their work in the browser anyway
unfocused: I work in government. Link 1 (2018) is essentially a dream. All of government got forced to use MS Dynamics CRM. Basically, anybody with a software requirement for case management, had to use MS Dynamics. I recommended we use Drupal in 2011. That was killed because everything had to be MS. I'm kind of surprised that it is in there given that nobody was allowed to use.Link 0 and 2 are essentially from TBS and CDS. They coexist together. They are essentially working at the very top as entities that gather information from other departments. They can do whatever they want because they help write the rules.I'm not trying to discredit your post, just saying that as someone who has brought OSS tools to development at the government and tried to use OSS tools for client (I failed at that), it is nearly impossible at the moment. We are married to Microsoft and its cloud.I do agree, that it may take an entire generation because right now, 190+ departments are not exactly jumping to FOSS, and in many situations, they are down right told you are not allowed.In addition, the current de facto document management system is from OpenText. Although many just use Sharepoint Online.Ironically, as everything moves to the cloud, it would be easier to move to a solution that is FOSS based, and based in the cloud. Technology has matured enough that you don't need executables on a desktop, you just need a browser pointing to a website.
kpw94: 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). Large employers like IBM etc also must be using red hat or some other distro
hirako2000: The french Gendarmerie already migrated to GendBunto, their own distribution. It took a while but it's now running on 97% of all workstations. I wouldn't call this just political fluff.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu
