Discussion

Souveraineté numérique : l'État accélère la réduction de ses dépendances extra-européennes

Latitude7973: France has been making good moves to achieve software independence from the US. It would be an even better move to allow those in Europe or indeed the rest of the world to also benefit.

rvnx: A couple of government-pushed French-tech is just US-tech rewrapped. e.g. Qwant is a re-skin of Microsoft Bing

Pay08: Ok? You could make the same argument about Chinese tech, German tech, or American tech.

sgt: That might work for government employees using webapps all day. But for power users it is unlikely to be friction free.

deaux: Unlike modern Windows, known for its lack of friction.

ForHackernews: It doesn't have to be friction-free. The rough edges can be sanded down with government investment that addresses the needs of citizen-users.

spiderfarmer: Being dependent on US tech feels the same as when we were dependent on Russian energy: strategically unwise and avoidable. We have alternatives, they just need work.

carlosjobim: Like last time, I ask again: Which are the European made computers?

edg5000: Interestingly, there are zero non-US powerful laptops. The closest option is the Moore Threads MTT AI Book (12-core 2.65Ghz, 32GB DDR5, 1TB SSD, 14 inch). It cannot reach a modern Ryzen in performance though. It's fascinating that only the US can make good computers. I'm not from/in the US so I'm not saying that from a patriotic point of view. How hard can it be to pop a good ARM chip in a laptop and compete with HP, Apple and the likes?

raverbashing: "We have two versions of Outlook and none of them are working"

Topfi: There are six (seven counting the web version) maintained Outlook variants on Windows 11, last I checked and I have issues with each one. Search especially, but then that has remained an unsolved problem for 30 years. I am sure "AI" will finally solve this.

teekert: I consider myself a power users, use of Windows is not friction free :)Over the years I've come to believe that there is only one thing important: What you are used to. The friction is in the change process. Not in the destination.As an independent, I have several customers on MS365, you know what my super power is? FireFox cookie containers. One for each org, and I switch with 0 effort between the orgs. No need for Windows in that workflow at all. In fact, using Windows and the native apps would probably give me a lot more friction.

JaggerJo: Hope we’ll do the same in germany.

newqer: They tried it a long time ago, but it seems to be rolled back to Windows again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMuxI hope our French friends can learn from this initiative during the adoption phase.

UK-Al05: These are almost always negation strategies rather than serious initiatives.

bayindirh: I don't think so. Having worked on a similar thing in my country, and the effort is monumental.When doing this in a company, making technical people appreciate free software and making lasting changes is hard enough. When doing this with non-technical people, everything becomes exponentially harder.

Lihh27: the license was never the real bill. the control plane was

cromka: > "Like last time"I am perplexed by people who use condescending phrases like this. You think we track what you said before?

samus: [delayed]

dubcanada: 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 replicated in web apps/libreoffice. And frankly most of this work can be migrated to AI.You can even skin Linux to look exactly like Windows if you want, or use Mint or something. But really all people need is to be able to open up Chrome and Excel.

Topfi: In fairness, the transition away from MSFT 365 Copilot (as we all of course call Office now) might include more friction. Mountainous VBasic monstrosities are sometimes the way things get done in orgs I am personally familiar with and that can be hard to switch away from. In general though, I consider this focusing on edge cases as just not helpful, especially as one must start a transition to fully uncover them and get to addressing them too. I also don't think that ancient Excel scripts are an unsolvable problem, but one that needs to be very carefully handled.

Propelloni: There were and are initiatives. Of course, they were and are ridiculed all the time. Who can't recall LiMuX or check out ZenDIS (Zentrum für Digitale Souveränität in der öffentlichen Verwaltung). Read up on the current migration away from MS Office in Schleswig-Holstein.

GJim: Being independent of Chinese manufacturing is a tougher challenge for anybody.Though at least the Chinese are predictable, unlike dealing with the USA.

2OEH8eoCRo0: What are the American-made computers? The Apple macbook assembled in China with Korean displays and Taiwanese chips?

sph: No European made computers today doesn't preclude the possibility that there will be one tomorrow. RISC-V is the way out, and there are a number of European initiatives (though nothing serious just yet, I admit)As a European dev, because I like RISC-V and because of the geopolitical situation I wouldn't bet on x86 in the long term.

faccacta: It seems like what Europe really needs to do this is a viable mobile OS. It's been true for a while that Linux + LibreOffice is plenty to handle most government workers' needs on the desktop, but that's only good for when they are at their desks. Are there any viable alternatives to iOS and Android that are totally free of "dépendances extra-européennes"? What's the plan?

samus: Android Open Source is good enough. The tough part are device-specific drivers that never make it upstream and are eventually abandoned by the vendor, making upgrade past specific kernel versions very troublesome.

notrealyme123: It is controlled by Google so it not. As long as Google is setting the roadmap for android it is not a viable option.

esskay: 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.

polski-g: It makes sense that everyone uses Windows for gaming, because you can't run games in your browser.It makes zero sense for businesses to use Windows if they're only doing PowerPoint and video conferences.

bergheim: This comment was wildly invalid even years ago.See proton, heroic launcher, etc, etc.Cyberpunks own benchmarking suite runs 30% faster (for whatever reason; my wintendo install is stock and nothing but nvidia drivers) on the ntfs windows partition on Arch.

Jyaif: Unless you need some windows-only software, using windows at this point is masochism. I was never a fan of Linux, but the Microsoft driven enshitification is so strong that Linux is now a better option. To win, all Linux had to do is stand still, and that's exactly what it did! Ubuntu in 2026 is pretty much the same as Ubuntu from 2006.

esskay: > Unless you need some windows-only softwareIn many cases even if you do though, its possible to run it on WINE pretty well these days. It's insane how good it's become in the last few years (partly thanks to proton and Valves investment in it all really)

ghaff: "Pretty well" is doing a lot of work. I have no horse in the race. I just run native on MacOS or Linux. Haven't run any Windows in a number of years. (I don't really game much and would just use my Xbox if I really wanted to--though that mostly functions as a DVD player these days.)But if "pretty well" causes the random administrative person to have issues with doing their job or increases IT support costs, it will be off the menu pretty quickly. We'll see. A lot of things are different from the last round of we're going to Linux in Europe.

hootz: Nowadays, pretty well a lot of times means really well, maybe even better than on Windows. See Windows games running faster on Linux through Wine.

ghaff: As I say no dog in hunt and don't actually have a Linux laptop any longer since I had to send it back to my company--from whence I'm sure it went straight to recycling. Maybe I'll buy an older refurb Thinkpad at some point.

self_awareness: It's kind of good news, but it's also bad news -- with Linux popularity, crapware will be more popular. I kind of liked times when Linux was used only by power users. Today it's slightly different, and with more popularity... we get things like age verification in systemd.But well, I can always switch to FreeBSD I guess. And that's my plan B.

lonelyasacloud: > I hope our French friends can learn from this initiative during the adoption phase.The apps are available now, so reasons to be optimistic.When LiMux and similar efforts happened around 2004 most business applications were Windows only. Even the ones that purported to be web used windows only technology and required IE and Windows.Now with years of business budget controlling types using their Macs and smart phones and wanting access to the their apps the majority - even MS's stuff - can be run well in a browser on almost any OS.

morog: I used Linux 10 years ago, but then due to job or corp. and needing Teams and Outlook I was forced to uses Windows. Now with corp job over I was finally able to switch to Linux this week (Fedora + KDE). Loving improvements made in the last 10 years, KDE will always have its quirks, but it is fast and smooth with no crashes yet. I got Claude to make me a migration script which worked brilliantly, haven't needed to boot Windows yet. Browser sessions and everything worked like nothing had changed. All my various ssh / putty configs migrated to Konsole, Thunderbird carries on like nothing has changed. Ahhhh freedom!

shevy-java: Strange. I switched to Linux +25 years ago. My setup became quite minimal; right now I use IceWM for the most part. GNOME3 was always useless; KDE also changed since Nate "I need more moneys!" took over (see his donation daemon or the more recent "systemd-only" tied with wayland-only garbage that KDE succumbed to).Linux is good in that you can combine things that work, so it is more flexible than windows. But desktop wise I don't see it becoming really dominant; GTK is now a GNOMEy-only toolkit. Qt is too busy focusing on their own business model. Desktop Linux is not useless, but it is really just sub-par compared to Windows. I also use Win10 on a second computer; I don't like it but I use it for testing. Linux lacks decision-making power focus (and corporations such as IBM/Red Hat are selfish, so these will never reach any "breakthrough" like the infamous Desktop of the Year, which I heard will come next year together with GNU Hurd ... I think).

bloqs: Fantastic news

lunar_rover: > To win, all Linux had to do is stand still, and that's exactly what it did!It is moving? Red Hat has been investing in containised apps and image based distros for years, Valve single handedly made Linux gaming viable. HDR development is mostly driven by Valve and Red Hat customers.And no Linux isn't good enough yet. UX is all over the place.

embedding-shape: > And no Linux isn't good enough yet. UX is all over the place.Of course you'd think the UX is messy if you only look at the kernel ;)It's up to the distributions and desktop/window managers to handle the UX, and the experience varies as much as there are desktop/window managers. Some of them are fairly internally consistent, like KDE and Gnome, and at least they're currently more internally consistent than Windows and macOS. I use macOS, Windows and Gnome daily, and the only one that doesn't give me daily grief in some manner, is Gnome.

klabb3: 1. total abandonment of desktop as a platform, and the massive hurdles to distribute desktop software2. move to Cloud and use electron wrappers because not even MS can bother making native apps on their shitty platform3. Make Windows so shit that even hardcore power users can’t debloat it.The moat of Windows is gone. Games, office work, all the classic arguments, have basically vanished in the last 5-10 years. The only surprise is why more people don’t get in the life rafts, when the ship is listing at 45 degrees. Is it because there’s still an army of workers and institutional inertia trained in Active Directory?

motbus3: This should have been done years ago. This will certainly drive bad actors to harm Linux too unfortunately

DrBazza: Which are the US made computers? Start by excluding all the ones with Korean LCD panels, and Taiwanese motherboards, and Chinese parts.If you mean assembled then there are lots of very small European companies that make custom build PCs.Economies of scale in the US, a single language, and cheap transport, mean that the US companies grow very big internally, very easily. And then go international without much effort. The same is not true in Europe, so there's not a huge Dell, HP, or IBM equivalent.In 2026, the only country on the entire planet that can likely make their own computer with 100% theirs parts and labour, and is actively trying, is China.

VadimPR: Anyone here familiar with the details of GendBuntu[1], the Ubuntu distro used by the French Gendarmerie? I'd love to hear what is working and what isn't on the ground.[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu?useskin=vector

LightBug1: Excellent move. Hopefully these moves continue the trend spreading through Europe.With another 3 or so years with the Orange Dildo in charge, there's a decent chance the momentum will turn into something tangible.

master-lincoln: WINE has come a long way. Most Windows software now just works on Linux.I don't know why you believe Ubuntu stood still. Looking at the history that does not seem to be the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_version_history

embedding-shape: Personally, the last holdover is Ableton. Last time this came up, bunch of people pointed me to https://github.com/BEEFY-JOE/AbletonLiveOnLinux which has since then been marked as archived, and I'm still unable to run Ableton 12 properly on Linux via WINE, even though I've probably spent too many man-hours on getting it to work...I'm still eagerly awaiting the day though, any day now surely.

Gud: No it makes no sense at all. I do my gaming on Arch.Windows sucks and I hope to see the demise of Microsoft during my lifetime(crosses fingers).

kuon: I am very happy that Linux is becoming main stream but I share your sentiment. FreeBSD is a nice alternative if you want to stay on the edge.

zoobab: What they should launch is an abuse of dominant position on the desktop/laptop market, with appropriate remedies such as fines.

zecg: Except today games all work and invariably markedly better on Linux. Even the games that stopped working on Windows for me work great, like https://www.protondb.com/app/2008510

Eldodi: French administration is about to become even more inefficient it was!

SyneRyder: Qwant is working on that. Together with Ecosia they're building their own index called the European Search Perspective:"Today, Europe receives 99% of the answers to search queries from external infrastructures. We believe, however, that a higher level of digital sovereignty is essential for a functioning democracy and economy. With our new web index, we are creating a European perspective on politics, culture and values. This is a long overdue step towards more plurality in the digital world, which is also being called for by our society."https://www.eu-searchperspective.com

halapro: > a European perspective on politics, culture and valuesTo be honest this does not sound much better. 40 years ago maybe I would have preferred EU values over the US' puritan values. Nowadays I'd just expect a different flavor of poison.

tcfhgj: "they" is a German city, not Germany

dackdel: remind me of firefox os https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/firefox-os

astrobe_: There's a negligible amount of "power users" among government employees; I think the majority of them are trained in reading and applying laws, and given the strong scientific/literary divide in the French culture, they usually think of themselves as inapt with computers (and the erratic behavior of MS products didn't help, if you ask me).But knowing France, what to really worry about is execution, in particular for administrations. Probably people working there who read the TFA already think "oh, big mess incoming" even though they don't know what this "Linux" thing is.I think standard IT/sysadmin training focuses mainly on Windows server etc., Linux being a second class citizen (because that's what the vast majority of small/mid sized businesses use). So recruiting good Linux sysadmins could be an issue, especially since the wages in government agencies are not exactly attractive.

rvnx: Still less, there is a lot of sovereignty-washing in EU, and specifically in France because this gives you access to grants and public markets.Bpifrance, the Caisse des Dépôts, France 2030, Horizon Europe, etc.To access that money, you need the right narrative. So companies learn to wrap their pitch in sovereignty language, get the grants, and then quietly build on top of AWS, Azure or GCP.Not that it's dramatic, but there is a difference between hosted in France (where dependency still exists), and hosted + engineered in France.Hopefully this transition to Linux is going to push France government to get rid of Crowdstrike, it's insane they let such backdoor run inside.

mickael-kerjean: As a French citizen who's been building an open source Dropbox alternative for almost a decade [1], the sovereignty talk in France makes me cringe. Everyone has the word in their mouth, but nobody bothers to even search for alternatives, let alone give them a chance. France represents about 1% of my customer base with only a single customer: LVMH. I've had a whole bunch of university contacting me, nobody was willing to contribute toward the development because culturally we assume libre software must be free of charge so you'd better have a rich uncle to sponsor your life. I've tried reaching out to the people who talk loudest about sovereignty. Turns out it's just something they say at conferences to entertain each other, and don't even get me started on public markets.[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

ghaff: >What you are used to.Absolutely. I've given using a tablet (with keyboard) as an alternative to a laptop when traveling and it sort of frustrates me for a lot of things. But talking to people I know who have largely switched over, my conclusion is that, in general, I probably mostly just haven't put the effort and commitment to make it worth it for me. And I'm not sure, not spending nearly as much time on planes as I used to, it's worth it relative to getting a laptop that is even lighter than the combination.

teekert: As part of the human species, which has conquered our planet's poles, its deserts and its jungles, I believe we are in a unique position to adapt to many -if not most- circumstances thrown our way, and flourish.

samus: [delayed]

HumblyTossed: This is traditionally how you renegotiate with MS.But seriously, how long before MS offers them a deal they would rather not refuse?

perarneng: It's different this time. It's a geopolitical safety move. You know why it happened and who is responsible for this. Never would have happened otherwise.

vrganj: France and Germany are actually cooperating on most of these, like the word processor: https://www.techspot.com/news/107225-france-germany-unveil-d...Plus, it's all open source, so the rest of the world is free to use it as well!

kombine: This is great! Any plans to add spreadsheets to the suite?

mrtksn: Prediction: If USA ends up attacking EU, EU will freeze all the US tech company money and compel them to open their platforms and move all the backend services to EU soil in exchange of unfreezing it and continue operating in a free but regulated market.For example locked communication devices are huge national security risk, so Apple will have their money frozen and given two options:1) Open up iOS etc, bring all the servers to EU. Continue business as usual, EU financial institutions may choose to use Apple services as Apple pay but they may choose to bypass it. EU developers may choose to use Apple App Store services and pay the Apple's fees or they may choose to bypass it. Apple may chose to make Xcode a paid software, developers may choose not to purchase Xcode and use other non-Apple tools and pay nothing to Apple.2) Use credit against the frozen money to refund your users if they bring their devices to you. All the Apple devices will be locked out from EU mobile provider and any remaining devices of the users will be refunded with the Apple's money. After some grace period, any money remaining in Apple's account will be transferred to Apple and if Apple wants to do business in EU again will have to do the option 1.I'm bit on the doomer side of things, so I think that if Trump keeps his current course and power, at the end of the term American software industry will contract by %90 as it will be expelled from most of the world and will be serving to 350M people instead of 8B people.

mrjay42: There's been some 'back and forth' or "progress and regress' about this.Adoption of Free Software:2012 Prime Minister circular — the most important formal turning point: Orientations pour l'usage des logiciels libres dans l'administration, signed on 19 September 2012. It explicitly gave guidance to public administrations on free software use.2016 Digital Republic Law — reinforced the direction by encouraging public administrations to use free software and open formats.2021 action plan for Free Software and Digital Commons — launched after the Prime Minister’s circular of 27 April 2021, with goals to increase awareness, use, publication of source code, and reuse across administrations.2024–2026 LaSuite / Suite Numérique — current state-led open-source collaboration suite, presented by DINUM as a coherent set of open-source tools for public agents and positioned as part of the state’s sovereignty strategyRollbacks and proprietary dealsMicrosoft “Open Bar” contract with the Ministry of Defence / Armed Forces — a major counterexample. The Senate records say the framework agreement started in 2009 and was renewed for 2013–2017 and 2017–2021, without publicity or competition, giving the ministry broad access to Microsoft’s catalog.Criticism and replacement with UGAP purchasing — later reporting says the open-bar arrangement ended in February 2021 and was replaced by a convention via UGAP, but the ministry still relied on broad Microsoft licensing and associated services.2025 education procurement for Microsoft — a public tender worth 74 million euros for the Ministry of Education and higher education services was attributed to Microsoft, showing that proprietary dependence continued alongside open-source policy.2025–2026 public-private partnerships in sovereignty language — France and Germany announced a partnership with Mistral AI and SAP for sovereign AI in public administration, which is not a free-software rollback in the strict sense, but it is a clear example of the state pursuing sovereignty through private-sector partnerships rather than purely internal open-source development.---Conclusion:Like anything in capitalism: it's a constant fight, permanent struggle. The big private companies will try to massively impact political life.So, there IS in France this 'feeling', this consciousness, throughout the political landscape (mostly on the left and also a little bit on the right) that we need to have some sovereignty over our data, services, software, etc.Every once in a while, a right-side political figure, who are basically ruling since 2000, (except from 2012-2017 where France had a social-democratic government and president) has a sparkle of dignity, decency, logic, and honesty towards the best interests of the country and leans towards Free Software adoption. But...the lobbies are always there to rollback each decision, or part of each decision, and gradually gain back their influence.

mickael-kerjean: As a French citizen who spent almost a decade building an alternative to Dropbox that's libre software [1] I was very disappointed my own country decided to build a product competing with mine when French companies are about 1% of the existing customer base. I would have never thought my own government would be competing on my niche[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

kombine: Actually, it's the exact opposite. There is really no alternative to PowerPoint on Linux, unfortunately. I'm saying this as someone who's used Linux for 20 years now.

dotcoma: If there’s no alternative to PowerPoint, that should be treated as a plus, not as a problem.

sublinear: Most consumers are primarily on mobile devices.Windows persists in the workplace where the cost to replace it is significantly higher than keeping it, and keeping it doesn't cost much to begin with. Part of that cost would be training, yes.The other part is finding compliant equivalents for the rest of the software they use. If the MFA, VPN, chat, email, etc. are all already vetted and designed to be compatible, there's no way they'd want to switch. Many policies regarding proprietary information disclosure are also built off this ecosystem and the certifications Microsoft's cloud already has.

stunseed: Most of their revenue is tied to other stuff though1. Productivity / Business (~43%)Includes:Microsoft 365 (Office, Teams) - these can be likely ported to Linux if they're not already since they also work on MacOS? LinkedIn Dynamics (ERP/CRM)~$120.8B2. Cloud (~38%)Includes:Azure (runs on mostly linux, and moving cloud provider as a big corp is expensive, I don't see massive companies stuck in azure infra moving from it) Server products (Windows Server, SQL Server, etc.)~$106.3BI fully support the demise of Windows as an OSBut microsoft as a company has shifted away from Windows as their source of revenue, and will probably not be impacted too badly if it were to die completely.

ChocolateGod: [delayed]

carlosjobim: You forget about MacOS. And Apple are making some very aggressive moves as of lately to capture users.

schnitzelstoat: MacOS is the same sort of walled garden as Windows though. It has plenty of dark patterns in stuff like iCloud too, I imagine with some more years of enshittification it will be in a similar state to Windows today.

carlosjobim: And corporate customers like the French government will want their users to be within strictly controlled environments - walled gardens. That's why they've used Microsoft for so long. MacOS isn't as good for this scenario from what I understand, but is Linux?

dominicrose: IMO the walled garden doesn't have to be the employee's computer but centralized servers holding the data, intranet services, etc.

enoint: France and Germany have endemic malware. Reacting defensively to it might be easier with Claude on the OS source code.

esskay: We've come a long way in the last 2 years. We're at a point where MOST Windows software works flawlessly. I said "pretty well" as theres no doubt a few that don't and it'd be a bit disingenuous for me to suggest otherwise.I certainly wouldn't come into this with knowledge on wine older than 2 years and make a snap decision though as its a totally different landscape - no weird quirkiness and tweaking needed for the vast majority of applications anymore.

einr: The same is not true in Europe, so there's not a huge Dell, HP, or IBM equivalent.In the 90s and up until the early 00s we used to have quite a few pretty serious contenders, but they are all dead now: ICL, Siemens-Nixdorf, Tulip, Bull, Olivetti, etc.

ngomez: Interestingly, Microsoft has been trying to get ahead of this for a couple of years now with their National Partner Clouds program [0], which they describe as:> designed for scenarios where full ownership and operational independence from Microsoft is requiredIn France's case, Capgemini and Orange have a joint venture to operate datacenters that Microsoft runs Azure and Office on top of [1]. Moving away from Windows and Teams would still reduce their dependence on Microsoft substantially. But if the core goal is to reduce dependence on non-European suppliers, I would be wary of the French government buying services from "Bleu" when it's mainly Microsoft and a couple of consultancies in a trenchcoat.[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sovereign-clou...[1] https://www.capgemini.com/news/press-releases/capgemini-and-...

drooopy: My Linux computer now is my main gaming machine. I purged my Windows partition a couple of years ago and haven't had the need to look back yet.

jrgd: Probably just a matter of time, it’s possible the friction will create opportunities. Something in the spirit of iaPresenter, md first would be awesome.At the moment i have long html page with key event for next and previous, tiny script to check on specif markup for autoscroll.

CalRobert: But will they use azure?

palata: > It's fascinating that only the US can make good computers.Lenovo is Chinese, right? Xiaomi, Samsung... can you really not name one non-US company making computers?

soco: I'm typing on Acer right now. And there's Asus, MSI, Fujitsu...

surgical_fire: The vast majority of my Steam library runs on Mint without issues (and some older games run actually smoother on Linux than they did on Windows).Not to mention my very large emulation library.I have no idea what you are talking about.

chocochunks: Huh? There's a ton of PowerPoint alternatives that work on Linux. LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, Collabora Office, Calligra Stage, Google Slides, the online version of PowerPoint, more techy things like LaTeX Beamer or Reveal.js. Maybe these don't have perfect PowerPoint compatibility, or some niche PowerPoint feature you need but there's plenty of slide deck making options that work on Linux.

cs02rm0: And then Canva, Prezi, etc. I can't understand the idea that there's no alternative to PowerPoint on Linux either.

llarsson: Imagine what can happen if the French and other governments would start pouring all the money into developing that further in the open, rather than just giving it all to Microsoft instead?

theshackleford: > 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?

CalRobert: I haven’t seen power point used professionally for over a decade. All google (though I’ve made the odd prezi)

ptk: Every single morning on the train to work, I watch people put finishing touches on PowerPoint presentations.

prmoustache: There are decent alternatives on all operating systems, including Linux.

the_lonely_time: Are you just hanging around California startups? I work in big consulting and am inside hundreds of the largest companies in the US, everyone of which is fully Microsoft and only ever seen PowerPoint. I’m in dozens of teams meetings a week across as many organizations and have been in 2 Google meets meeting in the last decade, both of which were California fintech startups.

knollimar: I was under the impression anticheat is the only thing stopping linux gaming from taking over

spiderfarmer: Or that he tracks me, which would be creepy

tekla: I continue to be impressed as to how much of a bubble HN people reside in. A very small bubble.

gib444: Efforts like this are good for people to realise there is a lot of talent in Europe that just gets overshadowed by USA's dominance.USAians tend think everything is less popular in Europe simply because it is inferior and fails purely on its technical merits. I know nothing will ever change their minds, but at least non-European non-USAians might recognise the efforts a bit more.We are also willing to accept 'good but not perfect' and understand tradeoffs.

drstewart: >USAiansThe word you're looking for is Americans, despite whatever preconceived notion you think the word "Americans" actually should mean in English. I know nothing will ever change European minds, but at least understand what the correct form is.>everything is less popular in Europe simply because it is inferior and fails purely on its technical meritsSo everything is less popular in Europe because it fails on many other points? Big applause to you, I guess. Are you looking for a participation award?

realusername: That's also what Microsoft 365 is, a webapp, even the latest Outlook is a webapp.

sgt: Nobody in their right mind prefer the web apps over the native apps if they sit all day doing e.g spreadsheets. I tried the M365 web app for Word the other day and it's sluggish.

forinti: Yes, liberty comes at a cost. It seems that convenience is no longer the main motivator for many people.

veber-alex: lol "liberty" as if you are fighting to free slaves or something.Europe doesn't want to depend on US infrastructure, that's the only reason to do this.Nobody cares about Linux "freedom" or open source.

pjc50: Freedom from suddenly being cut off is potentially important.

vladvasiliu: Yes, most people use MS where I live, too. But most of them only scratch the surface. To this thread's point, 99% of PowerPoint presentations I've seen are just walls of text on a bunch of slides, with the occasional illegible graph.Now I'm not saying I actually know my way around PPT or that I'm some presentation whiz, but this can probably be done with the browser version. Just like the "new" Outlook is simply a new Edge skin.I work for a company that has drunk the MS Kool-Aid and then went back for a refill, yet I've never had any issue using the web version of the suite ever since it came out. I don't even run Windows on my work laptop. Teams is the only app that seems marginally better in its heavy version (heh), since it supports separate windows for the calls.

lionkor: Anticheat and support for joysticks, steering wheels, VR, etc. is one factor for sure. I would say almost all games people play, which dont fall in the above categories, run out of the box with no or very minor tweaks needed (no terminal).

breve: Run your Windows games on Linux: https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/nearly-90-percen...

robertlagrant: I tried LibreOffice (Impress) for something simple and it was not good - in fact it would just freeze. Although it did have a feature on MacOS that PowerPoint for Mac didn't, so I ended up using Impress for the first little bit and then PowerPoint for the rest.

hug: Group Policy and Active Directory are dead, for all intents and purposes.It's now Intune (via OMA-DM), and Entra. Both of those products are about as bad as you might imagine the "cloud" versions of GP & AD might be.They are better, in ways -- no longer having to care and feed for domain controllers is nice, and there's no longer an overhead for additive policy processing, so endpoints only get a single set of policy and log on much quicker -- but for the most part, enterprise management of Windows devices is in a worse place than it was ten years ago.Try to figure out how long it will take an online Intune device to discover a new policy: As far as I can tell the answer is "eventually". There are bandaids for this, because of how infuriating it is, of course, but all time guarantees are basically gone.Ask me a decade ago what an enterprise should do, and my answer would be straightforward: AD, GPO, Exchange.The answer now is not simple.

apatheticonion: Hopefully this results in investment in desktop environments and Wine!

master-lincoln: Why? We have plenty of well working Desktop Managers and WINE is doing better than ever. I'd argue there are bigger issues in Linux like default process isolation and access authorization per program being behind other OSes

soco: I'd think the only Office part difficult to replace is Excel. It has a lot of functionality, provides a lot of value and is the workhorse of most business processes I see. Now how do you replace THAT?

embedding-shape: It's almost like Microsoft might be offering something on top of businesses using Windows, that isn't as commonly available for other platforms.Or businesses are just clueless face-less entities who have no idea what they're doing. Probably the truth is a little bit of both.

close04: They offer a full ecosystem where everything integrates with everything else, especially the central pillar of identity. But you will pay for that in more ways than just money or lockin. If you work with their solutions, the more you dig into them with the help of MS people, the scarier it gets. You will have a lot of "holy cow" moments.Businesses choose it because it works with what they already have. The existing tools, processes, skills, and because Microsoft was always a safe choice by virtue of being almost implicit. They choose Microsoft because they're already deep into Microsoft, it's the option carrying the lowest risk and lowest short term cost.Switching to Linux is complex, expensive, and risky. The transition is long and expensive, plagued with teething issues, your MS focused knowledge is redundant, the patience of your sponsor can run out before the move delivers anything of impact. Who wants to take such risks when they can just not rock the boat and call it a day?

freedomben: > Is it because there’s still an army of workers and institutional inertia trained in Active Directory?Yes, that is a huge driver of inertia. I've had to battle that in so many different companies now, and it is absolutely aggravating. That on top of comments about how Linux sucks from someone who either has never used it, or has only used it on a server and thinks that is all Linux has to offer, are absolutely soul destroying.

kgwxd: Even the old companies have moved away from that nonsense. Huge waste of resources.

close04: It makes sense a government will want to take full charge of the strategically important software they will run on especially when they try to establish it as a new standard in a challenging transition. One day when it's fully established they could still spin it off and some other entity takes point.

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

orochimaaru: Why haven’t they done it yet? I just think they’re incentivized enough for it.

sph: Because until literally a year ago, the country that hosted Microsoft was one of France's most trusted allies.It takes time to find a suitable replacement to a global monopoly.

kalaksi: > Desktop Linux is not useless, but it is really just sub-par compared to Windows.Each to their own. My experience is the opposite (I use KDE). I have to use Windows at work and it's always such a pain. At least Windows 10/11 finally has multiple workspaces natively and some keyboard shortcuts for managing windows (ironic), but I would have preferred to stay in Windows 10.Now Windows doesn't even support proper suspend anymore and it won't stay in the "modern standby" either. Constantly waking up and doing god knows what with fans screaming. When I take a look what it's doing, task manager claims that nothing resource intensive is going on. I'm guessing it's hiding some internal processes. It calms down when I put it to sleep again. Sorry for the rant, I better stop before I start.

morog: yes the flaky sleep is what did it for me - laptop would randomly boot up at 2am, bright lights and whirring fans. Thought it was a virus! Seems like Fedora has cracked the hibernate/sleep issue, possibly due to good intel driver support for my Dell and finally Linux has better hibernate, sleep and wake than Windows 11 (ymmv!)

carlosjobim: I haven't mentioned America or any other continent. It is the Europeans who are shouting about sovereignty right now.Americans for their part would probably be very happy to use made-in-Europe software on their computers whenever applicable.

einr: I haven't mentioned America or any other continent. It is the Europeans who are shouting about sovereignty right now.Well, no one has mentioned computer hardware until you did.Surely you understand how "all the motherboards are made in Taiwan" is less of an immediate risk to sovereignty than "all of our business and personal data is stored on American servers and subject to US law"It would be nice if Europe could produce its own computers, but right now no one can except China, so what is your point? That limited sovereignty efforts undertaken in the realm of reality are futile and that enables you to get some cheap shots in for whatever reason?

carlosjobim: Computing is the software and the hardware. So you're right, I feel that it is futile.Well, you can use the old hardware which you've already got if you get cut off from foreign suppliers. But the same is true for software. It's even more true for software.If the French government and other Europeans were serious about reducing or eliminating dependency on American cloud services, they should switch to older versions of MS Office and MS Windows be done with it. No need to retrain your workers, and a realistic and speedy way to implement it.

einr: Unfortunately that’s an unacceptable security risk, especially for a government.

sjdv1982: I am actually a research engineer paid by the French government. They take digital sovereignty pretty serious over here, which is sometimes good, sometimes less so.Definitely the right call on Windows, though. Even my parents (in their mid-seventies) moved to Linux this year.

microtonal: Why not? GrapheneOS and others show that it is possible to make viable operating systems on top of AOSP, which also have their own useful extensions.It seems like a waste not to use an existing, well-developed, hardened, open source base, that at the same time provides great compatibility with most existing apps.Since it is open source, it would always be possible to fork if AOSP goes off the rails.I think the primary issue is that it is currently hard to get embargoed security patches, unless you have some partnership with an OEM.

ano-ther: The French move will hit the Productivity/ Business segment. Their motivation is to limit extra-European dependence so they will look elsewhere for this.Similar to Germany with its DeutschlandStack and some migrations already ongoing.

lionkor: All 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 play run very well and mostly the process is just "install -> play".If a game has an aggressive anticheat, like Battlefield 6 or Valorant, it will not work and you can forget about it.Controllers work fine, so do some wheels and other peripherals, but a good number of wheels, pedals, joysticks, VR headsets, and other wild and wacky input devices might not work that well or not at all. It mostly depends on whether the software for them runs on Linux, runs in Wine, or is needed at all. Not sure about VR, but I know it was a bit dire 1-2 years ago.If you don't play hardcore simulator games, and don't play one of the competitive shooters with aggressive anticheat (e.g. CS2 and other competitive shooters run perfectly well), you can just install Linux, install Steam or one of the other launchers, and just hit play.If you're not sure, you can check the status on https://protondb.com.

Levitating: > Games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R.The old stalker games run on the X-Ray engine (the mods on a modified OSS version of it). In my experience they've always worked pretty well, though the games are quirky in general.Good hunting stalker.

mbreese: That was also the answer two decades ago. But if AD and GPO are now dead, what killed them and what are the options? Is the problem mobile and BYOD?I’ve been primarily on Macs since that time where endpoint management isn’t much, so there are fewer knobs to fiddle with. In some ways it’s nice in that admins can’t screw around too much with my system. In other ways, I’m sure Macs feel limiting for those in charge of enterprise security. However, most endpoint management feels like it’s written for Windows with Macs as an afterthought for checklist security. Knowing that, I’m happy there are fewer places for dodgy software to be able to interface with the OS.

harlequinetcie: I find fascinating how so many people are moving away from Microsoft decades after they should have because of simply the inertia that large organizations have on adoption.Above all, I'm also surprised on how those same organization are using Anthropic or OpenAI or other close source solutions for their agent harnesses instead of going for Open Source.Malte just yesterday showed how powerful innovation with small teams can be achieved particularly in EU.I hope they start looking for those alternatives too for their agentic systems, beyond using pi-mono.

Bayart: > I find fascinating how so many people are moving away from Microsoft decades after they should have because of simply the inertia that large organizations have on adoption.That should be a good lesson in anthropology : the delta between knowing something and acting upon it tends to be immediate necessity. We're still an immature species as we haven't learned to be lazy at scale, that is putting the right amount of work early on to do the least overall. But I'm optimistic we'll get there.

hereme888: Hopefully the rest of the world can benefit from their efforts. I hope the whole EU starts moving to Linux.

apatheticonion: A big hurdle to this is hardware vendors locking bootloaders and making it impossible (or impractical) to write or use existing drivers.Manufacturers maintain long running forks of Android (often very old Linux kernels) with their drivers hidden in their fork's source.I'm a firm believer in the right to repair software - and the fact that it's illegal to reverse engineer binary blob drivers (or proprietary software at all) is a shame (not that you could even untangle a driver from a binary blob of a Linux fork). I'd go as far as feeling strongly that drivers should be open source, and if they aren't, documentation sufficient for the community to write drivers should be made available by manufacturers.Linux on M5? Should be easyLinux on an X Elite Surface Book? Should be easyUbuntu Touch on my Pixel 9? Should be easyAndroid TV on my TV? Should be easyProxmox on my 5g mobile router? Should be easyNo drivers / locked bootloaders = not possible

opan: >the fact that it's illegal to reverse engineer binary blob drivers (or proprietary software at all) is a shameWhere? I don't think it's illegal in the US at least. The only things I'm aware of that may have legal issues are related to radios, specifically modem/baseband stuff, and maybe WLAN cards.

pulse7: It looks like the president - which was a businessman - will make a huge damage to American IT businesses. And IT stocks dominate the S&P 500, comprising roughly 1/3 of the index's total market capitalization... Good luck America!

microtonal: Open up iOS etc, bring all the servers to EU.How is that going to work? Apple will still be under the CLOUD Act, so Europe would still be vulnerable. The only solution would be for Apple to fork into two completely separate companies, which is unlikely to happen.Most likely there will initially just be a lot of chaos, because nobody is prepared for this scenario. There will be huge supply issues, COVID will look like nothing (both in terms of groceries, etc. and getting replacement hardware). Then Europe will on the short term rebase to Chinese/Korean/Taiwanese hardware, with probably an AOSP fork on the mobile side and Linux on the desktop/server side.But it will be terribly messy. Nobody seems to prepare, because everyone thinks this scenario is unthinkable or they just don't want to put in the effort. Even all the people that I know that are talking about digital sovereignty are still using their iPhones, MacBooks, or GMS Android phones.I am trying to tell tech people that the time to start switching is to alternatives is now, since tech people are usually early adopters and can help other people. But most switch from GMail to Proton Mail and proclaim victory. January 2026 (remember the good ol' days when the US wanted to take Greenland with force if necessary?) was already forgotten after 4 weeks or so.

hug: It was absolutely not the case two decades ago. There were no other options for an enterprise fleet, 20 years ago, if the question was asked. If you weren't Google (who never asked the question anyway), the answer for managing 25,000 endpoints was to use Windows devices with Active Directory as the management plane. Anyone doing anything else was in for a world of hurt... and that's why every enterprise ended up on Windows, and why everyone targeting enterprise management targeted Windows -- because that's what the endpoints were already running.What killed AD & GPO was Microsoft, in their bullheaded push toward Azure everything. Instead of listening to what it was that the enterprise customers actually wanted, they designed a system that made sense to them, but to no one else. The original UI was written in Silverlight. It was horrific.

Zababa: At least when you have a few different values you can pick and compare but yeah.

Zigurd: Personal computers were used in office environments long before the technologies to make them administer-able as if they were a mainframe. Before blindly jumping in and reproducing those technologies, better to ask why they emerged in the first place.Most workplaces don't have strict bans on personal mobile devices, and some of the ones that do, don't have the kind of physical perimeter defense that can detect people getting lazy about whether or not they carry their personal mobile devices into the workplace. That makes perimeter defense into security theater anyway. We need a rethink about what we are guarding against and how we're doing it.

ethbr1: > Most workplaces don't have strict bans on personal mobile devicesIf you're talking about select work apps on your mobile device, sure, but that's limited attack surface.If you're talking about employers who let unmanaged mobile devices hop on their internal network... I've never seen that. Maybe at a hypothetically perfect zero-trust shop?

orochimaaru: Not really. I mean Trump has amped the rhetoric, but there have been no new laws passed.The privacy threats were always there.

otikik: Must be the only nice and cohesive parts left. Perhaps they have not figured out how to put ads on AI on it because it doesn't have many users.

XorNot: Honestly as wide spread as it is, managing group policy sanely is still a challenge I've found - it's very resistant to configuration as code.Linux has a lot of the pieces but is principally lacking a solid distribution system - in particular a big missing component is the network-based SELinux policy distribution system which you can see some hooks in for the concept of a "policy server" which never eventuated.SELinux would be a lot more viable if it had a solid way to federate and distribute policy and has some nice features in that regard (i.e. the notion that networked systems can exchange policy tags to preserve tagging across network connections).

WhyNotHugo: > And no Linux isn't good enough yet. UX is all over the place.Sure, the UX for Linux desktop is all over the place, and a lot of software is messy and untidy. But Windows isn't any better in that sense. It doesn't have a clear, cohesive design style either. Its selling point used to be that users were familiar with the UI, but it seems to change so much that users can't really leverage that much either.

Lihh27: that's the catch with gp/ad. for a lot of orgs the hard part is intune/entra now. swapping the desktop is easy. replacing identity and device management is the real migration

samus: [delayed]

xandrius: My main reasons not to be able to fully switch 100% to Linux are the following:1. Graphic design software is subpar (expecially when compared to mac) and very often under supported. And GIMP has absolutely the worst UX of any program I've ever seen for such a widely recommended software. 2. Gamedev (i.e. Unity) is much less stable and annoying to work with (mac is much better but Windows still wins) 3. Older hardware support, most of the times you can use a super old software (say a printer) and it works. Linux much better than mac for this, from my experience 4. Lots of things on Win are plug and play, Linux is a pain of custom drivers from dead githubs. Mac slightly better or worse, it might either exist as a stupidly expensive application or have to jump hoops to get a driver in.And I know people say "just use Wine" or "GIMP is actually great and free" but at the end of the day, I want my main driver to be stable and good to use. If anytime I save a project running via Wine has a non 0% chance of it crashing and bringing down my entire work, it's not going to happen.I do use and recommend Linux quite extensively but that's why I always have 3 different systems at any given time:1. Win: gamedev, hardware stuff or bigger games, some design, GPU heavy work. 2. Mac: design, light GPU work, browsing and portability (battery life and cooling is fantastic) 3. Linux: everything elseThis hasn't changed in the past 10+ years, even though now I can see much more gaming happening on Linux, which is very nice.

specproc: This is so utterly urgent. The US is an increasingly-deranged, hostile actor, which is able to cripple our tech at will.I think we've been far too complacent about the direction of travel across the Atlantic. Trump and his crew are the new normal, and the key players in Silicon Valley are on board.Any European government not currently working towards independence from US tech is being almost criminally neglectful.

spiderfarmer: Steps are being taken. This week two big announcements in The Netherlands as well, one for a replacement to AWS and one for taking US tech out of state secrets, which weirdly enough wasn’t already a thing.

3form: And importantly, older games now tend to work better in Linux than they do in Windows.

Tarmo362: What about offline, to my knowledge Entra and Intune do not work without actual internet connection?

pjc50: > Linux still doesn't have anywhere near as nice and cohesive as Group Policy, Active Directory etc.Isn't it about time someone developed one?The foundations are there; you can imagine an organization deploying laptops with, say, Ansible, and not giving users root on them. LDAP sort of matches the old capabilities of AD, but not completely. There's even a "SAMBA as fake domain controller" mode.Ironically what it needs is a product or service which organizations can pay to take the problem off their hands. But then people get stuck in never paying for anything in the open source world.

mbreese: Well AD is just a really opinionated LDAP/Kerberos setup, so you’d think that there would be something that Linux could do.But when you’re talking about enterprise management of thousands of devices, you need some kind of consistent security policy management. That requires running OS software that accepts remote policy management, which is a very specialized configuration and not just “vanilla Linux”.You can get really far with LDAP, but I’ve only used it for remote accounts, file shares, and sudoer config. I’m sure there are more policy configurations that would be possible with a more advanced tool.I suspect the RHEL world has something to offer here.But, I agree with you - for an enterprise customer, this really needs to be some kind of paid/supported product. I wouldn’t want the French government to rely on some scripts that worked on my small cluster.

mechoblast: If your email was forcefully terminated would you call that an infringement on your freedoms.

robinwhg: Is there a performance hit for cs 2 compared to windows with an rtx card? That‘s pretty much the only thing holding me back.

xorcist: > Isn't it about time someone developed one?Honest question: Why? If you want a Windows-like environment, run Windows.I get this all the time when people ask about a Linux equivalent for something, and aren't really satistied when it doesn't work or look the same. Linux isn't a clone of Windows. Linux comes from an older heritage, and has a unique culture. You are in for a hard time if you want to use Linux like you would use Windows. That's a suboptimal experience, at best.That said, of course Linux should be easy to manage. But Windows is from a single corporate entity, of course their management tools will be different. It used to be unix admins that laughed about people using Windows as servers. The culture around Linux is one of scriptabiliy where even the user interface, the basic shell, is one where every command is inherently a script. That's why management on Linux looks like Ansible and OpenSSH, not like Remote Desktop and Group Policies.You could write something like Group Policies for Linux of course, but it wouldn't be a complete solution so people would just continue using Ansible, OpenSSH, and the respective package managers.

pjc50: > If you want a Windows-like environment, run Windows.One of these questions where we, those doing the discourse, need to pick apart what the word "you" refers to here.In this context, it is national governments, who have started to fear that there may come a day when they are not allowed to or able to or safe to run Windows. That gives rise to the question, "how can we get a system that minimizes the disruption of migrating away to Windows?"Ultimately it's not about specifically wanting AD or GP as technologies, either, but the things they enable: seamless single-sign-on across an organization, and management of software security and updates across a fleet of desktops.

fHr: Holy based

benterix: At this point I wouldn't be surprised if American companies started using it if the French get it right. The instability of the current administration is one thing, but Microsoft disregard for its user deserves an appropriate response that will actually hit them where they care.

BirAdam: I would love to self-host France's "La Suite" to keep myself out of Google and MS... but for many companies, it will not matter how much you tell them there are options that are both cheaper and better. They will believe that paying someone tons of money is better because others cannot afford it. That inherently makes it superior... for some reason... you see?

himata4113: Well actually I've been technically playing all the games that are protected by these aggressive anticheats on linux since I've decided to switch.My setup is a custom version of the linux kernel that 'backdoors' itself and exposes host information to the windows vm making all the anticheats happy enough to work out of the box. Have not gotten banned in any of the games either. Custom VMM and EDK builds are required to block blanket detections of virtualized hardware.I repurposed lookingglass to instead stream all the wdm buffers as seperate applications that I can open directly in linux like they're native applications. The neat part is that I forward all the installed applications to KRunner which talks to the windows vm and launches the application there and spawns a looking glass instance for that applications assigned path.The only downside that this is a two GPU solution and you have to run any GPU intensive applications in windows.

fauzanhilmi: Related: Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47507150

CalRobert: Perhaps! I’m not in the US for what it’s worth

everdrive: Group policy is an annoying pain. Yes, there aren't many better options out there, but it's not as if group policy is _good_.