The French government announced that its digital agency will switch to Linux during this year. This is about a few hundreds of computers owned by the agency.
The second statement is that this agency is expected to publish, by the end of the year, a plan to reduce the digital dependency on the US. It's not "France to ditch Windows", it should be "French government promises to plan soon for possible ways to decrease digital dependencies, but calendar unknown". Also note that the government (and president) will change next year, so even if the present drive was real, a political u-turn could come soon.
Overall, this statement could be the presage of a major upturn in a few years, but I think it far more probable that the policy change will be minor. There's already a small tendency toward Linux and Free Software in the public sector.
I feel you're underselling the second statement a bit:
> Each ministry (including operators) will be required to finalize its own [migration] plan by fall
This sounds like there's actual pressure to start moving soon, especially for adopting existing DINUM solutions.
(I agree the title is clickbait.)
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.
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.
From the botched implementations of AG Grid to their crippled version of CKEditor (with Copilot forced in of course), the daily bugs are an absolute nightmare.
And then most support tickets (if you can even open one after a forced chat session with Copilot), get handled by a third-party, most likely in India with different timezones than you and the support calls are a crapshoot.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/federal-phoenix-pay-sy...
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.
KDE 6.6 is great to me, but there are some quirks I have found. Their "peek at desktop" feature is annoying, I want "minimize all" but you have to do some scripting to enable that.
I've noticed that clicking the network button to see wifi status shows traffic rate, and that seems to lag and I suspect it has an impact on throughput.
I'm interested in Cosmic when it matures some more.
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.
They have done this everywhere; Microsoft Office is everywhere and terrible. Sharepoint used to be everywhere and is terrible. I know they bought it, but LinkedIn is nearly required everywhere and terrible. Teams seems to be increasingly used everywhere and terrible. And of course Windows is everywhere and terrible.
As far as I can tell, there is not a single thing that Microsoft does not half-ass. They're not a software company, they're a marketing company that sells software.
if Home Depot were to make an exam to pass a certification over their catalog, that would seem ridiculous. But when Microsoft does this, management ppl are happy and feel like they manage when they sign up everyone for AZ900 "certification"
Microsoft saw that users, power users and admins who are from the jobs are not making purchases, so you no longer need to design products for them
Legacy app compat is actually an argument for moving to Linux.
But certainly we are already at stage where Windows NT can be regenerated on the fly from a prompt anyway, aren’t we?
Otherwise, there is also ReactOS that could be leveraged on for that kind of scenario. I wonder where it would stand by now if all the money that governments around the world spent in Microsoft license would have been invested in it instead.
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.
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.
Are people designing aircraft carriers in Fusion?
Don't get me wrong, I understand that AutoCAD is extremely important for architecture and the death grip that AutoDesk has over that industry needs to be broken for the benefit of all of us, but from my understanding Dessault Systems makes software that is used for totally different purposes and is of vital strategic importance for a nation that wants an independent MIC which France obviously does.
So it seems foolish to me for them to have their own CAD software that can and is used to design weapons but be dependent on an American operating system produced by a particularly unscrupulous company who is obsessed with tighter and tigher control and has definite ties to the US intelligence apparatus.
Fusion360 -> PTC Onshape
AutoCAD -> BricsCAD
Inventor -> Easily outclassed by NX/SolidEdge, Solidworks/CATIA and Creo
I don't know, but I have watched people designing high-speed trains in CATIA.
Check out: https://www.army.mil/article/249241/armys_powerful_open_sour...
But I would assume defense contractors -- the private firms like Lockheed -- are probably using commercial software. The US military is pretty bureaucratic and is filled with bespoke stuff, whereas the contractors are basically businesses and would use whatever is common in commercial business world.
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.
All distros are basically identical. The only real difference is whether you spell "package manager" as apt, yum, or dnf.
We're talking about users who are going to do almost everything through the GUI, and who will associate the "distro" with the default choice of DE/WM/etc. stack in whichever flavour of whichever distro it is. Understanding what a "package manager" even is, will be the responsibility of "IT" specialists. Assuming they don't decide that only, say, Flatpak-installable software can be approved.
We're talking about massively bureaucratic institutions that have been steeped in Windows orthodoxy for decades. That's the administration policy they know, so it's what they will forcibly adapt to Linux.
You're going to need user retraining because the GUI has its own file manager program and no matter which one you choose (and they will choose exactly one) it is not Explorer. Because LibreOffice is not the Microsoft Office suite, and neither is any of its FOSS competitors. And so on and so forth. There's no telling what idiosyncrasies people depend on. In organizations like this I really doubt you can count on everyone being generically computer literate. I really doubt that generic computer literacy (as opposed to demonstrated competence with specific applications) was ever part of the hiring requirements.
How much retraining do you need for "click on the orange and blue spinny fox thingy and wait for your email to come up"?
> because the GUI has its own file manager program and no matter which one you choose (and they will choose exactly one) it is not Explorer
Nobody is ever going to use it. They're going to use a web browser.
> There's no telling what idiosyncrasies people depend on.
Funny way of spelling "Firefox bugs", but whatever.
> In organizations like this I really doubt you can count on everyone being generically computer literate
Basic adult literacy is computer literacy. If you can read you can use a computer.
"Click on the blue and orange spinny fox thingy" is easy for even the thickest user.
Have you ever used the Linux OS??
35 instead of 40? I don't think an extra 5 hours a week is really going to move the needle in a meaningful way.
But that's besides the point. The point is no company owns linux so you're not tied to big tech even if they are the biggest contributors to the kernel.
We may see Canonical or other commercial Linux vendors come forward with a government or enterprise-flavored solution for all this. But the important thing to keep in mind is that they're not selling Linux per-se. As the GPL prohibits this, these companies sell support for their Linux distro instead. That revenue goes into improving Linux and maintaining their distro (e.g. Ubuntu). But even with all that money changing hands, that they do not own Linux, the Linux kernel, or any other shred of GPL licensed stuff.
Resources always win. All that is needed to ruin an open project is dump money into heavy development up to the point where it becomes impossible to do without it. Plenty such cases already.
This also ruins the development of the project akin to feeding wild life, you get them dependent on you, and if you stop feeding them they lose the ability to feed themselves in the wild. Such is the Linux ecosystem, based on a type of work that so far made a great project for people who have a bit of technical skills. Making it more accessible to the masses only brings that kind of bullshit into it. Inevitably. There is no way something of such importance, to the masses, won't get corrupted in one way or another. That never happens, if there is too much interest there will be funds dumped into corrupting it, one way or another.
The best path forward for Linux was as before, to fly just under the radar, to bee a bit too complicated for most people. This is what protects it. Most, if anyone, don't seem to understand this very simple fact. No older Linux user gets anything worthwhile out of this deal, nothing relevant, just inevitable enshitification of it. Historically proven over and over again. I find "the year of the Linux desktop" to be a childish take in a world that functions on completely different principles.
edit: To add a bit more context, Windows is not the mess that it is today because of evil Microsoft, it is a reflection of its user-base. Same with Linux. They did that to Windows, with their behavior, with accepting all that nonsense.
You want to bring the very same type of people, with that kind of attitude, in Linux, what exactly do you thing is going to happen? They will adapt to Linux mentality or they'll proceed to ruin Linux with their behavior? I can take a good guess on what will happen. People will people, and corpos will corpo to milk them.
Also, Linux has a built-in mechanism against enshittification, which is its open source and multiple flavors. Ubuntu becomes enshittified? Move to Fedora. You can have a dumbed down consumer-friendly distro without affecting Arch.
Nokia isn't really an alternative at all since M$ bought it.
As for desktop, I suppose the only major European options are Ubuntu and SUSE with corporate backing.
https://mastodon.social/@GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social/116353...
https://www.clubic.com/actualite-604786-murena-e-os-intervie...
It's ironic that a company that pretends to be for privacy is using the same think of the children argument as those pushing Chat Control, age verification, etc. Of course, their privacy is mostly a farce, since they have also been caught uploading data to OpenAI for text-to-speechi
I hope that more European governments will start supporting GrapheneOS, since it can compete with Apple on security and is better than Apple and GMS Android when it comes to privacy.
You just have to be willing to put in the investment to verify/review with parties that meet your needs.
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
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.
Turns out the imperial boomerang impacts many things, especially when previous orders are easily destroyed (because only one country was benefiting).
It's not just about costs- managers are actively seeking to distance themselves from everything US.
We've stopped treating them like allies. Who's to blame them?
By luck and happenstance, I tuned into the Omacon conference this morning and my perspective on personal computing very much aligns with theirs. Would encourage a least watch the kickoff keynote if the VODs drop.
I lost count, it's how many attempts again? Fill me in.
Only place I know that went back to MS is Munich city council. After MS put a big research office in the town.
It doesn't matter if this or that doesn't work. Or if Microslop pressures to continue using Winslop.
Now the reasons are geopolitical.
Perhaps be aware before explaining everyone how things really are?
"[Yeah, if I'm just gonna be down-voted to oblivion regardless of my participation in the comments, good luck with your 'meaningful discussion'}"
making it impossible for others to read their original comments. If this now becomes a trend I feel like there may be a need to change the rules around editing.
File storage? Cheap by Y2K as well.
It's not a binary switch either, you build the platform bit by bit every year and roll it out to more and more workers. Four dimensional thinking, that could have succeeded already, a decade plus ago.
Sure a few components would have to be written in the meantime. Just a few million a year would be a huge boost to gaps in FOSS.
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 dependency to an open source ecosystem? Heh, no.
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.
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.
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.
If you want to discuss it on that level, it if Finnish tech imported to the USA, inspired by a Dutch implementation of a research OS.
On a more serious note, Linux has been developed by many individuals all over the world, you can't put a nationality stamp on it.
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.
Personally 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.
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 typical user would need.
I'd love to see either Valve or Nvidia really put in effort into creating their own hardware/software integration on a level that Apple does. I think it'd go a long way to legitimizing it.
I think people are so used to Windows' awfulness that they kind of forget about how much bullshit is associated with it. Linux has bullshit too, though it's getting better, but when people talk about Linux jank they're always smuggling in an implication of Windows having less jank, which I don't concede at all.
Out of the box most popular distros require less tweaking and hammering into shape than a windows 11 install and that is a very important "feature"
I've also had registry corruptions, and I've had unprompted updates brick my hard drive because Windows Update is a terrible piece of software, because as far as I can tell the Windows "repair tools" have never worked for any human in history, and neither has System Restore.
I've had updates in Linux break things but never so thoroughly as the time my mom got an automatic update where she literally could not boot in at all (because I think that the automatic update to Windows 11 that she did not want or ask for screwed up the boot keys).
Installing the equivalent of OS "slop" isn't Linux's fault... For better or worse the choice that is afforded by OSS licenses means that many of those choices will be bad.
There is another point too. The trend with Linux is up and improving slowly over decades. And for windows it seems to be the reverse and faster.
Linux may break more often, but you can almost always fix it with a quick google search. If it doesn't do what you want, there's certainly a setting or config or free app you can install that does.
MacOS may break less often, but when it does you're mostly out of luck. It may do what you want more often, but if it doesn't you have to buy an app, if its even possible at all.
And that’s where the problem is: a quick google search. Laughably trivial for technical users. Non-trivial for the majority of the population.
I love Linux and it is completely viable as a desktop operating system, but it’s far from ready for mainstream without better support.
For a rough analogy, I’d compare it to an old car before electronics. An old car is easy to work on and reliable if you do the maintenance. But an old car wouldn’t be reliable for somebody who doesn’t do any work on a car and outsources the maintenance.
Linux excels when things go right. The failure modes are substantially worse and far more likely to occur. It doesn’t matter if they’re rare. They’re not rare enough. And there isn’t support when things go wrong.
For example: It’s difficult to make the macOS UI fail to start through configuration. You never need to directly touch configuration. (And you can’t modify or delete macOS system files.)
With Linux, some normal problems just have to be solved in the terminal. This allows you to put the system into a configuration where the GUI does not start.
I use MacOS at work and although it is miles better than windows, if I had a choice, I would also use Linux for work.
I'm not regretting my choice, but it's also something where the average user can't just call Linux Support and get a "run X and it'll fix it" solution.
SUSE is a German company, so probably nothing to even develop.
I'm not in that world, so this is a genuine question. The last time I looked at SUSE it seemed typically German in being uniquely complicated for no good reason, but that was years ago.
They have a slightly different take on immutable than redhat but it also works well (rollback and all). Also the tumbleweed rolling is quite stable for a bleeding edge rolling release distro. Using it on a few boxes for the last few years and also installing it for other PC noobs and they seem fine with it.
The only difficult part about Linux is the fact that people can't learn, so absolutely anything being different from Windows is a roadblock to the average person (I still remember the societal meltdown when MS changed the interface in their Office apps, or Windows 8...)
They could however introduce a subscription-only windows 12 and have harsh cut-off requirements like they did with windows 11.
"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 you can do about it.
Microsoft bought Nokia's devices and services division for Windows Mobile in 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Mobile
The holistic platform security for a combined phone/tablet base system would have been really interesting.
We never did get around to our funeral for Nokia, sadly.
"/* Here be dragons */" in a particularly hideous d-pointer punching chain must have been a surprise for whomever eventually picked it up.
The moment you're developing for people with no IT experience and no CS degree, you're going to have to make tradeoffs like Microsoft or Google or Apple have to make today, and somehow deal with the "curl ... |sh" problem.
There's a lot of cases where this actually makes sense for compliance, support, and service level agreements between your org and the vendor's among many other cases. It just gets annoying when you absolutely cannot buy coffee beans from shop B on the team consumables budget because we have an exclusive contract with shop A.
In a governmental organisation, you might even need a public bidding process for any supplier contract big enough to cover printers and their ink/toner, as well as a support contract if something breaks.
The places you mention are already receiving huge doses of industry funding funnelled through the Linux Foundation. Honestly, it looks like the standard is going to be KDE. Even microsoft is copying it for their next DE: https://www.webpronews.com/microsoft-windows-ripping-off-kde...
A firefox agent downloading pictures of cats.. piping them to a graphics program drawing mustaches on them piping them to a moviemaker piping them to a firefox video uploading "the longest catswithmustaches" shorts compilation ever.. all clicked together in a "incredibble machine" like explorer by a user who doesent even know how to code..
And even without a big player, the number of people who are entirely operational with just a browser at work is huge.
Many SMEs already realized they can switch seamlessly between Windows and OS X / MacOS and I see people working on either one or the other. For example a desktop PC running Windows and a Mac laptop is not uncommon.
I switched an employee at my wife's SME to... Debian! And the transition has been more than fine: they live in the browser (Google Workspace, paid company subscription). Unattended-upgrades, a user account that cannot sudo, and that's it.
The number of desktop PC running Windows that are actually glorified browsers has to be through the roof.
Once people realize there's no need to pay the double-whammy Microsoft tax (pay for a new Windows / also pay for a new PC), suddenly installing Linux becomes an option.
Now I know: using Linux and Google is not "getting rid of US tech". But it's "getting of Microsoft" and that is fine with me. I'll never ever forgive the mediocrity this company has brought onto the world.