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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.
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.
I did contemplate playing this cat and mouse game and making anticheats accept that it's easier to just support linux instead of fighting it.
Now I have a form of WSL (LSW heh). There is a reason why everyone on windows uses WSL these days, same concept applies for LSW, but for games.
... and more invasive
This is largely true for games running directly through Steam, it can get pretty annoying for games that exist outside Steam.
Especially when you have to do things like apply an ".msi" style patch to a game .
It's doable, but the number of steps and tools you may have to pull in (such as protontricks) does get to be a bit of a pain at times.
For example: Add Diablo 2 exe to Steam. Run Diablo 2 in proton. This creates a folder like 123455 /home/user/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/123455/. Then Add LOD to Steam, add this to the system launch STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH=/home/user/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/123455/ and you can run the installer on the older file data. Do the same for a mod patcher, etc.
If I really want to play Apex or Battlefield I’ll fire up my dual drive dual boot Windows, and in the meantime, no more Microsoft spying on me, forced Windows updates and reboots at random times, ads in my Start menu, Xbox apps and other bloatware, etc
I assembled a PC last year from used parts specifically to try gaming on Linux after two decades with only the occasional FreeCiv or MineTest, and the experience with Steam is mostly painless. Impressive!
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.
Yes, last time (recently) I tried, the original games ran very well, with no (Linux specific) issues!
I have a projector that supports stereoscopic 3D. Sometimes I use things like HelixMod to add 3D to games. What would that look like on Linux?
Sometimes I use GPU driver settings to force games to use higher render resolutions (above my monitor's resolution), or better anisotropic filtering. What does that look like?
> 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
> If a game has an aggressive anticheat, like Battlefield 6 or Valorant, it will not work and you can forget about it
> Not sure about VR, but I know it was a bit dire 1-2 years ago
The determination of the average Linux user to ignore the faults of Linux is something to behold
I know that's not what you meant, but to less technical folks, it will read like you meant that it's somehow something Linux can fix.
The majority of people don't use fancy wheels that require custom software to work. Many people do use anti-cheat, but plenty of people don't need it.
When someone brings up issues related to Linux themselves, that’s clearly not “ignoring” them. It would be a true case of ignoring them if they simply kept quiet about them.
>> If a game has an aggressive anticheat
> the faults of Linux
And besides, as far as I know (well, maybe I'm missing something?), anti-cheat issues aren’t a fault of Linux itself.
Issues with anti-cheat aren't Linux's fault (the one to blame), but they are a fault (undesired attribute) of Linux.
Why do Windows users ignore the faults of Windows?
How many people care about support for Red Alert 2 and OG Xbox controllers on Windows 11 (assuming either of these truly don't work) versus people who care about the ability to play games like Fortnite?
Huh? But I do play Red Alert 2 on Windows 11 and it works just fine. Also can play online through CNCnet.
Is this something about a particular version not working, or some copy protection issue?
Those games running on Proton are still produced on a Windows factory.
Due to a lack of testing on all parts of that pipeline, it's usually better for performance and stability to run the Windows version via Proton anyway.
Anyhow, there are plenty of native games, we just don't notice, because running them tends to not be any harder than running Windows games these days.
That being said CS2 runs substantially worse than CSGO. It at least kicked my addiction when it released, since it no longer ran at acceptable framerates on my laptop ahaha
I thought it was fine, until a competitive player, friend of mine who has a machine comparable to mine saw the game running on mine and noticed a lot of stuttering and framerate loss. I don't believe it is a machine performance issue (Threadripper Pro 3XXX with a 3080p), and I was running a pretty standard Gnome Fedora 43 with NVIDIA drivers.
So if you are into competitive gaming, I guess it is debatable.
For GO, switching to Linux (with an AMD card) was a free performance boost. I gained like 30fps.
For early CS2, the performance on Linux was terrible.
Now, the peak fps is slightly worse, but the frame pacing is much more stable. Eg: you get less fps, but also less fps drops.
Yeah this is why I stick with Windows. Unlike it seems a lot of people on HN I don't really see any issues with it that would want to make me move away, especially as I already have WSL if I do need Linux, as WSL has GPU passthrough.
If you don't care about privacy issues or ads in your face, then yeah Windows is pretty good. I care a lot about that (and open source in general) so for me it's way worth it. But everyone is different and that's ok
Vague concerns about privacy are not strong enough reasons for me and most others, based on OS market share, to move away when the concrete reality is we can simply play more games on Windows. The only reason Linux gaming is getting good is because of Valve funding it heavily in the past few years for their own products like the Steam Deck, and to move away from an OS they have no control over in Windows, not because of privacy concerns which I guarantee you 99% of Steam Deck users don't give a shit about, they just want to play their games.
Linux still doesn't have anywhere near as nice and cohesive as Group Policy, Active Directory etc.
Plus you can pay Microsoft to host it all for you on Azure.
Especially since it is easier to find badly underpaid (and not particularly competent) Windows sysadmins than it is to find badly underpaid Linux admins.
You'd get a clusterfuck of a consensus spec, then they'd all get pissed off and develop their own incompatible versions anyway?
Have you seen international projects without strong, centralized leadership?
Enterprise environments use a number of tools like Powerbroker, UCS, Centrify/Delinea etc to bind linux machines to active directory and manage identity and access through active directory. This is for mixed environments with both Windows and Linux machines.
For pure linux environments, there are a number of tools like FreeIPA/IdM, Samba AD/DC (for A/D like management), and OpenText's eDirectory for the current version of Novell's eDirectory counterpart to A/D. They all provide centralized user/host/policy/access management.
Since Entra+Intune are the recent MS products, cloud-based equivalents are Jumpcloud+Fleet, Okta PAM, FreeIPA/IdM.
I really hope some of these answers are ergonomic enough for windows sysadmins to accomodate this transition.
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.
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.
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’d love to see a more general and commonly supported solution developed. It would make Linux more of an option for enterprise managed endpoints.
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.
What you list are no showstoppers, and since its a well known topic I cant imagine why some EU-funded effort in say 2 billions over next 3-5 years shouldnt reaolve it once and for all, for entire world. Well invested money.
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.
Long time ago I supported Linux&Windows desktops in an organization that chose to allow per-user customization, with the trade-off that if you ask for support, what support offers to do is reset your desktop (not data files) to default -- and that fixed practically all issues.
If 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?
It's probably something like "inception -> adoption -> convenience". For Windows it was the same, was it not? It wasn't absolutely convenient to use, it was just better (in terms of usability and features for the average consumer), and convenience came after (Windows XP, Windows 7). Sadly the functionality degraded, and now all that is left is convenience.
A good example of that would be what happened with Docker. Off the top of my head cgroups, namespaces, seccomp, overlays and capabilities had been around for a while before it got rolled up in a nice utility in 2013 and opensourced in 2015. Hence the containerization movement. Solaris zones and FreeBSD jails were nice but they always were let's say a bit too bearded.
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.
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.
(Edit: added quote to top)
I take your word for it (I know of Kerberos and LDAP and Netscape and Sun trying to make such palatable, but clearly haven't followed that in the last quarter-century).
That assumes however the server to be currently MS Windows. For government agencies, I'd rather expect some Mainframe to be (and remain) in place. Surely IBM (or here rather Groupe Bull) has user authentication/authorization figured out (more than half a century ago, methinks).
For the first part, Group Policy (GPO) can set the screen to lock after 2 minutes of inactivity, say, which works because there are Windows subsystems built to look for a reg key for their config, and policy templates exposing that config in the GUI management tools. Or group policy configures which security group can "logon as a service" which works because Windows has system-wide and domain-wide pervasive Access Control Lists (ACLs). GPO configures that Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) should limit its bandwidth use, which works because Windows Updates use BITS. Or sets the machine-wide SSL cipher order, because Windows software uses system-wide schannel not OpenSSL. Or GPO sets what your default printer will be and that's only useful because decades of 3rd party Windows software was written to use the standard Windows printer dialog, or User Documents path, or whatever.
For the second part, Active Directory is a tree-shaped organization tool; in screenshot[5] that I quickly Googled, the tree on the left has a folder named "Sydney" and below that "Sydney Users"; this lets sysadmins organise the company computer accounts, user accounts, and security groups by whatever hierarchy makes sense for that company - e.g. by country, office, team, department, building floor, etc. Then Group Policy overlays on that structure, and the policies are composable.
e.g. in this basic screenshot of the group policy manamement GUI[6] it's showing at the bottom a list of all group policy configurations that have been made in a domain such as "Block PowerShell", and higher up it shows the policy "PsExec Allow" has been linked inside the "ADPRO Computers" folder. So users and computers in that folder in AD, will get those policies applied. In screenshot[7] you can see a basic example showing corporate computers getting machine-wide settings, corporate users getting user-level MS Office config, and Executives get settings that nobody else gets. (This echoes the registry having separate HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and HKEY_CURRENT_USER subtrees). Screenshot[8] shows the relatively tidy GUI on the right for seeing which settings have been configured in a policy.
If you apply more than one GPO to a folder, the users/computers will get the all the policy settings combined. This is often what people complain about when logging on to a corporate Windows machine takes ages, btw. You can filter GPOs on a case-by-case basis to build patterns like "apply this machine-wide policy to all computers in the Sydney folder which are members of the WarehouseComputer security group" or "apply these logon-settings to employees in New York who are members of Finance and logging onto a laptop". So companies which have been around for years can have really (messy) big and intricate designs which would be a lot of work to migrate.
3rd party programs can release XML files which plug into the GPO management, and the programs were written to expect to be configured by registry keys so they can pick up those settings; there are templates for configuring FireFox[1], Chrome[2] Adobe Acrobat[3], Word, Excel, Office[4], VMWare Horizon, Lenovo Dock Manager, Zoom, RealVNC, LibreOffice, Citrix, FoxIT Reader, and so on. The more enterprisey a tool is, the more likely it will plug into that ecosystem. Then all kinds of 3rd party reporting and auditing tools look there to see if your company is compliant with this or that; the whole thing is integrated with Windows' domain-wide ACLs so you can give some admins permissions to view or edit just their regional subset of this.
As usual the lockin is not that they do something amazing that nothing else can do, the lockin is that Windows domains have been around in this format for 30 years since NT4 and Windows 2000, and it has huge inertia, familiarity, is deeply embedded in a lot of companies, you can easily and cheaply hire lots of people who know how to use and manage it, you can send screenshots of it to auditors and they understand it, if you don't know how but you have a bit of (oldschool) Windows experience then clicking around will get you the basics, you can buy 3rd party auditing software that will send you a management friendly report with green ticks saying almost everything is fine but you should change this setting for security...
[Yes of course you can build your own custom replacement for every single thing, just like you can build your own custom replacement for any software; it's "just" ldap and kerberos and dns and some scripts and site-to-site policy replication and management tools und und und].
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customizing-firefox-usi...
[2] https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/187202?hl=en
[3] https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/DesktopDe...
[4] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=490...
[5] https://www.windows-active-directory.com/wp-content/uploads/...
[6] https://activedirectorypro.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/gp...
[7] https://www.varonis.com/hs-fs/hubfs/blog%20posts/Group%20Pol...
[8] https://redmondmag.com/articles/2016/01/12/~/media/ecg/redmo...
The insight in AD+GPO wasn't in either thing, but in the +. Each would be far less useful without the other.
I am sure that's something the Gnome Foundation could figure out if they had a grant to do so.
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).
Imho, this was historically (and continues to be) Microsoft's Achilles heel.
Large parts of the company reflexively wrote features / tooling as manual-first, code-second (or never).
In hindsight, what was missing was a Gates-level memo circa 2000 similar to Amazon's API one: all teams are required to build their configurators to be programmatically exposed.
Unfortunately, I don't think Ballmer was enough of a technologist (and was likely too distracted) to intuit that path not taken.
Some places are using Okta for many of those functions too. Trump’s instinctive parasitic slumlord behavior may be enough for the sleepy Europeans to get their shit together.
I've no idea what current internal Microsoft org divisions are.
I haven't installed or used windows much for last decade, but still I'm bit a shamed that each time I install Linux on some computer I live existing windows drive untouched and available for backup in case I need it for some reason.
I think "Easy" has been the excuse for everything humans do in every day and age.
I doubt they’d care about which OS they’re on. Corporate tightens their laptops beyond belief, so all they’re really running is Teams and Excel. This seems to be the case for a lot of friends I talk to, no one gives a damn about Windows anymore. Heck, my sister-in-law moved to Ubuntu of her own choices, despite having low tech literacy.
It makes zero sense for businesses to use Windows if they're only doing PowerPoint and video conferences.
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.
Windows sucks and I hope to see the demise of Microsoft during my lifetime(crosses fingers).
1. 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)
~$120.8B
2. 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.)
~$106.3B
I fully support the demise of Windows as an OS
But 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.
At the moment i have long html page with key event for next and previous, tiny script to check on specif markup for autoscroll.
I'm guessing it's not compatible with Teams and that MS make sure it doesn't work properly with LO produced PPT files.
2. move to Cloud and use electron wrappers because not even MS can bother making native apps on their shitty platform
3. 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?
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.
That's like staffing a neurosurgery department with dentists. Or a dental clinic with neurosurgeons, it does not matter, you can have decades of experience working with a drill in the head area and still be the wrong person for the job.
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.
Not to mention my very large emulation library.
I have no idea what you are talking about.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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"
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.
Use Debian or AlmaLinux and the ride is smoother.
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...)
Which, knowing France, is not unlikely.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.)
Where we are at now is that the pain of moving away from Windows is acceptable for many larger organizations and governments, especially those with flat or decreasing budgets. You can just swap out the OS layer and keep other processes the same - keep using Office with just the browser versions if you want, or move to an alternative (like EU-based). Teams works on Linux. There is no moat on Windows anymore
And many of those tool providers could see for 10-20 years now that if they didn't provide a web based version sometime soon, they would go out of business sooner or later.
There are almost no applications that a government employee should be running natively on their machine anyway.
> designed for scenarios where full ownership and operational independence from Microsoft is required
In 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-...
Plus, it's all open source, so the rest of the world is free to use it as well!
[1]https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/
[2]https://www.getgrist.com/
Those initiatives are usually open source. It's just that many times, each country wants to make their own. But it's still better than staying with the TooBigTech monopolies.
This hits hard. I'm a French citizen who made an open source alternative to Dropbox [1], I would have never thought my own government to attempt competing in my niche. I did contact the people at DINUM and it seems they are more interested in making their own than contributing to existing projects they don't fully control
[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
e.g. Qwant is a re-skin of Microsoft Bing
It's a great move overall.
"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
To 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.
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.
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 strategy
Rollbacks and proprietary deals
Microsoft “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.
This is not really true, since 2017 we have a centrist president. For the legal power, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Assembly_(France)#Fif....
Macron's actions and decisions speak for themselves
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_New_Caledonia_unrest
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests#Fataliti...
* https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber_Files
* https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2023/10/24/i...
[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
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.
I was part of a SaaS company of diehard GenX Windows fans.
Decades of abuse by Microsoft has definitely hurt them: they have lost hope and are cynical about the future of Windows. I reckon they would switch away if they could afford to.
Every year Microsoft does something to make you feel like you're being screwed over.
We only just missed taking a silverlight bullet. Windows phone wasted over a year of development. Internet Explorer doubled development costs. The OS version churn is expensive. However SQL server has been a good foundation.
Microsoft used to love developers. They just abuse them now. Even Apple is nicer to developers!
Might not be 100% Europe-made from the get go, but good ideas and executions often start with small steps and iterate rather than having something groundbreaking out of the gate.
That said, I won't deny that Jolla is much more trustworthy than Google or Apple.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, as I'm not super familiar with Jolla's/Sailfish's architecture, but isn't most of the OS actually FOSS, while there is a thin proprietary compatibility layer, and that's about it? Was some months ago I last read about it so could be misremembering, but seems like a good first step at the very least.
Consumer don't care if the OS is proprietary, as long as it works and there is a responsible party they can trust to serve them the offering.
And in any case if you use Jolla without the Android emulation layer (so Google again), the app ecosystem is as barren as the Siberian wasteland.
See: https://postmarketos.org/
FWIW, it's not just the EU that needs this urgently: most of humanity sorely needs a trustworthy mobile OS that's not designed against their interests.
I've recently had some fun at the intersection of "moving windows between screens" vs "ui scaling" vs "ambient system is wayland but the snap uses x11 internally".
OTOH, I know that recent versions of GNOME struggle with this. Just last year I saw plenty of situations where moving windows across displays triggered all kind of quirks. This is a GNOME-specific issue, and like most of its issues, doesn't affect all other compositors.
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 easy
Linux on an X Elite Surface Book? Should be easy
Ubuntu Touch on my Pixel 9? Should be easy
Android TV on my TV? Should be easy
Proxmox on my 5g mobile router? Should be easy
No drivers / locked bootloaders = not possible
Where? 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.
You can look at a circuit board and figure things out and there are clean room techniques for decompilation - but neither of these are practical
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.
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).
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.
As a French citizen who own a business [1] that is in direct competition with this incentive from my very own government, I'm happy to disclose more than 50% of my customer base is already in America and France represent about 1%.
[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
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.
I have a degree in a tech-related field. I do things on the command line on purpose every week. It should not be this hard even for me to so something so simple. It is not even remotely ready for regular joe end users.
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.
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.
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
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.
I don't know, but I have watched people designing high-speed trains in CATIA.
Fusion360 -> PTC Onshape
AutoCAD -> BricsCAD
Inventor -> Easily outclassed by NX/SolidEdge, Solidworks/CATIA and Creo
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.
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.
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% their parts and labour, and is actively trying, is China.
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.
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.
Though at least the Chinese are predictable, unlike dealing with the USA.
Also, some partners are more reliable than others. If China becomes as volatile as the US, it would change the risk assessment and stimulate other parts of the industry.
This is a way way more concerning topic. The irony is that China might be the one fixing that dependency + bring prices down.
One bomb on the Netherlands and it is over for nearly all the worldwide supply-chain, 10 or 15 years of regression.
Even worse, they can remotely kill the machines for political reasons.
Of course the components are not European made. But Dell's components are not US made either.
I can also buy a Japanese or Korean (or Chinese) computer. There is no dependency on a single country.
Recently, not so many I suppose. But many of the earliest computers were European, so surely we could get there again at one point, hardly impossible.
Seemingly, the US might be able to design good computers, but it cannot make them themselves. This should make it easier for others to do the same, design the computer in country X but actually make it somewhere else, just like the US. Yet we're not seeing this at all.
Lenovo is Chinese, right? Xiaomi, Samsung... can you really not name one non-US company making computers?
Americans for their part would probably be very happy to use made-in-Europe software on their computers whenever applicable.
I am perplexed by people who use condescending phrases like this. You think we track what you said before?
I believe the largest Linux Desktop initiative in France is GendBuntu[1] for the National Gendarmerie
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu?useskin=vector
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.
The 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 merits
So 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?
English isn't controlled by a central authority. If a new word takes hold, it takes hold, that's it.
The way the USA thinks it has an absolute right to decimate central and South America disgusts me to the core and I'm tired of those poor people being lumped in with the term "Americans". It's offensive to them. The USA does not own the continent as much as the CIA tries.
Just as we received lectures on our declining power, it's time for the USA to suffer the same.
An Englishman? You mean Englandian. English is a language, you can't lump everyone who speaks it into one category.
>English isn't controlled by a central authority
Exactly. And the Englandian usage has no superiority over any other.
>The USA does not own the continent as much as the CIA tries.
Maybe not, but we do own the UK (:
I hope our French friends can learn from this initiative during the adoption phase.
> Reiter denied that he had initiated the reversal in gratitude for Microsoft moving its German headquarters from Unterschleißheim back to Munich
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
Lots of companies have flip flopped based on this, and that's what happened in MS case.
Tbh not saying MS didn't play dirty in general, but not necessarily in this.
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.
Apparently it was a decision by mayor Dieter Reiter after excessive lobbying by Microsoft. At roughly the same time, Microsoft moved their German headquarter back to Munich. What a coincidence...
Its not a surprise from Russia but the USA. I guess we’re right to cut all bridges as fast as possible with the USA.
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.
Definitely the right call on Windows, though. Even my parents (in their mid-seventies) moved to Linux this year.
[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
People think company hardware is their personal hardware and they have preferences.
I had a company phone once (terrible experience) and I'd routinely get txts from random services and people outside our company thinking it was the previous owner. The last employee who had used it mixed company use and personal use.
Nations and individuals can't depend or be held hostages of a handful of companies on the other side of the Atlantic that have the will to do whatever they want with their customers data.
This is the right path to follow and wish that in upcoming years this initiative becomes a reality across the globe. Long success for Linux and all BSDs!
And Linux development and adoption helps everybody not just France. A win win.
This should have happened already, is the general theme. I still have my Shrike CDs around and the modern-day Fedora (I think 44 is about to launch next week?) is more than sufficient for many, many use cases within the government, regardless of which distro they end up with.
My hope is that the backing of EU software development teams to open source will lift all boats and in addition to Linux, BSD may get some fruits of labor out of it.
9front as always is to be strictly forbidden without a security clearance.
I've been dual booting the first couple of years, then dumped Windows completely in 2016.
Since then I am on Linux only. Private and corporate.
Yes, sometimes I need to access a Windows machine or do work in one (I am my own boss), but then the client pays a "pain tax" as I call it.
There are some games I can't play I would've played in the past. Mostly competitive online games.
Technically that's annoying, but for me personally it's not a problem as I am not in my teens of twenties anymore and I have other hobbies and obligations.
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
I'm still eagerly awaiting the day though, any day now surely.
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.
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.
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.
In 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)
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.
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.
Well, Ubuntu MATE perhaps :)
Windows LTSC I find comes pretty close to the less intrusive Windows I remember from the XP/7 era.
Considering that most distros are basically just a new set of desktop backgrounds, this seems like a sure thing!
You just have to be willing to put in the investment to verify/review with parties that meet your needs.
But not FreeBSD, C, Go, or others.
Basically Government doesn't want MIT / BSD, they want GPL and AGPL.
It's a shame that we have no equivalent to Google or AWS in Europe and now that it seems LLMs might eat search, we don't have any of those either.
With another 3 or so years with the Orange Dildo in charge, there's a decent chance the momentum will turn into something tangible.
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 else
This hasn't changed in the past 10+ years, even though now I can see much more gaming happening on Linux, which is very nice.
The French government did not provide a specific timeline for the switchover, or which distributions it was considering.
Got to be Mandrake right?
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.
But well, I can always switch to FreeBSD I guess. And that's my plan B.
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 providers(technically very easy for iPhone, simply by blocking devices with Apple IMEI on EU networks) 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 shrink by %90 as it will be expelled from most of the world and will be serving to 350M people instead of 8B people. Its amazing how US is screwing up its dominant position in this incredibly lucrative industry that lets them serve a market of 8B people and accumulate huge wealth in the process.
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.
Being messy isn't a worse outcome than US invasion. Europeans aren't rooting to live like Americans or go to wars for America and the tech thingy will be a nuisance at most.
How is that going to happen if the US attacked Europe?
You don't ask entire ministries and public operators to formulate a migration plan from Windows to Linux with a relatively short deadline just for negotiation purposes or just for the fun of it, you do that once you're committed to actually migrating.
This is not just a pilot project or some local administration doing an experiment, it's new country-wide policy enforced from the top, hardly a "negotiation strategy".
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.
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.
I hate that I understood this.
I need to get get into Redhat^W Fedora^W Rocky again some time soon.
Have you ever used the Linux OS??
Ubuntu differs from Fedora only in newbie stuff, for instance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu
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.
This is one of 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.
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?
the main thing that keeps people locked in is (a) "Im use to windows" and (b) MS gives them some special contract to keep them.
My job is basically recreating a small part of the infrastructure that was designed for AWS, while patching some shortcomings of the OVH offerings which are not as featureful.
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.
But seriously, how long before MS offers them a deal they would rather not refuse?
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.
Obviously with people like you, Linux would never be popular. Personally I’m fine with that, Linux is just too damn buggy and inconsistent for my usage, but I’m pretty sure that it could benefits people. Think of students or people in low income countries.
And then, what prevents you from having a mainstream friendly distribution that just work, and another for the nerd who want to spend their day in the terminal ?
Linux isn’t just one distribution, one doesn’t prevent the other but currently it sure isn’t for mainstream usage.
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.
Yeah, let me dispute that. They were, at least on three occasions, forced to roll back due to "citizen sent me X and can't open it" and/or "sent Y to citizen and they can't open it" concerns.
Mind you: these issues still persist in a fully Microsoft/Adobe "solution environment", but less so than in the "disregard all and move to Linux" situation.
And to be perfectly clear: that's all unacceptable. But it adds another, say, EUR 2B to the equation.
It doesn't matter if this or that doesn't work. Or if Microslop pressures to continue using Winslop.
Now the reasons are geopolitical.
The complaints that lead to the several-reversions-to-Windows at the time, as I recall, were all around "citizen sent me X, can't open X"
And those are all addressable issues, but not without significant know-how and funding.
Perhaps be aware before explaining everyone how things really are?
Oof, 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.
File storage? Cheap by Y2K as well.
And, again, I'd very much like Microsoft to lose here, but, there are real issues here
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
That's just PR to avoid stocks going down.
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).
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.
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.
Yes, sometimes I have issues. I.e. yesterday Word kept deleting my last 1-2 sentences for some reason, even though hitting ctrl-s tells everytime: "I should not worry". but in general it's fine.
My business is on Proton, and I love that MS365 AND Google workspace calender invites go right into my agenda with no effort. There is nice stuff out there. Especially now we have Proton Meet, I can take some ownership over videocalls in Teams and Google Meet finally.
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.
Edit: Have checked and found that two I thought were still maintained (16 and 19) were EOLd in October.
It's a strategic decision and of course it's not financially optimal.
And if in 20 years thered still a few windows computers around in their org that doesn't matter
A few years ago, IBM tried to move everyone to LibreOffice from M/S Office. It failed, the reason why was top level execs and some others were allowed to stay on M/S Office. As time went on, M/S Windows became a Status Symbol. So people went begging and as time went on exceptions were granted. A few even went so far as to buy their own copy, which was allowed.
After 8 months IBM gave up. If you want things like this to succeed, you must be 100% in.
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.
Basic users just want a web browser and need instructions for anything else anyway.
Hardcore geeks have tried everything going and have no problems with Cisco IOS.
It's the folk in the middle who struggle.
Just kidding about Cisco: it sucks.
Thing is, I really don't get this knee jerk "but what about INSERT_RARE_EDGECASE". It isn't helpful and argues something no one actually working on these projects ever proposed. Even if MSFT software remains in use, any gained alternative is a win, license costs and strategic autonomy both being valuable.
And yes, as you hinted, a large contingent of clerical work may already happen in a browser, with any found exceptions potentially addressable in the coming years, especially as older implementation may be updated anyways.
Let's be honest, we all underestimate how much we (can) do solely inside the browser anyways and even more so severely misgauge how few people are reliant on any native (none Electron) software at all outside gaming.
Power user is such a nebulous term anyway. To me, someone spending hours on end in Confluence can be a power user, having never left the browser. The same for a designer using Figma. Course, if one truly requires native only software, they may more likely fall under the umbrella power user, but again, few are seriously discussing just forcing those over since, reasonably, one must presume they have a reason for doing what they are doing.
“No, it never does. I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but……
…But it might work for us!”
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.
Excel is the only thing holding Office 365 together.
Word, Outlook, OneDrive, Teams, SharePoint are all very easy to replace
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.
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.