All the comments about Linux gaming make me want to give my $0.02. I've been gaming on Linux, with no Windows installed anywhere, for around 6 years. In the first 3 years, it was a massive pain. Games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. would consistently have issues with mouse input, weird acceleration, a lot of games wouldn't run at all. This is NO LONGER the case at all. Things run very well out of the box.
All games I want to play run very well and mostly the process is just "install -> play".
If a game has an aggressive anticheat, like Battlefield 6 or Valorant, it will not work and you can forget about it.
Controllers work fine, so do some wheels and other peripherals, but a good number of wheels, pedals, joysticks, VR headsets, and other wild and wacky input devices might not work that well or not at all. It mostly depends on whether the software for them runs on Linux, runs in Wine, or is needed at all. Not sure about VR, but I know it was a bit dire 1-2 years ago.
If you don't play hardcore simulator games, and don't play one of the competitive shooters with aggressive anticheat (e.g. CS2 and other competitive shooters run perfectly well), you can just install Linux, install Steam or one of the other launchers, and just hit play.
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.
Yeah good on them, everyone needs to do this. It's nuts Windows is still the go-to for anything these days despite everyone knowing what a parasitic, buggy mess it is. "Easy" shouldn't be the excuse in this day and age. Big orgs and especially government entities should be hiring the people that know what they're doing and get off that crummy platform.
Imagine what can happen if the French and other governments would start pouring all the money into developing that further in the open, rather than just giving it all to Microsoft instead?
It looks like the president - which was a businessman - will make a huge damage to American IT businesses. And IT stocks dominate the S&P 500, comprising roughly 1/3 of the index's total market capitalization... Good luck America!
> Linux still doesn't have anywhere near as nice and cohesive as Group Policy, Active Directory etc.
Isn't it about time someone developed one?
The foundations are there; you can imagine an organization deploying laptops with, say, Ansible, and not giving users root on them. LDAP sort of matches the old capabilities of AD, but not completely. There's even a "SAMBA as fake domain controller" mode.
Ironically what it needs is a product or service which organizations can pay to take the problem off their hands. But then people get stuck in never paying for anything in the open source world.
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.
Well AD is just a really opinionated LDAP/Kerberos setup, so you’d think that there would be something that Linux could do.
But when you’re talking about enterprise management of thousands of devices, you need some kind of consistent security policy management. That requires running OS software that accepts remote policy management, which is a very specialized configuration and not just “vanilla Linux”.
You can get really far with LDAP, but I’ve only used it for remote accounts, file shares, and sudoer config. I’m sure there are more policy configurations that would be possible with a more advanced tool.
I suspect the RHEL world has something to offer here.
But, I agree with you - for an enterprise customer, this really needs to be some kind of paid/supported product. I wouldn’t want the French government to rely on some scripts that worked on my small cluster.
> Linux still doesn't have anywhere near as nice and cohesive as Group Policy, Active Directory etc.
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.
Personal computers were used in office environments long before the technologies to make them administer-able as if they were a mainframe. Before blindly jumping in and reproducing those technologies, better to ask why they emerged in the first place.
Most workplaces don't have strict bans on personal mobile devices, and some of the ones that do, don't have the kind of physical perimeter defense that can detect people getting lazy about whether or not they carry their personal mobile devices into the workplace. That makes perimeter defense into security theater anyway. We need a rethink about what we are guarding against and how we're doing it.
> Most workplaces don't have strict bans on personal mobile devices
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?
The primitives are there and they're solid, beyond that it's "just" architecture and integration work. Hopefully the French government will be rational with this (I believe the time and financial constraints will for it to be, we're broke and we lack time) and they won't fall into the trap of trying to internalize every bit of the platform.
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 does, it's called FreeIPA (or RedHat IdM). The only GPO parts it doesn't do are those that are not related to policy in the IAM sense (i.e. configuring some application related thing). There's other systems for that, just like on Windows you practically never run GPO without anything else. On top of that, you can pay RedHat or Canonical to host it all for you on any cloud or non-cloud.
Convenience comes as a result of mass market adoption, for products for which convenience was not already the main selling factor. Look at cars; they were kind of difficult to drive and maintain 60 years ago, now they're super convenient to drive and maintain as you essentially just press buttons and look at screens to get all needed information about the car and drive it.
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.
that's the catch with gp/ad. for a lot of orgs the hard part is intune/entra now. swapping the desktop is easy. replacing identity and device management is the real migration
Putting it in the hands on the GNOME foundation will just result in a lot of new soon-to-be-mandatory APIs and numerous configuration variables with only one allowed value.
I've never understood the management thing. People manage fleets of Linux machines all the time. What does group policy do that e.g. nix or ansible don't?
Honestly as wide spread as it is, managing group policy sanely is still a challenge I've found - it's very resistant to configuration as code.
Linux has a lot of the pieces but is principally lacking a solid distribution system - in particular a big missing component is the network-based SELinux policy distribution system which you can see some hooks in for the concept of a "policy server" which never eventuated.
SELinux would be a lot more viable if it had a solid way to federate and distribute policy and has some nice features in that regard (i.e. the notion that networked systems can exchange policy tags to preserve tagging across network connections).
Group Policy and Active Directory are dead, for all intents and purposes.
It's now Intune (via OMA-DM), and Entra. Both of those products are about as bad as you might imagine the "cloud" versions of GP & AD might be.
They are better, in ways -- no longer having to care and feed for domain controllers is nice, and there's no longer an overhead for additive policy processing, so endpoints only get a single set of policy and log on much quicker -- but for the most part, enterprise management of Windows devices is in a worse place than it was ten years ago.
Try to figure out how long it will take an online Intune device to discover a new policy: As far as I can tell the answer is "eventually". There are bandaids for this, because of how infuriating it is, of course, but all time guarantees are basically gone.
Ask me a decade ago what an enterprise should do, and my answer would be straightforward: AD, GPO, Exchange.
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.
It was absolutely not the case two decades ago.
There were no other options for an enterprise fleet, 20 years ago, if the question was asked. If you weren't Google (who never asked the question anyway), the answer for managing 25,000 endpoints was to use Windows devices with Active Directory as the management plane. Anyone doing anything else was in for a world of hurt... and that's why every enterprise ended up on Windows, and why everyone targeting enterprise management targeted Windows -- because that's what the endpoints were already running.
What killed AD & GPO was Microsoft, in their bullheaded push toward Azure everything. Instead of listening to what it was that the enterprise customers actually wanted, they designed a system that made sense to them, but to no one else. The original UI was written in Silverlight. It was horrific.
No alternative, you can't realistically fully control everything everyone does on every device in their possession. It was job security for useless control freaks, the products never should have existed.
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.
Anticheat and support for joysticks, steering wheels, VR, etc. is one factor for sure. I would say almost all games people play, which dont fall in the above categories, run out of the box with no or very minor tweaks needed (no terminal).
Most of their revenue is tied to other stuff though
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.
The French move will hit the Productivity/ Business segment. Their motivation is to limit extra-European dependence so they will look elsewhere for this.
Similar to Germany with its DeutschlandStack and some migrations already ongoing.
Actually, it's the exact opposite. There is really no alternative to PowerPoint on Linux, unfortunately. I'm saying this as someone who's used Linux for 20 years now.
Are you just hanging around California startups? I work in big consulting and am inside hundreds of the largest companies in the US, everyone of which is fully Microsoft and only ever seen PowerPoint. I’m in dozens of teams meetings a week across as many organizations and have been in 2 Google meets meeting in the last decade, both of which were California fintech startups.
Yes, most people use MS where I live, too. But most of them only scratch the surface. To this thread's point, 99% of PowerPoint presentations I've seen are just walls of text on a bunch of slides, with the occasional illegible graph.
Now I'm not saying I actually know my way around PPT or that I'm some presentation whiz, but this can probably be done with the browser version. Just like the "new" Outlook is simply a new Edge skin.
I work for a company that has drunk the MS Kool-Aid and then went back for a refill, yet I've never had any issue using the web version of the suite ever since it came out. I don't even run Windows on my work laptop. Teams is the only app that seems marginally better in its heavy version (heh), since it supports separate windows for the calls.
I've worked in academia for years (in computer vision labs) and I can confidently say that PowerPoint is the best tool to prepare research presentations.
Probably just a matter of time, it’s possible the friction will create opportunities. Something in the spirit of iaPresenter, md first would be awesome.
At the moment i have long html page with key event for next and previous, tiny script to check on specif markup for autoscroll.
Huh? There's a ton of PowerPoint alternatives that work on Linux. LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, Collabora Office, Calligra Stage, Google Slides, the online version of PowerPoint, more techy things like LaTeX Beamer or Reveal.js. Maybe these don't have perfect PowerPoint compatibility, or some niche PowerPoint feature you need but there's plenty of slide deck making options that work on Linux.
I tried LibreOffice (Impress) for something simple and it was not good - in fact it would just freeze. Although it did have a feature on MacOS that PowerPoint for Mac didn't, so I ended up using Impress for the first little bit and then PowerPoint for the rest.
I'd think the only Office part difficult to replace is Excel. It has a lot of functionality, provides a lot of value and is the workhorse of most business processes I see. Now how do you replace THAT?
1. total abandonment of desktop as a platform, and the massive hurdles to distribute desktop software
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?
> Is it because there’s still an army of workers and institutional inertia trained in Active Directory?
Yes, that is a huge driver of inertia. I've had to battle that in so many different companies now, and it is absolutely aggravating. That on top of comments about how Linux sucks from someone who either has never used it, or has only used it on a server and thinks that is all Linux has to offer, are absolutely soul destroying.
4. putting Mac users in charge of the UI who are genuinely incapable of understanding how they are breaking continuity.
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.
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.
Except today games all work and invariably markedly better on Linux. Even the games that stopped working on Windows for me work great, like https://www.protondb.com/app/2008510
What Microsoftoffer is having only one contact / contract for a huge fraction of the IT needs of a company so I can understand it solves some headache vs building stuff from many bricks with as many contracts.
They offer a full ecosystem where everything integrates with everything else, especially the central pillar of identity. But you will pay for that in more ways than just money or lockin. If you work with their solutions, the more you dig into them with the help of MS people, the scarier it gets. You will have a lot of "holy cow" moments.
Businesses choose it because it works with what they already have. The existing tools, processes, skills, and because Microsoft was always a safe choice by virtue of being almost implicit. They choose Microsoft because they're already deep into Microsoft, it's the option carrying the lowest risk and lowest short term cost.
Switching to Linux is complex, expensive, and risky. The transition is long and expensive, plagued with teething issues, your MS focused knowledge is redundant, the patience of your sponsor can run out before the move delivers anything of impact. Who wants to take such risks when they can just not rock the boat and call it a day?
Many government orgs have spent the last decade and a half slowly transitioning old legacy applications and platforms to browser-based alternatives. That old ERP software that used to require a thick client? Now it runs in Chrome. Microsoft recognized this and smartly moved to keep these customers locked in via an ever growing Microsoft Office bundle - subscription based, with Teams for their chat and then building up additional capabilities to extend the dependency, like InTune.
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.
I used Linux 10 years ago, but then due to job or corp. and needing Teams and Outlook I was forced to uses Windows. Now with corp job over I was finally able to switch to Linux this week (Fedora + KDE). Loving improvements made in the last 10 years, KDE will always have its quirks, but it is fast and smooth with no crashes yet. I got Claude to make me a migration script which worked brilliantly, haven't needed to boot Windows yet. Browser sessions and everything worked like nothing had changed. All my various ssh / putty configs migrated to Konsole, Thunderbird carries on like nothing has changed. Ahhhh freedom!
Strange. I switched to Linux +25 years ago. My setup became quite minimal; right now I use IceWM for the most part. GNOME3 was always useless; KDE also changed since Nate "I need more moneys!" took over (see his donation daemon or the more recent "systemd-only" tied with wayland-only garbage that KDE succumbed to).
Linux is good in that you can combine things that work, so it is more flexible than windows. But desktop wise I don't see it becoming really dominant; GTK is now a GNOMEy-only toolkit. Qt is too busy focusing on their own business model. Desktop Linux is not useless, but it is really just sub-par compared to Windows. I also use Win10 on a second computer; I don't like it but I use it for testing. Linux lacks decision-making power focus (and corporations such as IBM/Red Hat are selfish, so these will never reach any "breakthrough" like the infamous Desktop of the Year, which I heard will come next year together with GNU Hurd ... I think).
> Desktop Linux is not useless, but it is really just sub-par compared to Windows.
Each to their own. My experience is the opposite (I use KDE). I have to use Windows at work and it's always such a pain. At least Windows 10/11 finally has multiple workspaces natively and some keyboard shortcuts for managing windows (ironic), but I would have preferred to stay in Windows 10.
Now Windows doesn't even support proper suspend anymore and it won't stay in the "modern standby" either. Constantly waking up and doing god knows what with fans screaming. When I take a look what it's doing, task manager claims that nothing resource intensive is going on. I'm guessing it's hiding some internal processes. It calms down when I put it to sleep again. Sorry for the rant, I better stop before I start.
yes the flaky sleep is what did it for me - laptop would randomly boot up at 2am, bright lights and whirring fans. Thought it was a virus! Seems like Fedora has cracked the hibernate/sleep issue, possibly due to good intel driver support for my Dell and finally Linux has better hibernate, sleep and wake than Windows 11 (ymmv!)
I actually have been lucky since even my laptop from 15 years ago already worked well with Linux and suspend while Windows didn't (wasn't OEM Windows anymore). I have also had multiple desktops that have _mostly_ had no issues with suspend either: only nvidia has given me grief on some setups when sometimes the screen would be blank when waking up, but I figured out workarounds for that.
France has been making good moves to achieve software independence from the US. It would be an even better move to allow those in Europe or indeed the rest of the world to also benefit.
The docs project is part of "La Suite"[1]. They choose Grist[2] as the spreadsheet which is made by an American company but open source and there is a significant contribution from the French it admin.
> It would be an even better move to allow those in Europe or indeed the rest of the world to also benefit.
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.
Qwant is working on that. Together with Ecosia they're building their own index called the European Search Perspective:
"Today, Europe receives 99% of the answers to search queries from external infrastructures. We believe, however, that a higher level of digital sovereignty is essential for a functioning democracy and economy. With our new web index, we are creating a European perspective on politics, culture and values. This is a long overdue step towards more plurality in the digital world, which is also being called for by our society."
> a European perspective on politics, culture and values
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.
Still less, there is a lot of sovereignty-washing in EU, and specifically in France because this gives you access to grants and public markets.
Bpifrance, the Caisse des Dépôts, France 2030, Horizon Europe, etc.
To access that money, you need the right narrative. So companies learn to wrap their pitch in sovereignty language, get the grants, and then quietly build on top of AWS, Azure or GCP.
Not that it's dramatic, but there is a difference between hosted in France (where dependency still exists), and hosted + engineered in France.
Hopefully this transition to Linux is going to push France government to get rid of Crowdstrike, it's insane they let such backdoor run inside.
As a French citizen who's been building an open source Dropbox alternative for almost a decade [1], the sovereignty talk in France makes me cringe. Everyone has the word in their mouth, but nobody bothers to even search for alternatives, let alone give them a chance. France represents about 1% of my customer base with only a single customer: LVMH. I've had a whole bunch of French universities contacting me, nobody was willing to contribute toward the development because culturally we assume libre software must be free of charge so you'd better either beg for grants or have a rich uncle to sponsor your life. I've tried reaching out to the people who talk loud about sovereignty. Turns out it's just something they say at conferences to entertain each other as they have no power to actually make it happen, and don't even get me started on public markets.
There's been some 'back and forth' or "progress and regress' about this.
Adoption of Free Software:
2012 Prime Minister circular — the most important formal turning point: Orientations pour l'usage des logiciels libres dans l'administration, signed on 19 September 2012. It explicitly gave guidance to public administrations on free software use.
2016 Digital Republic Law — reinforced the direction by encouraging public administrations to use free software and open formats.
2021 action plan for Free Software and Digital Commons — launched after the Prime Minister’s circular of 27 April 2021, with goals to increase awareness, use, publication of source code, and reuse across administrations.
2024–2026 LaSuite / Suite Numérique — current state-led open-source collaboration suite, presented by DINUM as a coherent set of open-source tools for public agents and positioned as part of the state’s sovereignty 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.
>a right-side political figure, who are basically ruling since 2000, (except from 2012-2017 where France had a social-democratic government and president)
As a French citizen who spent almost a decade building an alternative to Dropbox that's libre software [1] I was very disappointed my own country decided to build a product competing with mine when French companies are about 1% of the existing customer base. I would have never thought my own government would be competing on my niche
It makes sense a government will want to take full charge of the strategically important software they will run on especially when they try to establish it as a new standard in a challenging transition. One day when it's fully established they could still spin it off and some other entity takes point.
It seems like what Europe really needs to do this is a viable mobile OS. It's been true for a while that Linux + LibreOffice is plenty to handle most government workers' needs on the desktop, but that's only good for when they are at their desks. Are there any viable alternatives to iOS and Android that are totally free of "dépendances extra-européennes"? What's the plan?
The Finns, as always, continue to develop mobile phones, Jolla is back from the dead and supposedly starts shipping sometime in 2026 with a new iteration on the hardware and the OS, time will tell if it'll have any impact.
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.
> I'm not convinced that replacing one proprietary OS with another is the solution.
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.
Linux on Mobile has been progressing steadily in recent years, and is in a state suitable for very early adopters and tech enthusiasts. Definitely not for the general population IMHO.
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.
A big hurdle to this is hardware vendors locking bootloaders and making it impossible (or impractical) to write or use existing drivers.
Manufacturers maintain long running forks of Android (often very old Linux kernels) with their drivers hidden in their fork's source.
I'm a firm believer in the right to repair software - and the fact that it's illegal to reverse engineer binary blob drivers (or proprietary software at all) is a shame (not that you could even untangle a driver from a binary blob of a Linux fork). I'd go as far as feeling strongly that drivers should be open source, and if they aren't, documentation sufficient for the community to write drivers should be made available by manufacturers.
>the fact that it's illegal to reverse engineer binary blob drivers (or proprietary software at all) is a shame
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.
Android Open Source is good enough. The tough part are device-specific drivers that never make it upstream and are eventually abandoned by the vendor, making upgrade past specific kernel versions very troublesome.
Why not? GrapheneOS and others show that it is possible to make viable operating systems on top of AOSP, which also have their own useful extensions.
It seems like a waste not to use an existing, well-developed, hardened, open source base, that at the same time provides great compatibility with most existing apps.
Since it is open source, it would always be possible to fork if AOSP goes off the rails.
I think the primary issue is that it is currently hard to get embargoed security patches, unless you have some partnership with an OEM.
At the same time it is an open source product and can therefore be forked. Being controlled by Google presents not nearly such an issue as Microsoft products or the Apple ecosystem.
At this point I wouldn't be surprised if American companies started using it if the French get it right. The instability of the current administration is one thing, but Microsoft disregard for its user deserves an appropriate response that will actually hit them where they care.
My main reasons not to be able to fully switch 100% to Linux are the following:
1. Graphic design software is subpar (expecially when compared to mac) and very often under supported. And GIMP has absolutely the worst UX of any program I've ever seen for such a widely recommended software.
2. Gamedev (i.e. Unity) is much less stable and annoying to work with (mac is much better but Windows still wins)
3. Older hardware support, most of the times you can use a super old software (say a printer) and it works. Linux much better than mac for this, from my experience
4. Lots of things on Win are plug and play, Linux is a pain of custom drivers from dead githubs. Mac slightly better or worse, it might either exist as a stupidly expensive application or have to jump hoops to get a driver in.
And I know people say "just use Wine" or "GIMP is actually great and free" but at the end of the day, I want my main driver to be stable and good to use. If anytime I save a project running via Wine has a non 0% chance of it crashing and bringing down my entire work, it's not going to happen.
I do use and recommend Linux quite extensively but that's why I always have 3 different systems at any given time:
1. Win: gamedev, hardware stuff or bigger games, some design, GPU heavy work.
2. Mac: design, light GPU work, browsing and portability (battery life and cooling is fantastic)
3. Linux: everything 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.
Interestingly, Microsoft has been trying to get ahead of this for a couple of years now with their National Partner Clouds program [0], which they describe as:
> designed for scenarios where full ownership and operational independence from Microsoft is 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.
I am actually a research engineer paid by the French government. They take digital sovereignty pretty serious over here, which is sometimes good, sometimes less so.
Definitely the right call on Windows, though. Even my parents (in their mid-seventies) moved to Linux this year.
I find fascinating how so many people are moving away from Microsoft decades after they should have because of simply the inertia that large organizations have on adoption.
Above all, I'm also surprised on how those same organization are using Anthropic or OpenAI or other close source solutions for their agent harnesses instead of going for Open Source.
Malte just yesterday showed how powerful innovation with small teams can be achieved particularly in EU.
I hope they start looking for those alternatives too for their agentic systems, beyond using pi-mono.
> I find fascinating how so many people are moving away from Microsoft decades after they should have because of simply the inertia that large organizations have on adoption.
That should be a good lesson in anthropology : the delta between knowing something and acting upon it tends to be immediate necessity. We're still an immature species as we haven't learned to be lazy at scale, that is putting the right amount of work early on to do the least overall. But I'm optimistic we'll get there.
It would be great, however the title is misleading: the only announcement regarding linux desktop is that the DINUM - a relatively small but perhaps influential government agency pledges to leave Windows.
I believe the largest Linux Desktop initiative in France is GendBuntu[1] for the National Gendarmerie
How is it misleading? While DINUM might be a smaller directorate, they're also asking all related ministries, including public operators, to put together a plan for how they'll migrate from Windows to Linux by autumn 2026. France has a relatively broad "digital sovereignty strategy" that this is a part of, but it's bigger than just DINUM moving to Linux.
Anyone here familiar with the details of GendBuntu[1], the Ubuntu distro used by the French Gendarmerie? I'd love to hear what is working and what isn't on the ground.
There should be a chapter in economic books on how entrenched monopoly companies become on the inside, like small states where little companies (called departments) play freemarket for promotion points, the outside forces completely suspended while the endoplasmic reticulum of the monopoly company lasts.
> I hope our French friends can learn from this initiative during the adoption phase.
The apps are available now, so reasons to be optimistic.
When LiMux and similar efforts happened around 2004 most business applications were Windows only. Even the ones that purported to be web used windows only technology and required IE and Windows.
Now with years of business budget controlling types using their Macs and smart phones and wanting access to the their apps the majority - even MS's stuff - can be run well in a browser on almost any OS.
> but it seems to be rolled back to Windows again.
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...
There were and are initiatives. Of course, they were and are ridiculed all the time. Who can't recall LiMuX or check out ZenDIS (Zentrum für Digitale Souveränität in der öffentlichen Verwaltung). Read up on the current migration away from MS Office in Schleswig-Holstein.
Why? We have plenty of well working Desktop Managers and WINE is doing better than ever. I'd argue there are bigger issues in Linux like default process isolation and access authorization per program being behind other OSes
Europe in general have great software engineers. What it lacks is investment. To see the goverment serving its own country instead of foreign billionaire interests is good change of pace.
And Linux development and adoption helps everybody not just France. A win win.
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.
Honestly the only thing keeping me from bringing up the idea of moving to linux is that Windows has active directory and domain wide group policies - if linux had something similar that was easy to manage I'm sure a lot more corporations would move to linux. The ease at which I can adjust system settings throughout the company or within each department such as disabling/enabling features, mapping drives or printers. I haven't found a better alternative than active directory
hmm. hoping that all the weird business requirements get confined to a specific distro with careful gating prior to upstreaming. it would be bad if they were allowed to pollute the ecosystem more generally (which one could argue is why windows is the way it is).
Being dependent on US tech feels the same as when we were dependent on Russian energy: strategically unwise and avoidable. We have alternatives, they just need work.
This is so utterly urgent. The US is an increasingly-deranged, hostile actor, which is able to cripple our tech at will.
I think we've been far too complacent about the direction of travel across the Atlantic. Trump and his crew are the new normal, and the key players in Silicon Valley are on board.
Any European government not currently working towards independence from US tech is being almost criminally neglectful.
Steps are being taken. This week two big announcements in The Netherlands as well, one for a replacement to AWS and one for taking US tech out of state secrets, which weirdly enough wasn’t already a thing.
Which are the US made computers? Start by excluding all the ones with Korean LCD panels, and Taiwanese motherboards, and Chinese parts.
If you mean assembled then there are lots of very small European companies that make custom build PCs.
Economies of scale in the US, a single language, and cheap transport, mean that the US companies grow very big internally, very easily. And then go international without much effort. The same is not true in Europe, so there's not a huge Dell, HP, or IBM equivalent.
In 2026, the only country on the entire planet that can likely make their own computer with 100% their parts and labour, and is actively trying, is China.
The same is not true in Europe, so there's not a huge Dell, HP, or IBM equivalent.
In the 90s and up until the early 00s we used to have quite a few pretty serious contenders, but they are all dead now: ICL, Siemens-Nixdorf, Tulip, Bull, Olivetti, etc.
No European made computers today doesn't preclude the possibility that there will be one tomorrow. RISC-V is the way out, and there are a number of European initiatives (though nothing serious just yet, I admit)
As a European dev, because I like RISC-V and because of the geopolitical situation I wouldn't bet on x86 in the long term.
It’s all about risk management. No solution is ever perfect, and that works for the US as well.
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.
Achieving redundancy from China is likely not possible in the near future. Meanwhile, the risk emanating from a rugpull or from deliberate sabotage by the USA is very concrete.
Interestingly, there are zero non-US powerful laptops.
The closest option is the Moore Threads MTT AI Book (12-core 2.65Ghz, 32GB DDR5, 1TB SSD, 14 inch). It cannot reach a modern Ryzen in performance though.
It's fascinating that only the US can make good computers. I'm not from/in the US so I'm not saying that from a patriotic point of view. How hard can it be to pop a good ARM chip in a laptop and compete with HP, Apple and the likes?
> It's fascinating that only the US can make good computers.
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.
Which powerful computers are made in the USA? Design and assembly don't count, as these are the least robust to replication attempts. Apart from that, the manufacturing is all in East Asia; Intel is the exception, not the normal!
I haven't mentioned America or any other continent. It is the Europeans who are shouting about sovereignty right now.
Well, no one has mentioned computer hardware until you did.
Surely you understand how "all the motherboards are made in Taiwan" is less of an immediate risk to sovereignty than "all of our business and personal data is stored on American servers and subject to US law"
It would be nice if Europe could produce its own computers, but right now no one can except China, so what is your point? That limited sovereignty efforts undertaken in the realm of reality are futile and that enables you to get some cheap shots in for whatever reason?
Computing is the software and the hardware. So you're right, I feel that it is futile.
Well, you can use the old hardware which you've already got if you get cut off from foreign suppliers. But the same is true for software. It's even more true for software.
If the French government and other Europeans were serious about reducing or eliminating dependency on American cloud services, they should switch to older versions of MS Office and MS Windows be done with it. No need to retrain your workers, and a realistic and speedy way to implement it.
Prediction: If USA ends up attacking EU, EU will freeze all the US tech company money and compel them to open their platforms and move all the backend services to EU soil in exchange of unfreezing it and continue operating in a free but regulated market.
For example locked communication devices are huge national security risk, so Apple will have their money frozen and given two options:
1) Open up iOS etc, bring all the servers to EU. Continue business as usual, EU financial institutions may choose to use Apple services as Apple pay but they may choose to bypass it. EU developers may choose to use Apple App Store services and pay the Apple's fees or they may choose to bypass it. Apple may chose to make Xcode a paid software, developers may choose not to purchase Xcode and use other non-Apple tools and pay nothing to Apple.
2) Use credit against the frozen money to refund your users if they bring their devices to you. All the Apple devices will be locked out from EU mobile 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.
I've been on a contract for a multinational European company that's in partnership with ESA for the past 18 months, and I've seen a lot of money and effort spent to move out of the US cloud to OVH. After the US decided to go rogue, this project became even more urgent.
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.
It's kind of good news, but it's also bad news -- with Linux popularity, crapware will be more popular. I kind of liked times when Linux was used only by power users. Today it's slightly different, and with more popularity... we get things like age verification in systemd.
But well, I can always switch to FreeBSD I guess. And that's my plan B.
Efforts like this are good for people to realise there is a lot of talent in Europe that just gets overshadowed by USA's dominance.
USAians tend think everything is less popular in Europe simply because it is inferior and fails purely on its technical merits. I know nothing will ever change their minds, but at least non-European non-USAians might recognise the efforts a bit more.
We are also willing to accept 'good but not perfect' and understand tradeoffs.
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?
Sometimes yeah, but clearly not in this case, if you took the time to actually read the article.
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".
I don't think so. Having worked on a similar thing in my country, and the effort is monumental.
When doing this in a company, making technical people appreciate free software and making lasting changes is hard enough. When doing this with non-technical people, everything becomes exponentially harder.
It's different this time. It's a geopolitical safety move. You know why it happened and who is responsible for this. Never would have happened otherwise.
Unless you need some windows-only software, using windows at this point is masochism.
I was never a fan of Linux, but the Microsoft driven enshitification is so strong that Linux is now a better option. To win, all Linux had to do is stand still, and that's exactly what it did! Ubuntu in 2026 is pretty much the same as Ubuntu from 2006.
Personally, the last holdover is Ableton. Last time this came up, bunch of people pointed me to https://github.com/BEEFY-JOE/AbletonLiveOnLinux which has since then been marked as archived, and I'm still unable to run Ableton 12 properly on Linux via WINE, even though I've probably spent too many man-hours on getting it to work...
I'm still eagerly awaiting the day though, any day now surely.
> To win, all Linux had to do is stand still, and that's exactly what it did!
It is moving? Red Hat has been investing in containised apps and image based distros for years, Valve single handedly made Linux gaming viable. HDR development is mostly driven by Valve and Red Hat customers.
And no Linux isn't good enough yet. UX is all over the place.
> 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.
> And no Linux isn't good enough yet. UX is all over the place.
Of course you'd think the UX is messy if you only look at the kernel ;)
It's up to the distributions and desktop/window managers to handle the UX, and the experience varies as much as there are desktop/window managers. Some of them are fairly internally consistent, like KDE and Gnome, and at least they're currently more internally consistent than Windows and macOS. I use macOS, Windows and Gnome daily, and the only one that doesn't give me daily grief in some manner, is Gnome.
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)
"Pretty well" is doing a lot of work. I have no horse in the race. I just run native on MacOS or Linux. Haven't run any Windows in a number of years. (I don't really game much and would just use my Xbox if I really wanted to--though that mostly functions as a DVD player these days.)
But if "pretty well" causes the random administrative person to have issues with doing their job or increases IT support costs, it will be off the menu pretty quickly. We'll see. A lot of things are different from the last round of we're going to Linux in Europe.
As I say no dog in hunt and don't actually have a Linux laptop any longer since I had to send it back to my company--from whence I'm sure it went straight to recycling. Maybe I'll buy an older refurb Thinkpad at some point.
> See Windows games running faster on Linux through Wine.
Let’s not leave out all the ones that don’t. Which is in fact, the majority of them. Strange how that’s always left out, we wouldn’t want to mislead people now would we?
We've come a long way in the last 2 years. We're at a point where MOST Windows software works flawlessly. I said "pretty well" as theres no doubt a few that don't and it'd be a bit disingenuous for me to suggest otherwise.
I certainly wouldn't come into this with knowledge on wine older than 2 years and make a snap decision though as its a totally different landscape - no weird quirkiness and tweaking needed for the vast majority of applications anymore.
MacOS is the same sort of walled garden as Windows though. It has plenty of dark patterns in stuff like iCloud too, I imagine with some more years of enshittification it will be in a similar state to Windows today.
And corporate customers like the French government will want their users to be within strictly controlled environments - walled gardens. That's why they've used Microsoft for so long. MacOS isn't as good for this scenario from what I understand, but is Linux?
At the least the french government has a plan. Now please have a look at Germany - the current leading guy is absolutely clueless as to what he wants to do. From appeasing Trump to ... actually doing what else? Germany with regards to its politicians is a problem for the EU. Yes, we also have Hungary etc... but it's a small country that is over-hyped by the media due to its intrinsic corruption in the leadership; the real problem really is Germany. In the past it always was "too much bureaucracy" - the problem goes much deeper. The THINKING process in Germany is broken. France, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Finland, Norway (not EU but clever nonetheless) and so forth, are much better at THINKING. Something is broken in Germany and Merz is the showcase of cluenessness here.
I consider myself a Power User, use of Windows is not friction free :)
Over the years I've come to believe that there is only one thing important: What you are used to. The friction is in the change process. Not in the destination.
As an independent, I have several customers on MS365, you know what my super power is? FireFox cookie containers. One for each org, and I switch with 0 effort between the orgs. No need for Windows in that workflow at all. In fact, using Windows and the native apps would probably give me a lot more friction.
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.
As part of the human species, which has conquered our planet's poles, its deserts and its jungles, I believe we are in a unique position to adapt to many -if not most- circumstances thrown our way, and flourish.
There are four ̶s̶i̶x̶ ̶(s̶e̶v̶e̶n̶ five counting the web version) maintained Outlook variants on Windows 11, last I checked and I have issues with each one. Search especially, but then that has remained an unsolved problem for 30 years. I am sure "AI" will finally solve this.
Edit: Have checked and found that two I thought were still maintained (16 and 19) were EOLd in October.
I feel like this is perfect being the enemy of good. So lets say only 80% of their staff can get off Windows and the remaining 20% need to remain on it. That's a great start!
And a recipe for failure. All 100% of their staff needs to be moved off of Windows at the same time.
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.
There's a negligible amount of "power users" among government employees; I think the majority of them are trained in reading and applying laws, and given the strong scientific/literary divide in the French culture, they usually think of themselves as inapt with computers (and the erratic behavior of MS products didn't help, if you ask me).
But knowing France, what to really worry about is execution, in particular for administrations. Probably people working there who read the TFA already think "oh, big mess incoming" even though they don't know what this "Linux" thing is.
I think standard IT/sysadmin training focuses mainly on Windows server etc., Linux being a second class citizen (because that's what the vast majority of small/mid sized businesses use). So recruiting good Linux sysadmins could be an issue, especially since the wages in government agencies are not exactly attractive.
Respectfully, so what? There have always be specific use cases and user bases requiring a specific OS. No one ever considered OpenBSD interchangeable with Windows, few see Linux distros as a 100% drop in replacement for someone relying on Logic Pro.
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.
What is a power user in this context? Someone deeply familiar with Windows and has tons of Windows related setup/applications?
That doesn't sound like a government worker... They rely on Microsoft Office, but the actual operating system could be anything. The only non-portable application is video games really. While LibreOffice may not have complete excel functionality, the vast majority of functionality can be replicated in web apps/libreoffice. And frankly most of this work can be migrated to AI.
You can even skin Linux to look exactly like Windows if you want, or use Mint or something. But really all people need is to be able to open up Chrome and Excel.
In fairness, the transition away from MSFT 365 Copilot (as we all of course call Office now) might include more friction. Mountainous VBasic monstrosities are sometimes the way things get done in orgs I am personally familiar with and that can be hard to switch away from. In general though, I consider this focusing on edge cases as just not helpful, especially as one must start a transition to fully uncover them and get to addressing them too. I also don't think that ancient Excel scripts are an unsolvable problem, but one that needs to be very carefully handled.
I'm a power user and I've used linux for over 25 years. My corporate windows machine is total trash and completely unsuitable for any power users, either because its windows or because corporate locks it down so much it's barely more functional than a chromebook, I don't really care.
Nobody in their right mind prefer the web apps over the native apps if they sit all day doing e.g spreadsheets. I tried the M365 web app for Word the other day and it's sluggish.
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.
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!
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.
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?
It takes time to find a suitable replacement to a global monopoly.
The privacy threats were always there.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
Europe doesn't want to depend on US infrastructure, that's the only reason to do this.
Nobody cares about Linux "freedom" or open source.
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).
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.
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.
What killed AD & GPO was Microsoft, in their bullheaded push toward Azure everything. Instead of listening to what it was that the enterprise customers actually wanted, they designed a system that made sense to them, but to no one else. The original UI was written in Silverlight. It was horrific.
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.
Similar to Germany with its DeutschlandStack and some migrations already ongoing.
I'm guessing it's not compatible with Teams and that MS make sure it doesn't work properly with LO produced PPT files.
Now I'm not saying I actually know my way around PPT or that I'm some presentation whiz, but this can probably be done with the browser version. Just like the "new" Outlook is simply a new Edge skin.
I work for a company that has drunk the MS Kool-Aid and then went back for a refill, yet I've never had any issue using the web version of the suite ever since it came out. I don't even run Windows on my work laptop. Teams is the only app that seems marginally better in its heavy version (heh), since it supports separate windows for the calls.
At the moment i have long html page with key event for next and previous, tiny script to check on specif markup for autoscroll.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
Not to mention my very large emulation library.
I have no idea what you are talking about.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
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....
[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
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.
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.
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.
https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/sailfish-os-clarifying-claims...
https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/sailfish-os-clarifying-claims...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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-...
Definitely the right call on Windows, though. Even my parents (in their mid-seventies) moved to Linux this year.
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.
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
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
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...
And Linux development and adoption helps everybody not just France. A win win.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I am perplexed by people who use condescending phrases like this. You think we track what you said before?
Americans for their part would probably be very happy to use made-in-Europe software on their computers whenever applicable.
Well, no one has mentioned computer hardware until you did.
Surely you understand how "all the motherboards are made in Taiwan" is less of an immediate risk to sovereignty than "all of our business and personal data is stored on American servers and subject to US law"
It would be nice if Europe could produce its own computers, but right now no one can except China, so what is your point? That limited sovereignty efforts undertaken in the realm of reality are futile and that enables you to get some cheap shots in for whatever reason?
Well, you can use the old hardware which you've already got if you get cut off from foreign suppliers. But the same is true for software. It's even more true for software.
If the French government and other Europeans were serious about reducing or eliminating dependency on American cloud services, they should switch to older versions of MS Office and MS Windows be done with it. No need to retrain your workers, and a realistic and speedy way to implement it.
That does not make any sense at all. These are full of known security vulnerabilities.
This is one of them.
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.
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.
But well, I can always switch to FreeBSD I guess. And that's my plan B.
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?
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.
But seriously, how long before MS offers them a deal they would rather not refuse?
With another 3 or so years with the Orange Dildo in charge, there's a decent chance the momentum will turn into something tangible.
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.
Let’s not leave out all the ones that don’t. Which is in fact, the majority of them. Strange how that’s always left out, we wouldn’t want to mislead people now would we?
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.
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.
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.
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.
“No, it never does. I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but……
…But it might work for us!”