1. The French government announces its digital agency is to write a plan, by the end of the year, so that France could reduce its extra-European dependencies. The communiqué is wrapped up with minor facts (e.g. the digital agency is to switch to Linux on dozens of computers) and big promises from Ministers.
2. Various news sites state that "France is ditching Windows", at least in their titles.
3. On new aggregators, most people react to the titles. Some do read the articles. Very few realize it's about promises to act toward a vague goal, with an unknown calendar, and many political uncertainties.
I would have hoped for more cautious reactions. It's not a leading act, not a reason to be proud, not a example to follow. It's just words.
The French government already made similar promises in the past. Sometimes, it did happen, like the Gendarmerie (rural police) switching to a Linux distribution. Sometimes, it didn't, like the pact signed by the Army Ministry with Microsoft in 2022: many clauses are still secret, even the prices.
> The German Foreign Office first moved over to Linux as a server platform in 2001... the Foreign Office of Germany made the announcement (translated news report) that it is migrating away from Linux back to Windows as its desktop solution.
> By December 2013, the city concluded the migration, with over 14,800 desktops running on LiMux... In November 2017, nearly four years after the conclusion of the migration, the Munich city council adopted a decision overhauling the move. All equipment was to be refitted with Windows 10 counterparts by 2020
> Birmingham City Council piloted OSS on hundreds of desktops
in its public libraries in 2005-6. It originally planned to install Linux ... but this was over-ambitious for
the time frame of the project and compatibility problems meant that
the open source OpenOffice (office suite) and Firefox (web
browser) were eventually run on Windows XP
The LiMux/Munich saga was actually successful to a large degree. What happened is that Microsoft put enormous efforts into killing it. High level people like Steve ballmer and Bill Gates made personal visits to Munich officials to win them back, Microsoft put a headquarters in Bavaria, and there were huge concessions. It's about as far as you can get from the image of empty promises and no action.
Those attempts happened before the US really made such a concrete demonstration it was a security and strategic risk though. That was back in the good old days where they at least pretended to be strategic partners.
It's good to be sceptical, but the US really does present a clear danger to the EU and UK now (and the rest of the world). I'm hopeful that this will actually materialise this time, and that Munich and Birmingham and the others will have paved the way and built some expertise.
The Reddit tier anti America FUD on this site never fails to get a chuckle out of me. Every single day the discussion here gets lower and lower quality.
France'a Gendarmerie (one of two branch of law-enforcement) has switched to linux for more than a decade. There is little reason to think they are bluffing. Furthermore, the groundwork has been laid for months, with forks being worked on.
I understand your take generally, but here I don't understand the skepticism.
They are already part of the way. They use "la suite" pretty extensively, it's an office suite based on open source components.
Migrating from windows as an OS is a logical next step.
Also the gendarmerie has their own dedicated Linux distribution for all their workstations as you mentioned. The French certainly have put in the work. It's not just talk.
It shouldn't make you sad, it should make you curious.
Broadly, I've observed that there's way way way too little discussion of the extent to which money and power, somewhat behind the scenes, can be thrown at what feels like "tech decisions."
A while back, here in Florida, a state representative had a relative who was kind of into open source and had it explained to him. Representative was like "oh interesting idea, Florida should look into doing more of this"
And the suits from Microsoft came down swiftly to "correct" matters.
You could be more pointed than that. French secret service "leveraging" Palantir is a disgrace , we all know who is leveraging who and its a plain shame.
It is always easy to make big announcements but harder to follow through.
They'd need a strong software and tech industry and ecosystem but in general business and economic policy, especially in France, is as hostile as possible and harder to change politically.
Really proud as a French, I think the government has had some success with moving to something matrix based for the public sector too.
https://tchap.numerique.gouv.fr
I just hope we end up having more wins at the EU-level, instead of massive fails like GAIA-X...
Has anyone noticed an increased of one-liner controversial commentary, usually assertions, with a bunch of replies, sometimes, "No and no" or something like "this is the right answer" or a bunch of greyed comments?
HN is not Reddit, and that's a Reddit pattern. It's an anti-intellectual pattern because it's a popularity/anger contest and there's nothing of substance.
I'd love to hear the pros and cons and even likelihood of Linux in government, but I'm having trouble finding the smart commentary from the grey noise.
This sounds interesting on paper but I wonder how likely it is they actually pull it off. Even putting aside the logistics of installing new oses across a bunch of workstations, migrating from legacy Active Directory domains is something even small enterprises struggle with.
We also migrated from AWS and Azure to European cloud.
But as you can see Mac is still from the USA so although the making things European sounds nice, it's only part of the reason.
Mac has greatly improved with the M chip line. Windows has greatly degraded over time.
AWS and Azure are by now something like 10x the price per year of just buying the hardware yourselves. They always compare the price to the salary of a senior engineer in San Francisco if you include vested stocks.
However installing a database with the correct security settings has also become a lot easier since AWS started.
The negative view of this and framing that it will be abandoned is interesting. France has already transitioned over 100,000 of their machines from Windows to Linux for their police force. They run a modified version of Ubuntu. Yes, it took them near a decade to do it.
There are roughly 80,000 more systems currently in transition at varying levels of complete.
Yes, this new directive is to move towards a goal of 2.5M systems. Yes, that's a lot more than their current number. They are making progress and now have a clear directive that guides them.
I prefer this reason, "risk", from the "cost savings" reasons we've seen in Germany, Russia, Germany (Munich at first) and Spain (Extremadura at first)
Linus Torvalds. Richard Stallman. GNU and the GPL.
As a bit of an old-timer, I literally don't know exactly where to start a new conversation on this in a place like this; for me the obviousness of the theoretical and practical superiority of free and open source software principles are just always there for me; and it's quite obvious here that it's different for younger people.
So I'm dropping the names and the concepts. Perhaps someone else knows how to get this going?
They’re still going the almost certainly end up running this on US designed chips, with US designed networking equipment and a bunch of other assets tied back to US companies. They should do what they want, but it’s “sovereignty theater” at best.
AI finding vulnerabilities in open source software is going to make it super unpleasant for a time. I expect there to be a shift back to closed source until we get through that period.
Nice! Now moving from Windows to Linux is the "easy", visible part. Replacing US cloud + US AI dependence end to end is much harder, and that’s the real deal today.
I don't see how this strategy can work without the EU basically having a counterpart to Microsoft. You can't beat Windows just uniting around the Linux kernel, it needs to be a whole OS plus an entire ecosystem including cloud.
Now that on-chip silicon radios have been invented, using anything but home-designed cpus, and in general all chips, is lunacy from a nation-state security standpoint.
Linux is also written by American companies at the end of the day. Most linux devs are supported by American companies and Linux's benevolent dictator for life, Linus Torvalds, lives in Portland, Oregon and is an American citizen.
There's literally no non-American general-purpose operating system.
Over time, more and more work is going to be done by AI though. At some point, it will be unthinkably slow and expensive to let humans work on anything.
305 comments
1. The French government announces its digital agency is to write a plan, by the end of the year, so that France could reduce its extra-European dependencies. The communiqué is wrapped up with minor facts (e.g. the digital agency is to switch to Linux on dozens of computers) and big promises from Ministers.
2. Various news sites state that "France is ditching Windows", at least in their titles.
3. On new aggregators, most people react to the titles. Some do read the articles. Very few realize it's about promises to act toward a vague goal, with an unknown calendar, and many political uncertainties.
I would have hoped for more cautious reactions. It's not a leading act, not a reason to be proud, not a example to follow. It's just words.
The French government already made similar promises in the past. Sometimes, it did happen, like the Gendarmerie (rural police) switching to a Linux distribution. Sometimes, it didn't, like the pact signed by the Army Ministry with Microsoft in 2022: many clauses are still secret, even the prices.
https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/german-open-source-expe...:
> The German Foreign Office first moved over to Linux as a server platform in 2001... the Foreign Office of Germany made the announcement (translated news report) that it is migrating away from Linux back to Windows as its desktop solution.
https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-so...:
> By December 2013, the city concluded the migration, with over 14,800 desktops running on LiMux... In November 2017, nearly four years after the conclusion of the migration, the Munich city council adopted a decision overhauling the move. All equipment was to be refitted with Windows 10 counterparts by 2020
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wienux:
> WIENUX[2] is a Debian-based Linux distribution developed by the City of Vienna in Austria... until 2008 when the download page was taken offline.
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/POST...:
> Birmingham City Council piloted OSS on hundreds of desktops in its public libraries in 2005-6. It originally planned to install Linux ... but this was over-ambitious for the time frame of the project and compatibility problems meant that the open source OpenOffice (office suite) and Firefox (web browser) were eventually run on Windows XP
It's good to be sceptical, but the US really does present a clear danger to the EU and UK now (and the rest of the world). I'm hopeful that this will actually materialise this time, and that Munich and Birmingham and the others will have paved the way and built some expertise.
I understand your take generally, but here I don't understand the skepticism.
Migrating from windows as an OS is a logical next step.
Also the gendarmerie has their own dedicated Linux distribution for all their workstations as you mentioned. The French certainly have put in the work. It's not just talk.
Broadly, I've observed that there's way way way too little discussion of the extent to which money and power, somewhat behind the scenes, can be thrown at what feels like "tech decisions."
A while back, here in Florida, a state representative had a relative who was kind of into open source and had it explained to him. Representative was like "oh interesting idea, Florida should look into doing more of this"
And the suits from Microsoft came down swiftly to "correct" matters.
They'd need a strong software and tech industry and ecosystem but in general business and economic policy, especially in France, is as hostile as possible and harder to change politically.
I just hope we end up having more wins at the EU-level, instead of massive fails like GAIA-X...
HN is not Reddit, and that's a Reddit pattern. It's an anti-intellectual pattern because it's a popularity/anger contest and there's nothing of substance.
I'd love to hear the pros and cons and even likelihood of Linux in government, but I'm having trouble finding the smart commentary from the grey noise.
Help!
[dupe]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47719486
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716043
We also migrated from AWS and Azure to European cloud.
But as you can see Mac is still from the USA so although the making things European sounds nice, it's only part of the reason.
Mac has greatly improved with the M chip line. Windows has greatly degraded over time.
AWS and Azure are by now something like 10x the price per year of just buying the hardware yourselves. They always compare the price to the salary of a senior engineer in San Francisco if you include vested stocks.
However installing a database with the correct security settings has also become a lot easier since AWS started.
There are roughly 80,000 more systems currently in transition at varying levels of complete.
Yes, this new directive is to move towards a goal of 2.5M systems. Yes, that's a lot more than their current number. They are making progress and now have a clear directive that guides them.
Microsoft has all but abandoned their self hosted products in favour of cloud, and their cloud services are a security dumpster fire.
Microsoft’s cloud was described as a “pile of shit” but it achieved FedRAMP ATO only because so many agencies were already using their services.
https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-cloud-fedramp-c...
Entra ID is full of disastrous design-level bugs like this one.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/19/microsoft_entra_id_bu...
Microsoft has deep rooted cultural problems that make the company structurally incapable of fixing their platform.
https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...
As a bit of an old-timer, I literally don't know exactly where to start a new conversation on this in a place like this; for me the obviousness of the theoretical and practical superiority of free and open source software principles are just always there for me; and it's quite obvious here that it's different for younger people.
So I'm dropping the names and the concepts. Perhaps someone else knows how to get this going?
There's literally no non-American general-purpose operating system.
Astroturfing around this is getting suspicious.
Over time, more and more work is going to be done by AI though. At some point, it will be unthinkably slow and expensive to let humans work on anything.
To do *that* locally, you need GPUs and LLMs.
How will Europe solve these two?