France starts moving government systems from Windows to Linux

[Karel]

France is ditching US software for homegrown alternatives of Google Docs, Microsoft Office, Zoom

European governments have long sought to reduce their dependency on non-European (i.e., American) software.
While individual municipalities and government sectors have recently begun switching to homegrown options,
France's latest announcement signals a broader shift away from tools such as Windows, Microsoft Office, Zoom,
and Google Docs.

https://www.techspot.com/news/112032-france-starts-moving-government-systems-windows-linux.html

https://linuxiac.com/france-launches-government-linux-desktop-plan-as-windows-exit-begins/

[Nominal Animal]

Unfortunately, this too will likely fail.  The reason is the quiet opposition from tens of thousands of Microsoft Windows -trained IT support persons.

In my experience, it is much harder to retrain a Windows professional into a Linux professional, than to train a Linux professional from scratch.  The reason appears to be the huge amount of subconscious routine knowledge, that suddenly no longer applies.  Not only do they have to learn the new thing, but also un-learn what they have already learned, at pretty big personal expense (time and effort).

[voltsandjolts]

Yes, but if there is a shift to thin clients and web office applications, then it's somewhat familiar to users, adequate for many of them, and requires less Linux IT support to run it all. After the thin clients are running Linux, the job is then to replace MS365.

[CatalinaWOW]

I suppose that means that France finds no problem with protection of domestic markets by other countries.  No more French wine or cheese or airplanes.  Or perhaps a ban on French CAD systems.

This strikes me as just as stupid as certain leaders waging tariff wars.

[Renate]

Things like Excel and Word hit maturity a decade ago.
They can easily be supplanted by LibreOffice.

A spreadsheet with equations? Great idea. I even use it as a quick DB with ODBC.

A document writing program with styles? I can muddle my way through.

[voltsandjolts]

They can easily be supplanted by LibreOffice.

I don't think its easy at any large scale of users. While I like LibreOffice, I use Word at work simply because everyone in my office does, and all our clients. It's a standard. And users get upset if you force them to switch to LO, because it's not perfect at rendering Word documents (because MS doesn't want it to be). And users get upset at spending time fixing things, only to find they broke again when someone else edited that doc with Word. All that time costs more than the Word license, unfortunately.

[rteodor]

I suppose that means that France finds no problem with protection of domestic markets by other countries.  No more French wine or cheese or airplanes.  Or perhaps a ban on French CAD systems.

This strikes me as just as stupid as certain leaders waging tariff wars.

This is not about the commerical aspect. In fact as far as can see here in EU we are not happy that we have to reinvent the wheel and many would be happy to keep paying for US software. Yes there were in the past some experiments at town level and we know how they ended.

Please read this right because is something way more troublesome: its the loss of trust in US products at the political/government level that is forcing a new and bigger try. Making this switch only to feel proud and independent is the wrong reason to do it and most people know it despite the misleading wording in the OP.

[tooki]

And users get upset if you force them to switch to LO, because it's not perfect at rendering Word documents (because MS doesn't want it to be).

That simply is not true: Microsoft opened up the file format many years ago. The problem with file fidelity is that to achieve identical rendering, you must FLAWLESSLY mimic every single behavior of the source program, including bugs.

LibreOffice not only doesn’t have all the features and functions of Word (no matter what its proponents claim), but moreover, Word uses a quite unique document object model that nobody else has wanted to copy. Translating between that and the more common tagged format of LibreOffice etc is nontrivial.

The Word object model was invented back when computers had very little RAM. The problem with ordinary tagged formats is that to determine the formatting of any piece of text, you must parse the entire document from the beginning, since it could be affected by an opening tag right at the beginning. To allow users to edit text that can’t fit in memory in its entirety, Word completely divorced formatting from the text itself. Instead, spans of text have no formatting within them, but instead are associated with a stylesheet which contains its entire formatting. If you select a word and bold it, for example, it breaks up the bold word and the spans before and after into different spans, and the bold word gets a different stylesheet. The association of text spans and their styles is kept in a separate table, which also tracks the order of the text. So not only is the text not formatted with tags, it can be physically stored out of order! (The original binary file format is actually basically a lightweight file system.) In the past, when disks were slow, like floppies, Word even defaulted to “fast save”, where it just appended modified text to the end of the file and amended the association table to refer to the new text spans, rather than rewriting the entire file. (Yep, this meant that you could roll back edits, which led to the leaks of sensitive  or embarrassing information!)

None of that design is necessary today, but that architecture remains. And nobody else stands a snowball’s chance in hell of reproducing it, since it’d be a mammoth undertaking.

[iMo]

The russians started with that in 2014, afaik, so you may ask the ru participants here on the results..

[Gerhard_dk4xp]

I suppose that means that France finds no problem with protection of domestic markets by other countries.  No more French wine or cheese or airplanes.  Or perhaps a ban on French CAD systems.

You have reversed cause and effect.

[Kleinstein]

Part of the problem are the EULAs from microsoft. I don't know the up to date versions, but there was an issue that makes many MS products not meeting the requirements to use them for personal data. So for much of government use Windows 11 and MS office just don't meet the requirements.

So it is kind of only going by the older law. Not sure if MS changed the rules, but in most aspects Win11 only got worse with transfering data.

The switch over takes quite some training, both for the normal users and the system administrators.

In Germany the city of Munich once also did a change to Linux. AFAIK the switched back to MS however. AFAIK is came with better conditions from MS.

[nonius_]

Rteodor]Please read this right because is something way more troublesome: its the loss of trust in US products at the political/government level that is forcing a new and bigger try. Making this switch only to feel proud and independent is the wrong reason to do it and most people know it despite the misleading wording in the OP.

+1!

What the French are doing isn't just 'teasing' or trolling. It's one of the first, directly tangible results of the fact that trust in the USA has been utterly lost. The matter is very, very serious, and I get the impression that Americans utterly fail to understand it for what it is. Every action begets a reaction. It's only now that the first tangible reactions are slowly beginning to show up.

'Trust arrives by foot and leaves on horseback'.

Trust, that they had gained for how they helped and fought for and with us in WW2(*). I don't see that trust re-appearing during my lifetime. Nor in the lifetime of anyone alive today. Perhaps future generations. Perhaps not.

Utterly amazing how the cooperiation and trust has been flushed down the drain, for absolutely NOTHING. Nobody gains from this apart from our adversaries.

(* over here people haven't forgotten about this. My particular area though was liberated by the Canadians in 1944 and they paid a very heavy price for it (Black Friday during the Battle of the Scheldt). It's commemorated here every year, 80+ years later. Streets, quarters and squares have been named in their honour. The area a bit more to the east was liberated by the Poles (the same soldiers who a little later got thoroughly shafted by Churchill e.a.)). We remember very well.

Apart from all that, I gave MicroSoft the finger in 2007 and switched to Linux. Have been very happy with it ever since. Does everything I require of it. I'm sure the French will be fine too.

[voltsandjolts]

And users get upset if you force them to switch to LO, because it's not perfect at rendering Word documents (because MS doesn't want it to be).

That simply is not true: Microsoft opened up the file format many years ago. The problem with file fidelity is that to achieve identical rendering, you must FLAWLESSLY mimic every single behavior of the source program, including bugs.

You've been duped by OOXML, which was its main intention; to create a standard which so esoteric it's of little use to anyone else who wished to make a parity replacement for Word, yet ticked the government check boxes for open standards. ODT was standardised 2 years before OOXML, which MS pushed through in a hurry to in response to governmental push for open standards, they didn't want ODT to get a foothold. Note they chose not to act in good faith and use the ODT standards (meaningfully, or by default), or assist in their improvement. No, it was all about keeping the golden goose propped up.

Fidelity needs well documented on-disk standards AND rendering which adheres to those standards.

https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/03/27/odf-is-the-future-ooxml-is-the-past/

[SiliconWizard]

Well, I don't know how it's going to pan out, but I don't see what the big surprise is. It's been in the talks for years. Any government should be independent from companies such as MS or Google, even the US government IMHO.

[Psi]

It's kind of inevitable, as Linux, its apps, and its ability to run windows apps, keep getting better every year while Windows keeps getting worse.
I don't know if this thing in France will succeed, but one will eventually.

There is a chance SteamOS may consolidate things a bit and bring about a new desktop linux distro for the general public.

Being able to install/run any windows app in Linux reliably without needing to faff around would be a big driving factor.

[golden_labels]

Munich did that in 2004, including their own distro. They ditched everything and moved back to Windows 15 years later. Lower Saxony also decided to rely on OpenSuse in 2006 and the decision was reversed a bit over a decade later. What are the chances French “revolution” is going to be any different?

The problem with authorities switching to penguinic ecosystems is always the same. It’s the reasons behind the decision. All the wrong reasons. What today drives them to use a Linux distro will in a few years make them switch to Windows. Good if it’s anything more than opportunism and short-lived hope to save a few bucks or fulfill a temporary political goal. That fizzles out quickly and what state agencies are left with is:

• Staggering short-term financial costs. The kind that is most visible and a low-hanging fruit for any hyena searching for an easy target.
• Extreme pressure from corporations. From which Microsoft is actually the least of concern. Rather think of ERP, document management, threat protection companies.
• Their own managers and accountants, who are mentally incapable of perceiving world beyond what Windows ecosystem already fills in best. And Microsoft knows that: this is why they don’t need to do too much and can just wait. They understand that the systematic issues will lead to them being called.
• In western countries: laws that punish not being a total jerk.

What kind of an outcome do you expect from the above situation?

Unless there is a social change (in the wider population) and unless authorities comprehend that FOSS is not about taking things without paying, there is no way I can see Linux distros or other open solutions stand a chance long-term. Sure, EU Parliament and European agencies — having to accommodate activist groups and the past “technological neutrality” rule — may once in a while support open choices,⁽¹⁾ but that’s rather an exception.

On the humorous side, North Korea embraced it a long time ago.

⁽¹⁾ At least on paper. Because both the details and actual state-level implementation or use differ widely. And the “technological neutrality” rule is a double-edged weapon.

[CatalinaWOW]

I suppose that means that France finds no problem with protection of domestic markets by other countries.  No more French wine or cheese or airplanes.  Or perhaps a ban on French CAD systems.

You have reversed cause and effect.

No, I was pointing out lemming behavior.  One country does something stupid (claimed to be punishment for something).  Said nation claims home country won't be harmed while target country feel the pain of their supposed transgression

Now a second country does the same thing.   

[Simmed]

 

[abeyer]

Munich did that in 2004, including their own distro. They ditched everything and moved back to Windows 15 years later. Lower Saxony also decided to rely on OpenSuse in 2006 and the decision was reversed a bit over a decade later. What are the chances French “revolution” is going to be any different?

For the early aughts, a 10-15 year lifecycle on a big IT project would probably qualify as quite successful.

[free_electron]

You'll have a french "ordinateur" that has a "dc" (disque compacte) running on "CD" (courent directe). The installed Os distro will be Xunil with only support for AZERTY keyboards.

[iMo]

Munich did that in 2004, including their own distro. They ditched everything and moved back to Windows 15 years later. Lower Saxony also decided to rely on OpenSuse in 2006 and the decision was reversed a bit over a decade later. What are the chances French “revolution” is going to be any different?

For the early aughts, a 10-15 year lifecycle on a big IT project would probably qualify as quite successful.

The projects were succesful because they had AisleRiot, KPatience, and PySolFC in their menu only.. 

[magic]

I suppose that means that France finds no problem with protection of domestic markets by other countries.  No more French wine or cheese or airplanes.  Or perhaps a ban on French CAD systems.

Do they have a choice in this matter?

Through the 21st century, the biggest new feature of every M$ Office version N was producing documents that can't be opened by version N-1, even if they are simple enough that N-1 could handle them in principle. And the biggest export of their home country in general was instability around the world.

What's the value proposition of M$ and U$ anymore?
It's greed for the sake of greed.

[Karel]

When a document, made with ms office, doesn't look right in Libreoffice, it's the fault of Libreoffice.
When a document, made with Libreoffice, doesn't look right in ms office, it's the fault of Libreoffice.
When a document, made with ms office version x, doesn't look right in ms office version y, it's ... normal!

[Nominal Animal]

Based on my own experience (including as a volunteer user-facing Linux IT support at an University), I do believe that open source based solutions could much better serve people in the long term.  The key feature is customization, making the tool better fit for purpose.

The issue is social inertia.  We do have tens of thousands of people who will absolutely object to, and many fail, retraining from Windows to Linux.  Just shifting your Windows knowledge to Linux desktop environments works for a small number of lightweight users, but not for support personnel.  I know this as a practical fact, having observed it close-by.

Subcontractors, service providers, et cetera will apply pressure at the higher levels, those who make the decisions.  Local companies aren't a problem, because they can and will adapt; it's the government-sized internationals that can buy just about anything.  (I'm not talking about bribes; I'm talking about making certain decisions so politically beneficial to the decider that they simply cannot refuse.  Politicians first and foremost interest is, unfortunately, always their own; most just explain to themselves that what benefits themselves, benefits the rest of the country too.  It's just human.)

[golden_labels]

Munich did that in 2004, including their own distro. They ditched everything and moved back to Windows 15 years later. Lower Saxony also decided to rely on OpenSuse in 2006 and the decision was reversed a bit over a decade later. What are the chances French “revolution” is going to be any different?

For the early aughts, a 10-15 year lifecycle on a big IT project would probably qualify as quite successful.

They didn’t switch back because of a planned life-cycle. The reason they did is the cumulative, mutually-enforcing effect of the points I listed. In particular with Munich that even got explicitly revealed in press releases at the time.