France starts moving government systems from Windows to Linux

[SiliconWizard]

Denmark has also decided the same thing a few months ago. I don't recall that making this much noise, but this time it looks a bit viral. It's like everyone is suddenly talking about France moving to Linux on social media for a reason I'm not sure about. It looks like it's being discussed everywhere. People are probably linking that to the current world situation, which would explain the sudden interest. But there are numerous past stories about, for instance, the NSA caught spying on european countries. It's not like the question of "sovereignty" is new.

I think many are overestimating the "complexity" of what most people working in public administrations do with computers. Most of them use ad-hoc software they've been trained on and otherwise make pretty basic use of general-purpose office software. For most office documents not handled by ad hoc sofware, they would probably do as well with document editing software from the 90's. As long as they can launch programs, do some basic editing and copy some files with a file manager, that's about it. After that, they use database systems a lot and as long as the front-end looks the same, they don't care about the OS.

The bulk of the work for transitioning would really be with system administration and porting existing ad hoc software (if needed) to a new platform. Personel training would comparatively not be that big a deal. But the IT aspect of it could well become a nightmare.

Now they're probably not too happy at MS and they'll probably try pretty hard to force their way back. Curious to see that.

[free_electron]

I am arguing how things could be done better, but how social and political forces in specific non-user quarters make any change exceedingly difficult; and how one huge factor is exactly people used and fixed into the ways things are done now.  I fully agree with you how things work now! 

i'm not denying things couldn't be done better. But there is another factor at play : legacy.

Codebases of commercial unix based tools are often "ancient". They date back to the days of the Nova, VAX and sun workstations (like most chip layout tools). they are not going to rewrite that. Proven to work. There's a reason outfits like banks are still running emulated ibm360 processors running a 360 os running a Cobol application on the latest and greatest hardware (emulation on top of emulation on top of emulation on top of virtualization. it's nuts, but you can test the virtual machine is correct. Then running your application is simply a matter of bringing over the entire stack, including the operating system. The hardware is now irrelevant). They don't dare touch it for fear of introducing issues !. Same for things like Sabre ( the flight booking system)

Fro command line or daemon style processes it is easier. Things that UI driven are more complicated due to dependencies.
To save development and verification time you simply eliminate variables. This kernel, these libraries, this config. Now all the dependencies are known and nothing will come get in the way. This is the old "but it runs fine on my computer" issue. To solve that : clone the computer, warts and all.

can it be done better ? yes. The question is : how much time and money are you willing to throw at it ? The carpenter needs that saw ... he's got cabinets to make.

Example, I get comments like  "why you stick to Altium ? why don't you use KiCad or Diptrace or Cadence or Mentor or Zuken or whatever".
Well , i've been using Altium since 1988 when it came on a single floppy disk and ran under DOS 3.21 in EGA mode... every version including the enterprise installs with 500+ users. That's 38 years ! I know that thing inside and out, i have been an alpha and beta tester, i had the SDK, and been in areas i cant talk about.

I can try to use a different tool but there is going to be a tool learning curve (not the process of pcb layout itself, using the tool. I know how to make the cabinet. The new saw has a learning curve).
I will never be as fast as i am now. I will get frustrated, my productivity will tank and stress will go up. I will be in a race against people that are already proficient in the other tool. My job evaluation will be bad because i will be slower...
I'm simply not interested in doing that. I Have a board to design. I've turned down many job opportunities. "But we offer cross-training". Not interested. I don't need the stress and frustration. After two heart attacks i need to take it easier...

That is a big factor at play inside many companies. The cost of retraining their workforce. Not just users, but also developers : they are also a workforce. And It people are also a workforce.. Time is money. Time to market is crucial , whether you are making cabinets or saws.
It's a difficult situation. can it be done better ? again, yes. Who will foot the bill ?

I personally think Web-based applications are the future. They run in an os-independent environment : a browser engine. That engine is available for different OSs.
The application doesn't care where it runs. It's a common virtual machine : The browser.
- For the application developer the Hardware, OS , middleware is all abstracted away. If it runs in the browser it runs everywhere.
- For the user it is the same whether they are on windows, macos, chromeos or Linux or are using a Dell , HP or Apple computer. Completely hardware and OS agnostic.

The backend can be whatever is required. Drop the entire contraption in a container, OS and all, and run it on a virtual system. Can it be done better ? yes. More power efficient ? yes. But can the deployment be easier and faster ? i don't think so. You send me the preconfigured docker image and i spin it up. I tell my user to point to a webpage. My work is done. So what if it consumes a bit of processing power and electricity. I save it on the front end.

just my two cents.

[free_electron]

I think many are overestimating the "complexity" of what most people working in public administrations do with computers. Most of them use ad-hoc software they've been trained on and otherwise make pretty basic use of general-purpose office software.

exactly ! And these days those apps run in a web-browser. That makes them hardware and OS independent.

And not just government. I was at Lowe's a couple of days ago (big home improvement store.) , ordering a door. The salesman had a flashy Mac computer .. running Chrome (yes, chrome, on a mac...) , pointing to a web page that presented  ... a Terminal emulation program.
text interface, 80x25 .. navigation using arrow keys and numerical keypad ..

[Karel]

France is replacing 2.5 million Windows desktops with Linux - and I mapped out its new stack

• France's government is switching from Windows to a Linux desktop.
• The desktop will be based on the police Linux distro, GendBuntu.
• The distro includes France's own suite of open-source desktop programs.

For decades, I've been saying Linux is a better desktop than Windows. Lately, more people have been
switching to Linux. There are many reasons to swap Windows for Linux, including Microsoft leaving
Windows 10 users in the lurch, the increased viability of gaming on Linux, easier-to-use Linux desktop
distros, broader hardware support, and rising concerns about security, privacy, and data control.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/france-leaves-windows-for-linux-desktop/

[free_electron]

[Nominal Animal]

I think many are overestimating the "complexity" of what most people working in public administrations do with computers.

FWIW, I don't; I fully agree with your assessment.  It is also why I don't expect that much pushback from end users, unless they're not properly supported by their IT personnel.

To repeat ad nauseam, it is the support personnel that can torpedo the entire endeavour, just by opposing the change by quiet quitting.

Personel training would comparatively not be that big a deal.

Except for the support personnel that consider themselves experts now, and feel that asking them to retrain is an offensive suggestion.

[golden_labels]

I love FOSS. With all my heart, to the point many probably can’t even imagine. I didn’t have Windows as my primary OS since 2010. Around Windows 10 release I started to explicitly refuse to use that system too because of what pile of turd it became. But I love the movement, the idea, as a part of a wider concept that redefines how the society as a whole may work. Not because I delude myself that Linux is the best for the sake of being Linux. Or that Linux ecosystem is the best, because in fact it’s in many ways inferior. As of 2026 it’s even worse and inadequate for the general population than it is to experts.

If he was saying that for decades, his comparison included Windows 3.x and then Windows 9x. That’s a very low bar to set.

Perhaps it’s time to revise opinions? Microsoft hires very good developers for no less than quarter century. As soon as the management allowed them to do their job Windows seen an enormous improvement. Claiming any major technological superiority of Linux distros over Windows in 2020s to me sounds like a pure form of fanboyism. The kind that gets wet from the mere thought of Linux being present everywhere, but without knowing why.

The management of Microsoft (as well as Apple and Alphabet) makes decisions that anger people dependent on their systems. But that’s a relatively recent thing, so Vaughan-Nichois couldn’t use this particular issue as an argument for decades. To the point of this being ridiculous: the landscape the aforementioned giants are now trying to destroy, to the dismay of many users, has been created primarily by Microsoft-IBM tandem in the first place.

That is also not technological shortcoming, but an organizational/social issue. Which means that the moment Linux becomes popular among the general population, gets endorsed by any major corporation, and appears on the radar of lawmakers, it undergoes exactly the same process as the competitors. And we have an empirical evidence, because that did already happen: Android. Do you really think that if BigName Linux becomes the standard installed on 4 billion computers, you’ll be able to use it without subscription to app-store, privacy infringement, government identification on every step, a mandatory backdoor, centrally-controlled ecosystem, vendor lock-in features preventing switching to another distro, and being used as a test lab? If you do, I say: you are completely missing the source of the problem, fail to see beyond the narrow tech brain’s perception, smelled too much cuberanarchy fumes, possibly all three.

[Cyclotron]

Except for the support personnel that consider themselves experts now, and feel that asking them to retrain is an offensive suggestion.

Every IT shop I've worked in and around for 30 years has tons of fiefdom lords. They have honed expertise in the systems there. It's worse in government than private industry, as it is often near impossible to cull bad actors for lots of reasons.

[Jeroen3]

...

...
To repeat ad nauseam, it is the support personnel that can torpedo the entire endeavour, just by opposing the change by quiet quitting.
...

I have never met any IT person that was happy they were working with Microsoft products.

[golden_labels]

I have never met any IT person that was happy they were working with Microsoft products.

My first professional programming environment was VB6. Certainly I could not complain. I also had to rely on spreadsheets for half of my career. Excel was uncomparably better than Calc. My favourite ball mouse was Microsoft Mouse 2.0.

[Nominal Animal]

I have never met any IT person that was happy they were working with Microsoft products.

Interesting!  Overwhelming majority of the many (career ones, excluding students temping) I met here in Finland between 1996 and 2010 were happy/happiest working with Microsoft products, and did not use Linux voluntarily or at all.  Finnish strangeness?  Things could be changing? 

Do note that I could very well be wrong in my pessimism here.  I'm often wrong.  It is the basis of the opinion, the reasoning and not the opinion itself, that yields an interesting discussion, after all.

[CatalinaWOW]

I have never met any IT person that was happy they were working with Microsoft products.

Interesting!  Overwhelming majority of the many (career ones, excluding students temping) I met here in Finland between 1996 and 2010 were happy/happiest working with Microsoft products, and did not use Linux voluntarily or at all.  Finnish strangeness?  Things could be changing? 

Do note that I could very well be wrong in my pessimism here.  I'm often wrong.  It is the basis of the opinion, the reasoning and not the opinion itself, that yields an interesting discussion, after all.

I suspect sampling bias.   Few IT professionals work in both environments equally and thus have a bias towards what they are familiar with.   And current users of Windows will most contact Windows familiar IT professionals while current Linux users will most contact Linux IT pros. 

[Nominal Animal]

I suspect sampling bias.

I personally used and supported Mac OS, Windows, Unix, and Linux at the time, and met with all sorts of end users, if that matters.

[dietert1]

Yes, the usual office applications are very similar nowadays. Maybe OpenOffice is some years back, but does it matter? For many, many years i have been using Linux for all online computing, while i used some applications that did not (yet) exist for Linux under MS Windows on an offline PC.
I'd guess it is extremely stupid to try and do business using an online Windows computer. One might as well send copies of everything to US competitors. I think after recent developments in the US everybody else needs to think carefully.
Of course there are security risks with Linux as well. As far as i understand large parts of a distribution like Ubuntu or Debian come from the US. One needs independent specialists to understand what it is. And one has to tell people clearly what it's all about. Otherwise US infiltration will persist.

Regards, Dieter

[Cyclotron]

I suspect sampling bias.

I personally used and supported Mac OS, Windows, Unix, and Linux at the time, and met with all sorts of end users, if that matters.

I've been an administrator for Solars, BSD, Linux, and Windows. Some OS2, AIX, and a few less knowns in between. For many years in my youth, I was a *NIX snob.  I didn't think very highly of Windows. But, I also looked down at Linux as it was and in some ways remains inferior to the proper UNIX systems. I'm still a system five fan.

I once did a Director of IT job for 3-4 years and my teams managed MacOS and Windows for end users. The biggest constraint today is having a proper device management platform to control and manage the fleet. Maybe there are Linux tools to do that but I'm unfamiliar with them. Someone has to control versions and updates and compliance. Many entities I work with today in sensitive areas control down to USB access, if you can do a screen shot, and lots of things. Maybe the French government has none of these security concerns.

The other major hurdle is that office applications are the last thing that I believe will be a problem. It will be government specialty applications that no one has bothered to fund an upgrade for in 20 years. Maybe they have planned all this out and its not just a knee jerk reaction to temporary geopolitical crap fest.

[dietert1]

I think recent moves were triggered by a severe security fault at the EU headquarters in Brussels. They found that important EU documents on their servers used to change over night and that those changes were executed by hackers in the US. Those are hostile acts and there is a need to stop it.
One important difference between Linux and Windows is the rythm of updates. Linux may be less fancy but it is more stable. We should not argue with our fears but the way MS Windows implements updates constitutes a terrible security risk. I can understand that this is inacceptable for critical systems. Of course specialists can control Windows updates, but those won't be independent specialists.
By the way: I think the same problem exists inside the US. One corrupt system administrator can ruin all good intentions of many others.

Regards, Dieter

[madires]

The other major hurdle is that office applications are the last thing that I believe will be a problem. It will be government specialty applications that no one has bothered to fund an upgrade for in 20 years. Maybe they have planned all this out and its not just a knee jerk reaction to temporary geopolitical crap fest.

Most of the adminstrative software used by governments, municipalities and so on need to be kept up-to-date to deal with the never ending changes of laws, regulations and directives.

[tooki]

...

...
To repeat ad nauseam, it is the support personnel that can torpedo the entire endeavour, just by opposing the change by quiet quitting.
...

I have never met any IT person that was happy they were working with Microsoft products.

I have met tons of them over the years. They’re not rare.

[Cyclotron]

I think recent moves were triggered by a severe security fault at the EU headquarters in Brussels. They found that important EU documents on their servers used to change over night and that those changes were executed by hackers in the US. Those are hostile acts and there is a need to stop it.
One important difference between Linux and Windows is the rythm of updates. Linux may be less fancy but it is more stable. We should not argue with our fears but the way MS Windows implements updates constitutes a terrible security risk. I can understand that this is inacceptable for critical systems. Of course specialists can control Windows updates, but those won't be independent specialists.
By the way: I think the same problem exists inside the US. One corrupt system administrator can ruin all good intentions of many others.

Regards, Dieter

@dieter
Can you provide sources for your allegations that hackers from the US changed important EU documents overnight?

Here are the two incidents that have been publicly investigated:
2015–2018 EU Diplomatic Cable Breach: A three-year-long cyberespionage operation was discovered in 2018 where hackers breached the EU's diplomatic communications network (COREU).
Source of Intrusion: Security firm Area 1 attributed the intrusion to hackers working for China's People's Liberation Army.
Nature of Attack: The hackers did not typically edit documents on the server but rather "downloaded thousands of cables". They created an open internet site to host the stolen, sensitive documents, which contained information on global trade and anxieties about the Trump administration.

March 2026 European Commission Breach: The European Commission confirmed a major cyberattack in March 2026 against its cloud infrastructure on the Europa.eu platform.
Details: Attackers gained unauthorized access to an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account and stole over 350GB of data, including email server dumps, databases, and confidential documents.
Attribution: The hacker group ShinyHunters claimed responsibility. The only identified and arrested member was French.

The US is to blame for a lot, but I don't see any here. Maybe this is just misinformation?

I don't see how Linux solves anything within the allegations or facts.

[CatalinaWOW]

I think recent moves were triggered by a severe security fault at the EU headquarters in Brussels. They found that important EU documents on their servers used to change over night and that those changes were executed by hackers in the US. Those are hostile acts and there is a need to stop it.
One important difference between Linux and Windows is the rythm of updates. Linux may be less fancy but it is more stable. We should not argue with our fears but the way MS Windows implements updates constitutes a terrible security risk. I can understand that this is inacceptable for critical systems. Of course specialists can control Windows updates, but those won't be independent specialists.
By the way: I think the same problem exists inside the US. One corrupt system administrator can ruin all good intentions of many others.

Regards, Dieter

How is this not true for Linux?

[dietert1]

..
@dieter
Can you provide sources for your allegations that hackers from the US changed important EU documents overnight?
..

I remember reading about this in a German newspaper, maybe this year. One detail i remember: that the modified documents were to be voted the next day, so little chance for parlament member to find the modifications.
My problem is that Google doesn't provide information on this. Know why? And European institutions try to hide certain facts as well.
You see, todays news about the strait of Hormuz didn't help with currencies. Normally with good news, we see Dollar and Euro rise. But it doesn't happen.
I really prefer to work on a piece of firmware or hardware that i have on my table.

Regards, Dieter

[dietert1]

How does linux help with all this? Politics handles problems by allocating resources. Probably many MS-certified professionals will leave and independent professionals will enter.

Just found this:
https://euobserver.com/211609/how-big-tech-wrote-secrecy-into-eu-law-to-hide-data-centres-environmental-toll/
They avoid the term "hacker" but make it appear more as social engineering/curruption.
The "digitaleurope" lobby group mentioned in the text has as corporate members:
amazon, cisco, google, hewlett packard, intel, jp morgan, meta, microsoft, nvidia, oracle, tiktok, visa - among others.

Regards, Dieter

[Cyclotron]

..
@dieter
Can you provide sources for your allegations that hackers from the US changed important EU documents overnight?
..

I remember reading about this in a German newspaper, maybe this year. One detail i remember: that the modified documents were to be voted the next day, so little chance for parlament member to find the modifications.
My problem is that Google doesn't provide information on this. Know why? And European institutions try to hide certain facts as well.
You see, todays news about the strait of Hormuz didn't help with currencies. Normally with good news, we see Dollar and Euro rise. But it doesn't happen.
I really prefer to work on a piece of firmware or hardware that i have on my table.

Regards, Dieter

I am just as apt to consider news corrupt and government very corrupt, but this just appears to be a lot of nothing. I'd be very interested to see the reference. I searched for references using many different search systems and AI, and could find nothing but social media tin foil hat conspiracy theories with nothing but political reasons behind them.  Very likely an organization that would benefit from distrust between Western nations, but who knows?

How does linux help with all this? Politics handles problems by allocating resources. Probably many MS-certified professionals will leave and independent professionals will enter.

Just found this:
https://euobserver.com/211609/how-big-tech-wrote-secrecy-into-eu-law-to-hide-data-centres-environmental-toll/
They avoid the term "hacker" but make it appear more as social engineering/curruption.
The "digitaleurope" lobby group mentioned in the text has as corporate members:
amazon, cisco, google, hewlett packard, intel, jp morgan, meta, microsoft, nvidia, oracle, tiktok, visa - among others.

Regards, Dieter

This is totally different than the accusation you made of US hackers.  The above is called politics and lobbying.  If you want to call it corrupt, I'm with you, but it's not hacking.
Again, the spread of "US hacks EU government" is likely in the best interests of some entities, and I can't tell you it's not true, but I can tell you I have found references that match your accusations.

And in the end, none of what is proposed would change any of the corruption and political backdoor crap that is going on today.  It's grandstanding for the purposes of gaining some political credit of "Look at me, I stood up to the Trump/US" and has really little to do with properly taking measures to ensure the country's data is secure and reliable.

There's no such thing as a non-hostile environment for your data. Any information security professional will tell you the same thing. You secure your data and build access redundancies and controls for the worst possible case all the time, 100% of the time. If done properly, it matters little if another government got a peek at the data. The fact is that the US and France share tons of secret data because, of course, they do. 

I think recent moves were triggered by a severe security fault at the EU headquarters in Brussels. They found that important EU documents on their servers used to change over night and that those changes were executed by hackers in the US. Those are hostile acts and there is a need to stop it.
One important difference between Linux and Windows is the rythm of updates. Linux may be less fancy but it is more stable. We should not argue with our fears but the way MS Windows implements updates constitutes a terrible security risk. I can understand that this is inacceptable for critical systems. Of course specialists can control Windows updates, but those won't be independent specialists.
By the way: I think the same problem exists inside the US. One corrupt system administrator can ruin all good intentions of many others.

Regards, Dieter

How is this not true for Linux?

You're nailing it; corruption doesn't know OS boundaries that I know of.

[dietert1]

I think you are living in the past.
If you listen to recent talks of J.D. Vance, he is bluntly announcing the destruction of the European union by the US. The situation has changed completely after the Greenland threats and after the actions of the US military in Ukraine and near east.
Europe will cut relations to the US, but everybody is afraid of more terrorist attacks from the US. So they won't attack the US government, but they can reduce/cut economic and technological dependencies. Recently a trade union between Brasil and EU was signed. There can be fair relations, but not with the US. Turning off light for US military installations in Frankfurt may happen much later.

Regards, Dieter

[Nominal Animal]

I'm much more worried about the unelected EU leadership, the commission, myself.

Conversely, I believe local and small to medium scale open source development for bespoke tooling could help a lot of cities, municipalities, counties, states, and countries.  Adapt the tools to the culture, instead of trying to unify culture to hide differences.  I like the richness and variety of human cultures, not the impersonal "international city" non-culture; and although we can leverage scale to reduce costs, there is a point where it leads to less innovation and more stagnation.

For the last twenty to twenty-five years I've been surprised that it hasn't picked up, even though the solutions I've made have shown it to be superior approach (to COTS fit-for-all but nobody in particular software solutions).  They are just tools, but then again, with better tools you can get much better results.  I've described most of my suspicions and reasoning why it hasn't picked up in earlier messages.

We also live in an era where governments fear people, and want to control people quite tightly.  Not just actions, but also speech and even thoughts.  The politicians are much closer to billionaires and huge corporations and lobbying organizations than the people, so the world they believe we have is different to the one most people live in.  This adds huge pressure to unify and standardize and limit.