The age of the Linux desktop might actually finally be coming
Personally I think we are at an interim period for a big player to emerge and take over this space. If enough governments in the EU start switching over to customized linux distros theres a big chance for someone like Nokia to come in and develop their own approved distro with proper MDM and GPO-like management functionality baked in .
On top of that it could be great to see SteamOS continue to gain share and become more than just something people run on gaming purpose hardware.
And thirdly would love to see a more simplistic but super lean and functional OS built on something like the BSD.
I've been using linux as a daily driver since the start of the year.
There's still a long ways to go before things "just work". It's about equivalent to windows right now in terms of frustrations, it's just that frustrations are more along the lines of "this is a bit wonky" instead of "this is malicious / was their intended behavior". It's gotten a LOT better, don't get me wrong, but it's still far off from what a typical user would need.
I'd love to see either Valve or Nvidia really put in effort into creating their own hardware/software integration on a level that Apple does. I think it'd go a long way to legitimizing it.
Thank you for saying something I've been saying for awhile: Linux definitely has jank, but I'm not convinced it's more janky than Windows.
I think people are so used to Windows' awfulness that they kind of forget about how much bullshit is associated with it. Linux has bullshit too, though it's getting better, but when people talk about Linux jank they're always smuggling in an implication of Windows having less jank, which I don't concede at all.
Ah the time old classic. Go into the registry and change these 3 keys that seeming have zero relation to the problem at hand and restart your machine TWICE then its fixed.
Out of the box most popular distros require less tweaking and hammering into shape than a windows 11 install and that is a very important "feature"
I don’t think it’s a question that Linux has more jank. I recently installed a fedora spin on a laptop that came with regular Fedora installed originally and the WiFi didn’t work. That’s some janky stuff right there.
Meanwhile I haven’t had a wireless issue on Linux since 2010 or so.
I've had wifi drivers not work with fresh installs of Windows as well, so that's hardly a unique Linux thing. I've also had to reboot Windows into special modes because apparently a driver from a Broadcom WiFi card was "unsigned", so I had to disable the check for that.
I've also had registry corruptions, and I've had unprompted updates brick my hard drive because Windows Update is a terrible piece of software, because as far as I can tell the Windows "repair tools" have never worked for any human in history, and neither has System Restore.
I've had updates in Linux break things but never so thoroughly as the time my mom got an automatic update where she literally could not boot in at all (because I think that the automatic update to Windows 11 that she did not want or ask for screwed up the boot keys).
> fedora spin
Installing the equivalent of OS "slop" isn't Linux's fault... For better or worse the choice that is afforded by OSS licenses means that many of those choices will be bad.
After I replaced my last windows install a few years ago... Checking windows 11 on a friend's PC a few weeks ago was a nightmare. I considered myself a power user back in the day and I really struggled. So now I do have perspective from the other end and it fits the picture - windows is also jank it is just familiar jank for most people.
There is another point too. The trend with Linux is up and improving slowly over decades. And for windows it seems to be the reverse and faster.
I've been using Linux on the desktop off-and-on for 20 years. I used OSX for awhile 2008-2015 when they clearly had the best hardware, and the OS was pretty nice. I've been using KDE since then, and I recently installed Bazzite (Fedora+KDE-based) on my sans-windows gaming PC. I also started a new job this year, where I have to use the company-provided MBP for compliance reasons, after having not used MacOS since 2015. So all this is pretty fresh in my mind, and I'll say that 2025+ KDE is by far the best out-of-box experience for power users. It mostly just works, and anything you want to tweak is easy to find in the settings. Setting up modern MacOS with things like more keyboard shortcuts for window management, focus-follows-mouse or even remembering where windows where after waking up from sleep requires you to buy an app or pay a subscription.
Linux may break more often, but you can almost always fix it with a quick google search. If it doesn't do what you want, there's certainly a setting or config or free app you can install that does.
MacOS may break less often, but when it does you're mostly out of luck. It may do what you want more often, but if it doesn't you have to buy an app, if its even possible at all.
> Linux may break more often, but you can almost always fix it with a quick google search.
And that’s where the problem is: a quick google search. Laughably trivial for technical users.
Non-trivial for the majority of the population.
I love Linux and it is completely viable as a desktop operating system, but it’s far from ready for mainstream without better support.
For a rough analogy, I’d compare it to an old car before electronics. An old car is easy to work on and reliable if you do the maintenance. But an old car wouldn’t be reliable for somebody who doesn’t do any work on a car and outsources the maintenance.
Linux excels when things go right. The failure modes are substantially worse and far more likely to occur. It doesn’t matter if they’re rare. They’re not rare enough. And there isn’t support when things go wrong.
For example: It’s difficult to make the macOS UI fail to start through configuration. You never need to directly touch configuration. (And you can’t modify or delete macOS system files.)
With Linux, some normal problems just have to be solved in the terminal. This allows you to put the system into a configuration where the GUI does not start.
Have also been using Bazzite since march on my home desktop and you are spot on. I think the main reason for average person linux being difficult these days are laptops with weird hardware configurations.
I use MacOS at work and although it is miles better than windows, if I had a choice, I would also use Linux for work.
Me too, I was a 30 year Windows developer and Electronics Engineer so I went pretty conservative with Kubuntu LTS and it's been a pretty slick experience. Gemini has been great tech support for all the CLI stuff and getting all of my weirder hardware projects interfaced (100% success rate to date). Just considering whether to delete my windows partition to put my MP3's on, as realistically I'm not going to get any more Windows Programming gigs.
Yeah, for example a bunch of my system updates began showing scary error notes because somehow there is a header inconsistency between the amdgpu driver and the kernel.
I'm not regretting my choice, but it's also something where the average user can't just call Linux Support and get a "run X and it'll fix it" solution.
Do typical users care that much about a bit of jank, though? All the “typical users” I know are on spyware infested Windows laptops and just interpret the horrible shabbiness of the whole experience as being normal.
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This is the saddest part - they actually think computers suck that much and don't know their lives could be a lot easier.
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> "theres a big chance for someone like Nokia to come in and develop their own approved distro"
SUSE is a German company, so probably nothing to even develop.
Does SUSE normally come up in conversations about "easy to use" linux distros for "normal" users?
I'm not in that world, so this is a genuine question. The last time I looked at SUSE it seemed typically German in being uniquely complicated for no good reason, but that was years ago.
I remember SUSE not being harder to use then any other desktop distribution. But it has a lot, and I mean a lot of knobs to turn if you want to. But you don't have to.
I am suse user for 20+ years with a big break in between. To me it fits the best. Ubuntu I gave up on a while ago and came back to find things so much nicer.
They have a slightly different take on immutable than redhat but it also works well (rollback and all). Also the tumbleweed rolling is quite stable for a bleeding edge rolling release distro. Using it on a few boxes for the last few years and also installing it for other PC noobs and they seem fine with it.
Suse is easy to use, just not mainstream.
Yes. It was as easy to use as Windows was like 30 years ago. It's still easy to use.
The only difficult part about Linux is the fact that people can't learn, so absolutely anything being different from Windows is a roadblock to the average person (I still remember the societal meltdown when MS changed the interface in their Office apps, or Windows 8...)
Yeah, I think if Windows 11 is going subscription based (plus all the copilot pushing garbage and even more baked in ads) that will be a strong incentive to switch to Linux or SteamOS. I barely even play games enough anymore to make a desktop worthwhile. Might just jump to Mac only.
They can't do that, when they've already sold you lifetime licenses.
They could however introduce a subscription-only windows 12 and have harsh cut-off requirements like they did with windows 11.
A subscription-only OS would effectively kill Windows, but MS have made enough pretty weird decisions to cripple the product I wouldn't put it past them.
They also "can't" screengrab your credit card numbers or upload all your private data to their cloud for inspection, or steal your email password and download all your mail to a Microsoft server, or send fake emails about full OneDrive to trick you into subscribing.
"Can't" only applies when someone is willing to stop them, and nobody is. Microsoft can do pretty much anything they want and there's basically nothing you can do about it.
> "theres a big chance for someone like Nokia to come in and develop their own approved distro"
They killed any Linux device development at Nokia in 2011. Still salty about Elop shooting down a project we had spent 5 years working towards.
The holistic platform security for a combined phone/tablet base system would have been really interesting.
I'm not sure if I would have started using Linux but for buying an n800, so thanks for that.
We never did get around to our funeral for Nokia, sadly.
Hah, if you ever used the N800 media player you will have been exposed to a tiny bit of my code. Some of the UI polishes and usability tweaks were mine. (Well, someone else had figured out they needed to be done and the bug landed on my lap...)
"/* Here be dragons */" in a particularly hideous d-pointer punching chain must have been a surprise for whomever eventually picked it up.
I'll make sure I toast Nokia at Elop's funeral.
big player + (standard) linux desktop may well be coming, but that means losing the semi-anarchist bazaar mentality. Will the standard be gnome or KDE or XFCE or ...? If gnome, version 2 or 3? Firefox or chrome as the default browser (or derivatives like waterfox or plain chromium ...)? AI integration?
The moment you're developing for people with no IT experience and no CS degree, you're going to have to make tradeoffs like Microsoft or Google or Apple have to make today, and somehow deal with the "curl ... |sh" problem.
Why does there need to be a standard application for everything? Is there a default pencil vendor? A default printer vendor? Paper? Car manufacturer? Taxi company? Just let people buy/get whatever vendor/application they like. I rather see more interoperational standards.
I guarantee you, in a large enough organisation, there will be exactly one approved pencil supplier. That's how corporate purchasing works.
There's a lot of cases where this actually makes sense for compliance, support, and service level agreements between your org and the vendor's among many other cases. It just gets annoying when you absolutely cannot buy coffee beans from shop B on the team consumables budget because we have an exclusive contract with shop A.
In a governmental organisation, you might even need a public bidding process for any supplier contract big enough to cover printers and their ink/toner, as well as a support contract if something breaks.
Yeah, and this is fine. This is basically what I meant, a company can just select and potentially make a contract for a specific application. That's how it works for everything. My point was that there doesn't need to be the unique single global vendor/application a priori.
> but that means losing the semi-anarchist bazaar mentality.
The places you mention are already receiving huge doses of industry funding funnelled through the Linux Foundation. Honestly, it looks like the standard is going to be KDE. Even microsoft is copying it for their next DE: https://www.webpronews.com/microsoft-windows-ripping-off-kde...
Personally i think there is a huge innovationspace for pipe connected agents doing work for the user.. a example:
A firefox agent downloading pictures of cats.. piping them to a graphics program drawing mustaches on them piping them to a moviemaker piping them to a firefox video uploading "the longest catswithmustaches" shorts compilation ever.. all clicked together in a "incredibble machine" like explorer by a user who doesent even know how to code..
But you can do that already with bash pipes. Doing it through the GUI just adds mega complexity
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> Personally I think we are at an interim period for a big player to emerge and take over this space...
And even without a big player, the number of people who are entirely operational with just a browser at work is huge.
Many SMEs already realized they can switch seamlessly between Windows and OS X / MacOS and I see people working on either one or the other. For example a desktop PC running Windows and a Mac laptop is not uncommon.
I switched an employee at my wife's SME to... Debian! And the transition has been more than fine: they live in the browser (Google Workspace, paid company subscription). Unattended-upgrades, a user account that cannot sudo, and that's it.
The number of desktop PC running Windows that are actually glorified browsers has to be through the roof.
Once people realize there's no need to pay the double-whammy Microsoft tax (pay for a new Windows / also pay for a new PC), suddenly installing Linux becomes an option.
Now I know: using Linux and Google is not "getting rid of US tech". But it's "getting of Microsoft" and that is fine with me. I'll never ever forgive the mediocrity this company has brought onto the world.
honestly since the browser has more or less become the real operating system the host OS doesn't matter so much anymore. most people do 90% of their work in the browser anyway
The title is very far from the actual public statement that is linked in the article.
The French government announced that its digital agency will switch to Linux during this year. This is about a few hundreds of computers owned by the agency.
The second statement is that this agency is expected to publish, by the end of the year, a plan to reduce the digital dependency on the US. It's not "France to ditch Windows", it should be "French government promises to plan soon for possible ways to decrease digital dependencies, but calendar unknown". Also note that the government (and president) will change next year, so even if the present drive was real, a political u-turn could come soon.
Overall, this statement could be the presage of a major upturn in a few years, but I think it far more probable that the policy change will be minor. There's already a small tendency toward Linux and Free Software in the public sector.
Uh, TIL the DINUM still used Windows. I wonder what held them, it's certainly not a lack of familiarity with Linux.
I feel you're underselling the second statement a bit:
> Each ministry (including operators) will be required to finalize its own [migration] plan by fall
This sounds like there's actual pressure to start moving soon, especially for adopting existing DINUM solutions.
(I agree the title is clickbait.)
Canada has been using and developing FOSS for a while now.
There's still a great deal of Windows usage, but hopefully that will phase out with the passage of time. Canada's bureaucracy moves slowly, at the pace of generational attrition. It won't be until the last GenX retires that they could even meaningfully begin transitioning the average office worker away from Windows.
I work in government. Link 1 (2018) is essentially a dream. All of government got forced to use MS Dynamics CRM. Basically, anybody with a software requirement for case management, had to use MS Dynamics. I recommended we use Drupal in 2011. That was killed because everything had to be MS. I'm kind of surprised that it is in there given that nobody was allowed to use.
Link 0 and 2 are essentially from TBS and CDS. They coexist together. They are essentially working at the very top as entities that gather information from other departments. They can do whatever they want because they help write the rules.
I'm not trying to discredit your post, just saying that as someone who has brought OSS tools to development at the government and tried to use OSS tools for client (I failed at that), it is nearly impossible at the moment. We are married to Microsoft and its cloud.
I do agree, that it may take an entire generation because right now, 190+ departments are not exactly jumping to FOSS, and in many situations, they are down right told you are not allowed.
In addition, the current de facto document management system is from OpenText. Although many just use Sharepoint Online.
Ironically, as everything moves to the cloud, it would be easier to move to a solution that is FOSS based, and based in the cloud. Technology has matured enough that you don't need executables on a desktop, you just need a browser pointing to a website.
We use Microsoft Dynamics 365 (model-driven app) at work, it's rarely mentioned on HN and people don't know how insanely bad this P.O.S. software is.
From the botched implementations of AG Grid to their crippled version of CKEditor (with Copilot forced in of course), the daily bugs are an absolute nightmare.
And then most support tickets (if you can even open one after a forced chat session with Copilot), get handled by a third-party, most likely in India with different timezones than you and the support calls are a crapshoot.
The Phoenix contract predates the more recent efforts to switch to FOSS.
But also, Canada loves to burn money on American suppliers. It's probably why the recent interest in _Buy Canadian_ has the American administration annoyed.
Phoenix was a literal trap laid by the Conservative government just before leaving knowing it would be a shit show for the Liberals in the coming years.
I hope it succeeds and I hope they document the experience and invite interested parties to see how it was setup and how (well) it works in order to encourage as many governments and organisations as possible to do the same.
For sure, I would love for this approach to spill over to the US and cause them to sever any contracts they have with the EU member nations
I am saying this as a very long time Windows user, and it saddens me. Politics aside, from a pure technichal, functional, privacy and UX perspective, the case for changing over from Windows to Linux is getting stronger by the day.
I am saying this as a very long time Linux user, and it saddens me. Politics aside, from a pure technical, functional, privacy and UX perspective, the case for changing over from Windows has been apparent for several decades.
If you picked XFCE as your front end you get WinXP functionality, with the nice things from win10/11 (start menu search that's actually local only, multiple desktop workspaces, and graphical settings/updates I've only needed to go to command line twice in four years).
How does XFCE compare to KDE and GNOME? Also, does it has all the nice window snapping features that I'm used to fron Windows?
As a long time Linux user, this comment makes me sad since many of those features were copied from Linux (many from Unity) :)
I think most of its features predate unity (compiz was integrated but existed before)
Unity really was a great project.
KDE 6.6 is great to me, but there are some quirks I have found. Their "peek at desktop" feature is annoying, I want "minimize all" but you have to do some scripting to enable that.
I've noticed that clicking the network button to see wifi status shows traffic rate, and that seems to lag and I suspect it has an impact on throughput.
I'm interested in Cosmic when it matures some more.
I don't think all the same shortcuts exist out of the box, although win-drag/win-right-drag to move and resize windows (might be alt by default) is _so_ much more convenient than the usual border/title dragging that you might find you don't miss them.
My personal PCs have enough screens that I haven't tried. Though I do really like Windows snapping features on my work laptop (can't change OS there).
I haven't played with other windowing systems to judge too much. And just picked right from screen shots/gifs to not need to try.
I think France seem serious in actually switching to open source/EU software. I recently had a telecon on Visio (France's Teams/Zoom substitute) and it worked well in a browser with ~ 10 participants.
I applaud France for this decision. Windows is basically legal spyware and adware at this point
Like most Microsoft products, Windows is a tool that benefits mostly from aggressive early marketing and successfully convincing everyone that they need this product, and by the time everyone realizes how terrible the product is it's too late because everything already depends on it.
They have done this everywhere; Microsoft Office is everywhere and terrible. Sharepoint used to be everywhere and is terrible. I know they bought it, but LinkedIn is nearly required everywhere and terrible. Teams seems to be increasingly used everywhere and terrible. And of course Windows is everywhere and terrible.
As far as I can tell, there is not a single thing that Microsoft does not half-ass. They're not a software company, they're a marketing company that sells software.
Now they somehow got the management of large companies to also push to adopt Azure, with an aggressive "no capex" / "you pay for what you use" campaign when everyone knows their offering work terribly and are overpriced.
if Home Depot were to make an exam to pass a certification over their catalog, that would seem ridiculous.
But when Microsoft does this, management ppl are happy and feel like they manage when they sign up everyone for AZ900 "certification"
Wish it would succeed, other day was reading about stuff and figure out, how much European Tech is actually controlled by American/Israeli Hegemony.
I'm sure there's a barely functioning business critical app that runs exclusively on Windows NT in their administration that would beg to differ
If it only runs on NT, it'll work better under WINE than on Win10/11.
Legacy app compat is actually an argument for moving to Linux.
It can be ported to React under a single prompt by now, don’t you know?
But certainly we are already at stage where Windows NT can be regenerated on the fly from a prompt anyway, aren’t we?
Otherwise, there is also ReactOS that could be leveraged on for that kind of scenario. I wonder where it would stand by now if all the money that governments around the world spent in Microsoft license would have been invested in it instead.
Sure. But if they can successfully convert 99% of their computers to non-Windows and non-Mac, that'd still be a massive win.
Ideology may actually be the best way to cut off legacy bullshit like this. There's passion-energy, which really gets the creative problem-solving juices flowing.
Good. The US is gone.
I’ve commented on this before but you’ll know France is serious when there are Linux ports of Solidworks and Catia.
France has a real edge over American companies by being the dominant player in the CAD world, it’s always surprised me that they nerfed that advantage by tying to an American operating system.
Autocad has 39% market share in CAD, Solidworks has 14% market share, and Fusion 360 has 9%.
None of this is a major national advantage for any side. It's bizarre to think that the US or France would treat this as some kind of mark of national influence, since if anything happens to these top three vendors, there are lots of other vendors waiting in the wings. It's not like a national oil reserve, where it's important that you have a reserve of CAD software available for your engineers.
But what kind of projects are people using these different pieces of software for?
Are people designing aircraft carriers in Fusion?
Don't get me wrong, I understand that AutoCAD is extremely important for architecture and the death grip that AutoDesk has over that industry needs to be broken for the benefit of all of us, but from my understanding Dessault Systems makes software that is used for totally different purposes and is of vital strategic importance for a nation that wants an independent MIC which France obviously does.
So it seems foolish to me for them to have their own CAD software that can and is used to design weapons but be dependent on an American operating system produced by a particularly unscrupulous company who is obsessed with tighter and tigher control and has definite ties to the US intelligence apparatus.
The idea that autocad has a "death grip" on the industry is laughable to me.
Fusion360 -> PTC Onshape
AutoCAD -> BricsCAD
Inventor -> Easily outclassed by NX/SolidEdge, Solidworks/CATIA and Creo
>Are people designing aircraft carriers in Fusion?
I don't know, but I have watched people designing high-speed trains in CATIA.
Big players use CATIA and Siemens NX almost exclusively. I don’t know many using Autocad, maybe architectural firms.
I doubt that the US military itself is using commercial CAD software, most likely they are using something in house. Again, CAD software is not Extreme Ultra Lithography, where it is a marvel of engineering and can only be produced by one firm. The netherlands can rightly be proud of ASML as a national achievement. But CAD software? Now that's just goofy.
But I would assume defense contractors -- the private firms like Lockheed -- are probably using commercial software. The US military is pretty bureaucratic and is filled with bespoke stuff, whereas the contractors are basically businesses and would use whatever is common in commercial business world.
Wasn't CATIA running on unix even before it ran on Windows?
>The French government did not provide a specific timeline for the switchover, or which distributions it was considering.
Do they realize they need to pick a LTS distro now? You can't mix and match distros without having a massive IT and user retraining budgets.
Just pick nixOS and provide base nixosConfiguration. tada.
Why would you need any user retraining?
All distros are basically identical. The only real difference is whether you spell "package manager" as apt, yum, or dnf.
For people with a level of technical literacy that has them interested in posting on HN, sure. But for typical government workers? I imagine the differences are going to be pretty significant. They're not programmers or "devops" people.
We're talking about users who are going to do almost everything through the GUI, and who will associate the "distro" with the default choice of DE/WM/etc. stack in whichever flavour of whichever distro it is. Understanding what a "package manager" even is, will be the responsibility of "IT" specialists. Assuming they don't decide that only, say, Flatpak-installable software can be approved.
We're talking about massively bureaucratic institutions that have been steeped in Windows orthodoxy for decades. That's the administration policy they know, so it's what they will forcibly adapt to Linux.
You're going to need user retraining because the GUI has its own file manager program and no matter which one you choose (and they will choose exactly one) it is not Explorer. Because LibreOffice is not the Microsoft Office suite, and neither is any of its FOSS competitors. And so on and so forth. There's no telling what idiosyncrasies people depend on. In organizations like this I really doubt you can count on everyone being generically computer literate. I really doubt that generic computer literacy (as opposed to demonstrated competence with specific applications) was ever part of the hiring requirements.
> But for typical government workers? I imagine the differences are going to be pretty significant. They're not programmers or "devops" people.
How much retraining do you need for "click on the orange and blue spinny fox thingy and wait for your email to come up"?
> because the GUI has its own file manager program and no matter which one you choose (and they will choose exactly one) it is not Explorer
Nobody is ever going to use it. They're going to use a web browser.
> There's no telling what idiosyncrasies people depend on.
Funny way of spelling "Firefox bugs", but whatever.
> In organizations like this I really doubt you can count on everyone being generically computer literate
Basic adult literacy is computer literacy. If you can read you can use a computer.
I get the sense you haven't worked with many non-technical people in government or enterprise contexts. I've seen people struggle with their workflows after upgrading to a newer version of Windows, to the point where company wide training sessions have had to be held.
This comment is completely out of touch with how typical office workers use their computers. "Package manager" is your feldspars. But it's even worse than that, because you don't train for the typical employee, you train for the least-technical employee lest they become completely useless overnight.
> because you don't train for the typical employee, you train for the least-technical employee lest they become completely useless overnight.
"Click on the blue and orange spinny fox thingy" is easy for even the thickest user.
> "Package manager" is your feldspars.
I hate that I understood this.
Yes. Noting that yum and dnf are basically the same.
>All distros are basically identical.
Have you ever used the Linux OS??
Let me guess, you're impressed by desktop decorations and which file-browser is the default.
Ubuntu differs from Fedora only in newbie stuff, for instance.
Yes, since it came on two 1.44MB floppies.
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They likely don't. It's a purely political move not a technical move. With the average length of the French work week, this will take a while to implement anyway.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great thought but I don't think it's more than a short-sighted reaction. Munich unfortunately faltered after a few years.
The french Gendarmerie already migrated to GendBunto, their own distribution. It took a while but it's now running on 97% of all workstations.
I wouldn't call this just political fluff.
> With the average length of the French work week, this will take a while to implement anyway.
35 instead of 40? I don't think an extra 5 hours a week is really going to move the needle in a meaningful way.
Who do they think writes Linux? The European Commission? They’re on the US tech stack whether they want to be or not, and nobody in Europe has the will or resources to pull a China and make their own alternative. More’s the pity.
Linux was created by an European. And there are many European distros. Even Canonical is European.
But that's besides the point. The point is no company owns linux so you're not tied to big tech even if they are the biggest contributors to the kernel.
Moreover for the folks in the back row...
We may see Canonical or other commercial Linux vendors come forward with a government or enterprise-flavored solution for all this. But the important thing to keep in mind is that they're not selling Linux per-se. As the GPL prohibits this, these companies sell support for their Linux distro instead. That revenue goes into improving Linux and maintaining their distro (e.g. Ubuntu). But even with all that money changing hands, that they do not own Linux, the Linux kernel, or any other shred of GPL licensed stuff.
2/3 major commercial Linux vendors are European, the author and BDFL of the Kernel is European and a ton of contributors of many projects are European (Qt and KDE come to mind). Yes IBM Hat has a lot of influence but they're not the only ones developing Linux.
Wish the Bangladeshi government did this instead of relying on pirated copies of Windows 7
At least they know enough to have stuck with the outright best version of Windows.
I know this might be a controversial take but nevertheless I will state my opinion: I do not think "the year of the Linux desktop" is the good idea that most people seem to think. Everything that gets the eye of Sauron on it proceeds to become a complete mess.
Resources always win. All that is needed to ruin an open project is dump money into heavy development up to the point where it becomes impossible to do without it. Plenty such cases already.
This also ruins the development of the project akin to feeding wild life, you get them dependent on you, and if you stop feeding them they lose the ability to feed themselves in the wild. Such is the Linux ecosystem, based on a type of work that so far made a great project for people who have a bit of technical skills. Making it more accessible to the masses only brings that kind of bullshit into it. Inevitably. There is no way something of such importance, to the masses, won't get corrupted in one way or another. That never happens, if there is too much interest there will be funds dumped into corrupting it, one way or another.
The best path forward for Linux was as before, to fly just under the radar, to bee a bit too complicated for most people. This is what protects it. Most, if anyone, don't seem to understand this very simple fact. No older Linux user gets anything worthwhile out of this deal, nothing relevant, just inevitable enshitification of it. Historically proven over and over again. I find "the year of the Linux desktop" to be a childish take in a world that functions on completely different principles.
edit: To add a bit more context, Windows is not the mess that it is today because of evil Microsoft, it is a reflection of its user-base. Same with Linux.
They did that to Windows, with their behavior, with accepting all that nonsense.
You want to bring the very same type of people, with that kind of attitude, in Linux, what exactly do you thing is going to happen? They will adapt to Linux mentality or they'll proceed to ruin Linux with their behavior? I can take a good guess on what will happen. People will people, and corpos will corpo to milk them.
Linux is already integral to the tech and enterprise worlds, which have a lot more money to throw around the consumer desktop space. I'm having trouble seeing how Linux becoming a more popular consumer OS would lead to the types of problems you're talking about, if being a leader in the server space hasn't already led to them.
Also, Linux has a built-in mechanism against enshittification, which is its open source and multiple flavors. Ubuntu becomes enshittified? Move to Fedora. You can have a dumbed down consumer-friendly distro without affecting Arch.
Ditch iOS and Android for a Blackberry OS / Nokia ?
Really, are there any alternatives?
SailfishOS, Ubuntu touch, and postmarketOS to name a few from the top of my dome.
Nokia isn't really an alternative at all since M$ bought it.
Motorola and grapheneos? If only the French government weren't attacking Graphene.
As for desktop, I suppose the only major European options are Ubuntu and SUSE with corporate backing.
The French government and Murena (makers of /e/OS). They are spouting nonsense that security hardening is only for pedophiles and spies:
It's ironic that a company that pretends to be for privacy is using the same think of the children argument as those pushing Chat Control, age verification, etc. Of course, their privacy is mostly a farce, since they have also been caught uploading data to OpenAI for text-to-speechi
I hope that more European governments will start supporting GrapheneOS, since it can compete with Apple on security and is better than Apple and GMS Android when it comes to privacy.
man, that's great - but can you imagine some bureaucrat lifer having to adapt to this?
There are few things in life more satisfying than forcing bureaucrat lifers to expand their minds.
we need more tech literacy overall, so this might help with that also
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Please tell me this also means that they are redirecting the expenses currently going to Microsoft into funding open source development?
I wish the US Government would do the same
I wonder if anyone in trumpland has thought of a T-branded distro.
Considering that most distros are basically just a new set of desktop backgrounds, this seems like a sure thing!
Political posturing that will never actually occur.
Any closed source, centralized system is going to be higher risk than an open source distributed system that can be independently verified and audited by multiple parties.
You just have to be willing to put in the investment to verify/review with parties that meet your needs.
Now nextcloud and libreoffice should give up the stupid drama and focus on beating microsoft.
Desktop Linux's security and antimalware solutions are not ready for government usage. This is a cyber attack waiting to happen if they go through with this. They should at least switch to ChromeOS if they want to use Linux.
Some might be tempted to brush aside that Server Linux threat model is very different from Desktop Linux (to snarkily reply "we'll it's powering a vast majority of GDP via all of AWS, Azure, etc.").
However comparing apples to apples, what makes you say this isn't ready for government usage, when it's ready for trillion dollar big tech companies' majority of their workforce? (Aside from Microsoft, Apple obviously). Large employers like IBM etc also must be using red hat or some other distro
You mean switch Windows by Microsoft for ChromeOS by Google? Weird suggestion.
As for "security" and "antimalware" solutions being ready, I don't think there is much difference between the OSs there. Windows is no candyland either.
As always, they will need competent people in the right places to pull this through. Tech is just an enabler.
Yes I do mean that. Google is one of the only companies in the Linux space who takes security seriously.
There is no security when the US government can legally compel Google to do whatever they want. This is why foreign governments want to move away from big tech.
Turns out the imperial boomerang impacts many things, especially when previous orders are easily destroyed (because only one country was benefiting).
And switching to Google achieves the aim of getting away from American tech giants?
I don't think it's a wise thing to do at this point in time. There is more risk by not depending on America.
If that really is the case, why not stay on Windows?
We're going to keep seeing this due to destabilization and political changes in the US. It drives nationalization elsewhere, even among allies.
This is exactly what I'm seeing in working with companies in Belgium, Germany and France.
It's not just about costs- managers are actively seeking to distance themselves from everything US.
We've stopped treating them like allies. Who's to blame them?
It doesn't help that Microsoft seems to be doing everything in its power to alienate Windows users.
This, I've officially been off Windows for a few months and will not be looking back. Microsoft has put a bad taste in my mouth as a developer.
By luck and happenstance, I tuned into the Omacon conference this morning and my perspective on personal computing very much aligns with theirs. Would encourage a least watch the kickoff keynote if the VODs drop.
this has been happening on and off for ~10+ yrs. MS cost are too high and you need more expensive computers to have the MS sub-par experience.
the main thing that keeps people locked in is (a) "Im use to windows" and (b) MS gives them some special contract to keep them.
What? Again?
I lost count, it's how many attempts again? Fill me in.
The gendarmerie already switched.
Only place I know that went back to MS is Munich city council. After MS put a big research office in the town.
As far as I know it was successful for the gendarmerie and assemblée nationale for exemple. There are many public entities and apparently each migration is news worthy
It needs just 1 successful attemp.
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Munich is a bad example - they were effectively „bought out“ by Microsoft by investing hugely into the local economy in the form of offices and employees. It was also two parties that kept flip flopping with different priorities.
Linux itself had some hiccups but was fine from what I recall.
It doesn't matter if this or that doesn't work. Or if Microslop pressures to continue using Winslop.
Now the reasons are geopolitical.
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You must be German — the French state is a lot more top down than Germany with its regions, so generally these kinds of mandates get applied broadly
[Yeah, if I'm just gonna be down-voted to oblivion regardless of my participation in the comments, good luck with your 'meaningful discussion'}
Sorry I didn't see your reply, what was it about?
Werent the munich government employees quite happy with linux, but microsofts lobbying with their headquarters got them to switch back?
Were they? Sounded like they stuck with some terrible old version of OpenOffice ("brokenoffice"). Users don't really care about the OS, its the apps.
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> I'm not aware of Microsoft's economic footprint in the Munich region, but I doubt it's significant.
Perhaps be aware before explaining everyone how things really are?
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I've never seen a user replace all their comments with
"[Yeah, if I'm just gonna be down-voted to oblivion regardless of my participation in the comments, good luck with your 'meaningful discussion'}"
making it impossible for others to read their original comments. If this now becomes a trend I feel like there may be a need to change the rules around editing.
@dang is it something on your radar? Lots of people do this on Reddit and it makes some threads unusable.
Earlier attempts were mostly about money and ideology. Now its a question of security, thanks to one 'clever' 'businessman'.
So thanks to his _great_ efforts, it might actually work out this time.
[Yeah, if I'm just gonna be down-voted to oblivion regardless of my participation in the comments, good luck with your 'meaningful discussion'}
If they only diverted 10% of the budget from MS to solving issues they’d have had a solution a decade or two ago.
[Yeah, if I'm just gonna be down-voted to oblivion regardless of my participation in the comments, good luck with your 'meaningful discussion'}
All of that came about without them spending anything. So the extra is just to fix bugs and do integration work. StarOffice (LibreOffice ancestor) existed in the 90s—I used it and it was fine for government work.
File storage? Cheap by Y2K as well.
[Yeah, if I'm just gonna be down-voted to oblivion regardless of my participation in the comments, good luck with your 'meaningful discussion'}
It's really cheap to run FOSS on commodity PCs in the twenty first century. Hetzner is very reasonable in the cloud more recently.
It's not a binary switch either, you build the platform bit by bit every year and roll it out to more and more workers. Four dimensional thinking, that could have succeeded already, a decade plus ago.
Sure a few components would have to be written in the meantime. Just a few million a year would be a huge boost to gaps in FOSS.
You’re saying a government couldn’t take open source building blocks and run.. office apps with basic security and.. file storage? For $100M a year? This could be done with a 30 person team
30 people managing the hardware? Sure, if you get good deals on the hardware itself, the employees stay healthy, and you have everything so centralised you don't need multiple people on call.
Centralising things to that level and supporting the users of the entire government structure of a country the size of France -- one of the countries the sun _never_ sets on -- while it's transitioning from decades of Microsoft dependency to an open source ecosystem? Heh, no.
Hetzner exists.
The claim above of 30 is not particularly important, the point is to lean on the community. Millions a year would get you incredibly far. Many are already helping for free.
24/7 linux webservers existed already by the late nineties.
[Yeah, if I'm just gonna be down-voted to oblivion regardless of my participation in the comments, good luck with your 'meaningful discussion'}
Munich led to "all of Schleswig-Holstein" in Germany. 44,000 Exchange mailboxes replaced with Open-Xchange. 25,000 Windows+Office desktops replaced with Linux+OpenOffice.
[Yeah, if I'm just gonna be down-voted to oblivion regardless of my participation in the comments, good luck with your 'meaningful discussion'}
Motivation matters.
[Yeah, if I'm just gonna be down-voted to oblivion regardless of my participation in the comments, good luck with your 'meaningful discussion'}
The fact that open source is a national security concern should have been something that a crazy orange man should have triggered.
Thus was obvious decades ago. And open source is the key model for collective development in a secure manner for disparate countries to secure their software base.
Alas, I fear they will only concentrate on the server side. The securing of the desktop should be a parallel concern as well, to help prevent your citizenry from becoming DDOS slaves.
I understand what they mean, linux offers freedom, enough that it divorces your tech stack from any one company.
But isn't linux US tech? The blueprint, UNIX was a US project, torvolds works from the US. the original userland GNU was a US based project. The new userland systemd is a US based project.
> But isn't linux US tech?
If you want to discuss it on that level, it if Finnish tech imported to the USA, inspired by a Dutch implementation of a research OS.
On a more serious note, Linux has been developed by many individuals all over the world, you can't put a nationality stamp on it.
Linux is a global project, and open source more broadly is also of course global.
Linux Mint (the distro I use) was started and is led by French developer Clement Lefebvre.
QEMU and FFmpeg are among the notable projects started by French developer Fabrice Bellard.
VLC was started by students of École Centrale Paris.
These are just the things that I know about as an American, so I'm sure there are more.
The difference, of course, is that they can inspect the source, and should the US try to use it as leverage they can just fork and continue on.
GNU was never anything but a flag-of-convenience. The number of people who take RMS seriously was and is small.
The age of the Linux desktop might actually finally be coming
Personally I think we are at an interim period for a big player to emerge and take over this space. If enough governments in the EU start switching over to customized linux distros theres a big chance for someone like Nokia to come in and develop their own approved distro with proper MDM and GPO-like management functionality baked in .
On top of that it could be great to see SteamOS continue to gain share and become more than just something people run on gaming purpose hardware.
And thirdly would love to see a more simplistic but super lean and functional OS built on something like the BSD.
I've been using linux as a daily driver since the start of the year.
There's still a long ways to go before things "just work". It's about equivalent to windows right now in terms of frustrations, it's just that frustrations are more along the lines of "this is a bit wonky" instead of "this is malicious / was their intended behavior". It's gotten a LOT better, don't get me wrong, but it's still far off from what a typical user would need.
I'd love to see either Valve or Nvidia really put in effort into creating their own hardware/software integration on a level that Apple does. I think it'd go a long way to legitimizing it.
Thank you for saying something I've been saying for awhile: Linux definitely has jank, but I'm not convinced it's more janky than Windows.
I think people are so used to Windows' awfulness that they kind of forget about how much bullshit is associated with it. Linux has bullshit too, though it's getting better, but when people talk about Linux jank they're always smuggling in an implication of Windows having less jank, which I don't concede at all.
Ah the time old classic. Go into the registry and change these 3 keys that seeming have zero relation to the problem at hand and restart your machine TWICE then its fixed.
Out of the box most popular distros require less tweaking and hammering into shape than a windows 11 install and that is a very important "feature"
I don’t think it’s a question that Linux has more jank. I recently installed a fedora spin on a laptop that came with regular Fedora installed originally and the WiFi didn’t work. That’s some janky stuff right there.
Meanwhile I haven’t had a wireless issue on Linux since 2010 or so.
I've had wifi drivers not work with fresh installs of Windows as well, so that's hardly a unique Linux thing. I've also had to reboot Windows into special modes because apparently a driver from a Broadcom WiFi card was "unsigned", so I had to disable the check for that.
I've also had registry corruptions, and I've had unprompted updates brick my hard drive because Windows Update is a terrible piece of software, because as far as I can tell the Windows "repair tools" have never worked for any human in history, and neither has System Restore.
I've had updates in Linux break things but never so thoroughly as the time my mom got an automatic update where she literally could not boot in at all (because I think that the automatic update to Windows 11 that she did not want or ask for screwed up the boot keys).
> fedora spin
Installing the equivalent of OS "slop" isn't Linux's fault... For better or worse the choice that is afforded by OSS licenses means that many of those choices will be bad.
After I replaced my last windows install a few years ago... Checking windows 11 on a friend's PC a few weeks ago was a nightmare. I considered myself a power user back in the day and I really struggled. So now I do have perspective from the other end and it fits the picture - windows is also jank it is just familiar jank for most people.
There is another point too. The trend with Linux is up and improving slowly over decades. And for windows it seems to be the reverse and faster.
I've been using Linux on the desktop off-and-on for 20 years. I used OSX for awhile 2008-2015 when they clearly had the best hardware, and the OS was pretty nice. I've been using KDE since then, and I recently installed Bazzite (Fedora+KDE-based) on my sans-windows gaming PC. I also started a new job this year, where I have to use the company-provided MBP for compliance reasons, after having not used MacOS since 2015. So all this is pretty fresh in my mind, and I'll say that 2025+ KDE is by far the best out-of-box experience for power users. It mostly just works, and anything you want to tweak is easy to find in the settings. Setting up modern MacOS with things like more keyboard shortcuts for window management, focus-follows-mouse or even remembering where windows where after waking up from sleep requires you to buy an app or pay a subscription.
Linux may break more often, but you can almost always fix it with a quick google search. If it doesn't do what you want, there's certainly a setting or config or free app you can install that does.
MacOS may break less often, but when it does you're mostly out of luck. It may do what you want more often, but if it doesn't you have to buy an app, if its even possible at all.
> Linux may break more often, but you can almost always fix it with a quick google search.
And that’s where the problem is: a quick google search. Laughably trivial for technical users. Non-trivial for the majority of the population.
I love Linux and it is completely viable as a desktop operating system, but it’s far from ready for mainstream without better support.
For a rough analogy, I’d compare it to an old car before electronics. An old car is easy to work on and reliable if you do the maintenance. But an old car wouldn’t be reliable for somebody who doesn’t do any work on a car and outsources the maintenance.
Linux excels when things go right. The failure modes are substantially worse and far more likely to occur. It doesn’t matter if they’re rare. They’re not rare enough. And there isn’t support when things go wrong.
For example: It’s difficult to make the macOS UI fail to start through configuration. You never need to directly touch configuration. (And you can’t modify or delete macOS system files.)
With Linux, some normal problems just have to be solved in the terminal. This allows you to put the system into a configuration where the GUI does not start.
Have also been using Bazzite since march on my home desktop and you are spot on. I think the main reason for average person linux being difficult these days are laptops with weird hardware configurations.
I use MacOS at work and although it is miles better than windows, if I had a choice, I would also use Linux for work.
Me too, I was a 30 year Windows developer and Electronics Engineer so I went pretty conservative with Kubuntu LTS and it's been a pretty slick experience. Gemini has been great tech support for all the CLI stuff and getting all of my weirder hardware projects interfaced (100% success rate to date). Just considering whether to delete my windows partition to put my MP3's on, as realistically I'm not going to get any more Windows Programming gigs.
Yeah, for example a bunch of my system updates began showing scary error notes because somehow there is a header inconsistency between the amdgpu driver and the kernel.
I'm not regretting my choice, but it's also something where the average user can't just call Linux Support and get a "run X and it'll fix it" solution.
Do typical users care that much about a bit of jank, though? All the “typical users” I know are on spyware infested Windows laptops and just interpret the horrible shabbiness of the whole experience as being normal.
This is the saddest part - they actually think computers suck that much and don't know their lives could be a lot easier.
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> "theres a big chance for someone like Nokia to come in and develop their own approved distro"
SUSE is a German company, so probably nothing to even develop.
Does SUSE normally come up in conversations about "easy to use" linux distros for "normal" users?
I'm not in that world, so this is a genuine question. The last time I looked at SUSE it seemed typically German in being uniquely complicated for no good reason, but that was years ago.
I remember SUSE not being harder to use then any other desktop distribution. But it has a lot, and I mean a lot of knobs to turn if you want to. But you don't have to.
I am suse user for 20+ years with a big break in between. To me it fits the best. Ubuntu I gave up on a while ago and came back to find things so much nicer.
They have a slightly different take on immutable than redhat but it also works well (rollback and all). Also the tumbleweed rolling is quite stable for a bleeding edge rolling release distro. Using it on a few boxes for the last few years and also installing it for other PC noobs and they seem fine with it.
Suse is easy to use, just not mainstream.
Yes. It was as easy to use as Windows was like 30 years ago. It's still easy to use.
The only difficult part about Linux is the fact that people can't learn, so absolutely anything being different from Windows is a roadblock to the average person (I still remember the societal meltdown when MS changed the interface in their Office apps, or Windows 8...)
Yeah, I think if Windows 11 is going subscription based (plus all the copilot pushing garbage and even more baked in ads) that will be a strong incentive to switch to Linux or SteamOS. I barely even play games enough anymore to make a desktop worthwhile. Might just jump to Mac only.
They can't do that, when they've already sold you lifetime licenses.
They could however introduce a subscription-only windows 12 and have harsh cut-off requirements like they did with windows 11.
A subscription-only OS would effectively kill Windows, but MS have made enough pretty weird decisions to cripple the product I wouldn't put it past them.
They also "can't" screengrab your credit card numbers or upload all your private data to their cloud for inspection, or steal your email password and download all your mail to a Microsoft server, or send fake emails about full OneDrive to trick you into subscribing.
"Can't" only applies when someone is willing to stop them, and nobody is. Microsoft can do pretty much anything they want and there's basically nothing you can do about it.
> "theres a big chance for someone like Nokia to come in and develop their own approved distro"
Microsoft bought Nokia's devices and services division for Windows Mobile in 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Mobile
They killed any Linux device development at Nokia in 2011. Still salty about Elop shooting down a project we had spent 5 years working towards.
The holistic platform security for a combined phone/tablet base system would have been really interesting.
I'm not sure if I would have started using Linux but for buying an n800, so thanks for that.
We never did get around to our funeral for Nokia, sadly.
Hah, if you ever used the N800 media player you will have been exposed to a tiny bit of my code. Some of the UI polishes and usability tweaks were mine. (Well, someone else had figured out they needed to be done and the bug landed on my lap...)
"/* Here be dragons */" in a particularly hideous d-pointer punching chain must have been a surprise for whomever eventually picked it up.
I'll make sure I toast Nokia at Elop's funeral.
big player + (standard) linux desktop may well be coming, but that means losing the semi-anarchist bazaar mentality. Will the standard be gnome or KDE or XFCE or ...? If gnome, version 2 or 3? Firefox or chrome as the default browser (or derivatives like waterfox or plain chromium ...)? AI integration?
The moment you're developing for people with no IT experience and no CS degree, you're going to have to make tradeoffs like Microsoft or Google or Apple have to make today, and somehow deal with the "curl ... |sh" problem.
Why does there need to be a standard application for everything? Is there a default pencil vendor? A default printer vendor? Paper? Car manufacturer? Taxi company? Just let people buy/get whatever vendor/application they like. I rather see more interoperational standards.
I guarantee you, in a large enough organisation, there will be exactly one approved pencil supplier. That's how corporate purchasing works.
There's a lot of cases where this actually makes sense for compliance, support, and service level agreements between your org and the vendor's among many other cases. It just gets annoying when you absolutely cannot buy coffee beans from shop B on the team consumables budget because we have an exclusive contract with shop A.
In a governmental organisation, you might even need a public bidding process for any supplier contract big enough to cover printers and their ink/toner, as well as a support contract if something breaks.
Yeah, and this is fine. This is basically what I meant, a company can just select and potentially make a contract for a specific application. That's how it works for everything. My point was that there doesn't need to be the unique single global vendor/application a priori.
> but that means losing the semi-anarchist bazaar mentality.
The places you mention are already receiving huge doses of industry funding funnelled through the Linux Foundation. Honestly, it looks like the standard is going to be KDE. Even microsoft is copying it for their next DE: https://www.webpronews.com/microsoft-windows-ripping-off-kde...
Personally i think there is a huge innovationspace for pipe connected agents doing work for the user.. a example:
A firefox agent downloading pictures of cats.. piping them to a graphics program drawing mustaches on them piping them to a moviemaker piping them to a firefox video uploading "the longest catswithmustaches" shorts compilation ever.. all clicked together in a "incredibble machine" like explorer by a user who doesent even know how to code..
But you can do that already with bash pipes. Doing it through the GUI just adds mega complexity
> Personally I think we are at an interim period for a big player to emerge and take over this space...
And even without a big player, the number of people who are entirely operational with just a browser at work is huge.
Many SMEs already realized they can switch seamlessly between Windows and OS X / MacOS and I see people working on either one or the other. For example a desktop PC running Windows and a Mac laptop is not uncommon.
I switched an employee at my wife's SME to... Debian! And the transition has been more than fine: they live in the browser (Google Workspace, paid company subscription). Unattended-upgrades, a user account that cannot sudo, and that's it.
The number of desktop PC running Windows that are actually glorified browsers has to be through the roof.
Once people realize there's no need to pay the double-whammy Microsoft tax (pay for a new Windows / also pay for a new PC), suddenly installing Linux becomes an option.
Now I know: using Linux and Google is not "getting rid of US tech". But it's "getting of Microsoft" and that is fine with me. I'll never ever forgive the mediocrity this company has brought onto the world.
honestly since the browser has more or less become the real operating system the host OS doesn't matter so much anymore. most people do 90% of their work in the browser anyway
There's an xkcd for that ;) https://xkcd.com/934/
The title is very far from the actual public statement that is linked in the article.
The French government announced that its digital agency will switch to Linux during this year. This is about a few hundreds of computers owned by the agency.
The second statement is that this agency is expected to publish, by the end of the year, a plan to reduce the digital dependency on the US. It's not "France to ditch Windows", it should be "French government promises to plan soon for possible ways to decrease digital dependencies, but calendar unknown". Also note that the government (and president) will change next year, so even if the present drive was real, a political u-turn could come soon.
Overall, this statement could be the presage of a major upturn in a few years, but I think it far more probable that the policy change will be minor. There's already a small tendency toward Linux and Free Software in the public sector.
Uh, TIL the DINUM still used Windows. I wonder what held them, it's certainly not a lack of familiarity with Linux.
I feel you're underselling the second statement a bit:
> Each ministry (including operators) will be required to finalize its own [migration] plan by fall
This sounds like there's actual pressure to start moving soon, especially for adopting existing DINUM solutions.
(I agree the title is clickbait.)
Canada has been using and developing FOSS for a while now.
0: https://www.canada.ca/en/government/system/digital-governmen...
1: https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...
2: https://github.com/canada-ca/
There's still a great deal of Windows usage, but hopefully that will phase out with the passage of time. Canada's bureaucracy moves slowly, at the pace of generational attrition. It won't be until the last GenX retires that they could even meaningfully begin transitioning the average office worker away from Windows.
I work in government. Link 1 (2018) is essentially a dream. All of government got forced to use MS Dynamics CRM. Basically, anybody with a software requirement for case management, had to use MS Dynamics. I recommended we use Drupal in 2011. That was killed because everything had to be MS. I'm kind of surprised that it is in there given that nobody was allowed to use.
Link 0 and 2 are essentially from TBS and CDS. They coexist together. They are essentially working at the very top as entities that gather information from other departments. They can do whatever they want because they help write the rules.
I'm not trying to discredit your post, just saying that as someone who has brought OSS tools to development at the government and tried to use OSS tools for client (I failed at that), it is nearly impossible at the moment. We are married to Microsoft and its cloud.
I do agree, that it may take an entire generation because right now, 190+ departments are not exactly jumping to FOSS, and in many situations, they are down right told you are not allowed.
In addition, the current de facto document management system is from OpenText. Although many just use Sharepoint Online.
Ironically, as everything moves to the cloud, it would be easier to move to a solution that is FOSS based, and based in the cloud. Technology has matured enough that you don't need executables on a desktop, you just need a browser pointing to a website.
We use Microsoft Dynamics 365 (model-driven app) at work, it's rarely mentioned on HN and people don't know how insanely bad this P.O.S. software is.
From the botched implementations of AG Grid to their crippled version of CKEditor (with Copilot forced in of course), the daily bugs are an absolute nightmare.
And then most support tickets (if you can even open one after a forced chat session with Copilot), get handled by a third-party, most likely in India with different timezones than you and the support calls are a crapshoot.
Apparently not everyone got the memo...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/federal-phoenix-pay-sy...
The Phoenix contract predates the more recent efforts to switch to FOSS.
But also, Canada loves to burn money on American suppliers. It's probably why the recent interest in _Buy Canadian_ has the American administration annoyed.
Phoenix was a literal trap laid by the Conservative government just before leaving knowing it would be a shit show for the Liberals in the coming years.
I hope it succeeds and I hope they document the experience and invite interested parties to see how it was setup and how (well) it works in order to encourage as many governments and organisations as possible to do the same.
For sure, I would love for this approach to spill over to the US and cause them to sever any contracts they have with the EU member nations
I am saying this as a very long time Windows user, and it saddens me. Politics aside, from a pure technichal, functional, privacy and UX perspective, the case for changing over from Windows to Linux is getting stronger by the day.
I am saying this as a very long time Linux user, and it saddens me. Politics aside, from a pure technical, functional, privacy and UX perspective, the case for changing over from Windows has been apparent for several decades.
If you picked XFCE as your front end you get WinXP functionality, with the nice things from win10/11 (start menu search that's actually local only, multiple desktop workspaces, and graphical settings/updates I've only needed to go to command line twice in four years).
How does XFCE compare to KDE and GNOME? Also, does it has all the nice window snapping features that I'm used to fron Windows?
As a long time Linux user, this comment makes me sad since many of those features were copied from Linux (many from Unity) :)
I think most of its features predate unity (compiz was integrated but existed before)
Unity really was a great project.
KDE 6.6 is great to me, but there are some quirks I have found. Their "peek at desktop" feature is annoying, I want "minimize all" but you have to do some scripting to enable that.
I've noticed that clicking the network button to see wifi status shows traffic rate, and that seems to lag and I suspect it has an impact on throughput.
I'm interested in Cosmic when it matures some more.
I don't think all the same shortcuts exist out of the box, although win-drag/win-right-drag to move and resize windows (might be alt by default) is _so_ much more convenient than the usual border/title dragging that you might find you don't miss them.
My personal PCs have enough screens that I haven't tried. Though I do really like Windows snapping features on my work laptop (can't change OS there).
I haven't played with other windowing systems to judge too much. And just picked right from screen shots/gifs to not need to try.
I think France seem serious in actually switching to open source/EU software. I recently had a telecon on Visio (France's Teams/Zoom substitute) and it worked well in a browser with ~ 10 participants.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716043 (764 points 5 hours ago, 384 comments)
I applaud France for this decision. Windows is basically legal spyware and adware at this point
Like most Microsoft products, Windows is a tool that benefits mostly from aggressive early marketing and successfully convincing everyone that they need this product, and by the time everyone realizes how terrible the product is it's too late because everything already depends on it.
They have done this everywhere; Microsoft Office is everywhere and terrible. Sharepoint used to be everywhere and is terrible. I know they bought it, but LinkedIn is nearly required everywhere and terrible. Teams seems to be increasingly used everywhere and terrible. And of course Windows is everywhere and terrible.
As far as I can tell, there is not a single thing that Microsoft does not half-ass. They're not a software company, they're a marketing company that sells software.
Now they somehow got the management of large companies to also push to adopt Azure, with an aggressive "no capex" / "you pay for what you use" campaign when everyone knows their offering work terribly and are overpriced.
if Home Depot were to make an exam to pass a certification over their catalog, that would seem ridiculous. But when Microsoft does this, management ppl are happy and feel like they manage when they sign up everyone for AZ900 "certification"
Wish it would succeed, other day was reading about stuff and figure out, how much European Tech is actually controlled by American/Israeli Hegemony.
I'm sure there's a barely functioning business critical app that runs exclusively on Windows NT in their administration that would beg to differ
If it only runs on NT, it'll work better under WINE than on Win10/11.
Legacy app compat is actually an argument for moving to Linux.
It can be ported to React under a single prompt by now, don’t you know?
But certainly we are already at stage where Windows NT can be regenerated on the fly from a prompt anyway, aren’t we?
Otherwise, there is also ReactOS that could be leveraged on for that kind of scenario. I wonder where it would stand by now if all the money that governments around the world spent in Microsoft license would have been invested in it instead.
Sure. But if they can successfully convert 99% of their computers to non-Windows and non-Mac, that'd still be a massive win.
Ideology may actually be the best way to cut off legacy bullshit like this. There's passion-energy, which really gets the creative problem-solving juices flowing.
Good. The US is gone.
I’ve commented on this before but you’ll know France is serious when there are Linux ports of Solidworks and Catia.
France has a real edge over American companies by being the dominant player in the CAD world, it’s always surprised me that they nerfed that advantage by tying to an American operating system.
Autocad has 39% market share in CAD, Solidworks has 14% market share, and Fusion 360 has 9%.
None of this is a major national advantage for any side. It's bizarre to think that the US or France would treat this as some kind of mark of national influence, since if anything happens to these top three vendors, there are lots of other vendors waiting in the wings. It's not like a national oil reserve, where it's important that you have a reserve of CAD software available for your engineers.
But what kind of projects are people using these different pieces of software for?
Are people designing aircraft carriers in Fusion?
Don't get me wrong, I understand that AutoCAD is extremely important for architecture and the death grip that AutoDesk has over that industry needs to be broken for the benefit of all of us, but from my understanding Dessault Systems makes software that is used for totally different purposes and is of vital strategic importance for a nation that wants an independent MIC which France obviously does.
So it seems foolish to me for them to have their own CAD software that can and is used to design weapons but be dependent on an American operating system produced by a particularly unscrupulous company who is obsessed with tighter and tigher control and has definite ties to the US intelligence apparatus.
The idea that autocad has a "death grip" on the industry is laughable to me.
Fusion360 -> PTC Onshape
AutoCAD -> BricsCAD
Inventor -> Easily outclassed by NX/SolidEdge, Solidworks/CATIA and Creo
>Are people designing aircraft carriers in Fusion?
I don't know, but I have watched people designing high-speed trains in CATIA.
Big players use CATIA and Siemens NX almost exclusively. I don’t know many using Autocad, maybe architectural firms.
I doubt that the US military itself is using commercial CAD software, most likely they are using something in house. Again, CAD software is not Extreme Ultra Lithography, where it is a marvel of engineering and can only be produced by one firm. The netherlands can rightly be proud of ASML as a national achievement. But CAD software? Now that's just goofy.
Check out: https://www.army.mil/article/249241/armys_powerful_open_sour...
But I would assume defense contractors -- the private firms like Lockheed -- are probably using commercial software. The US military is pretty bureaucratic and is filled with bespoke stuff, whereas the contractors are basically businesses and would use whatever is common in commercial business world.
Wasn't CATIA running on unix even before it ran on Windows?
>The French government did not provide a specific timeline for the switchover, or which distributions it was considering.
Do they realize they need to pick a LTS distro now? You can't mix and match distros without having a massive IT and user retraining budgets.
Just pick nixOS and provide base nixosConfiguration. tada.
Why would you need any user retraining?
All distros are basically identical. The only real difference is whether you spell "package manager" as apt, yum, or dnf.
For people with a level of technical literacy that has them interested in posting on HN, sure. But for typical government workers? I imagine the differences are going to be pretty significant. They're not programmers or "devops" people.
We're talking about users who are going to do almost everything through the GUI, and who will associate the "distro" with the default choice of DE/WM/etc. stack in whichever flavour of whichever distro it is. Understanding what a "package manager" even is, will be the responsibility of "IT" specialists. Assuming they don't decide that only, say, Flatpak-installable software can be approved.
We're talking about massively bureaucratic institutions that have been steeped in Windows orthodoxy for decades. That's the administration policy they know, so it's what they will forcibly adapt to Linux.
You're going to need user retraining because the GUI has its own file manager program and no matter which one you choose (and they will choose exactly one) it is not Explorer. Because LibreOffice is not the Microsoft Office suite, and neither is any of its FOSS competitors. And so on and so forth. There's no telling what idiosyncrasies people depend on. In organizations like this I really doubt you can count on everyone being generically computer literate. I really doubt that generic computer literacy (as opposed to demonstrated competence with specific applications) was ever part of the hiring requirements.
> But for typical government workers? I imagine the differences are going to be pretty significant. They're not programmers or "devops" people.
How much retraining do you need for "click on the orange and blue spinny fox thingy and wait for your email to come up"?
> because the GUI has its own file manager program and no matter which one you choose (and they will choose exactly one) it is not Explorer
Nobody is ever going to use it. They're going to use a web browser.
> There's no telling what idiosyncrasies people depend on.
Funny way of spelling "Firefox bugs", but whatever.
> In organizations like this I really doubt you can count on everyone being generically computer literate
Basic adult literacy is computer literacy. If you can read you can use a computer.
I get the sense you haven't worked with many non-technical people in government or enterprise contexts. I've seen people struggle with their workflows after upgrading to a newer version of Windows, to the point where company wide training sessions have had to be held.
This comment is completely out of touch with how typical office workers use their computers. "Package manager" is your feldspars. But it's even worse than that, because you don't train for the typical employee, you train for the least-technical employee lest they become completely useless overnight.
> because you don't train for the typical employee, you train for the least-technical employee lest they become completely useless overnight.
"Click on the blue and orange spinny fox thingy" is easy for even the thickest user.
> "Package manager" is your feldspars.
I hate that I understood this.
Yes. Noting that yum and dnf are basically the same.
>All distros are basically identical.
Have you ever used the Linux OS??
Let me guess, you're impressed by desktop decorations and which file-browser is the default.
Ubuntu differs from Fedora only in newbie stuff, for instance.
Yes, since it came on two 1.44MB floppies.
They likely don't. It's a purely political move not a technical move. With the average length of the French work week, this will take a while to implement anyway. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great thought but I don't think it's more than a short-sighted reaction. Munich unfortunately faltered after a few years.
The french Gendarmerie already migrated to GendBunto, their own distribution. It took a while but it's now running on 97% of all workstations. I wouldn't call this just political fluff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu
> With the average length of the French work week, this will take a while to implement anyway.
35 instead of 40? I don't think an extra 5 hours a week is really going to move the needle in a meaningful way.
Who do they think writes Linux? The European Commission? They’re on the US tech stack whether they want to be or not, and nobody in Europe has the will or resources to pull a China and make their own alternative. More’s the pity.
Linux was created by an European. And there are many European distros. Even Canonical is European.
But that's besides the point. The point is no company owns linux so you're not tied to big tech even if they are the biggest contributors to the kernel.
Moreover for the folks in the back row...
We may see Canonical or other commercial Linux vendors come forward with a government or enterprise-flavored solution for all this. But the important thing to keep in mind is that they're not selling Linux per-se. As the GPL prohibits this, these companies sell support for their Linux distro instead. That revenue goes into improving Linux and maintaining their distro (e.g. Ubuntu). But even with all that money changing hands, that they do not own Linux, the Linux kernel, or any other shred of GPL licensed stuff.
2/3 major commercial Linux vendors are European, the author and BDFL of the Kernel is European and a ton of contributors of many projects are European (Qt and KDE come to mind). Yes IBM Hat has a lot of influence but they're not the only ones developing Linux.
Wish the Bangladeshi government did this instead of relying on pirated copies of Windows 7
At least they know enough to have stuck with the outright best version of Windows.
I know this might be a controversial take but nevertheless I will state my opinion: I do not think "the year of the Linux desktop" is the good idea that most people seem to think. Everything that gets the eye of Sauron on it proceeds to become a complete mess.
Resources always win. All that is needed to ruin an open project is dump money into heavy development up to the point where it becomes impossible to do without it. Plenty such cases already.
This also ruins the development of the project akin to feeding wild life, you get them dependent on you, and if you stop feeding them they lose the ability to feed themselves in the wild. Such is the Linux ecosystem, based on a type of work that so far made a great project for people who have a bit of technical skills. Making it more accessible to the masses only brings that kind of bullshit into it. Inevitably. There is no way something of such importance, to the masses, won't get corrupted in one way or another. That never happens, if there is too much interest there will be funds dumped into corrupting it, one way or another.
The best path forward for Linux was as before, to fly just under the radar, to bee a bit too complicated for most people. This is what protects it. Most, if anyone, don't seem to understand this very simple fact. No older Linux user gets anything worthwhile out of this deal, nothing relevant, just inevitable enshitification of it. Historically proven over and over again. I find "the year of the Linux desktop" to be a childish take in a world that functions on completely different principles.
edit: To add a bit more context, Windows is not the mess that it is today because of evil Microsoft, it is a reflection of its user-base. Same with Linux. They did that to Windows, with their behavior, with accepting all that nonsense.
You want to bring the very same type of people, with that kind of attitude, in Linux, what exactly do you thing is going to happen? They will adapt to Linux mentality or they'll proceed to ruin Linux with their behavior? I can take a good guess on what will happen. People will people, and corpos will corpo to milk them.
Linux is already integral to the tech and enterprise worlds, which have a lot more money to throw around the consumer desktop space. I'm having trouble seeing how Linux becoming a more popular consumer OS would lead to the types of problems you're talking about, if being a leader in the server space hasn't already led to them.
Also, Linux has a built-in mechanism against enshittification, which is its open source and multiple flavors. Ubuntu becomes enshittified? Move to Fedora. You can have a dumbed down consumer-friendly distro without affecting Arch.
Ditch iOS and Android for a Blackberry OS / Nokia ? Really, are there any alternatives?
SailfishOS, Ubuntu touch, and postmarketOS to name a few from the top of my dome.
Nokia isn't really an alternative at all since M$ bought it.
Motorola and grapheneos? If only the French government weren't attacking Graphene.
As for desktop, I suppose the only major European options are Ubuntu and SUSE with corporate backing.
The French government and Murena (makers of /e/OS). They are spouting nonsense that security hardening is only for pedophiles and spies:
https://mastodon.social/@GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social/116353...
https://www.clubic.com/actualite-604786-murena-e-os-intervie...
It's ironic that a company that pretends to be for privacy is using the same think of the children argument as those pushing Chat Control, age verification, etc. Of course, their privacy is mostly a farce, since they have also been caught uploading data to OpenAI for text-to-speechi
I hope that more European governments will start supporting GrapheneOS, since it can compete with Apple on security and is better than Apple and GMS Android when it comes to privacy.
man, that's great - but can you imagine some bureaucrat lifer having to adapt to this?
There are few things in life more satisfying than forcing bureaucrat lifers to expand their minds.
we need more tech literacy overall, so this might help with that also
Please tell me this also means that they are redirecting the expenses currently going to Microsoft into funding open source development?
I wish the US Government would do the same
I wonder if anyone in trumpland has thought of a T-branded distro.
Considering that most distros are basically just a new set of desktop backgrounds, this seems like a sure thing!
Political posturing that will never actually occur.
Any closed source, centralized system is going to be higher risk than an open source distributed system that can be independently verified and audited by multiple parties.
You just have to be willing to put in the investment to verify/review with parties that meet your needs.
Now nextcloud and libreoffice should give up the stupid drama and focus on beating microsoft.
[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716043
So did the Great Country of North Korea.
Desktop Linux's security and antimalware solutions are not ready for government usage. This is a cyber attack waiting to happen if they go through with this. They should at least switch to ChromeOS if they want to use Linux.
Some might be tempted to brush aside that Server Linux threat model is very different from Desktop Linux (to snarkily reply "we'll it's powering a vast majority of GDP via all of AWS, Azure, etc.").
However comparing apples to apples, what makes you say this isn't ready for government usage, when it's ready for trillion dollar big tech companies' majority of their workforce? (Aside from Microsoft, Apple obviously). Large employers like IBM etc also must be using red hat or some other distro
You mean switch Windows by Microsoft for ChromeOS by Google? Weird suggestion.
As for "security" and "antimalware" solutions being ready, I don't think there is much difference between the OSs there. Windows is no candyland either.
As always, they will need competent people in the right places to pull this through. Tech is just an enabler.
Yes I do mean that. Google is one of the only companies in the Linux space who takes security seriously.
There is no security when the US government can legally compel Google to do whatever they want. This is why foreign governments want to move away from big tech.
Turns out the imperial boomerang impacts many things, especially when previous orders are easily destroyed (because only one country was benefiting).
And switching to Google achieves the aim of getting away from American tech giants?
I don't think it's a wise thing to do at this point in time. There is more risk by not depending on America.
If that really is the case, why not stay on Windows?
We're going to keep seeing this due to destabilization and political changes in the US. It drives nationalization elsewhere, even among allies.
This is exactly what I'm seeing in working with companies in Belgium, Germany and France.
It's not just about costs- managers are actively seeking to distance themselves from everything US.
We've stopped treating them like allies. Who's to blame them?
It doesn't help that Microsoft seems to be doing everything in its power to alienate Windows users.
This, I've officially been off Windows for a few months and will not be looking back. Microsoft has put a bad taste in my mouth as a developer.
By luck and happenstance, I tuned into the Omacon conference this morning and my perspective on personal computing very much aligns with theirs. Would encourage a least watch the kickoff keynote if the VODs drop.
this has been happening on and off for ~10+ yrs. MS cost are too high and you need more expensive computers to have the MS sub-par experience.
the main thing that keeps people locked in is (a) "Im use to windows" and (b) MS gives them some special contract to keep them.
What? Again?
I lost count, it's how many attempts again? Fill me in.
The gendarmerie already switched.
Only place I know that went back to MS is Munich city council. After MS put a big research office in the town.
As far as I know it was successful for the gendarmerie and assemblée nationale for exemple. There are many public entities and apparently each migration is news worthy
It needs just 1 successful attemp.
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Munich is a bad example - they were effectively „bought out“ by Microsoft by investing hugely into the local economy in the form of offices and employees. It was also two parties that kept flip flopping with different priorities. Linux itself had some hiccups but was fine from what I recall.
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https://itsfoss.com/munich-linux-failure/
It doesn't matter if this or that doesn't work. Or if Microslop pressures to continue using Winslop.
Now the reasons are geopolitical.
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You must be German — the French state is a lot more top down than Germany with its regions, so generally these kinds of mandates get applied broadly
[Yeah, if I'm just gonna be down-voted to oblivion regardless of my participation in the comments, good luck with your 'meaningful discussion'}
Sorry I didn't see your reply, what was it about?
Werent the munich government employees quite happy with linux, but microsofts lobbying with their headquarters got them to switch back?
Were they? Sounded like they stuck with some terrible old version of OpenOffice ("brokenoffice"). Users don't really care about the OS, its the apps.
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> I'm not aware of Microsoft's economic footprint in the Munich region, but I doubt it's significant.
Perhaps be aware before explaining everyone how things really are?
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I've never seen a user replace all their comments with
"[Yeah, if I'm just gonna be down-voted to oblivion regardless of my participation in the comments, good luck with your 'meaningful discussion'}"
making it impossible for others to read their original comments. If this now becomes a trend I feel like there may be a need to change the rules around editing.
@dang is it something on your radar? Lots of people do this on Reddit and it makes some threads unusable.
Earlier attempts were mostly about money and ideology. Now its a question of security, thanks to one 'clever' 'businessman'. So thanks to his _great_ efforts, it might actually work out this time.
[Yeah, if I'm just gonna be down-voted to oblivion regardless of my participation in the comments, good luck with your 'meaningful discussion'}
If they only diverted 10% of the budget from MS to solving issues they’d have had a solution a decade or two ago.
[Yeah, if I'm just gonna be down-voted to oblivion regardless of my participation in the comments, good luck with your 'meaningful discussion'}
All of that came about without them spending anything. So the extra is just to fix bugs and do integration work. StarOffice (LibreOffice ancestor) existed in the 90s—I used it and it was fine for government work.
File storage? Cheap by Y2K as well.
[Yeah, if I'm just gonna be down-voted to oblivion regardless of my participation in the comments, good luck with your 'meaningful discussion'}
It's really cheap to run FOSS on commodity PCs in the twenty first century. Hetzner is very reasonable in the cloud more recently.
It's not a binary switch either, you build the platform bit by bit every year and roll it out to more and more workers. Four dimensional thinking, that could have succeeded already, a decade plus ago.
Sure a few components would have to be written in the meantime. Just a few million a year would be a huge boost to gaps in FOSS.
You’re saying a government couldn’t take open source building blocks and run.. office apps with basic security and.. file storage? For $100M a year? This could be done with a 30 person team
30 people managing the hardware? Sure, if you get good deals on the hardware itself, the employees stay healthy, and you have everything so centralised you don't need multiple people on call.
Centralising things to that level and supporting the users of the entire government structure of a country the size of France -- one of the countries the sun _never_ sets on -- while it's transitioning from decades of Microsoft dependency to an open source ecosystem? Heh, no.
Hetzner exists.
The claim above of 30 is not particularly important, the point is to lean on the community. Millions a year would get you incredibly far. Many are already helping for free.
24/7 linux webservers existed already by the late nineties.
[Yeah, if I'm just gonna be down-voted to oblivion regardless of my participation in the comments, good luck with your 'meaningful discussion'}
Munich led to "all of Schleswig-Holstein" in Germany. 44,000 Exchange mailboxes replaced with Open-Xchange. 25,000 Windows+Office desktops replaced with Linux+OpenOffice.
[Yeah, if I'm just gonna be down-voted to oblivion regardless of my participation in the comments, good luck with your 'meaningful discussion'}
Motivation matters.
[Yeah, if I'm just gonna be down-voted to oblivion regardless of my participation in the comments, good luck with your 'meaningful discussion'}
The fact that open source is a national security concern should have been something that a crazy orange man should have triggered.
Thus was obvious decades ago. And open source is the key model for collective development in a secure manner for disparate countries to secure their software base.
Alas, I fear they will only concentrate on the server side. The securing of the desktop should be a parallel concern as well, to help prevent your citizenry from becoming DDOS slaves.
I understand what they mean, linux offers freedom, enough that it divorces your tech stack from any one company.
But isn't linux US tech? The blueprint, UNIX was a US project, torvolds works from the US. the original userland GNU was a US based project. The new userland systemd is a US based project.
> But isn't linux US tech?
If you want to discuss it on that level, it if Finnish tech imported to the USA, inspired by a Dutch implementation of a research OS.
On a more serious note, Linux has been developed by many individuals all over the world, you can't put a nationality stamp on it.
Linux is a global project, and open source more broadly is also of course global.
Linux Mint (the distro I use) was started and is led by French developer Clement Lefebvre.
QEMU and FFmpeg are among the notable projects started by French developer Fabrice Bellard.
VLC was started by students of École Centrale Paris.
These are just the things that I know about as an American, so I'm sure there are more.
The difference, of course, is that they can inspect the source, and should the US try to use it as leverage they can just fork and continue on.
GNU was never anything but a flag-of-convenience. The number of people who take RMS seriously was and is small.