> It's nuts Windows is still the go-to for anything these days despite everyone knowing what a parasitic

Linux still doesn't have anywhere near as nice and cohesive as Group Policy, Active Directory etc.

Plus you can pay Microsoft to host it all for you on Azure.

It makes sense that everyone uses Windows for gaming, because you can't run games in your browser.

It makes zero sense for businesses to use Windows if they're only doing PowerPoint and video conferences.

France and Germany are actually cooperating on most of these, like the word processor: https://www.techspot.com/news/107225-france-germany-unveil-d...

Plus, it's all open source, so the rest of the world is free to use it as well!

> It would be an even better move to allow those in Europe or indeed the rest of the world to also benefit.

Those initiatives are usually open source. It's just that many times, each country wants to make their own. But it's still better than staying with the TooBigTech monopolies.

France is funding a lot of open source projects. They may not be very sexy or trendy, but they are there.

It's good to differentiate truly independent tech from the unfortunately common government-pushed French-tech that are US-tech rewrapped.

e.g. Qwant is a re-skin of Microsoft Bing

It's a great move overall.

They do: https://github.com/suitenumerique It's used by, among others, the Dutch government: https://github.com/MinBZK/mijn-bureau

There's been some 'back and forth' or "progress and regress' about this.

Adoption of Free Software:

2012 Prime Minister circular — the most important formal turning point: Orientations pour l'usage des logiciels libres dans l'administration, signed on 19 September 2012. It explicitly gave guidance to public administrations on free software use.

2016 Digital Republic Law — reinforced the direction by encouraging public administrations to use free software and open formats.

2021 action plan for Free Software and Digital Commons — launched after the Prime Minister’s circular of 27 April 2021, with goals to increase awareness, use, publication of source code, and reuse across administrations.

2024–2026 LaSuite / Suite Numérique — current state-led open-source collaboration suite, presented by DINUM as a coherent set of open-source tools for public agents and positioned as part of the state’s sovereignty strategy

Rollbacks and proprietary deals

Microsoft “Open Bar” contract with the Ministry of Defence / Armed Forces — a major counterexample. The Senate records say the framework agreement started in 2009 and was renewed for 2013–2017 and 2017–2021, without publicity or competition, giving the ministry broad access to Microsoft’s catalog.

Criticism and replacement with UGAP purchasing — later reporting says the open-bar arrangement ended in February 2021 and was replaced by a convention via UGAP, but the ministry still relied on broad Microsoft licensing and associated services.

2025 education procurement for Microsoft — a public tender worth 74 million euros for the Ministry of Education and higher education services was attributed to Microsoft, showing that proprietary dependence continued alongside open-source policy.

2025–2026 public-private partnerships in sovereignty language — France and Germany announced a partnership with Mistral AI and SAP for sovereign AI in public administration, which is not a free-software rollback in the strict sense, but it is a clear example of the state pursuing sovereignty through private-sector partnerships rather than purely internal open-source development.

---

Conclusion:

Like anything in capitalism: it's a constant fight, permanent struggle. The big private companies will try to massively impact political life.

So, there IS in France this 'feeling', this consciousness, throughout the political landscape (mostly on the left and also a little bit on the right) that we need to have some sovereignty over our data, services, software, etc.

Every once in a while, a right-side political figure, who are basically ruling since 2000, (except from 2012-2017 where France had a social-democratic government and president) has a sparkle of dignity, decency, logic, and honesty towards the best interests of the country and leans towards Free Software adoption. But...the lobbies are always there to rollback each decision, or part of each decision, and gradually gain back their influence.

Strange. I switched to Linux +25 years ago. My setup became quite minimal; right now I use IceWM for the most part. GNOME3 was always useless; KDE also changed since Nate "I need more moneys!" took over (see his donation daemon or the more recent "systemd-only" tied with wayland-only garbage that KDE succumbed to).

Linux is good in that you can combine things that work, so it is more flexible than windows. But desktop wise I don't see it becoming really dominant; GTK is now a GNOMEy-only toolkit. Qt is too busy focusing on their own business model. Desktop Linux is not useless, but it is really just sub-par compared to Windows. I also use Win10 on a second computer; I don't like it but I use it for testing. Linux lacks decision-making power focus (and corporations such as IBM/Red Hat are selfish, so these will never reach any "breakthrough" like the infamous Desktop of the Year, which I heard will come next year together with GNU Hurd ... I think).

The Finns, as always, continue to develop mobile phones, Jolla is back from the dead and supposedly starts shipping sometime in 2026 with a new iteration on the hardware and the OS, time will tell if it'll have any impact.

Might not be 100% Europe-made from the get go, but good ideas and executions often start with small steps and iterate rather than having something groundbreaking out of the gate.

Linux on Mobile has been progressing steadily in recent years, and is in a state suitable for very early adopters and tech enthusiasts. Definitely not for the general population IMHO.

See: https://postmarketos.org/

FWIW, it's not just the EU that needs this urgently: most of humanity sorely needs a trustworthy mobile OS that's not designed against their interests.

A big hurdle to this is hardware vendors locking bootloaders and making it impossible (or impractical) to write or use existing drivers.

Manufacturers maintain long running forks of Android (often very old Linux kernels) with their drivers hidden in their fork's source.

I'm a firm believer in the right to repair software - and the fact that it's illegal to reverse engineer binary blob drivers (or proprietary software at all) is a shame (not that you could even untangle a driver from a binary blob of a Linux fork). I'd go as far as feeling strongly that drivers should be open source, and if they aren't, documentation sufficient for the community to write drivers should be made available by manufacturers.

Linux on M5? Should be easy

Linux on an X Elite Surface Book? Should be easy

Ubuntu Touch on my Pixel 9? Should be easy

Android TV on my TV? Should be easy

Proxmox on my 5g mobile router? Should be easy

No drivers / locked bootloaders = not possible

Android Open Source is good enough. The tough part are device-specific drivers that never make it upstream and are eventually abandoned by the vendor, making upgrade past specific kernel versions very troublesome.

remind me of firefox os https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/firefox-os

They tried it a long time ago, but it seems to be rolled back to Windows again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

I hope our French friends can learn from this initiative during the adoption phase.

There were and are initiatives. Of course, they were and are ridiculed all the time. Who can't recall LiMuX or check out ZenDIS (Zentrum für Digitale Souveränität in der öffentlichen Verwaltung). Read up on the current migration away from MS Office in Schleswig-Holstein.

You did, and you'll do again. Just like quitting smoking.

France and Germany have endemic malware. Reacting defensively to it might be easier with Claude on the OS source code.

Why? We have plenty of well working Desktop Managers and WINE is doing better than ever. I'd argue there are bigger issues in Linux like default process isolation and access authorization per program being behind other OSes

the license was never the real bill. the control plane was

Like last time, I ask again: Which are the European made computers?

I am very happy that Linux is becoming main stream but I share your sentiment. FreeBSD is a nice alternative if you want to stay on the edge.

>USAians

The word you're looking for is Americans, despite whatever preconceived notion you think the word "Americans" actually should mean in English. I know nothing will ever change European minds, but at least understand what the correct form is.

>everything is less popular in Europe simply because it is inferior and fails purely on its technical merits

So everything is less popular in Europe because it fails on many other points? Big applause to you, I guess. Are you looking for a participation award?

It’s getting downvoted, but I agree it’ll become a bureaucratic mess.

It's different this time. It's a geopolitical safety move. You know why it happened and who is responsible for this. Never would have happened otherwise.

Sometimes yeah, but clearly not in this case, if you took the time to actually read the article.

You don't ask entire ministries and public operators to formulate a migration plan from Windows to Linux with a relatively short deadline just for negotiation purposes or just for the fun of it, you do that once you're committed to actually migrating.

This is not just a pilot project or some local administration doing an experiment, it's new country-wide policy enforced from the top, hardly a "negotiation strategy".

I don't think so. Having worked on a similar thing in my country, and the effort is monumental.

When doing this in a company, making technical people appreciate free software and making lasting changes is hard enough. When doing this with non-technical people, everything becomes exponentially harder.

a Windows license is only cheap if your time has negative value

WINE has come a long way. Most Windows software now just works on Linux.

I don't know why you believe Ubuntu stood still. Looking at the history that does not seem to be the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_version_history

> Unless you need some windows-only software

In many cases even if you do though, its possible to run it on WINE pretty well these days. It's insane how good it's become in the last few years (partly thanks to proton and Valves investment in it all really)

> To win, all Linux had to do is stand still, and that's exactly what it did!

It is moving? Red Hat has been investing in containised apps and image based distros for years, Valve single handedly made Linux gaming viable. HDR development is mostly driven by Valve and Red Hat customers.

And no Linux isn't good enough yet. UX is all over the place.

> Ubuntu in 2026 is pretty much the same as Ubuntu from 2006.

Well, Ubuntu MATE perhaps :)

Windows LTSC I find comes pretty close to the less intrusive Windows I remember from the XP/7 era.

You forget about MacOS. And Apple are making some very aggressive moves as of lately to capture users.

I consider myself a Power User, use of Windows is not friction free :)

Over the years I've come to believe that there is only one thing important: What you are used to. The friction is in the change process. Not in the destination.

As an independent, I have several customers on MS365, you know what my super power is? FireFox cookie containers. One for each org, and I switch with 0 effort between the orgs. No need for Windows in that workflow at all. In fact, using Windows and the native apps would probably give me a lot more friction.

Yes, sometimes I have issues. I.e. yesterday Word kept deleting my last 1-2 sentences for some reason, even though hitting ctrl-s tells everytime: "I should not worry". but in general it's fine.

My business is on Proton, and I love that MS365 AND Google workspace calender invites go right into my agenda with no effort. There is nice stuff out there. Especially now we have Proton Meet, I can take some ownership over videocalls in Teams and Google Meet finally.

Unlike modern Windows, known for its lack of friction.

I feel like this is perfect being the enemy of good. So lets say only 80% of their staff can get off Windows and the remaining 20% need to remain on it. That's a great start!

There's a negligible amount of "power users" among government employees; I think the majority of them are trained in reading and applying laws, and given the strong scientific/literary divide in the French culture, they usually think of themselves as inapt with computers (and the erratic behavior of MS products didn't help, if you ask me).

But knowing France, what to really worry about is execution, in particular for administrations. Probably people working there who read the TFA already think "oh, big mess incoming" even though they don't know what this "Linux" thing is.

I think standard IT/sysadmin training focuses mainly on Windows server etc., Linux being a second class citizen (because that's what the vast majority of small/mid sized businesses use). So recruiting good Linux sysadmins could be an issue, especially since the wages in government agencies are not exactly attractive.

Can you call yourself "power user" when your point is that switching away from Windows is too hard for you?

Respectfully, so what? There have always be specific use cases and user bases requiring a specific OS. No one ever considered OpenBSD interchangeable with Windows, few see Linux distros as a 100% drop in replacement for someone relying on Logic Pro.

Thing is, I really don't get this knee jerk "but what about INSERT_RARE_EDGECASE". It isn't helpful and argues something no one actually working on these projects ever proposed. Even if MSFT software remains in use, any gained alternative is a win, license costs and strategic autonomy both being valuable.

And yes, as you hinted, a large contingent of clerical work may already happen in a browser, with any found exceptions potentially addressable in the coming years, especially as older implementation may be updated anyways.

Let's be honest, we all underestimate how much we (can) do solely inside the browser anyways and even more so severely misgauge how few people are reliant on any native (none Electron) software at all outside gaming.

Power user is such a nebulous term anyway. To me, someone spending hours on end in Confluence can be a power user, having never left the browser. The same for a designer using Figma. Course, if one truly requires native only software, they may more likely fall under the umbrella power user, but again, few are seriously discussing just forcing those over since, reasonably, one must presume they have a reason for doing what they are doing.

What is a power user in this context? Someone deeply familiar with Windows and has tons of Windows related setup/applications?

That doesn't sound like a government worker... They rely on Microsoft Office, but the actual operating system could be anything. The only non-portable application is video games really. While LibreOffice may not have complete excel functionality, the vast majority of functionality can be replicated in web apps/libreoffice. And frankly most of this work can be migrated to AI.

You can even skin Linux to look exactly like Windows if you want, or use Mint or something. But really all people need is to be able to open up Chrome and Excel.

Sometimes organizations need to undertake work that is not friction free to achieve longer term goals.

I'm a power user and I've used linux for over 25 years. My corporate windows machine is total trash and completely unsuitable for any power users, either because its windows or because corporate locks it down so much it's barely more functional than a chromebook, I don't really care.

Power Users faced the same problems when Office changed to ribbon menus. It doesn't has to be friction free.

That's also what Microsoft 365 is, a webapp, even the latest Outlook is a webapp.

It doesn't have to be friction-free. The rough edges can be sanded down with government investment that addresses the needs of citizen-users.