France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech | TechCrunch
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France's move to ditch Windows for Linux is its latest effort to reduce its reliance on American tech giants.

France is trying to move on from Microsoft Windows. The country said it plans to move some of its government computers currently running Windows to the open source operating system Linux to further reduce its reliance on U.S. technology.

Linux is an open source operating system that is free to download and use, with various customized distributions that are tailored and designed for specific use cases or operations.

In a statement, French minister David Amiel said (translated) that the effort was to “regain control of our digital destiny” by relying less on U.S. tech companies. Amiel said that the French government can no longer accept that it doesn’t have control over its data and digital infrastructure.

  • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    30·
    6 days ago

    My issue with Linux to weigh against its many benefits is, the distributions (distros) seem like a rat race. One moment, one is better, another, it’s the next one.

    You’ve been listening to distro hoppers chasing the “new shiny”. It’s bullshit though.

    I’ve run Debian for 15 years. It’s still good. It will be good in another 15 years.

    • redsand@infosec.pub
      4·
      6 days ago

      Government so they’ll probably pick RHEL, Suse or Ubuntu for support. Maybe Fedora or Debian.

      • azuth@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        8·
        6 days ago

        They are not going with Red Hat when the goal is to reduce US dependence.

        The French germanderie has been using a customized Ubuntu for years.

    • CerebralHawks@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      32·
      6 days ago

      I mean, yeah, but nobody really uses Debian (or Arch) until they know what they’re doing. Distro hoppers start with Ubuntu because it’s popular, then hop to Mint because it looks more like Windows (no disrespect intended toward Mint or KDE), then they go back to Windows until Microslop pisses them off again, then they try Fedora… that was basically my journey through Linux as well.

      Having been a Mac user for 3 years, I feel like I’d do better with Linux. If I ever get an old PC — one of my nerd fantasies is to “rescue” an 8th gen/later i5 workstation with 16GB RAM (maybe even 8) with the hard drive taken out (corporate secrets and whatnot), and I put a SATA SSD in there and put Linux on it. It’s not that expensive to do all that, but I don’t really have the room. I can also stick it in a corner somewhere and run it headless. I know that macOS is “certified UNIX” and I know enough to know that this is a mostly disingenuous statement, though I’m not well versed on the details. I do know you can do a lot more with macOS with the command line though, because macOS is built upon OS X, which was built upon NeXTStep, which was built upon UNIX. So the guts are still kinda there and you can do a lot with it. I actually prefer to use brew to install stuff, it’s a lot faster than going through the GUI. The site just gives me the name, I ⌘+Space, start typing Terminal (all I need is TER), hit Enter, “brew install” then whatever, and it installs the dependencies I don’t have, updates the ones I do, then installs the package and it just works. But anyway, all that aside, I’d just remote into it and run it as a server. Next step would be a NAS to take my Plex server to the next level. It runs fine on my Mac, but I think it would be better running on its own system.

      • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        9·
        6 days ago

        I mean, yeah, but nobody really uses Debian (or Arch) until they know what they’re doing.

        Wut? This makes no sense. Debian isn’t some weird “black belt” distro. And we’re talking about government desktops that will be centrally managed anyway.

        • Lydia_K@lemmy.world
          1·
          6 days ago

          Is there any enterprise grade central management software for Linux yet? I’ve looked before but not found anything good, I feel like it’s a real gap in the market right now.

          • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            31·
            6 days ago

            It’s a good question - it’s where Linux has always struggled as a “desktop” OS in corporate or government use. Active Directory is hard to compete with.

            RedHat is probably the furthest along in this area (maybe SuSe? I don’t know SuSe very well). There’s Ansible Automation Platform for managing systems. And I believe they have their own directory server and other offerings. I’m not an RHCE though.

            • Lydia_K@lemmy.world
              1·
              6 days ago

              Ansible is all well and good for managing servers and patching and stuff, but desktops and users and group policy to secure user workstations is the gap I have yet to see filled. Active Directory is just LDAP at it’s core, and LDAP existed in unix land far before windows, but the suite of management and policy tools seems missing.