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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.
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Didn’t another country in Europe try this before and then realized the docx format behaved differently in Microsoft Word compared to LibreOffice despite being labeled as an open standard? I guess if a document doesn’t open or work as expected they could always just open it in the web version.
What distro are they going with? Or are they going to roll their own?
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. So I’m wondering which one a government is going to trust for long-term use. As someone who’s dabbled in Linux off and on for 25 years (but never committing; I’m now a happy Mac user), I’d say Ubuntu is a great place to start. If you’re a casual user, it should serve you well. But a government might want something a bit more hardened. You’re not going to throw out-of-the-box Ubuntu on a bunch of government systems, lest the whole network get pwned by a disgruntled worker who knows her way around the command line. That’s not going to work.
I imagine Microsoft’s reaction is going to be similar to George W. Bush’s administration in the 2000s when they started replacing every name with “French” in it (like toast and fries) with “Freedom.” (And if you recall, France responded by saying simply “French Fries are Belgian” or something like that.) In other words, name calling.
Microslop also has a silver lining here. The French aren’t saying Windows is not secure. They aren’t even saying it’s not good. They’re saying they want to reduce reliance on US tech. They aren’t saying a single bad thing about Microslop or Windows.
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.
Government so they’ll probably pick RHEL, Suse or Ubuntu for support. Maybe Fedora or Debian.
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.
Maybe they’ll invest in apparmor development
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Agree - it’s always been a weak spot for Linux on the desktop.
