21 ms·
France's government is ditching Windows for Linux, says US tech a strategic risk
- BLKNSLVR 6mo agoDupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47719486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47719486
- ArtTimeInvestor 6mo agoIt is a step into the right direction. Over time, more and more work is going to be done by AI though. At some point, it will be unthinkably slow and expensive to let humans work on anything. To do *that* locally, you need GPUs and LLMs. How will Europe solve these two?
- ErroneousBosh 6mo agoNo-one needs LLMs. AI has no value.
- 7bit 6mo agoThe chariot was superior! Who needs them darn cars
- nickserv 6mo agoMy grandpa was doing just fine before those newfangled chariots became all the rage. What's wrong with walking?
- tosti 6mo agoI, for one, have never needed AI for anything ever in my life. AI has, however, made my life noticably worse. Especially when dealing with braindead robot driven customer "support". But also in making it financially impossible to buy more RAM or upgrade a GPU. I think we'd be better off without yet another bubble.
- Nasrudith 6mo agoWere you born yesterday? Phone AIs being dumb didn't take LLMs at all. They were always stupid and frustrating to deal with substitutes for customer support.
- tosti 6mo agoExcept now they also pretend to respond to email. Basically email support became /dev/null with cream and icing on top.
- corndoge 6mo agoAt this point in the broader dialogue your position is roughly as interesting as flat earth. Only bored people are going to bother replying and no one is taking you seriously. Don't do yourself a disservice by clinging to this.
- ErroneousBosh 6mo agoOkay, give me one example of what AI might be useful for.
- Mashimo 6mo agoAs a learning tool to quiz you.
- ErroneousBosh 6mo agoOkay, and what value would that provide? I'm not interested in games.
- Mashimo 6mo agoThe value is that you can have an effective tool to learn something new. I'm not quite sure I understand your question.
- samrus 6mo agoI think your wasting your time arguing with him bro
- Mashimo 6mo agoOh I know :)
- ErroneousBosh 6mo agoOkay, I don't think it would be all that effective and I don't see how it could be. I learn things by doing them, not by playing guessing games.
- samrus 6mo agoIm skeptical of the AGI claims but this is a bit too far in the toher direction. I use it to turn designs to code all the time
- swiftcoder 6mo ago> I use it to turn designs to code all the time A human can however do the same job. Turning designs into code isn't a fundamentally new capability unlocked by GenAI, it's just a shuffling of costs from employing humans -> renting GPUs
- ErroneousBosh 6mo agoTurning designs into code is the bit I enjoy. I write all my best code when I'm driving my car. It's great - no-one talking to me, no-one phoning me, nothing to distract me, I can just sit and think about stuff. Show me something that will somehow turn the code in my head into code on a computer, and I'll be interested.
- m_mueller 6mo agoI think it depends on how strong the compression advancements are going to be, such that much can be done locally in the future. I'd be interested in experiences of others here in using Gemma4, which is at the forefront of "intelligence per gigabyte" atm. (according to benches).
- Joeri 6mo agoThe EU chips act is subsidizing new fab construction in Europe. Meanwhile the french Mistral is partnering with Nvidia to build an AI data center near Paris on which their LLMs will run. But I agree this is not enough to make the EU a contender in the race with the US and China. The EU still has not seriously considered decoupling from American big tech.
- tonyedgecombe 6mo agoDo you people have to squeeze a comment about AI into every post?
- arter45 6mo agoNot all AI uses LLM, and for some common LLM applications like summarization and translation you can already use CPU only models. The government, or even your average employer, is not going to need a lot of AI video generation or other really GPU intensive tasks. Prompt processing is currently more GPU oriented, but I don't see it as an impossible challenge given, say, 10-15 years. Also, CPU-only doesn't necessarily mean "on your own computer". You can easily have 100 TB RAM in a couple of racks.
- casey2 6mo agoBut Linux is US tech? Isn't the main guy American?
- boomskats 6mo agoNo, and no? ...what?
- redat00 6mo ago?
- GardenLetter27 6mo agoYeah, he became American, just like Einstein, Fermi, Von Neumann, etc. There's a big lesson for Europe there, everyone super productive and able to move to the US does so at the first opportunity.
- drivingmenuts 6mo agoWhen the US is being run by relatively sane people, it's great. That is not the situation at the moment.
- bogeholm 6mo agoYeah, um… That might have changed somewhat, recently.
- skillina 6mo agoYou might want to do a bit more reading on why European intellectuals migrated en masse to the US in the 1930s.
- gsky 6mo agoFinally Europe grew a spine
- bpavuk 6mo agostill growing, you mean. France is, however significant, just one country. and then there is broader push to FOSS inside Europe, as well as Europe's own sovereign solutions. some attempts were failed, some were successful, but everything is still in progress EDIT: on a second read, this sounded too diminishing of this achievement than I intended. the point is that it's not fully done yet, although it is remarkable that there is, finally, a political will for such actions
- sdoering 6mo agoSadly back in the day the city of Munich caved in (hosting Germany's MS headquarter). They had a good good run with their Linux. But the state of Schleswig-Holstein is pushing for more open source and switching to Libre Office (80% or so done). They talk about that on their Open Source Initiative page [1]. [1]: https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/themen/digitalisierung/linux-plus1 https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/themen/... (German only)
- breppp 6mo agoLess so against China or Iran, presumably Europe will find itself on the "right side of history" yet again soon enough
- redsocksfan45 6mo ago[dead]
- embedding-shape 6mo agoAt least so against Israel and other countries actively engaging in open warfare against sovereign nations, as a European I'm very happy we're not getting pulled into those senseless conflicts.
- 6mo ago
- drstewart 6mo agoIs this the daily thread on this topic? Astroturfing around this is getting suspicious.
- Mashimo 6mo ago> Astroturfing around this is getting suspicious. Nah, linux and "$curreant_year is the year of the linux desktop" is just something the hacker / maker / nerd scene is passionate about.
- e2le 6mo ago> Astroturfing around this is getting suspicious. It's perfectly possible for people to be passionate about the subject.
- drstewart 6mo agoI've never met a real human that was passionate about what OS a government worker in some local French commune uses, but it's the hottest topic on HN behind AI
- EinigeKreise 6mo agoI do care for them setting an example for my local government.
- embedding-shape 6mo agoRight, what about FOSS developers who care about what guidelines the entire country has regarding OS usage? Maybe I'm living in a bubble, but everyone (mostly Europeans to be fair) seems excited about moving away from US technologies. This move isn't just "Local French commune thinks about Linux", it's "French government agency that can mandate what others do, set hard guideline for agencies and magistrates to come up with a concrete plan for how to move to Linux", which is worlds beyond what we've seen before.
- samrus 6mo agoMost of the passion is around being felt exploited my american tech giants and feeling hopeful at seeing large respectable institutions divest from them. Thats legit, not astroturfed
- selfsigned 6mo agoReally proud as a French, I think the government has had some success with moving to something matrix based for the public sector too. https://tchap.numerique.gouv.fr https://tchap.numerique.gouv.fr I just hope we end up having more wins at the EU-level, instead of massive fails like GAIA-X...
- Toine 6mo ago"As a French" ne veut rien dire en anglais. Il faut rajouter man, person ou quelquechose. Frenchman, French person, French citizen.
- Mindless2112 6mo agoThe demonym for France is "French," so it's not wrong (even if it doesn't sound right.)
- traceroute66 6mo agoNo. "French" is adjective or a collective noun, but don't use it as a countable noun. Trying to say "as a French" makes about as much sense as thinking "as a American" is correct. As has already been said ... "a French (wo)man","a French person","a French citizen" is the correct way to go. The reason you can say "an American" is because America starts with a vowel. Same reason why you would not say "a British" but you could say "a Brit".
- mistrial9 6mo agoa French; an American; a Brit, or a British sounds casual but correct to me
- traceroute66 6mo ago> sounds casual but correct to me I don't care if it "sounds ok to me". If you're going to make statements like that to go against what I've written then at least come up with some viable citations to grammar literature. Honestly, in all my years on this earth I have never, ever heard anybody in any English speaking country I've spent time in say "a French" "a American" "a British". And that amounts to a lot of time surrounded by people speaking VERY "casual" English. P.S. I said "an American" was ok if you re-read.. an NOT a
- peter-m80 6mo agoshould be done at EU level and make it mandatory for all members
- harvey9 6mo agoFrance has been doing this in parts of its government functions for years, building expertise and learning what works. What do you imagine the EU institutions would bring to the table?
- picsao 6mo ago[dead]
- dbdr 6mo agoGood on France for doing that work. More countries and/or EU involvement could bring economies of scale: apart from translation, a lot of work on fixing bugs and adding features to the relevant open source projects can be done once and benefit all. So either get the same results faster, more cheaply per country, or both. Sure, that adds some bureaucracy and coordination cost too, but should be worth it overall.
- harvey9 6mo agoThe EU could perhaps fund some of the work but it is the Cathedral to Linux's Bazaar.
- dbdr 6mo agoIt would be the Cathedral if it made a 5 year plan to build the perfect solution (even more so if from quasi-scratch). But the EU is also known to offer (sometimes small scale) grants in specific domains. That's much more compatible with the Bazaar.
- roysting 6mo ago[flagged]
- e-dant 6mo agoMicrosoft is a strategic risk for the US, too
- trinsic2 6mo agoExactly. I have been thinking about using this migration articles as a way to convince my customers to switch.
- Leomuck 6mo agoMicrosoft is a strategic risk for everybody, looking at their track records the last few years.. I don't love Linux, but I like it. It's no-bullshit. It doesn't always do everything perfectly, but it has the right mindset. It doesn't want to screw me over.
- redoh 6mo ago[flagged]
- gib444 6mo ago> Munich tried a big-bang migration without enough internal expertise and caved under political pressure Almost sounds planned to fail...
- gyulai 6mo agoIf anything, the lesson to learn from the LiMux failure has nothing to do with technology or with project planning + execution, but with politics. If you extort millions from government as a for-profit business, most of which ends up as pure profit, there is an “emperor's new clothes” dynamic. It aligns the interests of government officials with yours in driving a narrative that there was good value generated for the taxpayer from that taxpayer money you got. Also: You now have those millions in a war fund, which you can use as negotiation mass. (In the case of LiMux and Munich, Microsoft relocated their corporate HQ to Munich as a quid pro quo for the City of Munich abandoning the LiMux project, which directly benefitted the City of Munich because it now got to tax Microsoft in a way that it didn't previously get to do). … these kinds of strategies game theoretically dominate any kind of play that's possible through open source.
- mavhc 6mo agoPlanned to get a discount from MS at least
- clickety_clack 6mo agoEven the US government should be considering this.
- _ink_ 6mo agoGlad that France takes the lead, that Germany fumbled. Allez Les Blues!
- mrits 6mo agoFrance hasn't taken the lead. They haven't done anything. This will be abandoned by this time next year.
- M95D 6mo agoI fear this might be just license costs cutting and not something that Linux and FOSS will benefit from.
- ur-whale 6mo ago> I fear this might be just license costs cutting and not something that Linux and FOSS will benefit from. yup, at this point, nothing but cobwebs and IOU's left in the coffers over there and every little bit of saving helps.
- samrus 6mo agoWhy wouldnt linux and FOSS benefit from usage? At the least it result in social validation, if not bug reports
- M95D 6mo agoSocial validation brings incompetent users expecting something like Windows that "just works". Even if they could bring some bug reports... We have lots of those already! We have decades of ignored bug reports.
- Leomuck 6mo agoWait, do we not want incompetent users on Linux? That's a weird take. Linux is not for elite technologically profound users, it's for everybody. If things don't work for non-technical users, we should strive to make it better?
- M95D 6mo agoAs if Linux devs just sat and did nothing for the last 30 years... Linux today is the best they could do and it's not even at the Win95 functional level. No, we don't want incompetent users on Linux. It's going to be something like eternal september.
- fph 6mo agoWhy would only incompetent users expect something that "just works"?
- tjarjoura 6mo agoThis sounds interesting on paper but I wonder how likely it is they actually pull it off. Even putting aside the logistics of installing new oses across a bunch of workstations, migrating from legacy Active Directory domains is something even small enterprises struggle with.
- idoubtit 6mo agoThe chain of facts makes me sad: 1. The French government announces its digital agency is to write a plan, by the end of the year, so that France could reduce its extra-European dependencies. The communiqué is wrapped up with minor facts (e.g. the digital agency is to switch to Linux on dozens of computers) and big promises from Ministers. 2. Various news sites state that "France is ditching Windows", at least in their titles. 3. On new aggregators, most people react to the titles. Some do read the articles. Very few realize it's about promises to act toward a vague goal, with an unknown calendar, and many political uncertainties. I would have hoped for more cautious reactions. It's not a leading act, not a reason to be proud, not a example to follow. It's just words. The French government already made similar promises in the past. Sometimes, it did happen, like the Gendarmerie (rural police) switching to a Linux distribution. Sometimes, it didn't, like the pact signed by the Army Ministry with Microsoft in 2022: many clauses are still secret, even the prices.
- slibhb 6mo agoPerformative anti-Americanism has become one of the major features of European culture (and especially French culture).
- x3ro 6mo agoWhat's performative about not wanting to go down with a sinking ship? Or are you under the illusion that the U.S. is doing particularly well right now? It appears that the "we have the bigger stick" strategy is finally meeting some resistance, and I am happy to see it.
- slibhb 6mo agoFrance deciding, in principle, to come up with a plan for not using Microsoft is performative. It stops being performative when they actually do it. At any rate, is there a good reason for France to stop using Microsoft? I'm doubtful. It's a bit like the DoD declaring Anthropic a "supply chain risk"; basically performative. To respond to the rest of your post: while the Trump administration's behavior has diminished US standing in the world, the US is doing well compared to Europe in many important dimensions (e.g. economic growth). Also, far-right parties in Europe seem much more dangerous than the right in the US. But all of that is a side show. European skepticism of the US has its roots in the postwar era. It's fundamentally about resentment. Europe is geopolitically weak and depends on the US for defense which is galling, especially for France with its history as a global power.
- jlnthws 6mo agoNice! Now moving from Windows to Linux is the "easy", visible part. Replacing US cloud + US AI dependence end to end is much harder, and that’s the real deal today.
- Leomuck 6mo agoI think you're right. Even though France might not have done much yet, it's a sign many people will read about and maybe think Linux is a good alternative. That's a win in my book. AI and cloud are another thing altogether. Mistral is alright, open-source AI models are alright, but overall I think they can't compete yet. And I don't think there are fully capable cloud alternatives to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud yet. EU pushing Nextcloud-based alternatives really doesn't fuel confidence honestly. I mean Nextcloud is fine, but that's not the big alternative push we need here.
- bigfudge 6mo agoReally though, how many companies actually need Azure, AWS? In my experience in SME's there is _so_ much overcomplication, over-provisioning and overspending going on because there has been a default assumption that US cloud==lower risk. Governments properly mandating that data be held in the EU, or even in orgs with proper EU entities and checks and balances against US interference in time of conflict would change the game. This is what the EU should be working on... a data residency regime that allows us to use AWS but creates a firewall that allows us to take operational control of the servers if the US continues on it's current path.
- cmiles8 6mo agoThey’re still going the almost certainly end up running this on US designed chips, with US designed networking equipment and a bunch of other assets tied back to US companies. They should do what they want, but it’s “sovereignty theater” at best.
- ghighi7878 6mo agoYou always have to start somewhere. Whether this will succeed or not is not known, but you do have to start somewhere.
- pessimizer 6mo agoStart with not antagonizing China, and you'll have other vendors to chose from.
- omgwtfbyobbq 6mo agoI wouldn't say that. I think it's a proportional response to US tarriffs/changes in foreign policy under the current administration, just like the cancellation of defence contracts/orders. It's unrealistic for any nation to do everything themselves, but they can make some changes in response to the US starting trade wars, ditching foreign policy/climate objectives, etc...
- znnajdla 6mo agoThe US or Trump can’t switch off your chips or your networking equipment on a whim - and if they ever designed hardware that could do that, no one would buy such hardware as soon as that capability became known. Using cloud software is a much bigger risk - your access can be turned off anytime and data access is part of the deal. Sovereignty is not about building everything yourself. Division of labor advances civilization, but it doesn’t have to come at the cost of sovereignty. Sovereignty is about designing the work contract such that you don’t become entirely beholden to another party. You build hardware for me, but after that it’s mine, not yours. I trust you to build the hardware to fulfill that contract, and if you ever break that trust I’ll find someone else to build that hardware. That’s sovereignty. I don’t have to build everything myself.
- jhawk28 6mo agoAI finding vulnerabilities in open source software is going to make it super unpleasant for a time. I expect there to be a shift back to closed source until we get through that period.
- omgwtfbyobbq 6mo agoThat's also a benefit to some degree. Closed source likely has as many vulnerabilities and bugs, but if AI can't find them it'll progressively become less secure.
- swiftcoder 6mo agoIs there any evidence that GenAI is incapable of redteam'ing proprietary software? This seems like the sort of thing an agent with suitable tooling would be quite good at - I see someone already made an MCP for ghidra...
- Leomuck 6mo agoFair. But also I look at it as a chance. We get to fix lots of bugs. Bugs that bad actors can't use anymore.
- pessimizer 6mo agoA million eyes makes no difference when it comes to AI, they're all going to find the same vulnerabilities. Which means that one guy running AI against your closed source software is just about the same as 1000 guys running AI against your FOSS, but most of the people running against your FOSS are going to be doing it to help you, and the people who ran against your closed codebase are never going to tell you about it. AI finding vulnerabilities and cleaning them up is going to be a budget problem for closed-source software, who have gotten used to ignoring vulnerabilities until somebody screams at them. Closed source software isn't kept in a magical safe in a cavern deep beneath the earth, guarded by dragons. Half the people in your company touch it every day, and probably plenty of contractors.
- Rustwerks 6mo agoI suspect that the same AI trick works with binaries if you run them through a decompiler first. It would be interesting to try if I had time.
- anon291 6mo agoLinux is also written by American companies at the end of the day. Most linux devs are supported by American companies and Linux's benevolent dictator for life, Linus Torvalds, lives in Portland, Oregon and is an American citizen. There's literally no non-American general-purpose operating system.
- etchalon 6mo agoThey're not wrong.
- ChrisArchitect 6mo agoAgain? what was wrong with the previous two discussions about this OP? with 1400+ upvotes [dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47719486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47719486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716043 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716043
- mancerayder 6mo agoHas anyone noticed an increased of one-liner controversial commentary, usually assertions, with a bunch of replies, sometimes, "No and no" or something like "this is the right answer" or a bunch of greyed comments? HN is not Reddit, and that's a Reddit pattern. It's an anti-intellectual pattern because it's a popularity/anger contest and there's nothing of substance. I'd love to hear the pros and cons and even likelihood of Linux in government, but I'm having trouble finding the smart commentary from the grey noise. Help!
- sizzleflip5000 6mo ago[dead]
- ddtaylor 6mo agoThe amount of money and time wasted because people want to run Windows is staggering. There are organizations and governments running tens of thousands of machines, having highly sensitive data stolen, and much worse and paying for that "privilege." That's bad enough, but then you get to play the "tick tock" release game of a normal quality release, followed by whatever bizarre experiment comes after. Vista, Metro, and now 11. Features come and go, layers of complexity are added, abandoned, etc. You and your organization are a helpless passenger in a drunk drivers car. But hey, they'll throw you a few credits sometimes or introduce you to a new predatory side hustle of theirs with a rebranded flavor of vendor lock-in. Maybe they'll help you take something you own and lease it back to you via a subscription. Yes, I'm the Linux person. Yes, I've been saying these same things for decades. Yes, our system has flaws and could be better. But, what I have been learning that is new over the last few years is that when centralized and crappy systems are a combination of cheap and simple, people don't care about alternatives. Then once people are dug into a hole that only gets deeper it begins to be a much easier sell to just be at ground level looking down asking "You okay there buddy?" Virtually every problem I read about or hear people complaining about has a direct and simple solution that we in the FOSS community are already doing. Use free and open source software from the repository. Use sandboxing techniques like Flatpak. If you have the need, use something like Qubes. For most cases qemu is so good you can run a separate VM per task! KVM is very good. There are so many solutions and the landscape is wide open.
- jrm4 6mo agoLinus Torvalds. Richard Stallman. GNU and the GPL. As a bit of an old-timer, I literally don't know exactly where to start a new conversation on this in a place like this; for me the obviousness of the theoretical and practical superiority of free and open source software principles are just always there for me; and it's quite obvious here that it's different for younger people. So I'm dropping the names and the concepts. Perhaps someone else knows how to get this going?
- bhayanisumit06 6mo agoI totally agree, this was long time coming.
- jim33442 6mo agoI don't see how this strategy can work without the EU basically having a counterpart to Microsoft. You can't beat Windows just uniting around the Linux kernel, it needs to be a whole OS plus an entire ecosystem including cloud.
- flossly 6mo agoI prefer this reason, "risk", from the "cost savings" reasons we've seen in Germany, Russia, Germany (Munich at first) and Spain (Extremadura at first)
- merlin1de 6mo ago[dead]
- bigfatkitten 6mo agoEven if you don’t view the US as a strategic risk, it is wise to have a plan to not be in Microsoft’s ecosystem. Microsoft has all but abandoned their self hosted products in favour of cloud, and their cloud services are a security dumpster fire. Microsoft’s cloud was described as a “pile of shit” but it achieved FedRAMP ATO only because so many agencies were already using their services. https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-cloud-fedramp-cybersecurity-government https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-cloud-fedramp-c... Entra ID is full of disastrous design-level bugs like this one. https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/19/microsoft_entra_id_bug/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/19/microsoft_entra_id_bu... Microsoft has deep rooted cultural problems that make the company structurally incapable of fixing their platform. https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...
- ddtaylor 6mo agoThe negative view of this and framing that it will be abandoned is interesting. France has already transitioned over 100,000 of their machines from Windows to Linux for their police force. They run a modified version of Ubuntu. Yes, it took them near a decade to do it. There are roughly 80,000 more systems currently in transition at varying levels of complete. Yes, this new directive is to move towards a goal of 2.5M systems. Yes, that's a lot more than their current number. They are making progress and now have a clear directive that guides them.
- jurschreuder 6mo agoWe also migrated from Windows to Linux and Mac. We also migrated from AWS and Azure to European cloud. But as you can see Mac is still from the USA so although the making things European sounds nice, it's only part of the reason. Mac has greatly improved with the M chip line. Windows has greatly degraded over time. AWS and Azure are by now something like 10x the price per year of just buying the hardware yourselves. They always compare the price to the salary of a senior engineer in San Francisco if you include vested stocks. However installing a database with the correct security settings has also become a lot easier since AWS started.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- linzhangrun 6mo ago[flagged]
- Xiaoher-C 6mo ago[dead]
- spwa4 6mo agoNow that on-chip silicon radios have been invented, using anything but home-designed cpus, and in general all chips, is lunacy from a nation-state security standpoint.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]