All games I want to play run very well and mostly the process is just "install -> play".

If a game has an aggressive anticheat, like Battlefield 6 or Valorant, it will not work and you can forget about it.

Controllers work fine, so do some wheels and other peripherals, but a good number of wheels, pedals, joysticks, VR headsets, and other wild and wacky input devices might not work that well or not at all. It mostly depends on whether the software for them runs on Linux, runs in Wine, or is needed at all. Not sure about VR, but I know it was a bit dire 1-2 years ago.

If you don't play hardcore simulator games, and don't play one of the competitive shooters with aggressive anticheat (e.g. CS2 and other competitive shooters run perfectly well), you can just install Linux, install Steam or one of the other launchers, and just hit play.

If you're not sure, you can check the status on https://protondb.com.

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.

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.

Where we are at now is that the pain of moving away from Windows is acceptable for many larger organizations and governments, especially those with flat or decreasing budgets. You can just swap out the OS layer and keep other processes the same - keep using Office with just the browser versions if you want, or move to an alternative (like EU-based). Teams works on Linux. There is no moat on Windows anymore

> designed for scenarios where full ownership and operational independence from Microsoft is required

In France's case, Capgemini and Orange have a joint venture to operate datacenters that Microsoft runs Azure and Office on top of [1]. Moving away from Windows and Teams would still reduce their dependence on Microsoft substantially. But if the core goal is to reduce dependence on non-European suppliers, I would be wary of the French government buying services from "Bleu" when it's mainly Microsoft and a couple of consultancies in a trenchcoat.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sovereign-clou...

[1] https://www.capgemini.com/news/press-releases/capgemini-and-...

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.

Above all, I'm also surprised on how those same organization are using Anthropic or OpenAI or other close source solutions for their agent harnesses instead of going for Open Source.

Malte just yesterday showed how powerful innovation with small teams can be achieved particularly in EU.

I hope they start looking for those alternatives too for their agentic systems, beyond using pi-mono.

I believe the largest Linux Desktop initiative in France is GendBuntu[1] for the National Gendarmerie

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu?useskin=vector

Its not a surprise from Russia but the USA. I guess we’re right to cut all bridges as fast as possible with the USA.

Definitely the right call on Windows, though. Even my parents (in their mid-seventies) moved to Linux this year.

Nations and individuals can't depend or be held hostages of a handful of companies on the other side of the Atlantic that have the will to do whatever they want with their customers data.

This is the right path to follow and wish that in upcoming years this initiative becomes a reality across the globe. Long success for Linux and all BSDs!

And Linux development and adoption helps everybody not just France. A win win.

But not FreeBSD, C, Go, or others.

Basically Government doesn't want MIT / BSD, they want GPL and AGPL.

It's a shame that we have no equivalent to Google or AWS in Europe and now that it seems LLMs might eat search, we don't have any of those either.

The French government did not provide a specific timeline for the switchover, or which distributions it was considering.

Got to be Mandrake right?

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.

1. Graphic design software is subpar (expecially when compared to mac) and very often under supported. And GIMP has absolutely the worst UX of any program I've ever seen for such a widely recommended software. 2. Gamedev (i.e. Unity) is much less stable and annoying to work with (mac is much better but Windows still wins) 3. Older hardware support, most of the times you can use a super old software (say a printer) and it works. Linux much better than mac for this, from my experience 4. Lots of things on Win are plug and play, Linux is a pain of custom drivers from dead githubs. Mac slightly better or worse, it might either exist as a stupidly expensive application or have to jump hoops to get a driver in.

And I know people say "just use Wine" or "GIMP is actually great and free" but at the end of the day, I want my main driver to be stable and good to use. If anytime I save a project running via Wine has a non 0% chance of it crashing and bringing down my entire work, it's not going to happen.

I do use and recommend Linux quite extensively but that's why I always have 3 different systems at any given time:

1. Win: gamedev, hardware stuff or bigger games, some design, GPU heavy work. 2. Mac: design, light GPU work, browsing and portability (battery life and cooling is fantastic) 3. Linux: everything else

This hasn't changed in the past 10+ years, even though now I can see much more gaming happening on Linux, which is very nice.

For example locked communication devices are huge national security risk, so Apple will have their money frozen and given two options:

1) Open up iOS etc, bring all the servers to EU. Continue business as usual, EU financial institutions may choose to use Apple services as Apple pay but they may choose to bypass it. EU developers may choose to use Apple App Store services and pay the Apple's fees or they may choose to bypass it. Apple may chose to make Xcode a paid software, developers may choose not to purchase Xcode and use other non-Apple tools and pay nothing to Apple.

2) Use credit against the frozen money to refund your users if they bring their devices to you. All the Apple devices will be locked out from EU mobile providers(technically very easy for iPhone, simply by blocking devices with Apple IMEI on EU networks) and any remaining devices of the users will be refunded with the Apple's money. After some grace period, any money remaining in Apple's account will be transferred to Apple and if Apple wants to do business in EU again will have to do the option 1.

I'm bit on the doomer side of things, so I think that if Trump keeps his current course and power, at the end of the term American software industry will shrink by %90 as it will be expelled from most of the world and will be serving to 350M people instead of 8B people. Its amazing how US is screwing up its dominant position in this incredibly lucrative industry that lets them serve a market of 8B people and accumulate huge wealth in the process.

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.

USAians tend think everything is less popular in Europe simply because it is inferior and fails purely on its technical merits. I know nothing will ever change their minds, but at least non-European non-USAians might recognise the efforts a bit more.

We are also willing to accept 'good but not perfect' and understand tradeoffs.

You just have to be willing to put in the investment to verify/review with parties that meet your needs.

This should have happened already, is the general theme. I still have my Shrike CDs around and the modern-day Fedora (I think 44 is about to launch next week?) is more than sufficient for many, many use cases within the government, regardless of which distro they end up with.

My hope is that the backing of EU software development teams to open source will lift all boats and in addition to Linux, BSD may get some fruits of labor out of it.

9front as always is to be strictly forbidden without a security clearance.

I've been dual booting the first couple of years, then dumped Windows completely in 2016.

Since then I am on Linux only. Private and corporate.

Yes, sometimes I need to access a Windows machine or do work in one (I am my own boss), but then the client pays a "pain tax" as I call it.

There are some games I can't play I would've played in the past. Mostly competitive online games.

Technically that's annoying, but for me personally it's not a problem as I am not in my teens of twenties anymore and I have other hobbies and obligations.

This is one of them.

With another 3 or so years with the Orange Dildo in charge, there's a decent chance the momentum will turn into something tangible.

But well, I can always switch to FreeBSD I guess. And that's my plan B.

But seriously, how long before MS offers them a deal they would rather not refuse?

I lost count, it's how many attempts again? Fill me in.

Previous attempts to "ditch Windows" have not ended that well. Munich in 2003, the entire Federal German government in 2009, Munich again in 2013, Munich again in 2021, and so on. Most common end-result: back to Windows.

Breaking points are typically the lack of an "Office 2016" compatible suite, lack of "Adobe PDF" tooling, and a mishmash of legacy apps. The latter seems trivially addressable by a "Remote Desktop/RemoteApps" environment, but there are definitely issues, mostly surrounding printing and clipboard handling.

All of that can be solved, but definitely requires more funding and, crucially, coordination, beyond "Open Source Cures All."

[1] Oh, I just love it when an entire culturally-diverse region gets lumped in together, or, when, as in this case, ~6M French government employees are treated as a homogeneous group.

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.

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.

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.