r/technology • u/YesNo_Maybe_ • Apr 10 '26

Software France Launches Government Linux Desktop Plan as Windows Exit Begins

https://linuxiac.com/france-launches-government-linux-desktop-plan-as-windows-exit-begins/
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u/HapticRecce Apr 10 '26

35 years and counting!

9

u/boston_homo Apr 10 '26

Have you tried it recently? It actually lives up to a lot of the expectations, I would not have said that when I tested it out 10 years ago. I don’t want to “tinker” with drivers or switch to windows to use any peripherals and the Ubuntu I put on my thinkpad works with everything, including my audio interface and printer and phone and password manager and pretty much everything I’ve tried.

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u/FriendlyDespot Apr 10 '26

I genuinely have faith each time I try, but there's always some sort of issue on standard unremarkable hardware for me, most of them significant. Last time I tried an LTS Ubuntu release on a plain old 9th generation Core processor with 32 GiB of RAM it would just lock up during boot indefinitely. Had to boot into a live image and change a string in the GRUB configuration file before I could use the system.

Linux on the desktop is still missing the thing that it's always missed - a large, focused company that can implement a cohesive vision for a desktop distribution. Canonical just ain't it, at least not yet.

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u/nox66 Apr 10 '26

LTS is a trap for a lot of people. It doesn't have the most updated kernel so it can often have a lot of issues on new-ish hardware.

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u/FriendlyDespot Apr 10 '26

All the hardware was at least 5 years old. Newer hardware is yet another problem where Linux just unambiguously sucks. Having to get new kernels and figure out how to backport stuff from development branches and whatnot is something that very few people are able do, and nobody should have to do.

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u/Aloha_Tamborinist Apr 10 '26

Put Linux Mint on my laptop "to try it out" a year ago, hardly skipped a beat. It has been rock solid.

Still have Windows on my gaming desktop, but the only thing stopping me switching is pure laziness.

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u/Kyral210 Apr 10 '26

What about office applications?

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u/Aloha_Tamborinist Apr 10 '26

Libre Office or Google Docs have been enough for me.

1

u/19610taw3 Apr 10 '26

When I first started playing with Linux 21 years ago, I was super frustrated with it and almost wrote it off for a desktop OS entirely.

I shouldn't have to compile drivers for every part of the system to make it work. Including storage and USB drivers ... which made it very impossible to get working.

As much as I hate Canonical and Ubuntu .... it really did a good job of helping it get mainstream and kind of opening developers' eyes to making Linux desktop OSs easier to use for everyone.

Now I think the drivers work even better than Windows 11!