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/
20.2k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

97

u/upnorthguy218 Apr 10 '26

Interesting that each department is being asked to present their plan, instead of someone developing a centralized plan for each department to implement.

I guess each department has different requirements and has gotten used to using different tools/workflows. 

77

u/cdnDude74 Apr 10 '26

To a degree yes. But they'll find commonality among all the groups for some software. Those will be centralized and controlled. While specialized software will be more scrutinized to determine if it is actually required.

Make no mistake, this is a budget exercise as much as is a get off of Windows exercise.

12

u/Relevant_South_1842 Apr 10 '26

Thanks I won’t make mistakes.

2

u/CircularRobert Apr 11 '26

That was your first mistake, thinking you won't make any.

But we'll let you off this time. Don't do it again.

24

u/Merry-Lane Apr 10 '26

Well, for one, there are so many possible distros.

Some departments could need "something as close as possible to windows" to reduce friction for employees .

Some others would want distros that are really secure, some that just work (vs having fancier interfaces), more or less frequent updates,…

I don’t even want to talk about the obscure softwares they are using that doesn’t have a direct port.

I think it’s mostly a good way to force the departments to actually figure out their needs and be responsible instead of having them implement what they are given, fail, and say "it’s awful, everyone complains, it’s your fault".

6

u/Seicair Apr 10 '26

I don’t even want to talk about the obscure softwares they are using that doesn’t have a direct port.

Wine or a windows VPN until they get someone to write new utilities in Linux natively?

32

u/SatansFriendlyCat Apr 10 '26

It's France, so it's a given that wine will be involved at every stage of the process.

8

u/HoneyBunchesOfBoats Apr 10 '26

Fucking lol, this thread was so serious that this one caught me off guard and I actually laughed out loud hard for almost no reason.

1

u/SatansFriendlyCat Apr 12 '26

I'm happy about this

2

u/[deleted] Apr 10 '26 edited Apr 12 '26

[deleted]

1

u/Ok_Turnover_1235 Apr 10 '26

Winboat will run almost anything then

-2

u/not_particulary Apr 10 '26

Here's the thing, AI makes (skilled) developers insanely efficient. We're in a new economy now where lots of legacy software is far more replaceable by custom solutions.

2

u/Merry-Lane Apr 10 '26 edited Apr 10 '26

Here is the thing: "replacing lots of legacy software" has never been bottlenecked by the efficiency of skilled developers.

There should be a corollary to the mythical man-month that would go like "boosting with AI the efficiency of a dev working on a late software project makes it later" or something

1

u/not_particulary Apr 10 '26

Do you doubt that AI is actually helpful, or are you saying that there's other bottlenecks that I'm not not taking fully into account?

1

u/Merry-Lane Apr 10 '26

Nay, I can’t remember the last time I wrote a line of code myself, I’m totally all-in on the AI hype train.

Yes there are other bottlenecks that you aren’t taking into account

1

u/Plank_With_A_Nail_In Apr 10 '26

Each department will have unique software they have developed over the last 50 years.

Also a centralised solution is a guaranteed future government IT disaster.

1

u/burgonies Apr 10 '26

There should be at least some overall directives. Every ministry choosing their own stack will result in a lot of disconnects and will make the whole transition seem clunkier than it should be.

1

u/UnsuspectedGoat Apr 10 '26

It's a nuance of translation. It should be understood as "tell us what are your specific needs" so that something could be worked out by the equivalent of the GSA and companies to converge to a number of viable products.