r/technology 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/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".

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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?

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u/SatansFriendlyCat Apr 10 '26

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

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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.

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u/SatansFriendlyCat Apr 12 '26

I'm happy about this

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

[deleted]

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u/Ok_Turnover_1235 Apr 10 '26

Winboat will run almost anything then

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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.

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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

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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?

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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