year of the french linux desktop
this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2026
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But I am le tired
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Combining French snobbery with Linux snobbery could set off some kind of chain reaction.
How soon until Quebec joins the Bloc de L'nux?
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Meanwhile in the UK our government is strengthening ties to palintir. We always have to be the losers of Europe
You guys literally wrote the book on Orwellian governments.
Eh, Germany is currently doing the same, so we're both losing
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I'd be interested to try their distro when it's done...
I'll just need to remove the french language pack first. Let me look up instructions for that real quick... Oh no...
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They won’t go back. once you start getting used to having logic that responds to your commands it really is hard to give that up to ai slop.
J'utilise le Arch de Triomphe, btw
I know eveything in France is not sunshine and rainbows, but come on, cheap high speed internet, fantastic pedestrian infrastructure, great social welfare program, and now linux being adopted by the government?
France seems pretty cool to me
L'Nux
Le Nux
Hello, this is Le Nus Torvalds, and I pronounce Le Nux as Le Nux.
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This is how you renegotiate with MS.
Hopefully the time for negotiations is past
Yeah, I think/hope this is their "Find Out" era.
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Between this and expedition 33, France is coming up with some Ws these days.
Let's hope they'll use Gendarmerie's almost 20 years of experience on that.
Glad I found this comment. It was my first thought when seeing the headline: haven't they already been doing that for decades?
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Vive la France
I wish Spain did the same, but Microsoft is very present, almost exclusively, in the national and regional administrations. There used to be more Linux, for example in education, but know, Microsoft everywhere. Sigh
Monkey's Paw: They pick Red Hat as a distro.
Probably more likely to go for SUSE, since it's European but still Enterprisey.
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With the resources they have -- and the goal of having security and control over their digital supply lines -- I don't see why they wouldn't roll their own distro. Maybe heavily based on an existing distro (looking at you, Debian) but something that's completely under their control, so they can choose for themselves exactly what packages are included, what security settings are used as defaults, when and if to update things, etc.
Edit: after (gasp) actually reading the article, it seems that each department within the French government will be responsible for their own implementation, which means they might all end up using different distros in different departments.
It's either a political move (nobody wants to be responsible for and/or depend on another ministry), or 4D chess where they would prevent a single vulnerability to expose the entire user base.
Fun fact, Orange (former France Telecom) has developed its own distro for the best part of the last 25 years. It's.. very peculiar.
By who are we kidding. The actual work will be offloaded to the shittiest contractor available (Capgemini/Atos/SopraSteria), it will take 5 years of the planned 2 and will cost 3.5 times the initial budget, for something sensibly shittier than an uBlue script.
That seems odd, that just means higher costs for support. Pick one distro then do custom packages or Ansible for your stuff that you want on top but don’t go a million different ways
Going a millions different ways is more in the FOSS spirit than starting off by saying 'everyone will use this list of software'. They can't know what will be the best fit for everyone so they're approaching it flexibly.
They can iterate in the future or come up with standards as they need, but in the beginning it's better to try a lot of different things to see what people discover.
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So I can no longer make the joke about removing french language packs using rm -fr /?
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This is huge step, hopefully others will follow!
I use Arch btw
Coming soon: Arch de triomphe.
What is omphe and why do they need 3?
It was originally named Arch de Omphe omphe omphe for the noise of the soldiers marching through it, but they got tired omphe it, I mean of it and renamed it to Triomphe. Not to be confused with victory.
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As a French, I wait before believing it. The DINUM does not really hold authority above the rest of the government and all the other administrations. Our gendarmerie switched to ubuntu more than 10 years ago, but the police planned to change all its computers to accomodate to windows 11, and the DINUM advocated to for dong to stop using american cloud providers, but we have a shit ton of public stuff running on american cloud, including the health data hub.
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They should reboot mandrake/mandriva. As I recall it was a french project anyway.
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