Also GendBuntu, a custom version of Ubuntu used by 100 000 stations (almost all) of the national gendarmerie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu

"As a French" ne veut rien dire en anglais. Il faut rajouter man, person ou quelquechose. Frenchman, French person, French citizen.

Exactly. I have been thinking about using this migration articles as a way to convince my customers to switch.

Less so against China or Iran, presumably Europe will find itself on the "right side of history" yet again soon enough

still growing, you mean. France is, however significant, just one country. and then there is broader push to FOSS inside Europe, as well as Europe's own sovereign solutions. some attempts were failed, some were successful, but everything is still in progress

EDIT: on a second read, this sounded too diminishing of this achievement than I intended. the point is that it's not fully done yet, although it is remarkable that there is, finally, a political will for such actions

France has been doing this in parts of its government functions for years, building expertise and learning what works. What do you imagine the EU institutions would bring to the table?

The EU is not even a legitimate government in that it’s quite literally a con job (just shows up, moves in and declares “I’m your government now” and the people are like “yes, daddy!”. It’s weird, Europeans, it’s weird), but now you want to just have this fake government that is literally controlled by an unelected commission, unilaterally impose operating systems on all formerly sovereign nations too?

People like you amaze me, it’s the cattle advocating for the slaughter house because it has fancy neon lights and lasers.

I remember similar articles being posted 20+ years ago on Slashdot. And as we’ve seen, it’s often less of a “use Linux” and more of a “we have an alternate vendor” and there’s often suspicious lock-in (see the case in the EU or some similar country where the vendor was reading emails).

> Astroturfing around this is getting suspicious.

It's perfectly possible for people to be passionate about the subject.

> Astroturfing around this is getting suspicious.

Nah, linux and "$curreant_year is the year of the linux desktop" is just something the hacker / maker / nerd scene is passionate about.

Linus Torvalds created Linux as a student in Helsinki, Finnland. He later took U.S. citizenship and lives in Portland, Oregon, TTBOMK.

Now on some level, the question makes less sense, because Linux as we know it now is an international proejct that thousands of developers from dozens of countries collaborated on. But perhaps most would agree that Torvalds, who serves as main integrator, has more say than others regarding the directions of Linux, as long as he is alive.

The open source property of Linux is more important to the question which OS a country's government should adopt: corporate systems are hard to scrutinize, whereas open source systems you can inspect and compile yourself, and it is a wise move of the French government to go in that direction. It will also save a lot of money, but that should not be the primary motive.

It is open source. Many companies which contribute to it are American, but nobody from America can tell you what you can or cannot do with it - unlike Microsoft or Apple with their proprietary OS being forced by US government.

The “main guy” is Finnish. He also got American citizenship recently, but given the US has increased attacks on naturalised citizens [0] and has a history of this [1] it’s not a solid foundation.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2026/01/16/nx-s1-5677685/as-focus-shifts...

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

Just Wiki Linus Torvalds my friend:

> Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland

> In 2004, Torvalds moved with his family from Silicon Valley to Portland, Oregon.

?

No, and no?

...what?

Yeah, he became American, just like Einstein, Fermi, Von Neumann, etc.

There's a big lesson for Europe there, everyone super productive and able to move to the US does so at the first opportunity.

[delayed]

The EU chips act is subsidizing new fab construction in Europe.

Meanwhile the french Mistral is partnering with Nvidia to build an AI data center near Paris on which their LLMs will run.

But I agree this is not enough to make the EU a contender in the race with the US and China. The EU still has not seriously considered decoupling from American big tech.

I think it depends on how strong the compression advancements are going to be, such that much can be done locally in the future. I'd be interested in experiences of others here in using Gemma4, which is at the forefront of "intelligence per gigabyte" atm. (according to benches).

No-one needs LLMs.

AI has no value.