France is trying to move on from Microsoft Windows. The country said it plans to move some of its government computers currently running Windows to the open source operating system Linux to further reduce its reliance on U.S. technology.
Linux is an open source operating system that is free to download and use, with various customized distributions that are tailored and designed for specific use cases or operations.
In a statement, French minister David Amiel said (translated) that the effort was to “regain control of our digital destiny” by relying less on U.S. tech companies. Amiel said that the French government can no longer accept that it doesn’t have control over its data and digital infrastructure.
If a large country such as France is serious about such a switch I’d be surprised if they didn’t use some sort of custom distro, perhaps built upon Ubuntu. This would allow for solid compatibility with the “parent”, but also allow for some tweaking to fit the specific needs of the French government and its many agencies. To my knowledge the German state of Schleswig Holstein, which decided to switch to open source as much as possible months ago, still hasn’t decided which distro would be the best fit for their project. Such a major decision really needs good planning and cannot be allowed to go wrong.