France’s digital directorate dumping Windows desktops, adopting Linux instead
- Reference: 1776067266
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2026/04/13/france_tech_sovereignty_plan/
- Source link:
DINUM announced the swap last week during an interministerial seminar that saw several government agencies try to create momentum for development of sovereign technologies that reduce France’s dependence on non-European technology.
A government [1]statement about the seminar included a quote from Minister of Public Action and Accounts David Amiel to the effect that “The State can no longer simply acknowledge its dependence; it must break free. We must become less reliant on American tools and regain control of our digital destiny.”
[2]
The statement cited DINUM’s plan to develop a [3]videoconferencing platform called “Visio” , designed to help France’s government break free of American tools like Zoom, Teams, Webex, and Google Meet, as one example of a step towards sovereign tech.
[4]
[5]
It then revealed another: DINUM binning Windows and adopting Linux.
France’s entire civil service employed 5.8 million people in 2025. According to DINUM’s LinkedIn page, it employs 201-500 people. Let’s be kind and assume the agency employs 500 people – or 0.008 percent of France’s civil service.
[6]
Consider, also, the Linux Foundation’s [7]scorecard of organizations that contribute to the Linux kernel.
American entities Meta, Intel, and Red Hat take the top three spots, Google is number four, AMD is ninth and Oracle America Inc rounds out the top 10. The only European company in the top 10 is SUSE. Two others – Arm and Linaro – are based in the UK, but Arm is majority-owned by Japan’s SoftBank.
[8]France buys nuclear supercomputing spinoff Bull from Atos for €404M
[9]French DIY etailer ManoMano admits customer data stolen
[10]Attacker gets into France's database listing all bank accounts, makes off with 1.2 million records
[11]Europe's sovereign cloud spend set to triple as geopolitics bite
DUNIM has nonetheless struck a blow for software liberty, because the interministerial seminar will now do three things.
One is requiring all French ministries required to create a plan to adopt non-American tech for PC operating systems, collaboration tools, tools, antivirus software, artificial intelligence, databases, virtualization, and network equipment. Europe is home to solid alternatives for most of those products: the likes of SAP, MariaDB, Vates, Nokia and Ericsson could all fit in with France’s plans.
Another initiative calls on France’s State Procurement Department to devise a plan, and a timeline, for reducing dependence on American tech.
[12]
The third initiative is teeing up “industrial digital meetings" to be held in June 2026, to get the private sector onboard with the sovereign tech push.
DINUM hasn’t offered a timeline for moving other government agencies to non-American technologies, but it clearly wants to set the snowball rolling.
This is clearly a good move … for The Register and its readers, who can surely look forward to decades of stories about migration projects going pear-shaped across France as government agencies try to untangle years of investment in Microsoft, Cisco, and VMware to adopt sovereign solutions.
Given the Trump administration’s dislike of anything that harms American businesses, France’s plan could also set off a new round of tariffs or threats to extinguish civilizations. ®
Get our [13]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.numerique.gouv.fr/sinformer/espace-presse/souverainete-numerique-reduction-dependances-extra-europeennes/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/publicsector&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ady-xU7HnER3IG6ZzpzbHwAAAZE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/27/france_videoconferencing_visio/
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/publicsector&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ady-xU7HnER3IG6ZzpzbHwAAAZE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/publicsector&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ady-xU7HnER3IG6ZzpzbHwAAAZE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/publicsector&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ady-xU7HnER3IG6ZzpzbHwAAAZE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contributors?timeRange=past365days&start=2025-04-13&end=2026-04-13&widget=organizations-leaderboard
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/01/france_bull_purchase/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/27/manomano_breach/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/22/french_bank_hack/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/09/europe_sovereign_cloud_spend/
[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/publicsector&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ady-xU7HnER3IG6ZzpzbHwAAAZE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: "Consider [the] Foundation’s scorecard of organizations that contribute to the Linux kernel"
There's also the point that several contributing projects are based in Europe - KDE, LibreOffice and NextCloud being the most prominent. Then there are distros: Suse, Ubuntu, Zorin and Mint.
And what nationality is Greg Kroah-Hartman, the stable kernel maintainer? I believe he used to work for Suse so maybe there's a European steering that.
which distro will be adopted?
… perhaps no one single distro, but my bet would be that Emmabuntüs will do very well. https://emmabuntus.org/
This is huge for GNU/Linux - as big a validation as it is a condemnation of proprietary software. (And a huge loss in revenue for M$)
It also puts Linux very much in the spotlight - millions of new Linux users.
I also hope that this will mean that government-financed education moves to open source software.
And businesses will no-doubt take a look too.
Re: "Consider [the] Foundation’s scorecard of organizations that contribute to the Linux kernel"
There is also the issue of WHAT they are contributing.
Much of what they add is self serving, which in itself is no bad thing, but when say Intel are adding a large amount of code, a large chunk of that code will be for intel related stuff.
And who knows, when the AI bubble implodes, SoftBank will be utterly screwed, so the UK maybe able to pick ARM back up for Thee Shillings and Six Pence.
Re: "Consider [the] Foundation’s scorecard of organizations that contribute to the Linux kernel"
Seems to me that France would do well to look at China's experience in trying to discourage Windows use. The Chinese started moving away from Windows in 2000. They have home grown Linux systems. And the government is said to actively discourage the use of Windows. Yet Windows still has something like 70% market share on desktops there.
I'm NOT suggesting France and the EU should switch to Chinese OSes/providers. Politically that would be switching one dubiously reliable supplier for another that might not be much if any better. And pragmatically, I'd worry about how deeply the use of Chinese characters that contain much more contextual information than our Western phonetic alphabets is built into the software.
What I'm suggesting is that ditching Windows/Office may be a great idea. The OS is not that great. And Microsoft's atrocious quality control is becoming legendary. But switching away is probably going to be a long, hard, trek. I suspect much longer and harder than most Reg readers think.
I wish the French and Europeans luck. They'll likely need it.
Viva la France!
Problem is that the UK govt still has the fantasies that Britain is a world power and there is a "special relationship" across the Atlantic, not to mention the act of self-mutilation ten years ago.
At least I will be able to send emails to French colleagues. M$ has made that impossible in numerous other universities. Gmail has also started marking my emails as spam, even to very longstanding friends.
Walking the hard path
This will be a difficult path for them but I wish them sucess.
It won't be difficult because Linux is difficult to use but becasue of the interdependent, weird and generally badly developed bits of software that public sector orgs have to use.
The desktop is the easy bit. Cloud based SAAS apps will be easier just running them through the a browser but then you're back to US owned and controlled platforms.
Best of luck
Re: Walking the hard path
"but then you're back to US owned and controlled platforms"
The hoo-ha that's been reported about LO restarting development of a cloud-based version, NextCloud forking OnlyOffice and various initiatives to put together NC-based platforms for government use says that Office <365 and Google Workspace are expected to be replaced - in fct they should be prime targets even before the desktop. SAP is also a European product - so we can read about SAP migrations going off-course instead of Oracle.
Hosting or on-prem is going to need building up, though.
The EU Commission is very open to Linux. I have no issues logging in to the systems in Belgium using either Mac or Linux.
Threats to ensure self extinction
Given the Trump administration’s dislike of anything that harms American businesses, France’s plan could also set off a new round of tariffs or threats to extinguish civilizations.
That would not only be a "shoot foot" gesture, but a monumental "shoot yourself in the face with a very big cannon" move. Any sane government would immediately drop them hard. And even the insane governments would start to back off.
Re: Threats to ensure self extinction
... a monumental "shoot yourself in the face with a very big cannon" move.
Hmmm ...
... yet another monumental "shoot yourself in the face with a very big cannon" move.
There you go.
But fear not, there are still more to come.
.
management
What software can you use to manage Linux boxes. Is there an alternative to group policy, and active directory??
Re: management
If only there was some way to search the internet to find answers to questions like this.
https://www.devopsschool.com/blog/top-10-linux-fleet-management-tools-features-pros-cons-comparison/
It’s all about apps
The real issue is not the desktop operating system. It is not even Office, difficult as that can already be. The real challenge lies in the applications used by civil servants. In many cases, these are still classic client-server applications built for Windows. Over time, some of them can be migrated, ideally to browser-based access. Until then, though, many will likely continue to run on Windows Terminal Services, with Linux serving mainly as a fancy thin client.
Re: It’s all about apps
Let's imagine you're a software vendor selling Windows-based packages to European Civil Services. A large part of your user base says it intends to migrate to Linux. What to do, what to do?
"Consider [the] Foundation’s scorecard of organizations that contribute to the Linux kernel"
Irrelevant.
Linux is Open Source.
Putin could contribute if he was able, I don't care. If it's good, it should be used.
Of course, there's one caveat : Torvalds is supervising the project, not El Zuck or any other billionaire-boggled mind.
When/if that changes . . .