The French government has announced plans to migrate its Windows-based government computers to Linux, further reducing its reliance on American technology.
The French government has announced a goal to move away from Windows and migrate to Linux in order to establish digital sovereignty.
Souveraineté numérique : l'État accélère la réduction de ses dépendances extra-européennes
On April 8, 2026, France's Inter-Ministerial Digital Affairs Directorate (DINUM), in collaboration with the Directorate General for Enterprises (DGE), the French National Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI), and the National Agency for Procurement (DAE), held an inter-ministerial seminar, setting a clear goal of reducing digital dependence on areas outside of Europe. As a concrete initiative, DINUM announced a migration of workstation operating systems from Windows to Linux.
The French government has announced plans to transition to domestically produced collaborative tools as part of its efforts to establish digital sovereignty, possibly as early as January 2026.
The French government plans to switch from Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and other tools to the domestically developed 'Visio' - GIGAZINE
At this meeting, as a more concrete guideline for the transition plan, we requested that each ministry and public works contractor formulate plans for desktop systems, collaboration tools, antivirus software, AI, databases, virtualization tools, and network equipment by the fall of 2026, approximately six months from now.
Details such as 'which Linux distribution will be migrated to' have not yet been announced, and it seems we will have to wait for further decisions to be made at the government ministry level.
Accounting Secretary David Amiel emphasized the importance of digital sovereignty, stating, 'Nations can no longer afford to be dependent. They must break free. They need to reduce their reliance on American tools and forge their own digital destiny.'
The transition from Windows to Linux has garnered numerous comments on Hacker News, a news site frequented by engineers. Among them, lionkor , who has been using Linux for six years, responded to the opinion that 'many games don't support Linux, so I want to switch,' by saying, 'For the past three years, most games can be installed via launchers like Steam and run smoothly just by pressing the play button. However, games with strong anti-cheat features like Battlefield 6 and Valorant won't work.'
Hacker News has even featured a story about a hardcore individual who 'customizes the kernel to install a backdoor and configures it to work with anti-cheat, allowing them to play games with anti-cheat on Linux.'
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in Software, Posted by log1d_ts