David Amiel, France's Minister for Budget, Public Accounts and Civil Administration, announced plans to transition some computers in government institutions from Windows to Linux. This migration is part of an initiative aimed at ensuring digital sovereignty and reducing dependence on non-European technology companies.
Amiel emphasized that the French government can no longer tolerate a lack of control over its data and digital infrastructure. The timelines for the transition and the specific Linux distribution to be implemented have not yet been specified. The first to be migrated to Linux will be the workstations at the Inter-Ministerial Digitalization Management (DINUM). Ministries have been instructed to prepare their own plans to reduce dependence on non-European technologies by autumn, covering workstations, collaborative development tools, antivirus software, AI systems, DBMS, virtualization platforms, and network equipment.
The decision to replace Windows came just a few months after the announcement to transition the video conferencing system from the Microsoft Teams suite to the French product Visio, based on the open Jitsi platform. By the end of the year, there are also plans to replace the healthcare information system with a new in-house development. Additionally, there has been an announcement about migrating 80,000 staff from the health insurance system to their own interdepartmental document management platform.
Additionally, it is worth noting the development of the EU OS Linux distribution, aimed at use in the European Union's public sector. The distribution is being developed by enthusiasts who are collaborating with EU government bodies and intend to gain status as an initiative of the European Commission. This distribution is based on Fedora Linux, formed as an atomically updatable system image and comes with the KDE desktop environment. Other similar European distributions include: GendBuntu (a version of Ubuntu used by the French National Gendarmerie), Linux Plus 1 (implemented in the German region of Schleswig-Holstein), LiMux (used in Munich until 2029), and Linux Barcelona (an Ubuntu build used in government institutions in Barcelona).
Source: opennet.ru
