Frances switchted to Linux on 2.5 million PCs
I wonder how much money the government is saving on Windows licences alone
I just checked Microsoft’s website. They’re trying to make windows enterprise a subscription model. The current cost for what they’re calling “windows 365” is $99/yr per user. They’re saving nearly $250 million a year, or €211 Million
Probably also saving 100 to 200 million euros more in servicing fees. Licenses are but one component of cost models these days for companies. Sure, they will still have to find a vendor to service their Linux systems, but there should be a lot more cost flexibility in that space.
That might be the MSRP, but it’s not what they were paying.
They’re going to have at minimum three different types of “discounts” applied to their price:
- Volume discount
- Government discount
- Tenure discount
If I had to guess, it would knock anywhere from 30% to 60% off MSRP.
Windows 365 is the “cloud PC” that Microsoft is hosting as a VM in Azure. So you have a thin client that only connects to the VM over the internet. It’s very niche and pretty expensive. Regular windows licenses, especially with their volume of licensing will be a lot less. But they still save millions on licenses, especially for the M365 office licenses that they now no longer need.
License costs for Windows alone for one single Bundesland in Germany are 15 Mio EUR a year, I read, and that doesn’t include other costs. France is probably paying Microsoft in the hundreds of millions currently. You can do a lot on your own with that kind of money, especially when using everything open source has to offer, as basis.
I’m seems pretty reasonable for a cloud PC.
I just ran the costs through the Azure calculator, and a D2asV6 system with a 100GB drive and licenseing running 16hrs a day, 30 days a month would cost approximately 1200 dollars annually, so 99 bucks a year seems like a steal.
And a D2asV6 is not a lot of compute power. 2 cores, 8Gb ram.
In summary, Azure is fucking expensive if you are keeping VMs online all the time.
Wouldn’t you have to include user CALs as well? Im long out of windows land thankfully but I do recall needing those.
The current cost for what they’re calling “windows 365” is $99/yr per user.
Windows 365 Enterprise basic starts $31 per user per month and goes up from there.
I suspect you are confusing Windows 365 with Microsoft 365. The former includes a virtual (Cloud) PC and licensing for Windows and Office, the latter only provides Office licensing. Additionally the price point you quoted makes me think you are looking at Personal / Home pricing because Commercial & Government Office 365 pricing is calculated per user / per month and will vary wildly in price from $10 pu/pm to $50+ pu/pm.
I hate MS product names I hate MS product names I hate MS product names
I’m surprised one of those hasn’t been rebranded to copilot 365 yet
Microsoft 365 Copilot - Sign in - https://m365.cloud.microsoft/
🙃
Let’s be honest: If you’re buying 2,5 million licenses, you are not paying the price listed on the website
And if they put something like 10% of those savings back into developing more open source tech it would be a huge boost to the global community.
I’ve always wondered if the money saved from licenses would cover the cost of new full time employees to pick up support, it probably depends on the org size.
It’s not like they don’t need staff to support windows.
I read it as “pick up support for the FOSS projects” as opposed to user IT support.
So, contributing to the FOSS.
Even sponsorship would be awesome, in a “we can’t do the tech stuff, but here is 10% of what we saved” kinda way
What is saved, gets spent into operational costs now. Many cities tried the switch, had higher expenses and lower productivity, and switched back to Windows. Let’s hope France hired the right professionals for this migration
Boy I sure do remember a lot of people in the last ten years tell me its completely impossible to run any kind of modern enterprise set up without Windows.
Wow!
They were all fucking wrong!
Who could have guessed!
10 years ago, a significant number of enterprise software was written as windows native apps. What’s changed is now everything is a webapp and linux runs firefox/chrome/chromium/edge/etc just fine.
Also, already 10 years ago, corporate backends were pretty much already all running on Linux.
In big companies the stuff running in Windows has long been just been the Views in a multi-tiered Model-View-Controller systems architecture, whilst the data and logic sat in servers.
From my own experience, on the technical side it’s mainly the sunk cost into making the custom frontends in Windows and certain apps used to fill the gaps not covered by corporate systems (for example Excel and Outlook) that have held Windows in place.
On the management side, it’s probably a question of support contracts and friendly rather than professional relationships with specific Windows-only 3rd party vendors.
Not at all denying your point (which I totally agree with), just pointing out that in big enough companies to have their own software developers and proprietary systems, the movement away from Windows has been going on longer than that, just less visible to most people because what was being moved over was back and middle tier stuff.
Whilst people kept dreaming about the Year Of Linux On The Desktop, Linux had, since the 90s, quietly and steadilly been eating away at the responsabilities of software running on the Desktop.
I’m in the lucky position that I get to run Linux on my work machines in an otherwise Windows environment (helps that I’m in the IT dept). Enterprise apps are actually a lot better about supporting Linux these days. Zoom, WebEx, TigerConnect (healthcare focused HIPAA compliant messenger) all have native Linux versions. Also, the CrowdStrike EDR agent supports Linux too, which was helpful to get approval to run Linux. Support is good in IT specific tools too. VMWare remote console and
VMWareOmnissa Horizon client also support Linux natively, so I use Horizon to connect to a VM when I actually do need Windows. Most of the Cisco management tools that aren’t web based work too, e.g. CUCM RTMT, but they are in Java so not too surprising. The only stickler really is Microsoft products. I use Teams, Sharepoint and Outlook as PWA though, which is good enough for me (do all my actual document editing in LibreOffice though). Typically the only thing I actually need to log into actual Windows VM for is Windows Server Management Tools to manage AD, DHCP, DNS etc
So lucky. I hate W11 so much but dumb software developers keep me walled in
You could try running your windows-locked programs via Wine, Proton, or a VM-based solution for the worst offenders on a Linux distro (unless your employer requires you to run windows on bare metal, and I give you my condolences).
i never understood why my Government in Australia doesn’t have a tech division a Linux version to use, Libre Office software etc a messenger service, an email and a Mastodon instance. Doesn’t mean you have to use them by the Governments should and be available to all including our Oceania brothers if they wish including funding them.
Giving up digital sovereignty is beyond my understanding, let alone hosting Government. and financial services on foreign owned cloud services.
Yeah not having a government issued email is completely bonkers in this day and age. They should never have allowed Google to fill that gap.
Linux? I think we still using windows 10
Title makes it sound like a done deal but so far there’s a promise that there will be a plan in a few months.
The shift to Linux is happening and every French government ministry is required to put its migration plan in place by the fall of 2026, including considering complementary software such as antivirus, collaborative tools, and so on.
The shift to Linux is happening
Sounds like the shift to Linux is happening. I’m guessing by law. So, the first step is prep and planning, they aren’t going to back out of it, it just takes time to move an entire government over to a new OS.
Would be lovely if my Government would even consider that.
I hate using Win11, but it seems we’re so entrenched with Microslop that they’re even giving “officially endorsed” courses on how to use Co-Pilot.I understand that AI and Neural Networks have their uses, but why are people so willing to give up their ability to think and write for themselves??
Time is the main reason. In jobs where you write dozens of client-facing emails every day, small time savings compound fast.
Most people working in Outlook all day are doing exactly this kind of work: responding to clients, coordinating projects, clarifying requests, following up, documenting decisions, and managing constant communication.
Instead of writing every email from scratch, I can give AI instructions like:
“Read the email chain. The client needs X, Y, and Z. Write a draft reply in my voice.”
That takes seconds instead of several minutes per email. Across an entire workday, that can save hours.
Fair enough, but if you’re a manager isn’t that kind of the whole job? Communicating with people. If you’re not doing that, what are you getting paid to do?
I can’t imagine out-sourcing the skill-set you’re being paid for to an AI tool is a great way to build up that skill. Sounds like humanity’s typical great short-term idea with horrible long-term consequences.
I can write an amazing email word by word, or I can have my digital secretary draft it while I review, edit, and approve every part of it.
I don’t send anything I haven’t personally read and approved. The judgment, accountability, and intent are still mine.
You’re absolutely right that outsourcing learning and critical thinking to AI would have serious long-term consequences. But using AI to accelerate execution after you’ve already developed those skills is different.
I’m paid for the experience and judgment to know what needs to be said, what matters, and what outcome the communication is supposed to achieve.
Again, fair enough - treating it akin to a draft making machine isn’t a terrible idea…
But I would argue that reviewing an existing draft, while a perfectly valid skill to have, is not the same skill as actually writing that draft.
I can say from plenty of experience making and reviewing documentation, that making the first draft is always a much more demanding task than reviewing and making corrections.
And while there’s nothing wrong with making life a bit easier, maintenance of skills is just as important as making them in the first place. If you want to maintain skills for the latter, you need to let yourself write some drafts too.
I mean I have a microchasm example of this myself. I used to be good at remembering phone numbers prior to being able to store them all on a smartphone. Now, even if you put a gun to my head, I can really only remember my own. And that is because I outsourced that part of my memory to my phone, just as most people have - without any attempt to reinforce it.
I’ve genuinely enjoyed this exchange. It’s rare to find someone willing to refine an argument instead of just defending a position. I appreciate that you’re actually thinking through the implications instead of reducing this to “AI good” or “AI bad.”
And honestly, I think we agree on more than we disagree.
I don’t think replacing human thought with AI is healthy. Your concern about skill atrophy is legitimate, and your point about drafting versus reviewing is stronger than many people realize. Creating a first draft exercises very different cognitive muscles than critiquing an existing one.
Where I think we differ slightly is that I see an important distinction between:
- using AI to avoid developing competence
- using AI to accelerate execution after competence already exists
To me, that distinction matters enormously.
Someone blindly accepting AI output without understanding it puts themselves in a dangerous intellectual position. But someone who already has strong writing, reasoning, and communication skills can use AI more like a junior assistant or drafting tool while still retaining judgment, accountability, and intent.
What concerns me more is exactly what you’re pointing at: competence itself is becoming rarer.
If people start outsourcing the very processes that develop critical thinking, writing ability, synthesis, and communication before those skills fully mature, then we could absolutely weaken society’s long-term cognitive resilience.
That should concern everyone, regardless of whether they’re optimistic or pessimistic about AI.
Very cool! France is working towards achieving digital independent from US megacorps, and maybe this means more funding towards the development of open-source software!
Mistral AI!
Now for funzies, we need to get them to install the steam client.
97% of their police computers run on gendbuntu since at least 2017… they know linux already :)
If only the muppets in my homeland were half as competent as the bloody French.
Fantastic, it’s amazing what you can do when you don’t have billionaires on the stage patting each other on the back and laughing with each election.
France for whatever reason tends not to export much tech, so I think many people don’t realize how tech-savvy they have historically always been.
I hope they do the more users there are the faster improvements will happen and the more support for things in general.
2.5 Million government PCs seems like a lot