French Gendarmerie: "Open source desktop lowers TCO by 40%" | Hacker News Reader

French Gendarmerie: "Open source desktop lowers TCO by 40%"

joinup.ec.europa.eu

331 pointsTsiolkovsky131 comments

If the 40% figure is accurate, this is a BIG win for the Linux desktop (and Canonical in particular), because the TCO (total cost of ownership) of an enterprise desktop can be as much as four to five times greater than the cost of its hardware and software licenses.[1] At most corporations, training, support, maintenance, security, and other ongoing costs together vastly exceed the cost of just hardware and software.

For example, the hardware+software-only costs of a run-of-the-mill Windows+Office enterprise desktop, for a large corporation, might be $1,200 over three years, but the TCO could easily top $4,000 or even $5,000 a year. (If these figures seem high to you, think about the cost of training thousands of individuals about as computer savvy as your Aunt Tillie, and then having to troubleshoot all their virus infections, messed up files, one-off application bugs, unrepeatable weird crashes, etc. so they can do their work every day.)

The Gendarmerie, in other words, is claiming that the switch to Ubuntu Linux on the desktop is saving them somewhere between one and two thousand dollars a year per seat. With 72,000 desktops, the aggregate savings are probably in the mid-to-high tens of millions of dollars a year.

[1] http://www.gartner.com/id=2371417

Keep in mind that a motivation to change was the end of Windows XP so they're probably assuming the training costs for each OS (GendBuntu vs Windows Vista) would be identical. So while it is a victory for Linux, it's not a rout like these numbers might make it seem.

But also keep in mind that when using FOSS software, there is no controlling entity that can forcibly end something and force exit costs[1] and the subsequent training costs for a new product on you.

1: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/tco-should-include-exit-cos...

AFAIK what Microsoft forcibly ended was a support agreement for the software. I don't see how this is less possible with FOSS. If your third-party support provider doesn't want to support some software anymore and nobody else you trust wants to either, this puts you right where those companies were vis a vis Windows XP.

That's not true. If you're using an open-source distro and the vendor terminates the support agreement, you still have the source, so you can pay a 3rd party to maintain the software for you (e.g. by backporting security fixes from newer releases).

You can, but it will cost you 10x more to maintain the distro than it cost the original authors, and you won't be able to share the cost with many others. Worse, the cost will only increase over time. Not as dire as a closed source abandonment, but eventually you will have to upgrade.

You don't have to "maintain the distro" per se. You just have to backport security fixes for the subset of that distro's packages that you actually use. If you have a large organization and you only use a limited subset of the software provided by the distribution, it's not inconceivable that you might have the resources to do so.

That's simply unrealistic. It's a nice theory but if you're the only people using that software, how is it going to be cost effective to take the burden of maintaining it?

Well you have the same problem if the company that supplies the proprietary software goes out of business except that you are usually just flat out screwed. Granted it's unlikely that someone like Microsoft will go out of business anytime soon (but then again I'd say it's also fairly unlikely that Ubuntu disappears anytime soon and even that would leave you with a fallback option of other, similar Linux distros).

If say Windows XP just gets phased out on you that's not exactly cause for celebration either. And of course there's also the advantage that you can at least theoretically check most of the source code of Linux which is probably somewhat relevant in a government setting (a potential NSA cooperation of Microsoft says hi)

I see you've never encountered legacy enterprise software...

Sure there is, it's just smaller in magnitude. When the security updates for your distro revision stop, that's the end of that revision. Then you have upgrade costs.

Ubuntu in particular are bad at keeping things the same between (LTS) revisions - so many times when you google to fix something, there's different instructions for each of the past X releases.

Not to mention Ubuntu's definition of "long term" isn't quite the same as Microsoft's definition.

Even on my Arch Linux systems that is hardly an issue, and even when there are complications rollbacks are relatively easy to do, even system-wide.

How do you roll back "There are no more security updates available"?

Uhh, in which universe are you living where Ubuntu didn't forcibly end Gnome desktop?

You can still install Gnome just fine.

Ok, fair enough. But I still think that the choice of the default desktop strongly suggests what most people should use, at least with a distro like Ubuntu that is supposed to be newbie-friendly.

I interned in a french company a couple years ago, and was surprised to discover what the company's computer setup was. You had the usual windows XP, but you couldn't install anything on it: they had this system where you had to call IT, tell them what software you wanted, then they would deploy it to your computer. They would also do nightly backups of your systems, and all that jazz. Half of the time, it didn't work, so you had to call IT and they'd come troubleshoot. All in all, I have no trouble believing that factoring in the IT support behemoth and, the TCO was vastly more that $1000.

The problem with the 40% savings figure is that tablet-based operating systems cost around $1k annually. And in the long run, your windows desktop will have an OS more like a tablet than a windows 7 desktop.

Canonical has an OS for tablets that will be released soon, and they can support any tablet they want, if they order large amounts.

Nice estimations, and something that was missing in the original article.

It's a bit "curious" those numbers were absent, it would certainly have made things more clear (not to mention convincing).

If they're able to calculate the TCO difference, they most certainly had the numbers, right? Or perhaps the story wouldn't have been quite as compelling if they published the specific numbers they used to calculate "TCO".

Also, are we to believe that the replacement apps are fully as good as the commercial alternative? MS Excel is not superior in any way to the open source alternative? There most certainly is a cost associated with productivity, far beyond desktop maintenance costs in many cases.

> Also, are we to believe that the replacement apps are fully as good as the commercial alternative?

Considering that the police are using this software and their requirements are email and office apps then they don't need a lot of functionality. Hell you can use Google Docs and it would suffice.

>MS Excel is not superior in any way to the open source alternative?

Why would that be a requirement? Take any two things that aren't identical and each of them will be better than the other at something. You're assuming the comparison on net would favor Microsoft. For example, here's a short list of commands: grep, awk, sed, ssh, scp, rsync, wget, nc, dig, du, sort. These programs are not superior in any way to the Microsoft alternative?

Those would be superior to the alternatives on Windows undoubtedly - the questions is what % of users in a scenario are using those commands vs how many are using spreadsheets. I'd suggest there are more spreadsheet users in most organizations.

Regardless, I'm not even suggesting who necessarily wins, I am saying it is a very important consideration that should be considered if you are truly trying to calculate an accurate TCO comparison.

It's a smart move to first introduce cross-platform applications. Then after switching to a different operating system, the users will be familiar with the applications, so "only" the desktop changes, not the whole experience. If you are used to firefox, thunderbird and libreoffice, to many users it doesn't matter much if it's windows or linux underneath.

That was exactly how I converted for my own personal use. I gradually replaced all my Windows applications with cross-platform FOSS applications and finally switched from Windows to Ubuntu.

Definitely. I'd say that improving the Libreoffice experience on Windows is probably one of the most effective things we can do at present to increase adoption of desktop Linux.

The Libreoffice experience in Linux leaves something to be desired - particularly some parts like the pitifully slow spreadsheet app (Calc) and its charting facilities, or the desktop database app (Base) and its bizarre interface.

So even if you achieve parity across platforms, Office users are going to find a lot to complain about... with reason. Not because Office is great, but just because Libreoffice is lacking in polish, still, in so many ways.

I've evangelized Libreoffice to users for years, but some parts of the suite are just terrible no matter how you look at it, and meanwhile alternatives like Google Docs and Gnumeric have established themselves... Even if you improve Libreoffice across the board, this isn't really going to drive adoption so much as lubricate it slightly for people who want to replace Office. Things like Steam encouraging game development for Linux are going to have a much larger impact.

This was also true a decade ago. The fact is OpenOffice and Libreoffice in 2013 still suck compared to Excel. By most standards they even suck compared to Excel 2003. I'm not even sure they are closing the gap at all. And the outlook isn't very good because Google pays top people top dollar and Docs/Sheets/Drive has the exact same problem.

I've always been curious, what makes Excel better?

Runs faster on large spreadsheets that do a lot of recalculating, also some functions e.g. pivot tables have become widely used in some business areas.

LibreOffice people are working on speed of execution in Calc

Accountants use it as an IDE.

As do engineers, for that matter.

The VB stuff matters of course but as a regular excel user what kills me when I use LibreOffice is:

(1) The responsiveness which I guess is from hardware acceleration. It's like comparing a $60 cheapo tablet and an ipad or Al Bundy's old Dodge to a 2014 Camry.

(2) The need to flout basic Excel conventions as if that's somehow lauditory. LibreOffice has made some strides here (hey you can use commas in formulas again) but it still feels like someone from Samsung should be put in charge of the whole thing.

1) I think the responsiveness of Microsoft Office is largely from using appropriate APIs. LibreOffice is ultimately based on StarOffice, and StarOffice was the worst office program I've ever tried. It dragged its own OS platform on top of whatever OS it was installed on, and it was slow and buggy. LibreOffice is heaps better now, and it's improving fast, but it still suffers from the legacy.

2) I don't see the need to slavishly follow Excel conventions, but I don't know of any evidence that Samsung would be a good lead developer of any software. Be that as it may, Samsung is free as anybody else to contribute to the LibreOffice project.

>2) I don't see the need to slavishly follow Excel conventions, but I don't know of any evidence that Samsung would be a good lead developer of any software. Be that as it may, Samsung is free as anybody else to contribute to the LibreOffice project.

I think 2) was a joke about Samsung copying Apple.

Someone with the goal "make Calc a better Excel than Excel" needs to take a serious interest involving lots of developers.

Basically, LO needs to be able to import the sort of monster power user spreadsheet that takes 16 hours to run in Excel, and run it fidelitously in 12. These guys sign the cheques.

What would that take?

1. Get a pile of example spreadsheets. (Code to real-world examples, like Wine does, rather than abstract specs that are often inaccurate.) This will be the hard part.

2. Every OOXML tag in the documents needs to be correctly imported and understood.

3. The VBA in the documents needs to run perfectly.

4. Optimise the hell out of it.

That gets LO good enough to seriously compete. Then you make the IDE as good for those users as Excel's is.

What basic Excel conventions do you have in mind? I'd like to avoid making the mistake of flouting them.

I misread 'outlook' as 'Outlook' and was very confused, since it's never been good.

LibreOffice is much better than OpenOffice, but both still pale in comparison to Excel on Windows. However, Microsoft Excel for Mac sucks, and that hasn't slowed Mac adoption. It's now relatively standard practice for anyone doing serious Excel work on a Mac to install a Windows VM and a Windows copy of Excel.

It really does suck on Mac, as does Word. I'm guessing this is just Microsoft sticking it to Apple, but it's disappointing for their users who work on multiple platforms. Just make it the same everywhere MS!

Not that they were excluded, but explicitly consider browser based applications as part of those cross-platform applications. I own a copy of MS Office, but rarely use it since Google Docs solves every problem I usually have.

They've also contributed to Trustedbird [1]. Personally, I think that's totally awesome.

1: http://adullact.net/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/milimail/index.ph...

That's an impressive number, all things considered.

Many people rant about Open/LibreOffice not being comparable to MS Office, and while there probably is no good replacement for Outlook in Linux (simply from an ease of use standpoint), swriter and scalc provide 99.9% of the features that most people use MS Office for.

Overall, I'm eager for the time when a major US municipality switches over to Linux desktops. It just makes sense.

The biggest problem comparing open/libreoffice is that compatibility is 99% of the focus here. Trying to implement Microsoft's horrible file-formats just sucks all the oxygen out of the room - the users obsess over compatibility (for good reasons), and that means the developers have to obsess over compatibility (also for good reasons) but this makes it really hard for LibreOffice to actually focus on real features.

Also, as an aside, my wife's learning LaTeX for some math courses... she was shocked at how well her OOO Draw files could be converted and opened up in Inkscape, which in turn played nice with LaTeX. Having good compatibility between various small applications actually was surprising to someone used to the closed-source software world.

As someone who was part of a failed LibreOffice roll-out, I have to agree in my experience compatibility is the issue holding LO back. But users don't obsess, they just require decent interoperability. If basic features like charts can't be imported[1], of course it's a showstopper.

I have to disagree with everyone here saying that basic MSO interoperability is some impossible goal. If that was the case how has TextMaker achieved such better results?[2] LibreOffice and OpenOffice both have a group of paid developers. While I understand that volunteer wouldn't want to work on this, why can't the paid developers put some effort into this?

[1] https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=96426

[2] http://www.infoworld.com/d/applications/office-compatibility...

In my experience since version 4.0 the compatibility of LibreOffice Writer increased considerably. I do not have any problems with MS Word documents for quite some time. YMMV of course..

The compatibility test mentioned above [2] was performed in 2009. According to the LibreOffice release notes a lot of the positioning errors were fixed.

http://www.libreoffice.org/download/4-0-new-features-and-fix...

Saying that the tests were performed in 2009 and LO team claims to have improved compatibility doesn't prove anything. In fact, if you had dug a little deeper, you would have seen that 3 out of 4 of those 2009 bugs are still open.[1][2][3] The first 2 come directly from the report, the 3rd is a long outstanding bug that goes back to OO 2.0.

I don't know how you can claim that there are no serious problems with compatibility when you can't even import word docs that have charts or diagrams in them. This is stuff I was doing for my lab reports in HS and our marketing documents are full of this kind of material. These are not esoterica features we're talking about.

In a vacuum, LibreOffice / OpenOffice are perfectly usable word processors. In fact I prefer the LO UI over MSO's ribbon interface. The problem is MSO is the industry standard. So until they take compatibility seriously, they are going to be relegated to home users.

[1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65865

[2] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66058

[3] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58521

Upvote for linking the bug reports with test documents, by the way - so many compatibility complainants don't actually produce the bugs.

Is there a writeup of your 'failed LibreOffice roll-out' anywhere? I love reading the details of that kind of thing and I'm sure others do too.

Do you know about LyX? I loved that program for my math classes (mostly proof writing). Personally, I liked the shortcuts it provided so that I didn't have to write raw LaTeX for everything.

Have you (either of you) tried LaTeXiT[1]? As a gui interface/equation editor it helped me texify my stats submissions and also helped as a quick reference for some of those characters I don't use regularly.

[1] http://pierre.chachatelier.fr/latexit/latexit-home.php?lang=...

Overall, I'm eager for the time when a major US municipality switches over to Linux desktops. It just makes sense.

The problem is, it's been making sense for a decade now, at least for the office suite. But these wins against Microsoft remain one offs.

There are many reasons for this, but IT professionals are part of the "problem." Someone with a lifetime of MSFT certifications and training can come up with a dozen reasons why open source is bad. He needs to save his livelihood.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

— Upton Sinclair

This made me remember the other day in my job (I'm the webmaster) when I asked the IT dept. to install Firefox or Chrome (at least) on my machine (I was developing the main site on winXP + IE8). They told me that they couldn't because of 'security concerns'

The feature parity of libreoffice is much closer than the polish parity. There is still so much to do in terms of UI polishing in LibreOffice that I wouldn't know where to start.

It makes even more sense when your country isn't the home country of the NSA... !

Is there some reason why the open source desktop is a worse idea in the US? I don't think so...

Only that you're likely to get a "NO!" answer from Legal or from Corporate Security or some internal organization that's quite opaque, has veto power, and deals with US Government contracts, or has security clearances or something like that.

What is the best email/calendar/contact manager on Linux?

In this combination i'd say evolution, but i do not know the kde universe too well.

kontact/kmail (KDE mail ua) used to integrate all that stuff the only thing it lacked was an ability to handle HTML email. At the time the developers kept insisting that email should all be plaintext and they weren't going to allow HTML mailing in kmail.

I moved to thunderbird.

The rest of KDE4 caught up to being release standard at about version 4.6 and Kontact looks good but I've become entrenched with TB now.

gmail/google calendar/google contacts. I've been a desktop Linux user for 14 years, and while Evolution worked well enough for a while, it really stagnated about 8 years ago as all the users switched to webmail. I tell chrome to pretend it's on Windows and use Outlook Web Access when I need to interact with Exchange, and I actually like that better than outlook on windows anyway, but nothing beats gmail.

I'm using Evolution on imap now and it sucks. I'd been using mutt for many years and decided it was time to try a GUI client now that most emails are fairly graphical.

Evolution will routinely chew on my disk for over thirty seconds before starting up, for no clear reason. It pops up strange error messages about host resolution when I know the host is up just fine and quite reachable. It doesn't atomically handle email moves, so I've closed the client and later reopened it to find messages I've moved right back in their original places.

I honestly don't know. I've tried Zimbra and Thunderbird and some other client I can't remember the name of, but in general even Thunderbird isn't great - I usually resort to webmail.

Thunderbird+Lightning (for calendar and contacts). Or Claws mail for a "pro" (rough but very fast and functional) solution.

My father is a gendarme. One day, he found his computer changed, with an Ubuntu instead of XP.

A few years later, he still complains about it. I still haven't found any of his colleagues happy of the change.

The huge majority of those guys are not technical, and as pragmatic as the change may be; it is quite hard for the people impacted :).

In the end, every single guy I know now has bought a laptop with Win 7, brings it to work and works on it. Ubuntu is not used.

People don't want to change.

This may be true, but it does raise some questions:

Did your father have to configure his access to the (probably) Samba based file shares, set up his own account on the network, map all of the printers, configure his own email client etc?

Part of a large enterprise roll-out is pre-configuration. I can't imagine the Gendarmerie IT dept. appreciating all of this extra configuration for "every single guy" with a Win 7 laptop.

Hum, once again you go too technical. (no offense)

How does it work? With a cracked version of Office and a USB key that is passed from hands to hands. The email client? A web based interface.

For gendarmerie based stuff that requires special software (taking depositions for example), of course it is handled on Ubuntu because they have no choice.

But a lot of their paperwark time is spent filling word documents and excel spreadsheets, something that can be done on any computer.

Gendarmerie IT dept, lawl? They changed the computer and gave them one phone number for support, of a guy that is located 200 km away :).

I'm the mirror image of your father. I take my CentOS laptop into work where we have a Windows 7 network. I use a remote desktop session to access all the 'business applications' and I can have my own 'stuff' running behind the remote desktop window.

IT support don't want to put LibreOffice on the desktops in case it confuses users being similar but different to MS Office.

Haha, I know the feeling.

Was doing exactly the same when I was working for the government as a student a while back. There was no internet access, for security reasons.

Good lesson on how to learn about debugging and reading manuals though

Did your father experience a cross-over period of using OpenOffice (rather than MS Office) on Windows?

Governments should use as much open source software as possible, both because of cost reasons, but also in principle (especially now about the NSA scandals, instead of buying proprietary software from American companies).

> Governments should use as much open source software as possible, both because of cost reasons, but also in principle

IIRC the latter is a major reason why France's PM released a circular strongly recommending the increased use of OSS in administrations last year.

The first activity in that direction turns out to be almost 15 years old: back in 1999, a french senator had proposed mandating OSS use across the board[0]

[0] http://slashdot.org/story/99/10/28/0820202/french-senator-pr...

This is the first public announcement (I have seen) of a large government agency using open source desktop OSs. I've seen articles about tech companies using Linux for Desktops, and other articles that mention large organizations using Linux Desktops but the couldn't specify the company specifically (dont know if it was US based or not). I have doubts about a large US non-tech organization actually using Linux for their desktops. The user training would have to momentous and cant imagine the IT support personnel/time needed to successfully implement this kind of change. To be honest I cant even imagine my company or others even switching to Open Office.

I am glad that this is working out for the French, I wonder if their are any US government agencies that would consider a switch like this.

The National Assembly has been using Linux since 2007.

This article:

http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/linux-a-l-assemblee-nationale...

is in French, but it claims they have saveed 500 000 euros (over one year) from this switch, and that deputies are mostly pleased with the switch. It also features testimonies from both rightwing and leftwing deputies that agree with each other!

I can see why this would be a viable option in Europe. They seem to be more progressive in their decision making than the US. No way you could get the left and right to agree on something major in the US! Maybe if they saw how much money they would save doing something like this.

I wouldnt be pleased more if the strangle hold that windows has on "Work" computers was loosened in this decade. Even the multinational company I work for now has a BYOD program. They restrict us to using the "guest" throttled wifi as punishment though.

> Maybe if they saw how much money they would save doing something like this.

I really don't think national fiscal responsibility is high on the agenda for either party. Lobbying practically guarantees that any FOSS initiative is dead in the water.

It might actually be an even bigger achievement tech-wise, because the people working there have to share a lot of documents with all the other administrations that are still on windows.

Fwiw the city of Munich has been rolling out Linux since roughly 2006, and as of January 2013 had 13k linux workstations.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux for details.

> I have doubts about a large US non-tech organization actually using Linux for their desktops.

I could envision certain types of companies being able to do this -- those where the great majority (if not all) of the computing that an employee does is in the browser. (Call centers come to mind.)

Just out of high school, for example, I got a "data entry" job at Columbia House. Remember those "Get 12 CDs for a penny!" things that were in damn near every magazine imaginable ~15 years ago? My job consisted solely of typing into a custom (DOS-based) application whatever the customer had written on the card (e.g. their name, address, the ID numbers of the CDs they wanted to receive). That job could be done entirely on a Linux PC without issue (web-based application) although, on second thought, that job probably doesn't even exist anymore.

What I want to know is the PC that they are using. I love to use Linux on my computers but always have a hard time making sure that the hardware is completely compatible. I hope such adoptions lead to better hardware compatibility with cheaper commodity hardware. I've had a few weird experiences:

1. Previous laptop: wifi under Linux didn't connect to certain networks, wile the same machine connected to all networks under windows.

2. Current desktop: Under Linux, it will sometimes freeze with no errors reported (usually under heavy and sustained CPU and graphics usage) but nothing of the sort happens under windows.

And these issues are really hard to figure out for non systems programmers like me.

1) WiFi chipset manufacturers and the linux kernel are and have been at odds for some time. The issue is primarily that some (many?) of the chipset manufacturers that make the machinery that runs WiFi cards don't provide open source drivers for their chipsets. Some of these make proprietary kernel-compatible drivers (often inferior to their Windows offerings), and others have to make do with hackish workarounds (NDISwrapper). I'd argue this isn't a problem with Linux as much as it is the device manufacturers. I'd also argue from the end-user perspective that doesn't matter much.

2. See (1)--there is a notorious hate-hate relationship between nVidia and Linux; I'd bet that what you've experienced is related to that, although happily will admit to being wrong (if you aren't engaged in accidental selective memory--that is, remembering times Linux froze but not Windows, even though the latter surely has frozen on you before, under similar circumstances).

It doesn't matter if it's NVidia's fault or the WiFi chipset manufacturer's fault that Linux doesn't work well out of box on OPs computer. I've had similar experiences with Linux, and all I cared about was that I didn't want to spend several hours figuring out why some graphics problem prevented my laptop from booting, or why I couldn't connect to WiFi.

Accusing OP of "accidental selective memory" when he points out that his computer freezes frequently running Linux doesn't help. Problems like this make Linux unusable compared to Windows for new-to-Linux users who are willing to try it out. That makes it a Linux problem, which Linux needs to figure out how to solve- whether that be improving their poor relationships with WiFi manufacturers or improving drivers.

This kind of double standard makes me sick: Driver-related problem on Windows? It's the fault of the driver, of course. Driver-related problem on GNU/Linux? I don't care whose fault it is, I'm just going to blame "Linux".

Basically, manufacturers are supposed to write NT device drivers, but for Linux, the onus is on Linux contributors (which sometimes happen to be the manufacturer). While ridiculous by itself, it also points to a deeper problem:

Why do we need a driver per device per OS? Come to think of it, why do we need drivers at all? Aren't such things supposed to live mainly in the firmware?

Blaming Linux will not solve the problem. Throw your questions to those manufacturers and ask them to improve the current situation. Or you can contribute to open source hardware. If you just want to blame, surly nobody could prevent you from doing that, but things will not change, and you'd be better go to Windows and be happy with it.

I think you replied to the wrong comment.

You're right, the Wifi chipsets have proprietary driver issues. My graphics card is one of those low end ATI models that come in cheap desktops. I've heard that graphics cards can be an issue. I wonder if I could just disable the graphics card in some Ubuntu setting. I just want to run things like vi, ssh, gcc and a browser most of the time anyway.

Intel integrated graphics are getting astonishingly better, and they're open source friendly, except for the Atoms that have the pathetic PowerVR graphics. At this point, for casual use, I don't think it's worth the hassle dealing with AMD or NVIDIA graphics.

Though, if you are burdened with having to run a video card in Linux, then AMD models have basic performance for less hassle than NVIDIA. You actually can disable the graphics card, but you probably don't want to, because you would have no bitmap graphics at all. Vi, SSH, and GCC don't depend on graphics, but a browser does.

Heck, I've got a fairly decent graphics card in this not-so-cheap laptop (that's what I hear anyways; it's an Nvidia Quadro K2000m in a Thinkpad W530) and it has problems. Apparently that's due to the Optimus "stuff", though. Fortunately, like you, 95% of my time is spent using Firefox, a terminal, SSH, and mutt, so I don't need the higher graphics capabilities.

(Although occasionally it might be nice to watch a movie at higher quality on a long flight, though.)

I'd argue this isn't a problem with Linux as much as it is the device manufacturers.

It most certainly is a problem with Linux. It might not be fair because it isn't entirely their fault, but users want something that works, regardless of the politics behind it.

A government agency can always select hardware with good Linux compatibility.

presumably the police are not using a GPU, which seems to be a major source of issues in our lab. 64 bit ubuntu gives me more hardware headaches than 32 bit for things like wifi. Again this is for police desktops so probably they don;t use wifi.

The less frills and peripherals the better, I guess. Although I've usually seen most cheap desktops come with some entry level video card, so I doubt they have none at all.

As someone who has worked on Open Source in France I think this is big for another reason. It might lead to a nice push of Linux in Africa (specifically through the African Union). Many of the French speaking countries look at France for "tech trends" etc.

Microsoft is following an interesting strategy in Africa. basically the MS-whatever certificates are cheap and widespread (and nonauthorized copies of Windows are tolerated) which leads to IT guys wanting Windows. I always thought that was strange and Linux should be much stronger in Africa :)

"About 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade." - Bill Gates @ 1998

Everyone who cares about control over their software should be using open-source. This is why pretty much any investment bank, hedge fund and proprietary trading firm runs Linux or BSD, uses open-source tools and rolls their own trading software...

I'd be interested to know about how much they have in the way of custom software. If they're just using Office, I agree, this should be fairly easy. The tough thing is when you have custom development that happened on Windows.

For example, the US deploys a large number of custom applications on Windows. One of the biggest is the VA's electronic medical records application, CPRS. CPRS is a massive application. Wine might do the trick, though I'm not sure how it works with AD and other Windows services the VA depends on.

Isn't pretty much everyone moving to custom web applications for internal services? I doubt that in those cases it matters much what platform you're on since it's probably running on Apache on a linux server anyway.

I've seen this model even at tiny companies, and my impression is that it is also how the big ones do it. There are limitations, but the benefits are pretty substantial.

I would not be surprised if many non-US government agencies are evaluating running their own security-oriented Linux distributions. Hopefully this will result in a critical mass of vendors and technologies for running networks that have at least some chance of keeping communications and data storage secure.

Sadly, I would also not be surprised if many governments continue to rely on US vendors for a lot of network and voice infrastructure that have already been compromised.

https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/11-apresenta...

Nice use of Comic Sans in the presentation. Wonder if he paid the licence or used Powerpoint.

Nice post though, I did not know about GendBuntu ! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu

Comic Sans is freeware: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web

Installation is trivial (apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer). I think it is a default package.

I don't think he needs to pay any license to use Comic Sans:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web

I've attended to a course on presenting in a French university. The professor actually recommended Comic Sans as the most suitable font. With a straight face.

I can't imaging the savings if they had fused them with the police first and used the same software for everybody (even non-open source).

It's not unusual for a nation to have multiple police forces with overlapping jurisdictions. And I don't see it as a problem in and of itself. In Ottawa, Canada, for example, because it is the national capital there are three police forces with jurisdiction within the city: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (the federal gendarmerie force), the Ontario Provincial Police, and the Ottawa Police Service. As far as I know, and I live in Ottawa, it works out well.

But back to France. I imagine that IT costs are a small portion of the gendarmerie or police's budget. Most of it would be taken up by wages for the officers and staff and maintenance of equipment and facilities. Merging France's two police forces would do little to reduce those costs, since the combined organization would have the union of the two organizations' duties.

it would at least make only one set of procedures and one set of tools for everybody.

That can be a bad thing as well if those tools are chosen poorly. By diversifying you don't necessarily have the same weaknesses across all your components - and other parts of the group can copy things that work when someone tries something new out.

I always wonder how important people can take so long to understand so obvious stuff like that.

Sounds typical that society is figuring this out right about at the end of the era of desktop computers.

"[A] proprietary office suite". Hmmm... I wonder which one it's talking about? Haha

I find this somewhat cute. I didn't know what TCO was at first, so I had assumed from headline that France's national police was blowing FUD against open source, and this was another article about government agency malfeasance in tech.

Good to know adoption of so many GNU/Linux desktops. Though, Ubuntu is a bad choice because of the Amazon search bar spyware enabled by default which sends back search queries to Amazon. Perhaps they don't understand the underlying principles behind free software: something that gives the users complete freedom.

You do realize that the Amazon shopping lens is:

a) GPL software, with the source code readily available and

b) Easy to disable - a single switch in settings

c) Easy to remove altogether...

a) GPL code doesn't justify submitting user queries to Amazon without seeking explicit user permission b) It should be opt-in service, not an opt-out. By default, this should be switched off. c) That doesn't mean this feature isn't a spyware.

I imagine their custom version removed that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu .

They most probably tweaked it to remove that kind of things. The French Gendarmerie as a pretty good IT department. They even developed a big security plugin for thunderbird called "milimail" (may be abandoned now).

Self-reply: Milimail is not dead, it got renamed Trustedbird.

Freedom is always freedom from something. In this case, the main attraction wasn't freedom from non-complete user freedom (indeed, the end users are likely to experience a rather un-free computing environment), it was freedom from commercial software vendors.

Fedora would have been a better choice.

That's why 20 years later Linux and open source are still struggling to gain mainstream traction. Gnome vs KDE, 200 varieties of Linux, Open Office vs Libre Office, etc.

Most people don't care in the least. They just want a good acceptable solution where they can get help if they ever have a problem. Why would most people choose the mess of open source? Gimp vs Photoshop? Time is money.

The Open Source community is its own worst enemy.

Mainstream traction cannot be a justification for total domination of GNU/Linux by a company like Canonical that puts in spyware in Ubuntu (Amazon search).

Then make something better. Canonical is in this position because it does more things that are good for the end user than any other distro maker. Redhat's too busy trying to domineer the system through terribly written software like systemd to work on giving users a good experience, Arch is too centered around power users, and Slackware is similar. If you want people to not use Canonical's Linux offerings, then you need to provide something that will be supported for more than a year at a reasonable price, easy to use, and will reasonably Just Work. No other Linux distro has that at the moment, and it doesn't look like any will anytime soon.

SLACKWARE IS ALL YOU SHOULD EVER NEED YOU NARROW-MINDED EVANGELIST!!1

Funny how you say that, given that I've never seen Slack users display the type of attitude you described. Same goes for *BSD users.

Rather, most "Linux supremacists" or however you call them I've seen tend to be Arch users, and vigorously promote Arch. Many of them have never tried a flavor of BSD or any other UNIX (such as Plan 9) either and barely even mention it.

Disclaimer: I'm a Slackware user. Although I don't like Ubuntu, it's good to see institutions making the shift. Besides, they need an easy-to-use desktop distribution, they're obviously not going to expect their workers to have a terminal emulator open 24/7.

As a long-time Linux user on many distributions and a sometime BSD user: I find many of BSD's differences not particularly relevant, let alone endearing. It's just another platform. Although there is a street meme about BSD being real Unix or something, I don't see the point making it a badge of honor to use one rather than the other.

Sorry, I didn't want to imply Slackware users are loud-mouthed fanboys, or anything derogatory at all, for that matter. I have used Slackware myself for quite a long time and found the community to be quite wonderful.

I was just bashing Ubuntu's lack of purity with what seemed to be the most appropriate choice nowadays :-).

Fedora that stops supporting revisions after 13 months and doesn't have a long-term support option? That would be awful for an enterprise to roll out. It's a 'power user' distribution, not an 'office worker' one.

That's debatable. Fedora is great, but it is not very stable and skews toward the power users (documentation for solving common problems has a tendency to exercise Linux power user skills, for example).

I take it you meant RHEL/CentOS?

Fedora is a rapidly changing distribution. RHEL/Clones have updates until 2020

Reply on news.ycombinator.com