Good News! France Starts Plan to Replace Windows With Linux on Government Desktops
France's national digital directorate, DINUM, has announced (in French) it is moving its workstations from Windows to Linux. The announcement came out of an interministerial seminar held on April 8, organised jointly by the Directorate General for Enterprise (DGE), the National Agency for Information Systems Security (ANSSI), and the State Procurement Directorate (DAE).
The Linux switch is not the only move on the table. France's national health insurance body, CNAM, is migrating 80,000 of its agents to a set of homegrown tools: Tchap for messaging, Visio for video calls (more on this later), and France transfert for file transfers.
The country's national health data platform is also set to move to a sovereign solution by the end of 2026.
Beyond the immediate moves, the seminar laid out a broader plan. DINUM will coordinate an interministerial effort built around forming coalitions between ministries, public operators, and private sector players, with interoperability standards at the core (the Open Interop and Open Buro initiatives are specifically named).
Every French ministry, including public operators, will be required to submit its own non-European software reduction plan by Autumn 2026.
The plan is expected to cover things like workstations, collaboration tools, antivirus, AI, databases, virtualization, and network equipment. A first set of "Industrial Digital Meetings" is planned for June 2026, where public-private coalitions are expected to be formalized.
Speaking on this initiative, Anne Le Hénanff, Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs, added that (translated from French):
Digital sovereignty is not optional — it is a strategic necessity. Europe must equip itself with the means to match its ambitions, and France is leading by example by accelerating the shift to sovereign, interoperable, and sustainable solutions.
By reducing our dependence on non-European solutions, the State sends a clear message: that of a public authority taking back control of its technological choices in service of its digital sovereignty.
You might remember, a few months earlier, France set out on a similar path for video conferencing. The country mandated that every government department switch to Visio, its homegrown, MIT-licensed alternative to Teams and Zoom by 2027.
Part of the broader La Suite Numérique initiative, it had already been tested with 40,000 users across departments before the mandate was announced. So this move looks like an even more promising one, and we shall keep an eye on how this pans out.
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Source: It's FOSS