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France quietly deployed 100,000+ Linux machines in their police force - GendBuntu is a silent EU tech success story

I wanted to spotlight a quietly massive success story in European digital sovereignty: GendBuntu - France’s custom Ubuntu distribution used by the National Gendarmerie.

The GendBuntu project derives from Microsoft's decision to end the development of Windows XP Back in 2005, France’s Gendarmerie began switching from Microsoft products to open-source software - starting with OpenOffice. Fast forward to 2024, and GendBuntu(Linux) is now running on 97% of their workstations (over 103,000 computers!).

France has shown what’s possible when a government actually backs open-source, in-house, and EU-grown solutions.
More countries should follow suit.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu

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Kjell

lemmy.world

Nice! Hopefully their experience can be used to help other agencies to move to Linux and open-source software. It also shows how long time it takes to move for a big organisation, in 2018 it was 82% of the PC workstations that was running GendBuntu.

Ek-Hou-Van-Braai reply

piefed.social

I hope word of this success story spreads, I could literally not find a single English news article about it. I feel there is still a sentiment that it's too difficult, or the tools are not ready etc.

But this shows that it is possible at a large scale and has been done before

Hotznplotzn reply

lemmy.sdf.org

I found just one, and it's some time ago :-)

French police move from Windows to Ubuntu Linux -- (October 2013)

The big reason the French Gendarmerie made the Linux move? It saved them 40 percent in total cost of ownership over Windows.

In other news:

Yet another European government is ditching Microsoft for Linux: Schleswig-Holstein - Germany's most northern state - switches to Linux and Open Source - (June 2025)

[After] the state's cabinet had declared it would make the move [in April 2024, Schleswig-Holstein's] goal is to fully transition from Microsoft programs to Linux and open-source programs within the next three months.

And:

Why Denmark is dumping Microsoft Office and Windows for LibreOffice and Linux - (June 2025)

Before the Danish government announced its move, Denmark's largest cities, Copenhagen and Aarhus, had already announced plans to phase out Microsoft software and cloud services. Here's why.

FundMECFS

lemmy.blahaj.zone

Reposting because yeah

stoy

lemmy.zip

I am interested in seeing how the machines are managed, Windows uses GPOs, what does GendBuntu use?

sanpo reply

sopuli.xyz

Some kind of Ansible based custom solution:

This project offers a complete solution reminiscent of SCCM from the world of Windows, but Ansible replaces Powershell DSC and we have a bonus in the form of version control system git.

https://github.com/skosachiov/remediations-gendbuntu

azuth reply

sh.itjust.works

According to this comment a custom solution based on ansible and got.

truthfultemporarily reply

feddit.org

Yeah that's really the biggest issue with these deployments.