France’s digital directorate dumping Windows desktops, adopting Linux instead
Après ça, le déluge, as plans call for move away from plenty more American software and hardware
France’s Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs (DINUM) will drop Windows desktops, and adopt Linux instead.
DINUM announced the swap last week during an interministerial seminar that saw several government agencies try to create momentum for development of sovereign technologies that reduce France’s dependence on non-European technology.
A government statement about the seminar included a quote from Minister of Public Action and Accounts David Amiel to the effect that “The State can no longer simply acknowledge its dependence; it must break free. We must become less reliant on American tools and regain control of our digital destiny.”
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The statement cited DINUM’s plan to develop avideoconferencing platform called “Visio”, designed to help France’s government break free of American tools like Zoom, Teams, Webex, and Google Meet, as one example of a step towards sovereign tech.
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It then revealed another: DINUM binning Windows and adopting Linux.
France’s entire civil service employed 5.8 million people in 2025. According to DINUM’s LinkedIn page, it employs 201-500 people. Let’s be kind and assume the agency employs 500 people – or 0.008 percent of France’s civil service.
Consider, also, the Linux Foundation’s scorecard of organizations that contribute to the Linux kernel.
American entities Meta, Intel, and Red Hat take the top three spots, Google is number four, AMD is ninth and Oracle America Inc rounds out the top 10. The only European company in the top 10 is SUSE. Two others – Arm and Linaro – are based in the UK, but Arm is majority-owned by Japan’s SoftBank.
DINUM has nonetheless struck a blow for software liberty, because the interministerial seminar will now do three things.
One is requiring all French ministries required to create a plan to adopt non-American tech for PC operating systems, collaboration tools, tools, antivirus software, artificial intelligence, databases, virtualization, and network equipment. Europe is home to solid alternatives for most of those products: the likes of SAP, MariaDB, Vates, Nokia and Ericsson could all fit in with France’s plans.
Another initiative calls on France’s State Procurement Department to devise a plan, and a timeline, for reducing dependence on American tech.
The third initiative is teeing up “industrial digital meetings" to be held in June 2026, to get the private sector onboard with the sovereign tech push.
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DINUM hasn’t offered a timeline for moving other government agencies to non-American technologies, but it clearly wants to set the snowball rolling.
This is clearly a good move … for The Register and its readers, who can surely look forward to decades of stories about migration projects going pear-shaped across France as government agencies try to untangle years of investment in Microsoft, Cisco, and VMware to adopt sovereign solutions.
Given the Trump administration’s dislike of anything that harms American businesses, France’s plan could also set off a new round of tariffs or threats to extinguish civilizations. ®