

French National Police Switch 37,000 Desktop PCs to Linux - Libertatea
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/09/gendarmerie_linux/

======
cones688
> transferring to GendBuntu from a proprietary system means the staff member
> receives a new computer with a widescreen monitor. (0)

This is a great idea to get staff to accept the change, not "forced" upon them
but how about a bigger screen and a faster computer, now your colleague has
one and you have a slow old one... it's a no brainer really.

(0)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu)

~~~
netcan
It's the exact opposite of the linux desktop tradition: take a seven year old
dust caked laptop. Put linux on it. Get excited about how much better it is
than Windows NT. Hand it over to your 17 year old niece and watch her compare
it to her friend's new macbook air.

------
pilooch
Interestingly, Linux is moving to win on several fronts. Economy and debt
crisis, in addition to rising Ubuntu-like UI (easy to use, LibreOffice
included, etc...) increase the benefits for governments and agencies. That's
one front.

On another front, Linux clearly being the top platform for software
development, it can naturally then be a top OS for game development, and
become a top gaming platform itself, typically with SteamOS and Android.

At Ubuntu install parties, it's been a pleasure to see older French citizens
coming in with already good information, knowledge and know-how of the Linux
platform, for some because of their daily job at government agencies. And they
want the OS at home! What else ;)

------
haiduc
This is NOT the Police but the Gendarmerie, one of the four military bodies
along with the navy, the army and the air force.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gendarmerie](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gendarmerie)

They are soldiers, not civil servants. Unlike french public administrations,
when the army has an execution plan, it get things done!

~~~
yannickmahe
Didn't they just move from Defense to Interior?

~~~
masklinn
For budgetary/employment yes (back in 2009), but status-wise they remain a
military force.

So they're really halfway, under both defense and interior.

~~~
venomsnake
So they can influence and share that know how with both departments? This
could be interesting. I am really surprised that they managed to do it and it
will be an easier sell now with the MS/NSA collaboration thing. So maybe we
could expect other big deployments of that kind.

------
lloeki
A bit of trivia, which makes the title actually wrong: it's "Gendarmerie
Nationale" (which is a military corps, handled by "Ministère de la Défense" ~
DoD), not "Police Nationale" (which is not a military corps, under "Ministère
de l'Intérieur" ~ DoHS).

The USA relies (IIUC) on 2nd amendment to resist oppression, possibly from its
own police forces and government, whereas in France guns are outright
forbidden but there are by design those two distinct and independent entities,
with an autonomous chain of command, hopefully guaranteeing one will defend
the people rights should the other be subverted.

~~~
mathattack
This seems very much a French ideal. I used to visit France a lot for work,
and there seemed to be a lot of disrespect of authority. (Strikes, unions,
etc.)

This gets me thinking about Open Source. I would think that adoption is
consistent with the Power to the People ethos in France. How is their Linux
adoption as a country compared with the rest of the world?

~~~
forgottenpaswrd
In France Unions ARE the authority.

Most of the French work for the government and unions have lots of power.

~~~
johnchristopher
The union culture in France is much smaller than in Belgium or Germany. The
french media are giving it a lot of coverage (while criticizing it at the same
time) but it doesn't mean its influence is as effective as you make it sound.
There are your classical Poujadas scapegoats.

------
brudgers
_" The migration started in 2004, when the Gendarmerie was faced with
providing all its users with access to its internal network. In order to save
money, the agency switched from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice. Then the
agency rolled out Firefox and Thunderbird in 2006. Finally, in 2008, it
switched the first batch of 5,000 users to a Linux OS based on the Ubuntu
distribution."_

They started the transition to FOSS in 2004, which means planning began even
earlier: That's more than a decade.

They have transitioned approximat 7000 users a year to Linux for the past five
years. They still have a significant fraction of their desktops that have not
transitioned.

As an enterprise, they not only have state level funding but funding at the
level of a security/military organization.

In my opinion it would be a mistake to ignore the scale and pace at which the
transition was made. It would also be a mistake to discount the way in which
the character and culture of the institution facilitated the transition -
corporations don't have enlisted and staff officer cadres.

Sure there is no longer conscription, is not as if a gendarmerie can just quit
for a job elsewhere in the industry if they prefer OSX.

~~~
lloeki
> As an enterprise, they not only have state level funding but funding at the
> level of a security/military organization.

Which also means that they're procedural and bureaucratic in a way that can
make the term "enterprisey" sound like euphemism.

------
zmmmmm
I wonder if Windows 8 will be accelerating this kind of thing. The metro UI is
so annoying, useless and unsuitable in a corporate environment, it finally
provides a climate where even people who like Windows are happier with Ubuntu
than they are with Windows 8.

~~~
selmnoo
I know this horse has been already beaten to death... but, I just got a laptop
with Win8 this week and I have to say this, my goodness I am just awestruck
that this Metro interface actually made it to the public in its current form.
What the hell happened? Isn't Microsoft a company that conducts very basic UI
tests before shipping a big product?

I like to think of myself as a fairly technical person, and yet I could not
figure out how to do simple things like close windows, change windows, shut
down, etc. for a good while.

My dad, a 68 year old guy, calls himself a geek computer person, his friends
affectionately/comically refer him to as a "computer genius". He was trying
out the Win8 laptop the other day... and I heard him say "Hm, I'm not as good
with computers as I thought I was". That just really made me very sad. I'm
just going to get a Win7 laptop for him now.

~~~
spongle
To be honest, 8.1 is OK. It's not perfect but it sits in the rankings between
XP and 7. It's also going to be a free upgrade.

Basically you can turn off most of the crap and use the start screen as a
start menu and it's bearable. I'd take it over XP but not 7 (which it looks
like I'll be using until 2020)

------
josteink
Good for them!

As more and more people transition away from Windows, I'm always sad to see
some move to OS X. If you're going to leave one proprietary, commercial &
licensed platform for another, then really what's the point?

This sort of migration at least brings some tangible benefits, with one of
them being tax dollars _not_ spent paying Microsoft a tax for having a PC.

These sort of stories definitely cheer me up.

~~~
forgottenpaswrd
"If you're going to leave one proprietary, commercial & licensed platform for
another, then really what's the point?"

The point is using a complete UNIX operating system that works with any Unix
code using standards like OpenGL, but at the same time, is respected by
manufacturers of hardware and supported by service providers.

Half our computers(lots of them)in our company are Linux, half of them Mac.
Using Unix means we could inter operate between them very easy, not like using
Windows forcing DirectX(in theory you could use OpenGL, ha!).

Using Linux means we have total freedom in what we could do. We are outside
USA, not software patents here.

~~~
johnchristopher
What exactly are you working on ?

------
masklinn
There's an extensive discussion on the subject a few links below:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6469559](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6469559)

------
r0h1n
It's so heartening to see the scales finally beginning to tilt in favour of
free and open-source software after decades.

While one reason (for OSes) is of course the much improved UI,
installation/upgrade and app availability, I wonder how big a role the
relative decline in the importance of the OS itself plays?

I chanced by this tweet earlier today:

 _" Steve Jobs told Dropbox they were a feature. Increasingly its looking like
he had it backwards, the host OS is the disposable feature"_

([https://twitter.com/tolmasky/status/384756799351451648](https://twitter.com/tolmasky/status/384756799351451648))

------
philhippus
_Slow clap_ from Linux users everywhere. I think we are so jaded that some of
us prefer the masses to remain ignorant to the fact of a more powerful, more
stable and free OS. Things have become familiar this way.

~~~
ZenoArrow
"more powerful, more stable" Assuming you're comparing to Windows, in what
ways more powerful and more stable?

I've used various versions of Linux and Windows, and in my experience Linux is
great to use, until something breaks and you want to refresh that component.
When I first started using it around 2005 it was network issues (luckily
things are much improved now), when I use it now I most frequently have issues
with sound. On the other hand, Windows might not be as nice a development
environment, but at least you can rely on the drivers (for the most part).

~~~
username42
"refresh that component". That's the way of thinking in windows where you
reinstall random stuff until system works as expected.

In Linux, you will need to go through a lot of documentation and forum until
you learn enough about the component to understand how to fix the issue.

This may seems a huge effort, but it is very rewarding: your problem is solved
forever, you know what caused it, you have discovered many useful features of
you OS that you did not know, you have learned how to analyse similar issues.

Linux is very stable: almost everything I have learned 20 years ago remain
useful.

~~~
ZenoArrow
"your problem is solved forever" That might be true in your experience, but I
see things differently. There are plenty, and I mean plenty, of bugs that only
crop up in specific versions of software or specific distro configurations,
and due to the customisability of Linux systems tracking down solutions to
those bugs can be problematic.

Skills with Linux tools help diagnose the issue, but they don't always point
to an obvious solution. As I mentioned earlier, I often have issues with sound
in Linux, especially when trying something beyond the stock configuration
(e.g. JACK interfacing with PulseAudio and ALSA). The graphics stack in Linux
is slowly improving, I don't see why the same can't be done for audio. RTFM
shouldn't be a requirement for basic functionality (graphics, sound, input,
networking).

------
bambax
Gendarmerie is not "national police"; they are different entities (and of
course they hate one another).

~~~
johnchristopher
Keep it that way. It didn't do us any good to merge both (Belgium).

~~~
mercurial
This makes me curious. Can you elaborate?

~~~
johnchristopher
Yes. In a nutshell:

\- It was really expensive ;

\- the merging destroyed what used to work well within both groups but didn't
produce a better group ;

\- the old guard is still actively resisting changes in both groups ;

\- a lot of discrepancies between level of powers (local, regional and
national) that both groups weren't seeing in the same way (they had a
different who's who to call for help when they needed to push things around
and people lost some status or credit when trying to prevent it).

The main problem that should have been addressed (better coordination between
both groups) still remains as far as citizens are concerned.

There was a clash of culture since the "gendarmerie" was more like military
and police more like armed civil servants. Lines are being blurred now but
there are still weird intermediate unofficial rankings that are in place only
for legacy and "don't move my cheese and hurt my feelings" reasons.

Salaries inequalities were too obvious and "adapted" responsibilities didn't
match people's experience and training.

The overlap between the geographical regions each group were assigned to
before the merging still transpires in the new system, like a ghost.

There was a huge power struggle.

I am sure these problems will totally disappear in a generation but it didn't
go anywhere as smooth as the politicians said it would. And the results isn't
necessarily better.

One thing hasn't changed though: they still send officers from one linguistic
region to the other when dealing with protestations motivated by hot and
sensible topics.

There still are two different kind of police: the local one and the federal
one. The local authorities hire officers while the federal one has an endless
supply of new recruits* but every officers come from the same police
academies.

* gross exaggeration here.

To be honest it's not a problem of merging two groups or having only one
police faction. It was badly handled and rushed by the political world at the
time (they were in a hurry to fix many problems that were hot topic at that
time, people were in the street and the merging was part of the answer). But I
can't see how such huge changes in a society could be made without the
political world being under huge pressure to do so. So I can't see how those
kind of changes can't be done without being rushed.

Keep in mind it's only my advice and it was a sensible topic at some point.
Some opinions are really polarized about all this.

~~~
mercurial
Thanks for the detailed answer, this was insightful.

------
bdfh42
I suppose the moment when there are only two questions to be answered before a
non-developer's device is selected has arrived.

Q1: Does it run a mainstream, grade A browser? Q2: Is there an adequate way of
generating documents I can share with users of other devices?

Answer yes to both and it is down to price, convenience and aesthetics - with
(for some) the added advantage of a selection making life tougher for inter-
(and infra-) national spies.

~~~
simgidacav
As mentioned by many people, open source gives you peer review as an
advantages, and bugs (both in-good-faith and intentional) get more easily
spotted.

This however doesn't prevents bug from be there, and the question is: will
those guys be keeping their _custom_ systems up to date?

Also, as you point out, a lot of the work is now moved on this [gorram] cloud,
and unfortunately the simple fact you're running GNU/Linux hardly prevents
information from leaking. I wonder if they will also be using strong
cryptography or custom online services!

EDIT: the distro is likely being a spin-off of something existing -- indeed,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu)
as somebody linked -- so yes, that will be up to date.

~~~
devcpp
At least they _get to_ solve the problems. You can't do that with closed OSs.
Same goes for the cloud vs. your own server.

------
fyolnish
2013: Year of linux on the desktop!

------
dublinben
This article was already posted yesterday.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6469559](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6469559)

Just another duplicate spam post from Libertatea.

------
vinight
we will definitely start to see more and more stories like this around the
world. obviously not in the US.

