France is trying to move on from Microsoft Windows. The country said it plans to move some of its government computers currently running Windows to the open source operating system Linux to further reduce its reliance on U.S. technology.
Linux is an open source operating system that is free to download and use, with various customized distributions that are tailored and designed for specific use cases or operations.
In a statement, French minister David Amiel said (translated) that the effort was to “regain control of our digital destiny” by relying less on U.S. tech companies. Amiel said that the French government can no longer accept that it doesn’t have control over its data and digital infrastructure.
It’s a good question - it’s where Linux has always struggled as a “desktop” OS in corporate or government use. Active Directory is hard to compete with.
RedHat is probably the furthest along in this area (maybe SuSe? I don’t know SuSe very well). There’s Ansible Automation Platform for managing systems. And I believe they have their own directory server and other offerings. I’m not an RHCE though.
Ansible is all well and good for managing servers and patching and stuff, but desktops and users and group policy to secure user workstations is the gap I have yet to see filled. Active Directory is just LDAP at it’s core, and LDAP existed in unix land far before windows, but the suite of management and policy tools seems missing.
Agree - it’s always been a weak spot for Linux on the desktop.
Maybe something will finally get done to plug that gap.