French Police To Switch 72,000 Desktop PCs To Linux

jones_supa writes "France's National Gendarmerie — the national law enforcement agency — is now running 37,000 desktop PCs with a custom distribution of Linux, and by summer of 2014, the agency plans to switch over all 72,000 of its desktop machines. The agency claims that the TCO of open source software is about 40 percent less than proprietary software from Microsoft, referring to their article published by EU's Interoperability Solutions for Public Administrations. Initially Gendarmerie has moved to Windows versions of cross-platform OSS applications such as OpenOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird. Now they are completing the process by changing the OS. This is one of the largest known government deployments of Linux on the desktop."

Comments

the text is incorrect

[sxpert]

technically, the Gendarmerie are the military police force, that is mostly managing the countryside.

Proud

[TechNeilogy]

There are days when you wake up proud to have French ancestry.

OSS - with 100% less big brother then commercial

[schwep]

So not only do they get lower TCO, they also get 100% less built in spyware (literally) by the NSA.

It's truely a win-win!

All about the apps

[Dega704]

Moving to said open source applications beforehand was a smart move. Large-scale deployments like this can fail spectacularly, mostly due to the shock of having all of their applications change, rather than the actual OS. When the end users are already using Firefox, Open Office, etc., I have found that the transition goes much more smoothly with very little resistance.

Re:Short term money saving.

[Sarten-X]

On the contrary, I recently did support at a company migrating from Office to LibreOffice to save on transition costs. Standard issue was Office 2007, but 2010 was present and 2013 was announced, boasting yet another new interface to learn. The company switched to LibreOffice, with only a few key Office installations for things that had to be perfectly correct to leave the company.

There was no real training budget, but there was only one brief period of transition rather than several, no licensing costs, and everything just worked.

Re:Gendarmerie is not THE national law enforcement

[boule75]

The situation is a bit peculiar : - both the Police Nationale and the Gendarmerie report to the Ministère de l'Interieur. But Gendarmes retain a military status while Policiers are civilians: some differences in duties and in pay, but a strong difference on rights: les gendarmes are not allowed to go on strike or to publicly profess political preferences (as all soldiers here) while les policiers can do both. - both forces have elite counter-terrorism teams, altough the most renowed one belongs to the Gendarmerie (GIGN). And both forces are requested to work together if need be, and regularly train together. As for the police : Windows on the desktop, 80% Linux in the datacenters, with some AIX and windows.

Re:national law enforcement agency = FBI in usa?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the Gendarmerie Nationale is part of the Military. It is not a civilian institution.
So Police in the USA = Police in France.
Gendarmerie in France is something in between military police and the FBI in the USA.

Re:Remember all those years of Linux on the Deskto

[devent]

Why Gnome? KDE is perfectly stable, have more features, looks great and functions in the same way then Windows 7.
In my opinions KDE is much more user friendly and have more features then Gnome, and have a round-up experience (the KDE applications are integrate very well). I run for 2 years now Fedora with KDE and it's extremely well experience.