France is switching 2.5 million government computers to Linux and the rest of Europe is watching – Startup Fortune
Publish Date: 2026-04-25 11:41:00
Source Domain: startupfortune.com
On April 8, 2026, France’s Interministerial Digital Directorate ordered every government ministry to eliminate its dependence on American software, starting with Microsoft Windows, in the most sweeping act of digital sovereignty any Western democracy has yet attempted.
The directive is not a pilot program or a political aspiration. France’s DINUM, the central body responsible for state digital infrastructure, has formally announced it is migrating its own workstations from Windows to Linux and has mandated that all other ministries, agencies, and affiliated public bodies submit their own migration plans before autumn 2026. The scope covers an estimated 2.5 million government devices. The directive extends well beyond the operating system: cloud infrastructure, collaborative tools, and artificial intelligence platforms are all included. French budget minister David Amiel was direct about the motivation. “We can no longer accept that our data, our infrastructure, and our strategic decisions depend on solutions whose rules, pricing, and risks we do not control,” he said. That is not the language of a procurement review. It is the language of a government that has decided American tech dependence is a strategic liability.
The April 8 directive did not arrive without context. France had already mandated in January 2026 that Microsoft Teams and Zoom be replaced across 2.5 million civil servants with Visio, a domestically built open-source video platform, by 2027. The French Gendarmerie has operated its own Linux distribution, GendBuntu, for more than fifteen years, giving the state a credible internal proof of concept for large-scale migration that most governments lack. What changed this spring is scope: the directive now covers every ministry, not just forward-leaning agencies, and it explicitly names cloud and AI platforms as targets alongside the operating system. As The Next Web reported following the announcement, this is the…