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."

Re:national law enforcement agency = FBI in usa?

[Arkh89]

FBI in the USA = Police in France
Police in the USA = Gendarmerie in France (The one who pull you over for DUI, giving speeding and parking tickets, etc.)

Re:Short term money saving.

[dakohli]

They already switched to OpenOffice, I've used both and while there are some differences, if you know one, you can use the other without too many problems.

Most folks don't even use more than a small percentage of the features of a word processor anyways. I have friends who work with lawyers who say Word is no good for them, and that they have to use WordPerfect for their legal documents.

I agree that formats are very important. This organization is large enough to be able to mandate the formats they will use. But a quick check of LibreOffice Writer (4.0.2.2) shows it can handle the fol formats: odt, ott, sxw, stw, fodt, uot, doxc(MS Word 2007/2010 XML) , doc, xml(ms Word 2003 and Doc Book), html, rtf, txt, and docx (OpenOffice XML Text)

It appears that they won't have many problems accepting any common format.

I work in a very large organization. We use MS Office, and we provide training for many of our staff in Excel, Word, Powerpoint and Outlook. If we were to swtich, it would involve creating new lesson plans, but the savings in licensing would more than pay for that.

Re:I'm taking bets!

[timeOday]

Sounds to me like they know what they are getting into pretty well:

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.

Ahh, it's so nostalgic to have this discussion on slashdot again!

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.

Re:Are they capable of using Linux ?

[jbengt]

Indeed, the question should probably have been whether they were observant enough to notice the difference

This, exactly.
I once put a Knoppix live CD in the family computer because of some potential virus issue. After my wife asked something like "Why does this look different" and I explained, she found Firefox, got on Facebook, and soon forgot all about not being in Windows.