France has formally committed to replacing Windows with Linux across all government desktops, marking one of the most significant rejections of US tech dominance by a major Western nation to date.
The country’s Interministerial Digital Directorate, known as DINUM, confirmed the shift in an official press release this week. Every ministry and public operator is now required to develop an implementation plan by autumn 2026, covering not just desktop systems but also collaboration tools, antivirus software, AI platforms, databases, and network equipment.
The desktop transition is just one piece of a much broader strategy. In January, France announced that all 2.5 million of its civil servants would stop using video conferencing tools from US providers, including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex, and GoTo Meeting, by 2027. In their place, the government will roll out Visio, a French-built, open-source video conferencing platform that has been in testing for about a year.
The government estimates the switch to Visio alone could save up to one million euros per year for every 100,000 users. The platform is hosted on infrastructure owned by Outscale, a subsidiary of French software company Dassault Systèmes, keeping both the data and the dollars within French borders.
France isn’t acting alone. Across Europe, governments are scrambling to reduce their dependence on US tech, driven partly by data privacy concerns and partly by fears that geopolitical tensions could see Silicon Valley companies compelled to cut off access. Austria’s armed forces have already switched from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, Denmark’s government has committed to doing the same, and the German state of Schleswig-Holstein has migrated 44,000 employee inboxes away from Microsoft to open-source alternatives.
The timing is particularly interesting for Australia. In February 2026, the Australian government signed a brand new five-year deal with Microsoft, giving Commonwealth agencies access to the company’s full cloud and AI stack, including Copilot, Microsoft 365, Azure, and Dynamics 365. While Europe moves away from US tech dependency, Australia appears to be leaning further into it.
No specific Linux distribution has been chosen for the French rollout yet, with that decision expected to come later. But the announcement is no trial balloon. It is a formal declaration from one of Europe’s largest governments, positioning Linux desktops as a central part of its national digital sovereignty agenda.
Whether this inspires similar conversations closer to home remains to be seen, but it’s clear that the days of assuming every government computer will run Windows are well and truly over.
