I wanted to spotlight a quietly massive success story in European digital sovereignty: GendBuntu - France’s custom Ubuntu distribution used by the National Gendarmerie.
The GendBuntu project derives from Microsoft’s decision to end the development of Windows XP Back in 2005, France’s Gendarmerie began switching from Microsoft products to open-source software - starting with OpenOffice. Fast forward to 2024, and GendBuntu(Linux) is now running on 97% of their workstations (over 103,000 computers!).
France has shown what’s possible when a government actually backs open-source, in-house, and EU-grown solutions.
More countries should follow suit.
I am interested in seeing how the machines are managed, Windows uses GPOs, what does GendBuntu use?
Some kind of Ansible based custom solution:
https://github.com/skosachiov/remediations-gendbuntu
Yeah that’s really the biggest issue with these deployments.
According to this comment a custom solution based on ansible and got.