OuiChat
Every 2-3 years, the French government announces that they released a brand new homemade app that will replace some bigtech because sovereignty or whatever bureaucratic bullshit communication they fancy at the moment. Then they issue a BIG contract to an IT consulting company to develop the thing, who get tons of money to send junior devs to release a buggy tool that no one will ever use because migrations cost a lot. This new app will die like the others.
All this instead of just hiring a few senior devs to contribute to any of the number of existing open source projects that are already infinitely better than any new thing they will come up with.
the french do make some great stuff tho like cryptpad or mobilizon - the problem is usually always the same tho. it’s in french and they only give half a shit about their french users, anyone else is considered an obstacle.
heck i’ve been playing dofus for 20 years and the non-french community is always shafted. always.
Once these countries leave, they’ll never go back. And then the rest of us get better alternatives to this enshitification model.
Munich went open source / Linux a couple of years ago, ditching Microsoft. Using a big budget to convert everything and support employees etc. It was a huge act.
…Then they went back to Microsoft in yet another huge act, using a big budget. And then never revealed the budget for the last one. Which is really weird, considering its public money.
edit: just wanted to say that when idiots get power, there is always a way back. No matter how obviously stupid that would be
Also improves Teams/slows the enshitifcation. It’s harder to make the product bad when it’s hardly a monopoly.
Once these countries leave, they’ll never go back.
Look up LiMux and the massive Microsoft deal that followed.
That deal that totally had nothing to do with Microsoft relocating their headquarters closer to Munich
No, please stop with this garbage misinformation. Microsoft made a (suspected) under the table deal with the Munich government at the time to setup a Microsoft office in Munich if they switched back to Windows.
That’s what the news reported on endlessly. That’s the narrative that keeps getting falsely repeated over and over, and no one ever checks the BS stories they spread.
The rest of the story didn’t make headlines, where the new incoming Munich government said “hell no!” (prob in German) and continued the Linux rollout.
Today the environment is a mix of Linux and Windows, but they already have a large focus on FOSS software.
Despite the astonishingly stupid decision to roll their own in-house distro (LiMux), the program was massively successful, with Linux users filling only 40% the number of tickets the Windows users did.
Edit: I’m correcting something I said, they didn’t “continue the Linux rollout” as they had already covered most of their systems. The current status is a mix of Windows and Linux, because they vetoed the rollback to Windows in 2020.
Citation Needed
You first
You first
Are you afraid to provide any reference to your claim? Do you need extra time making up stuff?
“Die 43 000 städtischen Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeiter nutzen also mittlerweile wieder Word, Outlook und PowerPoint […] Einfacher sei die Software-Frage bei den Servern im städtischen Rechenzentrum zu beantworten. Zwar haben man durchaus auch Windows-Server, aber die meisten laufen mit Linux, so Gernhardt.” (29. Juni 2025) https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-verwaltung-open-source-it-microsoft-li.3256886
So Linux on servers, Windows including MS Office on desktops. The migration to Linux on desktops was completely reversed.
So where is ““hell no!” (prob in German) and continued the Linux rollout”? Where has it been “garbage misinformation”? Where are the exact stats about opening tickets? After all, you claim “Linux users filling only 40% the number of tickets the Windows users did”. That’s pretty specific.
Are you afraid to provide any reference to your claim? Do you need extra time making up stuff?
No. Just calling out your double standard. If you didn’t provide sources for your statements, then it’s rich for you to demand sources from me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
“In May 2020, it was reported that the newly elected politicians in Munich, while not going back to the original plan of migrating to LiMux wholesale, will prefer Free Software for future endeavours.”
There are no official numbers, but the rollback to Windows was halted. It’s estimated that it’s currently a mix of Linux and Windows. And it’s been acknowledged that the move back to Windows was almost entirely political due to influence from Microsoft.
“In May 2020, it was reported that the newly elected politicians in Munich, while not going back to the original plan of migrating to LiMux wholesale, will prefer Free Software for future endeavours.”
So you lied. You claimed that Munich said “Hell no” to Microsoft Migration but here you spell it out yourself: The politicians did sell out to Microsoft and only newly elected politicians partially reversed it.
They use Windows and MS Office on desktops to this day and use Linux on servers and some FOSS tools ON WINDOWS DESKTOPS.
I was right, you lied.
Im not an expert on this, but it seems like Ms was worried that success of Limux would be the drip that starts the trickle so to speak. It made sense for them to do whatever it took to patch that leak.
Things have really changed since then though. Valve has been very successful in a Linux end user environment, and Eu is becoming disenfranchised from the US rather than Microsoft specifically.
I think Munich’s motivations were financial, but Frances will be ideological.
With these things in mind, the calculus has changed. That doesn’t necessarily mean France won’t fail, but id be surprised if Microsoft pursues them in the same way.
Don’t listen to that other commenter. They’re wrong about the Munich LiMux story. It keeps getting repeated but it’s not correct.
While I would love to see them never going back, here in Germany, all it takes is some corrupt politician taking a huge bribe from a lobbyist and swoosh, they are back to Microslop.
Edit: Knowing our little corrupt fuckers in charge in German politics, the bribe probably doesn’t even have to be mediocre.
In Australia a lobbyist would get that for around 10k AUD from Labor and probably 6 from the Coalition.
Our system (in the end it’s the same no matter where you are) is so fucked up :/ Kids need to learn empathy and selflessness as the most important school subject.
Kind of funny considering that Visio is the name of another Microsoft product.
ETA: I’m not defending Microsoft’s usage of the term ‘Visio’ here. The French use of that term makes a lot of sense, and Microsoft has an annoying tendency of using and copyrighting very common terms like ‘Word’ or ‘SQL Server’. And France (or the French government) should be allowed to use it for their video conferencing software. I’m just smiling at the idea of some people opening Microsoft Visio by mistake and trying to figure out how to make a call through a diagramming app.

It’s also a French word that means video conference (as a shortened form of visioconférence).
Gosh, someone should tell the Microsoft teams team that Microsoft teams for business and Microsoft teams for personal and Microsoft teams for students are also using the same names and make communication difficult. They should get a copilot team on it
Now replace Windows with Linux, and fucking invest into not needing to use American-controlled CPUs as every single one of them contains a backdoor.
I don’t understand why governments trust official matters in the hands of closed source software and suspicious hardware. Even China uses a special version of Windows 11 in public computers, this is nuts.
and fucking invest into not needing to use American-controlled CPUs as every single one of them contains a backdoor.
China has been working intensely for at least 2 decades to catch up, and they are still about a decade behind!
Netherlands has ASML which is a huge advantage for European independent manufacturing, but even with that it’s an insanely expensive investment to make a realistic competitor to AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Broadcom etc. because they have loads of patents that are hard to avoid, and they have decades of know how. This is not even accounting for the software infra structure that would have to be built almost from scratch.
Chip production is a global enterprise, and even USA isn’t independent anymore. They depend on ASML and TSMC for their most popular products in AI, Smartphones, servers, laptops and desktops. And more and more Arm is taking over from Intel/AMD.What we may be able to do would be using Arm and have TSMC help us with manufacturing. But to make such a project succeed is not an easy thing, we had European computer companies in the 70’s and 80’s that were heavily subsidized by governments that dominated home markets for several European countries, and they essentially all failed against international competition.
So what we risk if we were required to use a European product funded by EU/European governments would be to have to use an overpriced under-performing technology, that would be a millstone around the neck of all of Europe, making Europe not catch up, but instead fall further behind.they have loads of patents that are hard to avoid
China doesn’t care about patents of outsiders.
Seems to me that it’s time for the rest of the world to invalidate US IP and go from there.
He is talking about software. A fucking video conferencing tool not controlled by American tech is no ASML level investment.
We could at least start with this
American-controlled CPUs
Ignorance, mostly. It’s sad but Chinese leaders seem to listen to their experts, while EU leaders listen to CEOs, and of large companies only.
… Pretty much every CPU contains backdoors, not just american ones. The Chinese government does the exact same thing as the American government. They are two sides of the same coin but the Chinese government seems more competent and efficient unlike the US government.
Even if the hardware doesn’t have backdoors, the firmware often will, which you also can’t get around with software.
The tier after that is software which also has a lot of back doors, luckily, you can run Linux and open source software. That is the best you can do. Really the only thing you can “trust” not to have backdoors is MCUs because those backdoors are much more likely to need physical access.
Sadly, our entire tech world is built on backdoors and intentional security flaws to enable easier debugging, recovery, and compliance with government law enforcement after the sale.
Here’s my guess, and I could be completely wrong.
All the governments use 2 sets of computers. The first, is a closed network used only internally. Open source, connected as a network, but NOT connected to outside neteorks. This uses closed source OS that they themselves develop. No backdoors. Highly secured.
The second set is what you know. Windows 11, backdoors, easily spied on. Intentionally left open, because that’s their way to spy on the other countries.
They leave this open, to let themselves be spied on, so that they can spy on the other side. Neither side realizing they’re both doing the same thing, and both sides just getting mostly useless info.
Then, to throw off the trail of it being useless info, they occasionally allow a juicy bit of info into their windows computer. Just so it’s not obvious that this isn’t the real info.
I have zero evidence, and came up with this theory after reading your comment. So I could be very wrong.
You put way too much trust in governments if you think they can be this organized.
This is only a part of france’s “LaSuite” (very original name guys), that seemingly will replace every equivalent american service.
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/
They generally work pretty well (demo on the site) and are a mix of homegrown solutions and rebrands of existing projects like matrix. All of them are open source.
And the apps have docker for easy setup! I was expecting something very convoluted and not suitable for tinkerers. What’s good/bad is that the the apps seem to be deployed independently. Would love to have single user for everything. Need to read a bit further to see how it’s done
To have a single user with multiple services you usually use a separate oauth provider, in the french government’s case that’s France connect but authelia is a good self-hosted option.
It’s possible these ones have a built-in system for this though, I haven’t checked.
I might not have explained well. Not only a single user, but a connected one. If I’m in the chat app and want to share a file, to show automatically my cloud drive, to jump from text chat to video call video call or to have a notification on the chat app when an invite with a video call is received.
As much as I hate MS, almost everything I do with teams and outlook alone.
tbh I really don’t know for this solution, but you might like nextcloud, it’s exactly what you’re looking for, each part of the site is connected in that way.
Thanks, I used to have it. It died on me multiple times in the past (I’m sure I’m ultimately at fault) so I’m a bit wary.
For lasuite I’m thinking about it’s long term staying power in France institutions and adaption by other agencies/companies.
There will be a big pushback by users, so the smoother the better
Yeah nextcloud is a bit of a beast to manage alone. Tell you what, I’ll try selfhosting LaSuite sometime and I’ll tell you if it has it or not.
I guess they’re all cloud tools? Or is there something I can install in my laptop?
They’re all cloud tools, but if you have a spare computer and some knowledge you can host it yourself.
Yes and yes but no interest in self hosting
Good on them, but I Wonder why they can’t just build on top of something open source like Nextcloud.
It already has the majority of the Office-365 suite
I don’t know on what it’s based on, but it’s open source and audited.
Because the French government is hell bent on saving money, but they don’t care about anyone’s privacy at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are building a privacy nightmare system here. Having said that, at least they are removing Microslop, and anything that could potentially hurt Microslop in any way, shape or form, is a good thing.
i mean, a lot ia still in handwriten notebooks, the french and other similar countries should just skip IT and jump eight into the future and stay on paper, no?
Trump is amazing. He literally destroys anything he touches and still get rewarded for it. Just wow.
Edit: Destroys casinos and hotels. Gets rewarded a tv show. Destroy multiple brands. Get rewarded the presidency. Destroys so many American lives. Gets rewarded the presidency a second time. Destroys the United States and it’s ties with it’s allies. Gets rewarded with untold billions.
He is as fucking narcisist, he doesn’t care not to ruin anything.
magic or a trick?
Depends on if you believe in Satan or not.
i was just thinking of magicians, psychics or tv evangelists. they are all kind of in the same buisness. it is psycology.
amigo, i am on lemmy for 1 day, but i already forgot what you are replying to and i don’t know how to jump to my own comment to find what you are replying to. Can you help? Thank you√2
When you see my comment in your inbox, you can click the small icon below it that looks like a chainlink. That will take you to the original comment I replied to. From there you can also navigate up the thread.
thank you 👍
You’re welcome!
Yeah. You asked if Trump being so successful despite a complete failure at everything was a trick or magic.
Could you destroy unnecessary apostrophes in possessive pronouns? Get rewarded with correct grammar.

Ok incel.
Oh sorry, I interrupted you in the middle of changing the world.
Why not jitsi meet? Isn’t better to use an already “established” opensource conferencing tool?
They could just selfhost their instance.
They’ve been building an entire open source suite of software tailored to their needs. If I had to guess, Jitsi isn’t performant enough for large (100+) user meetings in a way they can scale easily. It’s a great tool, but it seems better geared towards smaller loads. Video conferencing at scale is a pretty big challenge.
Between this, their new Docs platform and some Matrix-based chat platforms, I think this is something they’ve put a fair bit of thought into how they want to build. Overall, it’s a cool initiative, but I think it’s pretty clear that it’s open source as a means to be transparent as a government organization rather than to form a platform for broad use by everyone. They do have some self-hosting instructions on their GitHub though.
I was wondering the same, but this does make sense.
At the same time, it might also make sense to build on top of existing FOSS tooling rather than building new, but I suppose that depends on where the bottlenecks are and if stuff like proprietary codecs might be involved
Why do european tech companies need to call their products the same name as already established american products. Don’t they google the names before they make the decision?
We don’t do google here ok
It’s uncouth and unfashionable, the French prefer to get information by sticking their head out of the window whilst wildly waving a baguette and yelling: “Quoi de neuf ?”
american law is relative, who cares
Visio is an outdated spreadsheet name, in English.
Visio is the new video conferencing software, in French.
France leads the world, it is up to everyone else to worry about conflict with France, not the other way around. /s
Nice, replace Microslop Windows too pls.
Lol, replacing one o365 product with one named identically to another o365 product, classic.
Came to comment this. I know there are only so many letters, and so many combinations of 4-8 of them, but can we quit naming new things with the name of an old thing?
Finding any details about France’s Visio is going to be a cluster.
Visio is [the shorthand of] what the french call a video call
visioconférence
Does that make this better? A translated French search query would be ‘joining video call isn’t working’ and that will return results for every conference tool known to man.
Call it something like FVC (la France VisioConférence) , or some French play on the way that sounds, which would be a uniquely searchable term in this domain.
This is not a hill I’m dying on, but it’s terminally short sighted and a bad user experience to name your product the same thing as a microslop trademark. They are the worst for this already with their multiple active variants of office 365 tools like outlook and their xbox name nonsense.
Oh, I have a great idea for a new car company. Lets call it ‘Car’! Then people can have a Car Car, or maybe even a Car Car 2026… oh or a Car Truck when we branch out. (future google search: replace car truck 2028 oil filter)
Nah, you can always come up with new combos. They could have named it ‘squonchy’ or ‘flurgled’, for example.
Source code: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet
Next: move away from github, as it’s owned by MS
That’s great. I wish Visio/Vizio were not such common names for software and hardware. We done did those already. Do something else.
Beautiful. Trump is causing the US to lose its grip on the world in yet another way.

















