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The Netherlands joins Europe's gradual migration from Windows to Linux on government PCs (www.xda-developers.com)

submitted 1 month ago by Kirk@startrek.website to c/linux@programming.dev

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[-] fruitcantfly@programming.dev 35 points 1 month ago

Always take these stories with a grain of salt.

For example, while the article claims that "we saw Denmark's government move from Windows to Linux back in 2025", the reality is that it was just one department and they didn't even move to Linux. They merely started a pilot project to see if they could move from Office 365 to Collabora: https://www.digmin.dk/digitalisering/nyheder/nyhedsarkiv/2025/jun/digitaliseringsministeriet-saetter-gang-i-pilotprojekt-om-digital-suveraenitet

[-] morto@piefed.social 33 points 1 month ago

Shhhh. Those sensationalist claims make it easier for us to convince people in our institutions to migrate

[-] ivn@tarte.nuage-libre.fr 4 points 1 month ago

Same for France, it's only a pilot project in the digital directorate, about 250 devices if I recall correctly. But they are also building a NixOS config.

[-] hperrin@lemmy.ca 34 points 1 month ago

It’s kind of hard to believe these governments were all on windows for so long.

[-] slartibartfast141@piefed.zip 9 points 1 month ago

I wonder why NixOS. I've never used it, so my surface level understanding guesses that it's related to the declarative config, but we have Ansible/Chef/Puppet.

[-] john_tech@lemmy.zip 30 points 1 month ago

Pretty sure it's because NixOS is reproducible. You can send your configs to your friend and they'll get a file-for-file identical copy of NixOS to yours (obviously except the user files)

[-] morto@piefed.social 7 points 1 month ago

I never used it too, but it feels like something so nice for research labs

[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 7 points 1 month ago

Or for a fleet of hardware that you control and want to have predictable outcomes.

[-] hallettj@leminal.space 23 points 1 month ago

NixOS goes deeper than Ansible/Chef/Puppet. Those options use a declarative config, but they operate on a mutable system - in particular a system with a mutable package manager. They try to run the necessary operations to change the system state to match the config. But it's not guaranteed that you get exactly the same state if you roll back and forth between declarative config revisions, especially since there are parts of system state outside the scope of the Ansible/Chef/Puppet config.

OTOH the Nix package manager is immutable down through the package manager, and also through system config files (which are linked to the current config generation in the Nix store). If you use a lock file then the NixOS config describes the exact state of every package, and of every managed config file.