France has ditched Windows 11 for Linux on 2.5 million government PCs here's why Microsoft should worry that millions more could follow by the end of 2026

Date:
Sat, 18 Apr 2026 12:30:00 +0000

Description:
Is 2027 set to be the year of Linux? There are signs that this might actually be the case, for sure.

FULL STORY ======================================================================Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Tech Radar Get daily insight, inspiration and deals in your inbox Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more. Become a Member in Seconds Unlock instant access to exclusive member
features. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors By submitting
your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. You are now subscribed Your newsletter sign-up was successful Join the club Get full access to premium articles, exclusive features and a growing list of member rewards. Explore An account already exists for this email address, please log in. Subscribe to our newsletter If you follow the latest desktop operating system news, and stories around Windows 11 in particular, you can't have failed to notice a trend: everybody hates it .

Well, that's not quite true, but if you hang out on some forums or
subreddits, the posts you scroll through will very much give you this impression and convince you that the hate is very real. And you don't exactly see many folks rushing to Microsoft 's defense, either, in the main. Of course, it's always been 'cool' to hate 'authority' (and use 'quote marks'), and Microsoft is very much the dominant monarch when it comes to desktop platforms. And lately, it's become a growing trend to declare that you're heading to Linux, or macOS, and that [ insert whatever Microsoft just did
here ] is the final, camel-destroying straw for you and Windows 11. Article continues below You may like Microsoft is finally fixing Windows 11 under the hood but is it too late? Apple's MacBook Neo triumph could also be great
news for Windows 11 laptops Microsoft promises to fix Windows 11 this year and it's about time

So much so that I, and many others, have started to wonder if this really is
a tipping point for Microsoft's OS where it's in danger of sliding into a meaningful decline. While members of the computing public defecting is one thing, though, something bigger just happened the government of a large country has announced it's migrating away from Windows to Linux. Last week,
as ZDNet highlighted , it became official that the French government has had enough of Windows on its computers and is switching over to Linux. This isn't some airy, political statement about 'one day' doing so this is a call to arms, a declaration of 'digital sovereignty', that's happening now. As David Amiel, who is Minister of Public Action and Accounts, puts it (translated): "We must become less reliant on American tools and regain control of our digital destiny. We can no longer accept that our data, our infrastructure, and our strategic decisions depend on solutions whose rules, pricing, evolution, and risks we do not control. "The transition is underway: our ministries, our operators, and our industrial partners are now embarking on
an unprecedented initiative to map our dependencies and strengthen our
digital sovereignty." Get daily insight, inspiration and deals in your inbox Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more.
Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from
us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. The shift to Linux is happening and every French government ministry is required to put its migration plan in place by the fall of 2026, including considering complementary software such as antivirus, collaborative tools, and so on. France has already got some of this move underway, previously having abandoned Microsoft Teams, for example. Which Linux distro will the French government adopt? It'll surely be GendBuntu although that's not official yet. This is a spin on Ubuntu which has been used by the police force (Gendarmerie) in the country since 2008, and is well-proven at this point, already running on over 100,000 PCs. By next year, 2.5 million government workstations will be added to those numbers, computers that were previously Windows systems. What to read next Microsoft has finally started its campaign to 'make Windows 11 better' Microsoft rumored to be cutting back AI ambitions in bid to save Windows 11 Windows 11's new year goes from bad to worse as two bugs are crashing apps A lack of faith Microsoft should find disturbing (Image credit: Shutterstock) You may recall that last year in Europe, an entire German state, Schleswig-Holstein, axed Windows (and Microsoft's other services) to adopt Linux (and LibreOffice). Other countries (such as Denmark) have also been exploring ditching Microsoft's software, if not Windows itself.

We've heard the prediction that the big shift to Linux is coming a lot of times, but never has this felt a real threat for me not until now. However, the French decision is a blow to Microsoft of an entirely different
magnitude, given that it's a national, not state-based, policy, affecting millions of computers. And while a government's concerns are obviously quite different to those of an individual, these entities are ultimately mulling
the same path migrating to an alternate OS (and if that isn't Linux, it's macOS) and likely for the same reason: trust, or a lack of it.

It's crystal clear that there's been a growing lack of faith in Microsoft and the direction it has taken with Windows 11 since the launch of its newest operating system. But that feeling really intensified last year as Microsoft continued to push more AI features, and many Windows 11 users pushed back , and hard, insisting that they wanted the many problems with the OS fixed, rather than getting new AI tricks .

And boy are there a lot of issues with wonkiness in Windows 11, in terms of sluggish performance, jarring bits of interface, and indeed plain old-fashioned bugs. Of course, as you've doubtless seen, this almighty user backlash led to Microsoft promising that it's going to fix Windows 11 in all sorts of ways. Indeed, the company has gone well beyond what many hoped for, with an extensive list of remedies that covers elements I frankly wouldn't have believed if you'd have told me about all this a year ago.

Promises are one thing, though, and the reality of successfully actioning
them will be entirely another. Now, let's be clear: I'm not saying Microsoft can't do this, and I love the new attitude of the various company execs in
the Windows group, which includes listening to people, far and wide, on
social media, actively engaging with them, and promising yet more fixes (or
at least that 'things are being looked at').

However, I'm worried that Microsoft has bitten off more than it can chew
here. The work in front of the company in terms of getting all this functionality implemented, pepping up performance, and smoothing over a heap of glitches and problems, collectively seems like a towering mountain of tasks. And what happens if 2026 rolls to a close and the grand campaign to
fix everything in Windows 11 hasn't moved the needle nearly as much as is the suggestion now?

The goodwill Microsoft has earned is going to falter, and online sentiment is going to turn nasty (again). Windows 11 might be declared broken and unfixable, perhaps. Specifically, the area I'm most concerned about is Microsoft dropping the ball with fixing bugs. Internal affairs (Image credit: Ollyy / Shutterstock) Okay, so we've seen Microsoft is listening, it's more engaged with the community, and is in the mood to generally roll up its sleeves and fix stuff. Great! And regarding preview versions of Windows 11 where the nuts-and-bolts of these cures are tested, just as promised, this month Microsoft revamped the entire Windows Insider program .

It's crystal clear that there's been a growing lack of faith in Microsoft and the direction it has taken with Windows 11. That's good to see, too although as a caveat, some testers still aren't quite happy with the new way of organizing these preview channels, but I'm not going to get into that here.

What concerns me, however, is that we haven't heard much of what Microsoft is going to do internally to improve its quality assurance, bug finding and ground root testing. In fact, we've heard lots about community feedback and Windows Insiders, but barely a peep about internal improvements within the company halls where Windows 11 is actually developed.

As far as I'm aware, the main statement from Microsoft on this was the following from its sweeping blog post on the ' commitment to Windows quality
' last month: "As part of this effort, we are evolving how Windows is built behind the scenes to raise the quality bar and deliver innovation where it matters most, shaped by the feedback we are hearing from you.

"This includes deeper validation and broader testing across real-world hardware and usage scenarios before new experiences reach Windows Insiders [testers], and a more intentional approach to where and how new capabilities are introduced."

The 'intentional approach' comment refers partly to the freshly-introduced abilities to choose what features you want to test (rather than having to
hope they're rolled out to your particular PC), but the main point here is
the "deeper validation and broader testing across real-world hardware and usage scenarios" before new features even reach Windows Insider test
channels.

This idea sounds all well and good, certainly, but it's a rather vague assertion. I haven't seen any further talk from Microsoft, or meat to those bones, about exactly what it's doing behind the scenes to improve the quality assurance processes with Windows 11. Whereas there's been plenty of extra noise about, well, pretty much everything else you can think of.

Maybe I'm being overly sensitive on this point, I'll give you that, and perhaps Microsoft just feels it's too dull (or confidential) to go into. But
I really wish Microsoft would elaborate further, and I feel this way mainly because my real fear is that in this grand plan to rejuvenate Windows 11 and win back the faithless, the bugs will be Microsoft's undoing.

If it comes to the end of the year, and we remain in the familiar troubleshooting rut that Windows 11 has been in for some time now since the 24H2 update, certainly the danger is that people are going to throw their hands up in the air and give up.

And by familiar troubleshooting rut, I mean the following sequence of events: Patch Tuesday arrives: Windows 11 update released Bug found in update Fix for update deployed Another glitch found in update Another fix rolled out That
fix works, but causes another additional problem as a side effect Accusations of Microsoft using AI to do too much of its coding abound Another fix for the new problem, here you go That one doesn't work at all Oh no, 'Microslop' has done it again, AI sucks etcetera Second rejigged fix for side-effect-bug does work, all is good finally Wait a couple of weeks, Patch Tuesday rolls around again, rinse and repeat this cycle or some close variation of it Much ado about nothing? (Image credit: MAYA LAB / Shutterstock) To sum up my fear: Microsoft has made a whole big fuss here about getting Windows 11 right. If, by the end of 2026, we're still facing similar bugs and wonky aspects of performance being regularly introduced via Windows 11's monthly updates, as has been the case for some time, the computing public is going to start to lose all hope of the operating system ever getting it right.

Then those folks might look at France's mass migration to Linux and other Windows 11 defectors on Reddit telling their tales of never having looked
back and decide to leave for one of those distros themselves , or perhaps
for macOS. The latter is especially pertinent if any given person is
searching for a new laptop, given what a hit the MacBook Neo has been so far, and that success looks set to continue for Apple (it seemingly can't make enough of these wallet-friendly notebooks ).

We've heard the prediction that the big shift to Linux is coming a lot of times, but never has this felt a real threat for me not until now (and part of that is the strides forward with Linux, too, particularly for gaming and with SteamOS).

It's by no means something I'd predict as likely not yet but if Microsoft makes a mess of fixing Windows 11 this year, and especially if the OS continues to be buggy, it's clear that alternative desktop platforms have never had a better chance of grabbing some meaningful territory. The best laptops for all budgets Our top picks, based on real-world testing and comparisons

Read our full guide to the best laptops 1. Best overall: Apple MacBook Air 13-inch M5 2. Best budget: Apple MacBook Neo 3. Best Windows 11 laptop Microsoft Surface Laptop 13-inch 4. Best thin and light: Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i 5. Best Ultrabook Asus Zenbook S 16 Follow TechRadar on Google News and add
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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows/france-has-ditched-windows-11-for- linux-on-2-5-million-government-pcs-heres-why-microsoft-should-worry-that-mill ions-more-could-follow-by-the-end-of-2026


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