For years, "digital sovereignty" was the speech French officials gave before renewing their Microsoft contracts. That era appears to be over.
The Direction interministérielle du numérique (DINUM), the agency that steers the French state's digital strategy from the Prime Minister's office, is now running a two-front campaign to pull the administration off American software: La Suite numérique, a bundle of open source collaboration tools meant to replace Teams, Zoom, and Google Drive for public agents; and as of April, a plan to replace Windows with Linux, starting with DINUM's own computers.
"The state can no longer simply observe its dependence; it must escape it," said David Amiel, France's minister for public action and accounts, when the plan was announced on April 8. "We can no longer accept that our data, our infrastructure and our strategic decisions depend on solutions whose rules, prices, evolution and risks we do not control."
That's the political framing. The more interesting story is what's happening underneath it: a small team inside DINUM quietly built a code-managed Linux workstation for its system administrators, liked it, and is now scaling the experiment into what could become the template for 2.5 million public agents.
First, the suite
La Suite numérique launched in May 2024 as the state's answer to the American productivity suites. At a progress event in November 2025, DINUM presented six core tools: Visio for video meetings, Docs for collaborative writing, Fichiers for storage, Tchap for secure instant messaging, Grist for no-code data management, and the Assistant, a generative AI chatbot built with Mistral AI.
