In July 2026, France 3 Centre-Val de Loire aired a report on the town hall of La Croix-en-Touraine (Indre-et-Loire, about 2,500 residents). The municipality is gradually migrating its workstations to Linux, after moving collaboration to a French suite. Thirty staff, no internal IT department: general director of services Cyril Rebillard is driving the project.
Migration underway
Two workstreams are advancing in parallel.
Since October 2025, the town hall has used the Hexagone suite (Interstis), spotted via the Indre-et-Loire management centre. Messaging, workspaces, document sharing, municipal councils and committees run there.
In parallel, workstations are moving to Linux, temporarily coexisting with the existing Microsoft environment.
In the report relayed by LinuxFr.org, officials argue that Linux is less targeted than Windows, less resource-hungry, and lets them keep machines longer while better protecting everyday data (civil registry, administrative files).
“Today, we local authorities have the means to take back control of our digital sovereignty. There is no reason not to get started.”
Cyril Rebillard, DGS (Hexagone testimony)
Why they started
On arrival, Cyril Rebillard found sensitive data on a single local server, with a security level he judged weak against GDPR expectations. Elected officials approved splitting the data and working with providers able to deliver real cybersecurity.
The project began before digital sovereignty became a permanent public debate. The DGS notes that a large share of French administrations still collaborate under a US vendor flag. For him, a service outage would feel like a power cut lasting weeks.
In the rationale cited by the specialist press, the municipality also mentions about €5,000 saved by avoiding refresh of PCs incompatible with Windows 11.
Hexagone required habit change. Newly elected officials, used to collaborative tools in the private sector, accelerated adoption. The Linux migration follows the same gradual pace.
“Changing solutions is like being a child on a diving board for the first time. At first it’s scary, but in the end you just fall into water one metre below your feet and it doesn’t hurt.”
Cyril Rebillard
Collaboration first, desktops second
Digital sovereignty is not only the operating system.
In La Croix-en-Touraine, collaboration came first: messaging, sharing, meetings. Linux follows. For an organisation of this size, the order makes sense: first what documents and exchanges flow through, then the workstation base.
Larger authorities can extend the same logic to infrastructure (virtualisation, storage, firewall, identity, monitoring, backups). Open source covers most of these building blocks without a brutal cutover.
Other authorities on the same path
In Germany, the state of Schleswig-Holstein is migrating about 30,000 workstations from Windows and Microsoft Office to Linux and LibreOffice. By late 2025, nearly 80% of workstations (excluding tax administration) already used LibreOffice. The state announces more than €15 million in annual licence savings, for €9 million invested in 2026. As early as 2021, officials flagged Windows 11 hardware requirements that would have forced a mass PC refresh.
In France, Fontaine (Isère) moved part of its schools and town hall to Linux. The national gendarmerie remains the best-known free-desktop example. Contexts differ (size, provider, uses), but the direction is the same.
Schleswig-Holstein has resources, time and a dedicated team. The gap is real. La Croix-en-Touraine still moves forward, with elected support and the right partners.
What next?
Replacing the operating system is often the first visible step. It is not the last.
An authority that wants to go further can rely on Nextcloud for document sharing (see our article on the end of SPO OTP), Keycloak for identity and SSO, KVM / QEMU for virtualisation, TrueNAS for storage and backups, OPNsense for the firewall, LibreOffice or OnlyOffice for office suites.
For reproducible, documented environments, NixOS lets you describe the whole system in versioned files that can be rebuilt identically. We covered this in Understanding NixOS.
What DINUM is preparing
The local project aligns with a direction set by the State.
In April 2026, DINUM (France’s interministerial digital directorate) announced moving its own workstations from Windows to Linux. Ministries must submit a digital sovereignty plan in autumn 2026. The desktop is no longer treated as locked to a single vendor.
To build that shift, DINUM publishes two open source projects on GitHub (cloud-gouv), both in alpha:
Sécurix is not a new Linux distribution. It is a hardened NixOS configuration, aligned with ANSSI guidance: strengthened kernel, disk encryption, FIDO2 key authentication, Secure Boot, reinstantable profiles (administration, intranet-only, multi-level). The code is MIT-licensed. The goal: a secure, auditable base for sensitive workstations.
Bureautix builds on Sécurix and shows how to turn it into an office workstation: installer, machine inventory, user environment customisation (office suite, everyday tools). It is a model to clone and adapt, not a finished product ready to deploy as-is in every town hall.
Sécurix answers “how do we secure the desktop”. Bureautix answers “how do we make it an agent’s workstation”. Both rely on NixOS to keep configuration under control, versioned and reproducible.
La Croix-en-Touraine will not switch to Bureautix tomorrow. These projects show that the State is publishing reusable sovereign building blocks, beyond announcements.
In short
The question is no longer whether Linux works at the office. It is how far to go, and at what pace, given the size of the authority.
Migration in La Croix-en-Touraine is underway. Without an IT department, with about thirty staff and a DGS carrying the topic, the municipality still advances.
HeBeKo supports authorities and organisations on these migrations (audit, deployment, operations). To talk it through, contact us.
Also see our pages on digital sovereignty and NixOS at HeBeKo.
Sources
- France 3 report, relayed by LinuxFr.org
- Testimony of Cyril Rebillard, DGS (Commune de La Croix-en-Touraine)
- Schleswig-Holstein open source strategy (Interoperable Europe)
- Heise: licence savings in Schleswig-Holstein
- Municipality presentation
- Sécurix and Bureautix (DINUM / cloud-gouv)