Switzerland's Federal Chancellery is preparing to offer a FOSS workplace suite to some 3,000 employees – but the Swiss Armed Forces are pushing ahead faster still. European interest in digital sovereignty isn't limited to the European Union: the Swiss Federal Chancellery plans to offer selected government employees a FOSS alternative that will run alongside Microsoft 365. The chancellery is launching the program with an initial 3,000 staff, out of some 47,000 federal employees. The platform is expected to become available to about 3,000 selected employees from the end of 2027, with the first phase forecast to cost CHF 9 million (£8.2 million, $11.1 million). For comparison, Swiss Radio reported last year that the federal government had spent CHF 1.1 billion (£1 billion, $1.4 billion) on Microsoft licenses. The program follows the BOSS Proof of Concept feasibility study, which began last year and tested browser-based FOSS tools with 172 users. The English version of the report says: "Functions examined included document editing, email, calendar, contacts, tasks, file storage, audio and video conferencing, chat, and identity and access management." The study carefully spells out four limits to its scope: It would not replace Microsoft 365 It would not have 1:1 functionality It would not have full M365 compatibility It would not be permanent infrastructure It's important to make this stuff plain right at the start. Back in 2022, in a piece whose working title was You can't buy software, this vulture mentioned a member of one of his online communities who wanted to replace Microsoft software with free software – but demanded complete fidelity, including intact imports of all his Outlook files. This kind of exact and perfect match is basically impossible, and the four bullet points above strike us as a good effort at managing users' expectations. The Chancellery concluded that the browser-based suite was suitable in principle for key standard tasks, although it also identified technical and operational limitations. The next phase will cover less than 10 percent of federal employees and is expected to take about 15 months. The plan is to use the openDesk suite from the German state-owned enterprise ZenDIS. This is the same collaboration suite that we reported Mecklenburg-Vorpommern was adopting in July, following neighboring Schleswig-Holstein in 2025. The move is part of the Swiss government's Digital Switzerland Strategy 2026, announced in Bern at the end of 2025 – less than a month after its Federal Council's report on Swiss digital sovereignty. They also follow the 2024 introduction of the Federal Law on the Use of Electronic Means for the Fulfilment of Governmental Tasks – or EMBAG for short. The government has a fresh interest in open source – indeed, the Chancellery maintains an online catalog of its own open source tools. Back in July, Heise reported in English that the Swiss Armed Forces were making similar moves. It cites a German-language report from Swiss publication Republik, Die Cyber-Spezialisten des Bundes kehren Microsoft den Rücken – The federal government's cyber specialists are turning their backs on Microsoft – which has more details. The military is moving faster: Republik says it aims to complete the migration by October 2026 – next month at the time of writing. Again, there is a local precedent – this time, from Austria. In September last year, representatives of the Austrian military presented a talk at the LibreOffice Conference in Budapest: Migration to LibreOffice in the Austrian Armed Forces (ÖBH). Last month, the ÖBH gave a long interview to the Document Foundation about how and why: part 1 and part 2. ®

Microsoft has pumped ads into the Windows Start menu and pushed users through setup screens promoting its services. Now it's bringing advertising to the Windows desktop with a Harry Potter promotion in its Bing Wallpaper app. Users of Microsoft’s Bing Wallpaper app took to Reddit and Microsoft’s own Learn site, where users can post questions about Microsoft products and services, to ask why their usual rotation of scenic desktop wallpapers was interrupted Monday by an ad for Harry Potter films. The wallpaper displays a minimalist vector image of the Hogwarts castle from the film adaptations of author J.K. Rowling’s seven-book fantasy series along with text reading “Harry Potter/Fantastic Beasts 11-film collection” and an additional line noting that all eleven movies in the series are “available now.” “Why in the world is my Bing wallpaper today an advertisement for a film collection, not a beautiful landscape or nature photo,” a Microsoft Learn poster identifying himself as Reed Miller said. “Will there be more advertisements, and if so, must I uninstall Bing wallpaper now to prevent them, or is there a way to opt out?” Reddit users similarly expressed dissatisfaction about their usual rotation of photographs being hijacked to advertise a movie collection. “Usually it's animals, landscapes, or architecture,” one poster noted. “Today it's shit.” While both Miller and Reddit commenters complained in part about Rowling’s transition from author of kids’ books about a young boy who grows up with a hidden identity to an anti-transgender activist, one need not lean on the fact that Rowling’s intellectual property is the one being advertised to find dissatisfaction with the move. Plenty of people leaving ratings on the Bing Wallpaper app’s Microsoft Store page since Monday made no mention of Rowling or her politics in their one-star reviews, only noting that they were upset the app had turned into one that delivers desktop ads. “What's next? Immediately uninstalled. Fair warning to everyone else,” one reviewer said. Another pointed out that the settings for Bing Wallpaper now note AI is used to generate some wallpapers served by the app. Others complained that there had to be a better way to monetize the Bing Wallpaper app. This isn’t the first time such a seemingly innocuous app has drawn criticism. As we noted in late 2024, the Bing Wallpaper app was spotted snooping on and decrypting browser cookies. When asked, Microsoft didn’t technically deny it, only telling us at the time that it didn’t peruse and decrypt “all user Edge and Chrome cookies,” with Firefox not getting a mention. Beyond the Bing Wallpaper app, Microsoft has a lengthy history of privacy controversies involving user data – and inserting ads into Windows, including Microsoft Store promotions that landed in the Windows 11 Start menu in 2024. One could argue that the many iterations of cramming Copilot into every corner of Windows in a bid to increase user numbers are tantamount to advertising, too. We reached out to Microsoft to get more info on the latest addition to its in-your-face advertising portfolio, but didn’t immediately hear back. In the meantime, your best bet might be uninstalling the Bing Wallpaper app before it hijacks your wallpaper. ®

The Asahi Linux gang has announced support for Apple's M3 silicon, with a few ifs and buts for owners that want to try out the code on their hardware. According to the project, "Asahi Linux now officially supports Macs with an M3 series SoC!" There are, however, some substantial caveats. Want performant or power-efficient 3D acceleration from the GPU? You'll need to wait a bit. How about the HDMI port? "The lack of DCP support means that the HDMI port on equipped MacBooks is currently disabled." Sleep does not work either, although the project noted: "This will be addressed once full DCP support is wired up for M3." Even with those limitations, it is quite a feat of reverse engineering. According to the project, almost everything supported on the M1 and M2 series machines "just works." This includes the webcam, internal microphones, USB, hardware-accelerated video decoding including support for AV1, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. The lack of GPU support is nevertheless a significant limitation that will make anything other than a 2D desktop a painful experience. Work is underway, but the synopsis of a talk planned for the X.Org developer conference at the end of September points to hurdles caused by hardware differences from previous generations. Although support for M3-series machines has been merged into the installer, it remains gated behind Expert mode, meaning users must run the installer with EXPERT=1 enabled. The project aims to drop this requirement in time for the Fedora Linux 45 beta in a few weeks, barring any major regressions or other showstoppers. Apple debuted the M3 in 2023, and Asahi's support extends to the M3 Pro and M3 Max. The M3 Ultra, found in the Mac Studio, is not yet on the supported list. With luck, the work on M3, including its GPU, should stand the team in good stead when tackling Apple's subsequent chip generations. Apple announced the M6 last month. ®

Kumander Linux has been around for a few years now and version 3.0 is nearly ready, with some strong nostalgic appeal. We recently came across Kumander Linux and thought it was an interesting distro – although not technologically "interesting," which isn't always a good thing. Underneath, it's almost boring: Debian 13.6 with Xfce 4.20. These are safe, solid, sensible choices, combining a lightweight mainstream desktop with one of the most established Linux distros. What's not to like? What's fun about Kumander Linux is its looks. It makes a very convincing effort to look and work more or less like Windows 7. It doesn't go as far as the wholesale "borrowing" of commercial assets and trademarks seen in Wubuntu, AKA "Windows Linux," nor is it a strange, hacked-together combination of genuine Windows components like Classic 7. It uses a mixture of FOSS and freeware components. The office suite is LibreOffice 25.2, configured with a Microsoft-like ribbon UI. The image editor is GIMP 3.0.4, and it comes with native Linux versions of some familiar Windows tools, such as Google Chrome, PuTTY, Audacity, and VLC. Yes, Chrome isn't FOSS, but it's a much more widely used web browser than Firefox. The customizations go beyond appearances, with some of Xfce's stock tools replaced. For instance, Xfce's slightly feeble Task Manager has been replaced by a tool that was new to us, System Manager. There's also an easy point-and-click Software Center. Both were written by distro developer Roy Hoejgaard. The presence of non-FOSS tools such as Chrome means that a few additional repositories are configured. Flatpak and WINE are both preinstalled, but neither comes with any apps preloaded. One simple but effective touch is that the Start menu lists popular apps from Ardour and Blender to the Steam client, suffixed with Installer. These are not the applications themselves, but handy links for downloading and installing them. Kumander isn't the smallest distro – it's a 4.25 GB download, and a full install takes 11 GB of disk. Even so, providing installation links rather than preinstalling all those applications makes it substantially smaller than Zorin OS Pro, for instance. Xfce is pretty lightweight, and Kumander Linux 3 takes about 725 MB of RAM at idle. In places, we do feel that the customization has perhaps gone a little too far. For instance, when we opened a terminal window, we found that the default shell prompt said C:/home/lproven>. Familiar to a nervous Windows migrant, yes, but almost misleading – there are no drive letters here. It's harmless, though. The distro's About page explains a little of its history. The name is an indirect tribute to Commodore computers – it's "Commander," but spelled the Filipino way. We think this is the first distro we've seen from the Philippines. The changes to Xfce are modest: Kumander doesn't even use the docklike plugin for a Windows 7-style taskbar with pinned applications. Instead, it has its own Quicklaunch plugin. This is documented – unlike some other customized distros, it has a page with links to the repositories of all custom components, which is good to see. Even the Extended Security Updates scheme only has slightly over a year left. The international edition of Windows 10 LTSC is nearing the end too. Only the IoT edition has years left. If you're disenchanted with Windows 11 and modern flat user interfaces in general, you have our sympathies. If you miss the gradients, transparency, and overall look of Windows in the Noughties, but want Debian stability and Xfce simplicity, Kumander Linux 3 offers an appealing combination. The current build is Release Candidate 2, and it looks close to being ready. ®