The farthest journey in human history concluded Friday evening when NASA’s Artemis II astronauts returned to Earth after a flight around the moon. The crew’s Orion space capsule named Integrity splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego shortly after 5 pm Pacific Time, marking the end of a 10-day, more than 695,000-mile voyage beyond the lunar far side and back.

The four-person crew of Artemis II—commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and mission-specialist Jeremy Hansen—traveled a greater distance from Earth than ever before, reaching 252,756 miles from our home planet.

“We most importantly choose this moment to challenge this generation and the next to make sure this record is not long-lived,” said Canadian astronaut Hansen as the crew passed the previous record of 248,655 miles set during Apollo 13.

Integrity began its fiery descent when the spacecraft hit Earth’s atmosphere at about 24,000 miles per hour, entering a communication blackout and decelerating from friction as its heat shield reached temperatures of roughly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The plan was for the capsule to deploy two drogue parachutes at an altitude of about 22,000 feet, slowing it to about 200 miles per hour, then deploy pilot chutes pulling the three main parachutes at roughly 6,000 feet. This would further slow the spacecraft to around 20 miles per hour before it splashed into the ocean.

During their mission, the Artemis II crew saw things that no human has seen before. Flying higher above the lunar surface than the Apollo missions, the astronauts were the first people to see the entire disk of the moon’s far side. They also witnessed a solar eclipse from the vicinity of the moon as the sun slipped behind the lunar disk and illuminated it from behind.

“Humans probably have not evolved to see what we are seeing,” said NASA astronaut Glover during the eclipse. He and the rest of the crew described a halo of light surrounding the moon while one side of the lunar surface was bathed in earthshine. Venus, Mars, and Saturn shone among the stars. “It is truly hard to describe. It is amazing.”

Artemis II began on April 1 when the crew launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop the 322-foot-tall Space Launch System rocket, the most powerful vehicle to ever carry humans. After conducting multiple altitude-raising engine burns and testing the manual controls of the spacecraft, the crew proceeded with the engine firing known as translunar injection on day two of the mission, which sent them on a trajectory to the moon.

For the next three days, the crew tested the Orion spacecraft’s systems, practiced putting on their spaceflight suits, conducted additional course correction burns, manually flew the Orion capsule again, and prepared for the lunar flyby around the far side of the moon. They also had trouble venting wastewater from the Orion capsule’s toilet into space.

“We definitely have to fix some of the plumbing,” NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said during a conversation with the crew.

At 12:41 am Eastern Time on April 6, Artemis II entered the lunar sphere of influence, where the moon’s gravity overcomes that of Earth. That day, the crew made their closest approach to the moon, flying to about 4,000 miles above the lunar surface. During the lunar flyby, the crew communicated with a team of scientists on the ground, both before and after a roughly 40-minute communication blackout on the far side, to describe geologic features such as craters and canyons.

Just after breaking the distance record, the crew proposed names for two young, unnamed craters on the moon. The first they called Integrity, after their spacecraft, and the second they named Carroll, in honor of commander Reid Wiseman’s wife, who died of cancer in 2020.

In short: France’s Interministerial Digital Directorate (DINUM) announced on 8 April 2026 that it is migrating its own workstations from Windows to Linux and has ordered every government ministry to formalise a plan to eliminate extra-European digital dependencies by autumn 2026. The directive covers operating systems, collaborative tools, cloud infrastructure, and artificial intelligence platforms. It follows France’s January 2026 mandate to replace Microsoft Teams and Zoom with its domestic Visio platform across 2.5 million civil servants by 2027, and is the most comprehensive digital sovereignty measure the French state has yet announced.

What France is actually committing to

An interministerial seminar convened on 8 April by the Directorate General for Enterprise, the National Agency for Information Systems Security, and the State Procurement Directorate produced a directive with two immediate obligations. DINUM itself, which employs roughly 250 agents, will migrate its workstations from Windows to Linux. All other ministries, including their operators and affiliated bodies, must produce their own reduction plans before autumn 2026. The plans are required to address eight categories of dependency: workstations and operating systems, collaborative and communication tools, antivirus and security software, artificial intelligence and algorithms, databases and storage, virtualisation and cloud infrastructure, and network and telecommunications equipment.

No specific Linux distribution has been named in the public announcement, and individual ministries retain the flexibility to choose their migration path within that framework. The software replacement strategy for the most common desktop tasks is already in place in the form of La Suite Numérique, a stack of sovereign productivity tools developed and maintained by DINUM. It includes Tchap, an end-to-end encrypted messaging application already deployed to more than 600,000 civil servants, Visio for video conferencing, a sovereign webmail service, file storage, and collaborative document editing.

The entire platform is hosted on Outscale servers, a subsidiary of Dassault Systèmes, and is certified SecNumCloud by the French information security agency ANSSI. As of April 2026, La Suite had been tested by some 40,000 regular users across departments before the broader mandate. The next milestone is a first set of “Industrial Digital Meetings” scheduled for June 2026, where DINUM intends to formalise public-private coalitions to support the transition.

The precedent that makes this credible

Announcements of government Linux migrations have a long and largely disappointing history. Most have quietly reversed course under the weight of compatibility problems, vendor pressure, and the path dependence of legacy software. France has a reason to believe this time is different, and the reason is the Gendarmerie nationale. Beginning in 2004 with a phased adoption of OpenOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird, the Gendarmerie progressively built the internal competencies and governance structures required for a full operating system switch. In 2008 it launched GendBuntu, its customised Ubuntu-based deployment.

By June 2024, GendBuntu ran on 103,164 workstations, representing 97% of the force’s computing estate. The financial outcome has been unambiguous: the project saves approximately two million euros per year in licensing costs and has reduced the total cost of ownership by an estimated 40%. In February 2026, the Gendarmerie was cited explicitly by DINUM as the governance model for the national rollout.

The international context adds further validation. Germany’s state of Schleswig-Holstein, which began its own Microsoft-to-Linux transition in earnest in 2024, completed nearly 80% of its 30,000-workstation migration by early 2026 and recorded savings of €15 million in licensing costs in 2026 alone. The lesson both cases illustrate is the same: phased migration with coherent governance, strong internal support functions, and sustained political will consistently outperforms big-bang approaches that attempt to switch everything at once.

The geopolitical trigger

The April 8 announcement does not exist in isolation. It is the operating-system layer of a digital sovereignty strategy that France has been accelerating visibly since late 2024, driven in significant part by the changed relationship with the United States under the Trump administration. Trump’s tariffs reignited Europe’s push for cloud sovereignty from April 2025 onward, with OVHcloud and Scaleway reporting record client growth as European institutions began actively seeking to reduce their exposure to American vendors. In November 2025, France and Germany convened a joint summit on European digital sovereignty, establishing a task force to report in 2026.

In January 2026, France announced it would replace Teams and Zoom with its homegrown Visio platform for all 2.5 million civil servants by 2027, a move described at the time as digital sovereignty moving from slogan to policy. The April 8 Linux mandate is the same logic applied to the operating system itself. Anne Le Hénanff, Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technology, has framed the imperative plainly: “Digital sovereignty is not an option, it is a strategic necessity.” David Amiel, Minister of Public Action and Accounts, who led the announcement alongside Le Hénanff, stated that France “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 context for that framing is structural: US cloud providers control an estimated 85% of the European cloud market, according to Synergy Research Group, and spending on sovereign European cloud infrastructure is forecast to more than triple to €23 billion by 2027. Europe’s broader bid to reclaim its technology stack has moved from a niche policy concern to a headline political priority across the continent, and France is now moving faster than any other EU member state at the level of government desktop infrastructure.

The limits and the open questions

The April 8 directive is a mandate, not a completed migration. The absence of a specified Linux distribution means each ministry will face its own procurement and compatibility decisions, and the history of public sector IT projects suggests that autumn 2026 plans will vary enormously in ambition and specificity. Certain categories of specialist software, particularly in defence, healthcare, and financial regulation, have deep dependencies on Windows-specific applications for which open-source alternatives either do not exist or are not yet production-ready.

DINUM has acknowledged this through the flexibility it has built into the framework, but the question of how many of those remaining dependencies can realistically be resolved by a government-mandated roadmap is one that will only be answered over the next two to three years. The sovereignty strategy also contains a structural irony that will persist regardless of which operating system runs on civil servant desktops. Even as France replaces Windows with Linux and Teams with Visio, the twelve European AI startups selected for Amazon’s 2026 AWS Pioneers cohort illustrate that the continent’s most ambitious technology projects continue to be built and scaled on American cloud infrastructure. Replacing the desktop layer matters, but it sits above a cloud and compute substrate that remains predominantly American.

The full sovereignty project, if France and its partners are serious about it, will eventually have to address that substrate too. For now, the direction is clear, the political will is real, and the Gendarmerie’s 103,000 Linux workstations provide proof that the goal is achievable at scale. 2025 established AI as the defining technology of the decade, and the decisions governments make now about which infrastructure that AI runs on, and under whose legal jurisdiction, will shape the continent’s digital autonomy for the next generation.

Forrester’s research has shown that a failure to commit to long-term, inclusive AI education can greatly impact an organisation.

Research and advisory firm Forrester has published the results of a report in which it explored the ramifications for employers and their organisations, when there is a failure to promote AI education across the entirety of a company.  

The AIQ 2.0: Employees (Still) Aren’t Ready To Succeed With Workforce AI report found that while the majority of AI decision-makers and their organisations are using predictive and generative AI (GenAI), only half say they offer training in this area to non-technical employees. As a result, many companies are failing to invest in AI understanding, skills and ethics among the wider workforce. 

The report said: “Those that have tried to upskill haven’t been particularly successful, yet people remain central to the success of your AI strategy.”

Employer readiness

According to a previous report issued by Forrester, the State of AI 2025 survey, almost 70pc of AI decision-makers said they are using GenAI in deployed production applications, while 20pc use it to run experiments and among automation decision-makers. 81pc of automation decision-makers also said AI copilots that assist employees in their work are important applications. 

Forrester suggests that this is indicative of a growing problem in which there is a growing disconnect between the AI needs of a company and the actions being taken. 

“AI is becoming more important to the work lives of employees and employees must adapt,” said the organisation. “But adaptation isn’t coming quickly or easily. Many employers remain mired in an environment of low skills and employee fears that isn’t conducive to successfully adopting workforce AI or driving productivity from its use.”

Research found that the proportion of AI decision-makers across six countries who said their organisations offer internal training on AI to non-technical employees only grew from 47pc in 2024 to 51pc in 2025, an improvement of just 4pc. Also only growing by 4pc was the number of AI decision-makers who said that their organisations offer training on prompt engineering – which Forrester finds to be a key skill for using most workforce AI tools in the modern era – which grew from 19pc to 23pc. 

Fear factor

Forrester also noted that fears around ‘stunt adoption’ and AI-related job loss are hindering implementation, despite Forrester’s opinion that “very few jobs were lost to AI in 2025”. Data indicated that future job loss, while possible, will not constitute a job apocalypse, yet fears persist, due in part to a failure by organisations to correctly or consistently discuss and explain the process of introducing AI.  

The report said: “Forrester’s 2025 data shows that 43pc of employees fear that, in general, many people will lose their jobs to automation in the next five years, while 25pc fear it will impact their own job during that span. This creates an ambient environment of fear and mistrust.”

The organisation added that one business leader said some of their employees fear job less, which turns them away from AI “altogether”.

“Organisations that fail to frame workforce AI as an opportunity builder for employees and that don’t articulate the benefits from an employee perspective see fears of job loss magnified,” said Forrester.

So, how might fears and anxieties be reduced so employers and employees can better embrace the changing landscape?

According to Forrester’s research, comprehensive learning and engagement programmes are key, with the report noting that leading organisations move beyond formal training and invest in continuous, hands-on learning and peer-based approaches that drive real adoption and impact.

Commenting on the findings of the report, JP Gownder, a vice-president and principal analyst at Forrester said: “Employers aren’t giving their people the skills, understanding, or ethical grounding they need to succeed with AI and it’s becoming a clear bottleneck to productivity and ROI. Our research shows most organisations are rolling out AI tools without investing in employees’ ability to use them effectively.

“To close the gap, businesses must move beyond surface-level training and build continuous, hands-on learning that demystifies AI, addresses employee concerns and develops real capability. This isn’t about replacing workers, it’s about enabling them to work smarter with AI.

“The organisations that treat AI literacy as a strategic priority, not a box-ticking exercise, will be the ones that unlock meaningful productivity gains and long-term competitive advantage.”

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Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.

Want more word-based fun? Then check out my NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games, and Marc’s Wordle today page for the original viral word game.

Meta debuted its upgraded Meta AI chatbot this week, showing off plenty of tricks made possible by the new Muse Spark model embedded in the chatbot. The social media giant’s AI can’t deny its origins, behaving more than a little like a social media influencer who’s not scrolling their feeds. It’s notable when compared to ChatGPT‘s endless equivocating in the name of fairness.

I tested some of Meta AI’s highlights against ChatGPT, and the split shows up fast when you ask for more than facts. The Muse Spark model has Meta AI reach for the social layer and all its opinions first, while ChatGPT keeps a cooler head.

1. The local fun radar