Local services will be partially operated by a private company from 2025 onwards but to be fair it will be hard to do worth than SNCF in the south. They are on strike so often they could stop working I’m not sure anyone would notice.

edit: works in Chrome, here are the trips exactly 1 month from now (August 6): 65€ 6am, 65€ 7:13am, 116€ 7:39am, 116€ 9:36am, 116€ 10:39am. A month and a half or two months advance seem to be required now, how bad we think it is is up to debate but it's definitely worse than when I commuted regularly, 2009-2011.

Also if you struggle with SNCF Connect which is terrible my advise is to use Trainline instead. It’s not as good as it used to be when the French part was still CaptainTrain but it’s miles better than the SNCF app.

Yeah this was already the wisdom in the days of voyage-sncf.com. Some things never change.

This is exactly their problem: over-the-counter tickets are prohibitively expensive, making them effectively operate like airlines if not worse, and taking all its drawbacks from the customer point of view but none of the advantages.

Domestic railways has recently been open to competition, but prices still haven't gone down much enough to match with the low-cost carriers they're competing with.