The EU is trying to establish an operating system to be used by the public sector and they chose Fedora as the base distribution:
Great idea, the link page seems to be built by an individual though. Do you have any more links? But everything starts with one person!
I stumbled over it through this The European Union has its own Linux Distribution and it's Called EU OS
But it did elude me, that itâs also marked as âcommunity drivenâ. So maybe itâs nothing at all 
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I was about to post it here, I also just saw the itsfoss news. It looks great, letâs hope for the best. I know Germany has policies favoring FOSS software.
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Germany, Netherlands and France are all working on interoperable sovereign systems. Iâm not sure which distros they run though.
A couple of other big EU FOSS funders
Iâm really curious why? Or rather, why wouldnât they prefer an already EU-based vendor like SUSE, or even Canonical?
It could be better to back your own stuff as a national thing, but on the other hand why would EU trust their data within a US-based distro?
Fedora is a global distro.
A better question is why do so many people currently use Microsoft? I was watching a video from FOSDEM and the Pirate Party people were saying that they have to use MS Teams etc in the European Parliament.
Also it is not clear that the original post is more than one person pushing for an EU OS.
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Itâs a POC and the proposal is to do it with Fedora. It doesnât mean that if it gets implemented, itâs going to use Fedora. But itâs a great start.
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Why so many governments and such use Microsoft (instead of why the EU might have chosen a âUS-based distro,â as someone asked above) is definitely a better question.
Brodie Robertson discusses all the issues raised in this thread and more in his video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bu3S2A02FFc and says heâs hoping for an interview with the developer.
Here is a poorly formatted transcript of the YouTube link. I think he just repeats what is in the original âitsfossâ article and the links from there. Questions whether Fedora is the right distro because its âUS basedâ
00:00
Say what you will about the current US administration. Frankly, I don't care. Not my president. I live and was born in Australia. But I think it's fair to say there is growing tensions between the US and the European Union, and especially interest in the tech sovereignty of the EU. And recently, a few people sent this my way. In light of the increased uncertainty on the reliability on the US, European democracies should strengthen their strategic autonomy. This includes autonomy from Microsoft Windows in the public and private sector. EU OS proposes to
00:37
develop together a community-led proof of concept for a free Libra replacement of Windows. Now, this isn't some like new operating system that no one's ever heard of. It's Linux. What is EU OS? This, EU OS, which is really hard for me to say, is a proof of concept for the deployment of a Fedora-based Linux operating system with a KDE Plasma desktop environment in a typical public sector organization. Other organizations with similar requirements or less strict requirements may also learn from this proof of concept. Despite the name, EU OS is technically not a new operating
01:16
system. As I said, also, as you could probably tell, it's Linux. But it's not necessarily just another new distro. Its value is a little bit different from that. A common Linux OS as a base for all EU OS users with options to layer on top modifications, national layer, regional or sector specific layer, organization specific layer, and a common method to manage users in the data, software and devices. Now, I'm sure that the keen-eyed among you are immediately noticing some problems here for a EU public sector project or something that wants to be in that role. Don't
01:59
you worry. I will be getting to those criticisms in just a bit. But for now, let's just go to the goals page. Now, EU OS is not the first to propose a Linux-based operating system for the public sector. The motivation is often the same and can be looked up from projects like Genbuntu, Limux, and there's a few other mentioned here as well. Linux Plus One, Scientific Linux, and Linux for Barcelona. All of these have the same general idea of... I need to fix my font. Why are my fonts doing this? I don't know.
02:33
But they have the same general idea of creating a standard operating system, a standard distro for use in the public sector of those various countries. Public money, public code, means the entire public investment profits the entire public and private sector. So money that is going into a public project is benefiting the public sector. Now, here we have some use case and this lists some other countries which do very similar things. For example, there is Astra Linux in Russia, there is Kylin and NeoKylin in China, and Nova Linux in Cuba. Now, before someone mentioned something like
03:14
Red Star OS, Red Star was not made for use by the North Korean government. They know how insecure Red Star is. That was for use by people outside the government. But these three listed here were made for use in the public sector by government officials because, for whatever reason, they either couldn't or didn't want to rely on what was being used in other countries. You know, in the case of China, in the case of Russia, there are good reasons why you might not want to be on Windows or cannot use
03:47
Windows. In the case of Cuba, Windows is expensive, and they didn't exactly trust the relationship between Microsoft and the US government and didn't trust that there weren't going to be, you know, backdoors put in there. Understandable. To be fair, you don't have to be in a different country to deal with backdoors and Windows. Those are just there from the start. Synergy effects lead to tax savings because there is no per seat license cost. So when you buy Windows, you need to actually, you know,
04:17
buy Windows. If you have something that is made for the public sector, it's open source, anybody can use it, and there's no licensing fee, naturally it's going to be cheaper. Independence from software suppliers and vendor lock-in. Now, in a sense, this is kind of unavoidable. There's always going to be some specific piece of software you absolutely need, but you shouldn't be in a situation where every single piece along the chain has vendor lock-in. If you can avoid that at some point at, say, the OS level, that's at least something you can work from.
04:59
So if you want to change that out, you don't have to change everything out you do. Independence in scheduling software migrations and potential hardware upgrades. So when you control the distro, you can choose if and when you want that version to be earweld, if you want it to be rolling, how you want to handle this. You're not locked into, this is what Microsoft is doing? Enjoy deploying new technologies with controlled cost. Use of open standards to foster innovation. Again, you're basing it on Linux. It's open. There you go. Better use of IT administrator resources. Reportedly
05:41
for the French use case with 90,000 seats. So in the French case, they found it a lot easier to manage a Linux-based system than what they were using before, which makes sense. It's generally easier to do so. Ability to do your own code analysis because it's open source and the worldwide free software community. Now, this project as it stands is very, very early. There is nothing to actually go and test. There isn't a distro here that you can go and download and see, oh, this is what it's like. Hey, let's try
06:15
it out. Right now, it is very much a proof of concept, very much a idea that is being fleshed out. And I did reach out to the developer who at the very moment is busy and is not able to come onto the podcast, but potentially willing sometime soon. We'll see about that in the coming days, coming weeks. So if that happens, I will let you guys know. But for now, let's talk about some of the critiques because yes, it's a proof of concept, but that's the perfect time to change things. And even though it's proof of concept, there are already some really weird choices made. Firstly,
07:01
back to the homepage. So EU OS is a proof of concept for the deployment of a Fedora-based Linux operating system. Right there. That's where we stop. So yes, KDE, whilst being a worldwide project, the KDE e.V is a German organization. So I think it's fair to say that KDE is German. Fedora... Fedora's not. It's squarely a US project. Now, Fedora people like to talk about it being a separate thing from Red Hat and by extension IBM. And in many ways, this is true. The development is very community focused and it's not like Red Hat is making every single shot in the project. If you
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want that, go over to RHEL. But a large number of Fedora contributors are Red Hat employees. The project leader is a Red Hat employee. Red Hat provides the legal oversight to the project. Fedora is a Red Hat project. It's a US-based project and IBM is also a US-based company. And in most cases, there would be nothing wrong with that. But when the goal is to make an EU-focused project specifically to get away from US control, starting with Fedora, starting with a US-based distro is not the move that I would make, especially when there are EU-based distros. Ubuntu is no longer in
08:45
the EU because it's canonical, based in the UK, and you know, it's in the European continent, but not part of the European Union. But there is OpenSUSE. OpenSUSE, sponsored by the SUSE project, is a German organization. Now, whether it's a perfect technical base, I'll let you guys argue that standpoint. But when it comes to the ideological reason for this project existing, an EU project for the public sector, I don't understand why you wouldn't go down the route of OpenSUSE as your first go-to, right? Like, if you need to do Fedora because something about OpenSUSE simply is just
09:28
not going to work. Understandable. It's not great, but it's understandable. But not going with the EU-based project to begin with, again, just seems really weird to me. But the other major problem is sort of just the idea of tech sovereignty when we are talking about a project like Linux. Linux is, again, a worldwide project. But a lot of the contributors, a lot of the companies involved, a lot of the people involved are based in the US. It's not a US project, but without the US, you would lose out on a lot of work being done on the project. And really, if you want to have
10:11
something that is truly a tech sovereign project, it needs to be done separately from the main project. It needs to be either a fork of that project, or really, it needs to be something entirely new. But if it's entirely new, then you lose out on all that existing support. And really, this idea of individual tech sovereignty in the open source space is very difficult, unless you've built everything from the ground up. Really, unless it's going to be a proprietary operating system, there's always still going to be that connection there to some extent. Now, whether you deem that
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an important issue or not is going to be very much up to you and very much up to the specific goals of the project and guidelines of the project. But I do think it's very much a concern that needs to be kept in mind. Now, I'm going to be keeping an eye on this project because, again, this is very early on. It's unclear if anything's actually going to come out of this. And, you know, lots of people have started projects like this, and then they don't really go anywhere. But some of them do. Some of them do. So maybe. I don't know. And there are a lot of European countries which are adopting
11:28
Linux in the public sector and actually trying to move away from Windows and try to support this open source ecosystem. And if something like this has value, I'm curious to see if anything, you know, really happens with it. But let me know your thoughts down below. Do you think a project like this actually makes any sense? Or do you think we already have enough EU-based projects where you could just use one of those and basically get the same result? I don't know. I don't just know. So if you liked the video, go like the video. If you really liked the video and you want to become
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one of these missing people over here, check out the Patreon, subscribe, stuff. LiberaPay. Link in the description down below. That's going to be it for me, and... Eeeeeeeeee. We'll be right back.
I canât see anything about any EU institution backing or funding the project. I would be very happy being the case.
So, the post title is wrong and I humbly suggest to rename it to avoid misleading and confusion. Sorry.
You are right, I changed it.
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AFAIK, EU OS is a project of @rriemann .
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