Comment by ragebol
2 hours ago
All great, but I would love EU and (national, local, ...) governments in the EU simply use the open source stuff already available.
Often there is an 'you must open source, unless you explain why not' and then there is some faff about why they really need to be buying more stuff from Microsoft (which is more and more cloud stuff and thus under the CLOUD act etc.)
Time to get rid of the 'unless' bit.
Although I usually come up negative on my The Year of Linux Desktop comments, that would already be a starting point.
Unless EU citzens are able to easily walk into FNAC, Vobis, Cool Blue, MediaMarket, Carrefour, Publico,.... and come out with a laptop or desktop with e.g. SuSE Linux already set up, this will always be a niche thing from nerds assembling their own PCs, or finding their ways into Tuxedo and co.
And there needs to be some kind of value in actually doing that for normal people, otherwise it will be just like netbooks, most people will return them and ask for a Windows PC, after being "tricked" into getting one of those Linux PCs.
You do realize there is basically zero demand for a Linux desktop by "normal"/"average" users, right?
I do not think I want my public sector running GNU/Linux desktops. There is no distro that meets the security requirements.
I don't know if Windows is better, I have heard rumours that it's pretty bad.
I know MacOS is MUCH better from a security PoV but I definitely don't want my public sector shelling out to Apple and I don't think it meets the boring IT management requirements anyway (I think big tech has a lot of crazy workarounds to make their MacBook fleets workable).
So yeah overall no good options here. I would love to see the EU fund development of a better distro for this usecase, but doubt it's the highest ROI thing you can do in this space.
I don’t get your comment. They can make a distro secure enough for government use. It’s not like it’s alien technology only the US have, that you need to buy Apple or Microsoft.
It would certainly be the highest ROI to have a local, open system built (by funding) local enterprises. Who knows, maybe a slice of the private sector might adopt it instead of sending money overseas.
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In what aspect does GNU/Linux not meet EU sovereignty security requirement, but two American companies do?
Other than the elephant in the room that most FOSS projects are anyway sponsored by US companies, that is.
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Sounds like the Linux is still the least worst? There is at least possibility of having secure and quite independent machine. The question is not about distro, it's who does the support and how it's all put together. There are big vendors who sell linux to enterprises that for sure have to be highly secure.
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I think that SUSE and RH can definitely work well in a fairly secure setting as needed. I certainly don't think it's any less secure than your typical corporate windows setup.
> I do not think I want my public sector running GNU/Linux desktops. There is no distro that meets the security requirements.
Windows being a buggy spyware wouldn't
If actors in the EU are serious (I have my doubts, as so far I see nothing more than riding recent anti-Trump sentiment in a hope to win popularity contest) they cannot rely on volunteer effort and gluing bunch of unrelated FOSS projects.
It is not enough to fund a new distro. EU needs its own OS (may be based on Linux, sure) and it needs to fully control it. Otherwise it will end up like most other FOSS projects, full of personal drama and technical bike-shedding.
> And there needs to be some kind of value in actually doing that for normal people, otherwise it will be just like netbooks, most people will return them and ask for a Windows PC, after being "tricked" into getting one of those Linux PCs.
This is the big thing.
Even as a massive nerd, I keep trying various distros and going "meh" and right back to MacOS.
This is a conversation that has been going on for 20+ years and the OSS community hasn't managed to get that in their heads
I have simply given up
Me too, which is why I mostly use Windows as main OS laptop OS since Windows 7[0], however with current geopolitics, eventually we might have to really chose something else, even if the ergonomics aren't there.
[0] - You will find emails from me with M$ like signatures during the 1990s, in whatever archives
There is definitely a lot of this happening, e.g. this is a 'collaboration suite for civil servants' that's basically a collection of existing open source projects
https://github.com/MinBZK/mijn-bureau-infra/
They show all the components they use here https://minbzk.github.io/mijn-bureau-infra/docs/category/com... and have set up guides for departments to operate it all on Kubernetes
I'm guessing from my own use of NextCloud, Matrix etc that this will simply be deemed not good enough compared to Google Workspace or Microsoft WhateverItsCalledNow as these things are pretty rough around the edges in my experience, but this looks like a good step in the right direction to me
All laudable efforts, but I'd love for my Dutch govt to actually use these broadly. With the support behind it to file down those rough edges for the benefit of all.
I like the thing the French have been cooking up, La Suite Numerique: https://github.com/suitenumerique#%E2%84%B9%EF%B8%8F-about-l...
It looks much more polished than a lot of the existing open source tooling, they've been building a lot of stuff in-house and really been paying attention to UX (which imo is the biggest problem with a lot of existing FOSS solutions).
I have high hopes this'll become a viable solution going forward, maybe even for non-gov users.