Linux

This is specifically for the public sector. The fact that it is open source make it adaptable to different scenarios.

Europe isn't a region, it's a brand.

Most distros, not all, are based in, or run by, American legal entities.

Redhat, Rocky, Alma, Debian, etc - all legally American. This is a problem if the US requires sanctions against another country. All of those cannot legally supply products to Russia now, but in the future who's to say what other countries the US will sanction? People are only now starting to realise that sanctions can be applied to software too, and many countries are entirely reliant upon US Software. (Seriously, do a quick audit - 90% of our tech company's stack is US originated)

Alternatives: Suse (German) Ubuntu (UK, but based on Debian, so likely subject to supply chain restrictions).

I just looked into how easy it would be to install nvidia drivers on openSUSE and it's not as great as Fedora for comparison, that's one of the only 2 down sides I've found so far. The other downside is a personal preference one, for many it's an upside, and it would be an upside for anyone basing an entire distro on it, and that's how there's nothing fancy installed alongside openSUSE, it's not bloated. No starship prompt in the terminal, no proprietary codecs etc. I like how openSUSE defaults to a lot of BTRFS subvolumes for almost each important root directory and comes preinstalled with snapper, that's very neat. And it's so nice to use YaST, what a treat. While Fedora does also have patterns, getting to use a graphical installer with YaST is so nice.
I'm glazing a lot for someone that doesn't daily run it, so maybe I should just switch one of these days, haha. Maybe when my Nobara installation dies.

But is it Enterprise Grade and Web Scale? RedHat has a lot of marketing legacy behind it.

Edit: I realize I probably should have specified the /s I’m making fun of RedHat marketing.

alternative POV: it’s entirely FOSS so there’s little control that can be exerted from its use. it’s also entirely free, so use is extracting value without providing anything in return. by its use, you’re taking resources to maintain, host, etc and providing nothing in return

similar reason to why i don’t use ecosia with an ad blocker: by blocking ads you’re using their resources without giving back and thus you’re taking resources away from the charity

I'd add:

• Mageia (French)
• Zorin OS (Ireland)
• Ufficio Zero (Italy)

Mint and Ubuntu have Debian as an upstream, don't they?

Debian is a US legal entity, so if it was required to sanction countries, it feels that software built with it would likely be restricted.

I would like the EU to make an official universal Linux distro, intended for the ordinary person to use on their PC. Bonus points if they can collaborate with Steam to make it compatible with gaming stuff. The big reason I stuck to Windows 11 is for the sake of games, but if compatibility and ease of use to customize was improved, I would be happy to switch away.

The big thing that the EU can bring to the project is contributing lots of money for making Linux suitable as a daily driver, along with mandating its usage on government machines.

Having seen SuSE destroy collaborators like OL, CNC and probably Turbo, I'm okay never even working with them as a customer. I intend to avoid them until death.

I was wondering the same when I came across it a few hours ago and decided to look into it, apparently it’s because it was decided to use an atomic distribution as a base and Suses is apparently not considered stable enough by them. (I can not argue the validity of these statements given either way, that’s just what I found in one of their gitlab issues . if someone wants to look at it for themselves, searching for Fedora on the issue tracker should bring it up)

Well, companies like Valve, they are a bit more worried if the distro are community or organization driven. So, for government, perhaps that same philosophy should be considered which is not the case of Fedora or Suse. They check distros such as Arch or Debian and derivatives.

I didn’t know red hat was working for the US government. Can you tell me in what way?

But it's a good starting point. Better than inventing everything from the scratch.

I read the sovereign to mean something like an unified platform for EU institutions, that you can dev and train people on.

dependent on the whims of a US defense contractor like RedHat/IBM

A very good point.

They should call it EUROS.

As a Swede we claim all of linux to be finno-swedish :)

I mean Fedora is open source but if they really wanted a european base, they could have gone with opensuse. AFAIK opensuse is the only fully european linux distro plus they use many of the same tech that redhat/fedora does.

Ultimately I think it doesn't matter too much since even the linux foundation is based in the US and large parts of what makes the linux desktop are maintained by non-EU companies (on top of all the major projects hosted by Github, Gitlab including most of Flathub). If its all open source, I think the risks are pretty low e.g. huawei was able to use Android despite all the restrictions.

From the subheading on the ReadMe.

Community-led Proof-of-Concept for a free Operating System for the EU public sector 🇪🇺

So it's made by the EU in the sense that the maintainers are likely citizens of the EU, I guess.