EU OS: A Fedora-based distro 'for the public sector' : linux

[-] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 86 points 3 months ago

I wonder how much work is entailed in transforming Fedora in to a distro that meets some definition of the word "Sovereign" 🤔

Personally I wouldn't want to make a project like this be dependent on the whims of a US defense contractor like RedHat/IBM, especially after what happened with CentOS.

[-] Korkki@lemmy.ml 34 points 3 months ago

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.

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[+] Geodad@lemm.ee 71 points 3 months ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

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[-] mostlikelyaperson@lemmy.world 13 points 3 months ago

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)

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[-] GNUmer@sopuli.xyz 50 points 3 months ago

The idea of a "distro for EU public sector" is neat, but even the PoC has some flaws when considering technical sovereignty.

First of all, using Gitlab & Gitlab CI. Gitlab is an American company with most of its developers based in the US. Sure, you could host it by yourself but why would you do it considering Forgejo is lighter and mostly developed by developers based in the EU area?

The idea of basing it on Fedora is also somewhat confusing. Sure, it's a good distro for derivatives, but it's mostly developed by IBM developers. The tech sovereignty argument doesn't hold well against Murphy's law.

[+] taanegl@lemmy.world 17 points 3 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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[-] Auli@lemmy.ca 16 points 3 months ago

Fedora is not that detached from IBM.They dictate it's development hence the removal of codecs. If it was a community addition why would it matter? And why would they remove the codecs. After that it was obvious fedora was not a community dustro but driven by Redhat.

[-] zarenki@lemmy.ml 13 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

If it was a community addition why would it matter? And why would they remove the codecs.

You don't have to be a corporation to be held liable for legal issues with hosting codecs. Just need to be big enough for lawyers to see you as an attractive target and in a country where codec patent issues apply. There's a very good reason why the servers for deb-multimedia (Debian's multimedia repo), RPM Fusion (Fedora's multimedia repo), VLC's site, and others are all hosted in France and do not offer US-based mirrors. France is a safe haven for foss media codecs because its law does not consider software patentable, unlike the US and even most other EU nations.

Fedora's main repos are hosted in the US. Even if they weren't, the ability for any normal user around the world to host and use mirrors is a very important part of an open community-friendly distro, and the existence of patented codecs in that repo would open any mirrors up to liability. Debian has the same exact issue, and both distros settled on the same solution: point users to a separate repo that is hosted in France which contains extra packages for patent-encumbered codecs.

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[-] marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com 45 points 3 months ago

I'd rather they used SUSE

[-] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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.

[-] dafta 10 points 3 months ago

SUSE Linux Enterprise exists since 2000.

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[-] RedSnt@feddit.dk 9 points 3 months ago

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.

[-] pumpkinseedoil@mander.xyz 10 points 3 months ago

My daily driver is an nvidia laptop with opensuse, takes like one afternoon to get everything ready with barely any former Linux experience.

Just use zypper (or yast) to add the proprietary nvidia repository (or nouveau) and install your drivers. Install everything else you need through zypper (or yast or flatpak). Familiarise yourself with keybinds, set new keybinds (not needed of course but its nice to know keybinds - if you're using KDE already they'll probably be the same anyway). Select KDE's dark "breeze for OpenSUSE" theme (or some other theme, but breeze for opensuse just is so polished). Configure other preferences (night light from sundown to sunrise, set up Firefox sync (if you use that), connect to onedrive or whichever cloud you're using, ... . Done. No need to wait :)

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[+] kokolores@discuss.tchncs.de 44 points 3 months ago

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[-] mlg@lemmy.world 22 points 3 months ago

Probably since it's the main redhat upstream and they want the advantage of already widespread usage.

Although at that point why not OpenSUSE for the same reason you mentioned.

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[-] Pirky@lemmy.world 33 points 3 months ago

EUbuntu?

[-] SpiceDealer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 61 points 3 months ago

They should call it EUROS.

[-] muhyb@programming.dev 14 points 3 months ago

European Union Redstar Operating System?

[-] mutual_ayed@sh.itjust.works 10 points 3 months ago

Fedora based actually

[-] catloaf@lemm.ee 17 points 3 months ago

EUdora, since I don't think the mail client is still under development

[-] enemenemu@lemm.ee 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Family Feudora

[-] miguel@lemmy.sdf.org 26 points 3 months ago

But Fedora is based on an IBM product... so that's a swing and a miss. SuSE would be a better direction, IMO

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[-] wewbull@feddit.uk 23 points 3 months ago

Scammers never let a good global crisis get in their way.

Rebadge a distro and say it's fromm the EU
.....????
Profit!

[-] m33@theprancingpony.in 23 points 3 months ago

@SpiceDealer Sorry, what ? How can it be made in EU if it's a Fedora fork/derivative ?

[-] lambipapp@lemmy.world 32 points 3 months ago

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

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[-] notanapple@lemm.ee 20 points 3 months ago

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.

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[-] JOMusic@lemmy.ml 21 points 3 months ago

As much as I love what they're doing, tieing an OS to a specific region via name seems like the opposite of Open Source values.. Then again, I suppose it could just be forked into a more generalized version

[-] blackbeard@feddit.it 22 points 3 months ago

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

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[-] Mwa@lemm.ee 20 points 3 months ago

Is this made by European union I wonder

[-] Telorand@reddthat.com 34 points 3 months ago

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.

[-] ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 25 points 3 months ago

Depending on who the group is ... it is good to first do a thorough check on who the group is ... it can just as likely be a group of scam artists that are riding on some nationalism band wagon happening around the world these days.

[-] Telorand@reddthat.com 10 points 3 months ago

They could, and if I was an EU government entity, I would do my homework on what they were offering, even if they were acting 100% in good faith.

However, helping governments get away from the clutches of the likes of Apple and Microsoft seems like a noble goal, and if this idea spurs that change regardless of the adoption of this distro, I think it will have been a net positive.

[-] Viri4thus@feddit.org 17 points 3 months ago

Government is only in the clutches of MS because MS bribes officials to maintain their cancerous software as a staple everywhere in Europe... Hungary is one of a few quite famous cases of bribery.

There's no depth to my loathing of MS and its illegal and anti-competitive practices.

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[-] Showroom7561@lemmy.ca 18 points 3 months ago

Fedora Origin: USA

No, thanks. 🙅

[-] pupbiru@aussie.zone 12 points 3 months ago

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

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[-] gomp@lemmy.ml 17 points 3 months ago

Based on a US distro whose versions are supported for 1 year, and "built to the requirements for the EU public sector" (because the EU public sector has one coherent set of requirements and the dev knows them, even if he doesn't list them out).

This is most probably good-intentioned and it is admirable how the dev sprung into action, but it's naive at best.

[-] arsCynic@beehaw.org 17 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

"Made with ❤️ in Brussels by Robert Riemann"

Clicked his URL…

"physicist and computer scientist…passionate about open source and free software, cryptography…"

Whew, almost read crypto"currency"…

"…and peer-to-peer technology such as BitTorrent or Blockchain/Bitcoin.

Goddammit.

--
✍︎ arscyni.cc: modernity ∝ nature.

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[-] unabart@sh.itjust.works 16 points 3 months ago

I read EUDORA for a split second and got all excited that the best email client ever was getting reborn!

But this is cool too… i guess.

[-] Bali@lemmy.world 14 points 3 months ago

In my opinion, If sovereignty is the goal i think GTK based DE will be safer than QT based DE.

I am aware of The Free QT foundation And its relation to KDE but in a long term there is possibility of things might get complicated if there is change in policy . And even the QT trademark is not totally free. I'm not trying to start DE war, i love both KDE and GNOME.

[-] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 13 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

The Qt foundation tried to get fucky once already, and KDE and some other major companies that rely on it were about ready to fork it if they persisted. Qt seemed to calm down after that.

Not a great relationship to be in though, constantly suspecting that your toolkit might do a rugpull at some point if the shareholders demand it. But I think they could pull off a fork if they ever did.

[-] DreasNil@feddit.nu 14 points 3 months ago

Love this! We definitely should try to spread Linux to become more accessible and popular.

[-] utopiah@lemmy.ml 11 points 3 months ago

Meanwhile https://www.europarl.europa.eu/petitions/en/petition/content/0729%252F2024/html/Linux%2Bstatt%2BWindows just closed with 2474 Supporters

[-] ColdWater@lemmy.ca 11 points 3 months ago

Why not use the existing Distros?

[-] digdilem@lemmy.ml 21 points 3 months ago

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).

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