- cross-posted to:
- buyeuropean@feddit.uk
- buyfromeu@feddit.org
- cross-posted to:
- buyeuropean@feddit.uk
- buyfromeu@feddit.org
It’s only a proof of concept at the moment and I don’t know if it will see mass adoption but it’s a step in the right direction to ending reliance on US-based Big Tech.
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Fedora is too much into RedHat, and that’s an American company, it depends on it. You’ll have to go at least Arch, or Debian (which are more community-driven), or Ubuntu or Mint (that are European). But I wouldn’t use anything Redhat-produced for an EU OS.
But Fedora is based on an IBM product… so that’s a swing and a miss. SuSE would be a better direction, IMO
Only after IBM purchased Redhat recently
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.
Why Fedora? Sorry, but there are so many European options, it makes no sense to build a European house on an American basement.
“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.To be fair, he said he’s passionate about peer-to-peer technology and listed Bitcoin as an example. I don’t think that makes him a crypto bro. He probably just appreciates the theory behind it.
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.
For me, it’s a perfectly fitting compromise, because Fedora is a community that is detached from RedHat and IBM, but it is also the best distribution out there.
They are pushing the envelope and have been for some time. If it weren’t for Fedora devs we wouldn’t have seen Wayland, PipeWire, Nouveau, etc be pushed to the general public. Also Fedora a libre distribution built by community. If that were ever to change they’d hemorrhage devs.
Compare that with Ubuntu. They want a vendor lock-in via Snaps (and in one point in time Mir), they’re currently replacing coreutils (copyleft) with uutils (copyright) and have what I would say is a pretty bad and convoluted GPU stack.
OpenSuSE could probably be a better alternative, if they took the Linux desktop seriously. But they play second fiddle to Fedora and have not even been close enough to push the envelope like Fedora has.
In conclusion Fedora is the best libre Linux distributions out there.
Now if Eelco Doolstra wasn’t fucking around, we could have had a super LTS NixOS - but NOOOO.
If the EU were concerned about the US jurisdiction of Linux projects it could pick:
- OpenSuSE (org based in Germany)
- Mint (org based in Ireland)
- Manjaro (org based in France/Germany, and based of Arch)
- Ubuntu (org based in UK)
However if they didn’t care, then they could just use Fedora or other US based distros.
I think it would be a good idea for the EU to adopt linux officially, and maybe even have it’s own distro, but I’m not sure this Fedora base makes sense. Ironically this may also be breaching EU trademarks as it’s masquerading as an official project by calling itself EU OS.
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.
i’d say if it happens it should start with focusing on:
- government and workstation (this is important first to have control and independence over so that government isn’t beholden to the whims of foreign companies)
- then server (maybe - idk really if that’s worth it though; it’s a whole can of compatibility worms and adoption expense)
- then user desktop
though there is the argument that workstation and user desktop are close enough to each other that user desktop should be above server, but i’d imagine it’d be more of a “home user” than gamer situation. i could imagine some regulations around refurbishing old tech with this kind of OS too, and this would be more about low spec machines (that’d help workstations too)
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.
Debian is open source though. So unless they make it closed source we can keep using it.
Making it closed source would probably kill it and a fork would take its place.
Well, all the distros being discussed are open source - it’s kind of a requirement when making a linux distro because the licences require it and you wouldn’t be able to make it closed source. (Unless there’s a huge shift in the law)
And being open source doesn’t necessarily prevent it falling under sanctions legislation. I have seen a linux distro being legally required to “take reasonable steps” to geo-block Russian access to its repos, and I’ve personally read disclaimers when installing linux that “This software is not allowed to be used in Russia”. (That distro is ‘owned’ by an organisation that was controlled by a single person, so it’s probably not comparable to Debian) We’re all technical people so we can all probably think of half a dozen ways around that, but it was still ordered by the US Government (even before the current government)
And you may be right in that it would be excempt. Debian isn’t owned by anyone, but its trademark is(Software in the Public Interest), and it feels possible that those who help distribute foss (by mirroring repos for example) may be restricted if they fall under US jurisdiction. I don’t know for certain - and unless someone here is a qualified lawyer specialising in software licences as well as how software rooted in the US relates to sanctions - we’re all probably guessing.
Three months ago any of this would have felt ridiculous - who would want to stop free software? But now? In this era of the ridiculous? I certainly feel unsure about predicting anything.
I still don’t see how the US can stop anyone from forking Debian etc.
Worst case scenario I can see is “The US implements martial law, no more trade what so ever allowed with anyone outside of the US and they put up a fire-wall to block all internet”
In that scenario we literally just pull Debian from the European mirrors, fork it and create NewDebian.
Problem solved.
Currently we heavily rely on Microsoft, Apple etc. If the US does the same thing, we’re fucked because we can’t just fork MS or Apple software.
We’re an ingenious and motivated bunch (See all the Redhat attempts to stop clones, and lots of other examples), so yes, I think we’d absolutely work around the problem if it was to happen.
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.
