The petition is open to all EU resident. The goal is to replace all Windows in all public institution in Europe with a sovereign GNU/Linux.
If the petition is successful it would be a huge step forward for GNU/Linux adoption.
For governments, I think the priority should be exchange and archive formats. Regardless of what apps and platforms they use, I as a citizen should be able to read that data via free software. Govt should be able to read what I provide to them. Govt in the future should be able to access archives if they have moved to free software.
Next is the platform ( the OS and the web browser ). You can run your proprietary video editing on Linux. If demand on the scale of ALL European gov moved to Linux, I assure you that Linux versions of the software they need would exist ( even if still proprietary ). I use Outlook on Linux every day. I also use Teams ( usually on Edge ). RMS would hate me. But I only archive to AV1 and Opus, never HEVC and AAC. Most of what I use is FOSS.
Least important really is the apps. I have no problem with companies solving problems better than FOSS and getting paid for it. Even by gov. As above though, those that do not need the “better” version should be free to use something else. And the “default” ( for things like basic docs ) should be FOSS too. This is just not as important as the file formats and platforms.
It’s ridiculous that governments don’t use customized Unix/Linux builds.
Funny enough, I’m working in IT in government exclusively with Linux for the past 20 years, which shows that indeed it’s possible.
There are a few reasons I don’t believe a petition like this will change a thing though
Why? I’ve worked in two companies where IT allows Linux as an option and people are constantly having issues (including me). And these are highly technical people. Two people who are not stupid managed to break their laptops by uninstalling Python 2 which Gnome depended on.
Yes that’s technically a UX issue, but there are plenty of good old bugs too, e.g. if you remove a VPN connection that a WiFi network autoconnects to then that WiFi network will entirely stop working with no error messages to speak of. Took me a long time to figure that out. Or how about the fact that 4k only works at 30fps over HDMI, but it works fine over DisplayPort or Thunderbolt3. The hardware fully supports it and it works for other people with the same OS and laptop. I never figured that out.
That’s just a taster… I almost never have issues like that on Windows or Mac.
Windows may cost more than “free” but the additional support costs for Linux are very far from free too.
Maybe something like Chromebooks makes sense if everything is in the cloud.
Or how about the fact that 4k only works at 30fps over HDMI, but it works fine over DisplayPort or Thunderbolt3
Blame HDMI forum for that. They objected to AMD releasing open source driver for HDMI 2.0+ that lets you do higher modes like 4k60 or 5k etc due to patent reasons. DisplayPort folks on the other hand, had no objections. DP is quite a superior technology too, so if you could, use it instead of HDMI please.
Why?
It makes no sense for a government/military to use a proprietary system made in another country when there’s a very strong movement inside of said government for an open system. They have incredibly smart people at SUSE, Manjaro and KDE right on the inside and you are telling me they can’t do better than hitting subscribe on Office365?
Assume the EU and US have a conflict, now the EU is stuck with an entire ecosystem made in the US. Assuming they don’t already have all your internal data, they can just get it with a single click.
That uninstalling python2 bit reminds me of stories of users deleting their system32 folder to free up disk space.
Yeah except that uninstalling Python 2 is a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do.
We exclusively use Windows on our user’s devices (over 10k devices!) and don’t have to support anything else. We end up with problems like those all the time.
- occasionally all installations become blocked no matter what means or which user, requiring reimaging to resolve.
- DisplayPort connections mysteriously failing and requiring reboots of the device and sometimes also the dock or monitor. Sometimes we even have to swap the cable out, even though the cable will continue to work in another setup just fine.
- using a different brand of dock than the ones we have at our hotelling stations and disconnecting for any length of time causes wifi to fail until reboot
- wifi at the office mysteriously stops working as you move around the building, requiring restart
None of our Linux test devices experience any of this.
In an enterprise imaged Windows laptop they and you probably wouldn’t have superuser privileges in order to keep yourselves from doing stuff like deleting core Windows dependencies. Maybe they give you full administrative access at your company but if you deleted the Program Files folder to save time you’d be blamed by pretty much everyone.
You guys obviously have root privileges or else you wouldn’t have been able to delete the system’s core Python2 installation. And frankly you must have literally manually deleted it because the package manager would have told you what havoc you were about to enact and made you tell it to do it anyway.
But what’s even weird to me is that most python devs I know, including myself use python virtual environments (venv) to use different versions and package bloat control from something like pip but keep it all nice and neat.
If you wanted python3 to be the default you have to change the PATH in Windows or if you don’t know what you are doing I guess reinstall whichever python with a .MSI an hope it does it for you.
Meanwhile, in Linux you can just use the alternatives utility to literally pick your preferred versions and it takes care of the paths for you.
And with the HDMI issue? You must not be using the same graphics drivers and someone is using proprietary graphics drivers (won’t have the issues you’ve described) and the other is using open source versions (you’ll have the issues you’ve described) because companies are shitty about their proprietary closed standards.
Which brings up another point. You say you all use the same laptop model and OS but you don’t all use the same drivers? There’s no baseline? There’s no control?
This sounds like a Hell of your own making. This is why users in general should never have full administrative privileges and they should be tailored down to just what you need. Epecially if they haven’t yet learned the basics of the OS they are using because they are at best a danger to themselves and at worst a vulnerable laptop inside the network.
If they can keep the MS lobbyists out, it’s feasible, just ask Munich.
My main worry with Linux becoming more popular is that it will be attacked with more malware and viruses. I wouldn’t mind though if Linux programmers could come up with better protection.
Linux is already what a decent chunk of servers run, so I don’t really see it increasing malware.
The insecure parts of Linux is mostly on the DE side opposed to the core OS part that servers use. We absolutely will see more vulnerabilities in the future as Linux grows.
Many developments over the last few years have been for improving those aspects, e.g. Wayland is far more secure than X11 could ever be. There will be more vulnerabilities found, but it won’t be as bad as one might fear.
Most of the Windows malware gets deployed by some user downloading and executing random files they downloaded on the web. Since installing applications on Linux is usually done through some centralized package manager or app store (Flathub), it almost entirely eliminates this attack vector. Running random scripts from the internet by downloading them using curl and piping them into sudo bash is a whole nother issue though. Noob-friendly distros like Ubuntu should IMO have some safeguards in place to block these actions.
Since installing applications on Linux is usually done through some centralized package manager or app store (Flathub), it almost entirely eliminates this attack vector.
xz moment.
Yes, I see that weasel word “almost” in that sentence. I expect it’s going to be doing increasingly heavy lifting as Linux becomes a more lucrative target to attack over time.
Your point generally stands, though. Even if they’re fallible, at least someone is vetting it at all somewhere in this pipeline.
Linux-based OSes are less uniform than Windows. They could and probably will be targeted, but exploits won’t spread because of how many verities they are and how different and incompatible they can be. Some, for example, don’t even use the GNU utils and userland.
PSA: You can support this petition even if you’re not an EU resident
