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.
dunno how many online petitions actually worked, but “kay guys… now… linux!” ain’t gonna work.
That’s a parliament petition. If it succeed it is forced by EU constitution to be turned into an EU law.
That tool is offered to EU representant to create a kind of referendum and accelerate the adoption of a law through direct democracy.
I think you’re a bit mistaken. Per https://www.edf-feph.org/enforcement-toolkit-european-parliament-peti-committee/
“The Petitions Committee does not have investigatory nor enforcement powers and it can only adopt non-binding recommendations. Nevertheless, it can be a good tool to draw political attention to specific matters.”
At most, it makes the parliament have to look at the proposal and decide if its worth looking into or not. It doesn’t force anything.
Unless I’m looking at the wrong kind of petition to the EU Parliament?
Double edged sword. Forced adoption of a shitty distro, or a really locked down/limited system might not be a step forward at all.
From memory, Germany did this many years ago, and ended up rolling it back?
The 30,000 employees of Schleswig-Holstein’s local government will be moving to Linux and LibreOffice as the state pushes for what it calls “digital sovereignty,” a reference to non-EU companies not gathering troves of user data so European firms can compete with these foreign rivals.
Munich, the capital of German state Bavaria, switched from Windows to Linux-based LiMux in 2004, though it switched back in 2017 as part of an IT overhaul. Wanting Microsoft to move its headquarters to Munich likely played a part in returning to Windows, too.
Solution: don’t ship a shitty distro. This is the sort of issue that actual IT professionals need final say in. Not the MBAs. Not the politicals. The people who actually know what they’re doing. Additionally, years ago Linux was in a much different place. It’s really matured into something more suitable for both the average end user as well as professional adoption.
Thats the problem though, there are near infinite ways for someone along the way to completely fuck it up, and very few ways to get it right. And security concerns are almost always going to make the distro worse for the users.
And even if it was left to IT professionals, they are just as capable of making it a mess on their own.
We could say that about every single general decision that anyone in the world has ever made. It’s a truism which tells us almost nothing about this situation.
No, it isn’t a double edged sword. Even a mediocre distro would be better than Windows, any distro would be cheaper than Windows, and there’s no reason to choose a bad distro anyway.
No one wants to choose a bad OS environment, it will become one due to security or other non-negotiable requirements.
They aren’t going to just toss Ubuntu on a box and call it done. Itll be locked down, limited, and horrible to use. And users who dont know any better will blame “Linux”.
A government SOE Linux just isnt going to be a good ambassador for general desktop usage.
Nope, not Germany. The city of Munich, and it was rolled back because a politician took Microsoft bribes and drank the Microsoft snake oil.
Apparently they are back on the Linux train as of 2020, so thats good news.
It’s ridiculous that governments don’t use customized Unix/Linux builds.
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.
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.
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.
Supported!
Why creating a new distro instead of using a big one and contribute to it?
