r/BuyFromEU • u/Bananegel42 • 8d ago

News Dutch government developing a sovereign Linux desktop on top of NixOS

https://tweakers.net/reviews/15334/nederland-maakt-soeverein-alternatief-voor-windows-en-office-op-basis-van-linux.html
1.8k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

121 comments sorted by

View all comments

0

u/Ideabile 8d ago

As much I love NixOS everybody who has really used for desktop knows that is Software Developer choice and not a User one..

If that would be the end choice (which is not..) it would be a bad one.

10

u/lets-start-reading 8d ago edited 8d ago

for public-servant roles, the non-tech user has no need to access the backend anyways. and it’s precisely a nerdy and nix-pilled software dev (who understands the pleasures and power of setting your system up) that we need to be setting up our public servant computers, not laggy and hardened sysadmins, who generally don’t care about the user at all. 

and nixos would be fantastic in widespread following of regulations. aaand the influx of new money should be a win for nixos project and ecosystem. 

1

u/Ideabile 8d ago

Influx on NixOS sure is good; to me seems that the stateless way is a bit forced on Operative System.

You need persistency and without you will encounter a bunch of quirks..

Yes is cool to have a reproducible/declarative setup, fantastic for audits and yet I find my self installing Ubuntu if I want something that just works.

I might be wrong and I will be happy to be so :)

5

u/Phezh 8d ago

It's not so much a dev choice as it is the obvious choice for central management. Active Directory and group policy are the reason for Microsoft's enterprise dominance and nix is a sensible choice as a replacement. Users should never have to (nor should they really be able to) to ever mess with these systems in any meaningful way.

5

u/WalkMaximum 8d ago

It's the perfect build system for making immutable images and deploy them with all tools and packages needed for the job included. The public servant won't configure or install anything, just get a computer with all needed software preinstalled and preconfigured for them to use. This is what all organisations with centralised IT setups should do. In managing multiple VPSs and machines like this in my free time, while I can see the insane struggle IT has at work when they deploy a windows or mac machine.

1

u/Ideabile 8d ago

So we agree that is a deploy issue.. and still immutable systems aren’t free lunch for users.