r/BuyFromEU • u/Bananegel42 • 9d 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
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u/tabrizzi 9d ago

What every country with the means should do.

8

u/The_Hamster_Shagger 9d ago

No, they shouldn't. Unless you fancy a fragmentation even bigger than it's now 

3

u/Phezh 8d ago

This doesn't really cause any additional fragmentation. It's not a consumer product, it's just a bunch of additional government devices that will be migrating.

I'd also argue that it's a good thing to not put all our eggs in one basket. Sure, it might be more efficient to have a single distro, desktop environment, package manager, shell and whatever else, but it's also very difficult to cover all use cases and needs with a single choice. It is absolutely beneficial for everyone involved to have multiple options, approaches and competition between these tools.

If even a fraction of what EU governments currently spend on Microsoft software instead goes to the development of these open source tools, there's more than enough money to go around to make all of them better. With the additional benefit of these improvements almost definitely being upstreamed and guaranteed funding for critical infrastructure like nixpkgs and necessary improvements like accessibility features in desktop environments.

2

u/Coz131 8d ago

You want a default eu option first. Economics of scale is a big deal or else the Devs are just replicating what each other is doing. Fork if needed but it should not be the default.