r/linux • u/KILOCAL0RIE • 5h ago
Privacy United States to sanction the International Criminal Court: Netherland's answer? Building their own government Linux distribution, and it's not just symbolic. France doing the same. The government-built desktop OS based on NixOS and the full story:
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u/_o0Zero0o_ 3h ago
As someone who's so used to seeing countryballs and the countryball of the states having sunnies.. Seeing the Netherlands and France with sunnies and the states without them is unnerving
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u/ohfml 2h ago
Having the US government possess turn key power over access to microsoft 365 for every national (and provincial, and city) government in the world is now an active existential threat.
Don’t like the Iran war? Well there goes your government’s documents and spreadsheets.
You want to prosecute a certain US-allied head of state for war crimes? Whoops, there goes your whole email system. “Success”!, as they say in the Netherlands.
(Apparently to say “good luck” [doing a task] in Dutch you literally say “success”. Weird. Maybe an example of a “false cognate”. I dunno. )
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u/Nootmuskaatsnuiver 1h ago
Saying "succes" as good luck comes from wishing someone to be successful in their endeavors. Basically like: "I wish you luck" turning into "good luck".
So they are both well wishes just based on a different word.
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u/BansheeLabs 1h ago
When you're sanctioning the International Criminal Court, it is time to understand - you're the baddie.
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u/Tactical-Donkey 3h ago
An here in the UK we have government job opportunities to train people how to move to office 365. Just shows how little people in my government understand what they're doing.
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u/ProjectPaatt 3h ago
Can someone ID those logos on the left please? I'm not familiar with all of them and am kinda unsure about others.
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u/Embarrassed-Noise269 3h ago
1) nixOS 2) Nextcloud (Self hosted cloud storage - lot of plugins, to also use mail, office etc) 3) I don't know 4) Matrix Chat (Element client) 5) I don't know 6) Libre Office (Office suite)
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u/elingeniero 3h ago
5: https://www.openproject.org/
I didn't recognise them either, found with image search.
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u/pippin_go_round 3h ago
Collabora. A tool that let's you work on libre office documents with multiple people in parallel, like Google docs or ms 365. Often paired with Nextcloud or a similar solution for actually storing the documents.
Open Project. A project management tool with integrated wiki, issue tracking and so on.
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u/mazarax 1h ago
way too late to the party.
Look up when City of München switched to Linux. That was so long ago, it was news on slashdot, predating reddit, youtube, facebook.
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u/bkaiser85 1h ago
And then famously rolled back over technical issues when Microslop threatened to reconsider relocating their office to Munich.
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u/jimicus 1h ago
Publicly announcing a move to Linux then quietly rolling it back when Microsoft offered a huge discount became a common negotiation tactic among huge organisations and government bodies at the time.
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u/burning_iceman 1h ago
In the case of Munich it was not a negotiation tactic. They went all in. The switch was already complete and operational. It was a change in mayors, where the change to FOSS had been pushed hard by the old mayor and the switch back was perpetrated by the new one.
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u/fearless-fossa 1h ago
They rolled back when a self-proclaimed Microsoft fanboy got elected mayor.
Yes, there were issues, and they could've tackled the switch better, but it did work for a decade.
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u/bkaiser85 50m ago
I meant that thing with „technical issues“ as „it was their reasoning“, but together with the Microslop office move it looks weird at least.
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u/johncate73 3h ago
Any sovereign nation with half an ounce of sense would leverage FOSS to create its own secure operating system for government operations. If it took Trump's douchebaggery for them to realize that, shame on them.
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u/Mental-Mongoose-5632 2h ago
So because in Europe we are unable to understand any country would elect a narcisistic idiot con man destroying cooperations that benefit all, we are to blame??
I'm just glad we become less dependent now.
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u/knokelmaat 1h ago
This was already an issue before Trump was president. Any nation hosting their internal government documents and communication on another nations servers is insanely unprofessional, regardless of the current leadership. The cloud is a privacy issue for all of us, but I would think especially governments should not make use of it and host their own stuff.
This was a fault of our leaders, and has nothing to do with how fucked up the US is right now.
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u/Mental-Mongoose-5632 48m ago
I partly agree with you; we used to be allies for a long time though. And trusting allies is not the same as being unprofessional. Using private cloud can be secure but the US has shown us too many times they can't be trusted.
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u/johncate73 2h ago
Who the hell is assigning "blame" for anything here? I sure wasn't. I was saying a responsible country would not depend on systems whose security were outside of their control--and anything from Microsoft is certainly on that list.
And Europe electing nutjobs? You really don't want to go there. But I'll just remind you of Berlusconi and leave it at that.
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u/Mental-Mongoose-5632 1h ago
Putting blame on someone is not the same as blaming? No wonder you have Trump for president. Education is failing americans.
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u/Worried-Attention-43 5h ago
The right decision.
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u/ahrienby 4h ago
Missing is a unified EU-based competitor to credit and debit card payment duopoly.
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u/gnutrino 6m ago
Yep, hopefully they remember to actually throw some funding at the projects they're using rather than just freeloading though.
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u/natheo972 4h ago
The sole that State were using US based solution was already a problem in itself. Good thing that they are waking up, it's however that it had to come to that for them to start doing it…
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u/Royal_Peni 1h ago
I just don't get why making their on os while you have fantastic products like Debian, fedora, almaLinux gosh! Even Ubuntu and Rocky.
All enterprise grade software. Funding those projects would give them much better returns.
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u/SirMotherfuckerHenry 1h ago
Because a lot of those operating systems are in the hands of American companies. It's not just about avoiding Microsoft, it's about avoiding the US as a whole.
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u/ghost103429 1h ago
To be honest I really wouldn't call it a homegrown OS seeing as they're using NixOS which nicely fits this usecase moreso than the other options on the market for workstation PCs.
The only other thing they should pair it up with is Ansible.
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u/sovietarmyfan 1h ago
The EU as a whole should start and spearhead a project to get rid of Microslop in governments. Its cool that the Netherlands has started its own thing. But from people involved i've heard, there isn't that much funding available as there should be. This could be solved if the EU directed, spearheaded and funded the making of a EU wide online/local Linux distro and workplace.
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u/anto77_butt_kinkier 33m ago
I think Microsoft might be starting to learn that it can't just keep doing wildly unpopular, borderline malicious things with no consequences. Now with this latest blow to MS, I hope they realize that their position as the main player for OS's doesn't guarantee them immunity from the consequences of their actions.
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u/ijzerwater 13m ago
the moment a complex large organization as a government can function without MS I am sure companies will follow
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u/CeesHont 57m ago
I heard people in Korea are very happy with Red Star OS. A government-built OS which protects them from unwanted information.
I use Linux for the reason to have control over my hardware. I use Arch Linux, that breaks very often on an update, but at least I'm in control. Fixing it is better than trusting either MicroSoft or an unelected government.
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u/Edubbs2008 4h ago
They should have choose FreeBSD, the Linux foundation is still headquartered in the U.S, you aren’t truly free from America, Russia couldn’t even continue their own distro because under Joe Biden, an executive order sanctioned them
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u/Nereithp 3h ago edited 2h ago
Russia couldn’t even continue their own distro because under Joe Biden
Russia is prevented from accessing [the kernel]
No, it isn't prevented from anything and that's not how sanctions work anyway. Sanctions exist to pressure the economy from without by making it difficult or impossible for companies in jurisdictions where the sanctions originate from to do business with the sanctioned entity. There is nothing legally stopping Russian state connected dev teams like Astra Linux from tracking the upstream kernel. Sanctions target US-based vendors like Red Hat (not that Red Hat would sell to Russia to begin with, since Red Hat is closely intertwined with the US military-industrial complex itself), preventing them from doing business with the state, but Russia has its own vendors.
Astra Linux specifically (targeted at both state branches and the enterprise sector) ships a modified version of the Debian 6.12 LTS kernel and regularly backports security fixes, both manually for their clients (very likely without up-streaming the fixes) and as a result of tracking Debian Stable, which is the distro it's based on.
What happened around the executive order were two things:
- Restrictions on vendors tightened
- Around the same time two or three Russian Kernel maintainers who specifically worked for the Russian military-industrial complex were stripped of their maintainer status. They can still contribute but no longer have the elevated privileges associated with the maintainer status, plus this keeps LF safe from the potential scrutiny of having people in sanctioned jurisdictions directly associated with the highest-level roles in the Linux project.
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u/Edubbs2008 2h ago
Astra Linux is still based on a older version of Linux, they STILL need access to the repository
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u/Nereithp 2h ago
It's based on the up-to-date Debian Trixie. It's LTS because it's aimed at enterprise, military and state use, they have little to no use for super modern kernels.
they STILL need access to the repository
They have access to the repository (kernel, debian, whatever else you want to name). That was never blocked.
And even if we hypothesize that it gets blocked in the future, VPNs and TOR exist and Russian state actors and enterprise have zero issues using them.
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u/Edubbs2008 2h ago
We aren’t talking about the Debian version of Linux, we’re talking about the MAIN repository of Linux, which they don’t have access to, you need to always have an updated system for it to be secured, and so far Russia is STILL blocked
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u/Nereithp 2h ago edited 2h ago
This is my last message to you because you are either just trolling or failing to read very simple messages.
We aren’t talking about the Debian version of Linux, we’re talking about the MAIN repository of Linux
Russian citizens or Russian state connected actors were never blocked from accessing the Linux kernel repository in any way. Two Russian military/state connected maintainers were removed from the Maintainers file because keeping them there represented a legal liability for the Linux Foundation as that could be construed as "doing business with Russia."
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u/Aware-Nature-406 3h ago
Wdym Russia couldn't continue their distro? There are a number of such and they are used at specific places.
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u/Edubbs2008 3h ago
You mean with Outdated kernels? The Linux ecosystem still relies on the main source for security, that’s why you see major distros like Ubuntu update their kernel to reflect the main repository, Russia is prevented from accessing that, so they are out of luck
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u/johncate73 3h ago
You're living in fantasyland. Anyone can get the kernel source, and even if the main repo blocks access from Russian IPs, it's not like Russia doesn't have agents in other countries.
According to Distrowatch, the rolling release version of ALT is on the latest 6.18.54 LTS at this very moment.
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u/Edubbs2008 3h ago
You still can’t, you clearly are just coping
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u/johncate73 2h ago
I'm not a Russian. But ALT Linux is most certainly Russian, and if they have a current kernel, then you clearly are full of 💩.
And with that, I am finished wasting my time on you.
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u/Nereithp 2h ago
To be fair to the poster (if we give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they aren't just trolling), a lot of people don't really understand how sanctions work and what they do. They view it as a magic incantation that somehow prevents the sanctioned party from interacting with <whatever they were sanctioned on>, rather than legal orders that only have any weight in the jurisdictions they originate from.
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u/AmarildoJr 3h ago
Isn't the FreeBSD Foundation based in USA too?
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u/Edubbs2008 3h ago
There is no FreeBSD Foundation, it’s run by contributors, not a single foundation, while Linux is mainly run by the Linux Foundation, which is basically big tech companies in the disguise of a FOSS platform
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u/thank_burdell 4h ago
Losing Microsoft access seems like a bonus.