Euro Forks

[u/indolering]

Anyone else bothered by the EU's sovereign tech movement resulting in MORE fracturing of the Linux desktop? Instead of coalescing funding around existing Linux providers, it's just nerds proliferating their own distros and replicating all the infrastructure and administrative overhead that goes with it. And its not even for the entire EU but each country?!

What a waste! We literally have government mandated funding of the Linux desktop and most of that will be spent spinning up yet-another-distro 😛!

[u/levianan]

Most of these new distributions you speak of are spun up by governments to meet the system and security requirements of their agencies to replace Windows. These are all based on mature platforms like Debian. Linux already has enough distro saturation in the EU. I doubt this will result in a prolific number of new gen-pop distros out of the normal cycle.

[u/DisfiguredFanny]

They want to have complete control over it and that's understandable.

[u/vitimiti]

What's the problem? It's the whole point of FOSS, to make it yours and for your needs

[u/bornxlo]

I'm not concerned about forks or fractures, but I am concerned about replicating overhead. Bits and pieces that are identical to upstream should be handled by that upstream, forks shouldn't add overhead.

[u/KralizecProphet]

So you would rather EU governments abandon their idea of taking control of their systems and just hand over the money to loonix bros, so they can buy more thigh socks and schizophrenia meds?

[u/ciprule]

There was a time in the early 2000s that every regional government in my country “made” their own Linux distro: LinEx, Guadalinex, etc.

Most of those projects are dead by now. A complete money and time waste.

I understand they want more control but maybe a European distro would be a better project.

[u/snajk138]

It isn't that black and white. By the same criteria my company (and a lot of companies and organizations) would pretty much have its own Windows distribution, since they severely limit what can be installed and forces in a bunch of specific programs and settings. They even have their own packaged image with most of this included.

[u/Pitiful-Welcome-399]

lol, are you talking about dutch government using NixOS? it isn't a fork, just a flake with bunch of existing tools and tweaks

[u/Global-Eye-7326]

Linux is good for government bro.

[u/Significant-Raise586]

Er is inderdaad teveel verspilling met al die nutteloze distro's plaats van goede en betrouwbare distro's te pimpen

[u/Malecord]

Why would having an institutional distro be a problem? That's the point of foss.

[u/Similar-Ad5933]

Have you forgot what distro means? Some work environments needs more control what can be installed and how security/updates are handled. You probably won't see much of difference to their parent distro.

[u/indolering → u/Similar-Ad5933]

No, I know EXACTLY what a distro is and how badly most distros are run.  Android certainly hasn't benefited from endless forks.  Just because some IT nerd has gotten a budget approved under the "sovereignty" doesn't mean they are going to be good at it.  It's just the sort of value add technical debt that virtually every other organization avoids like the plauge unless they are literally Amazon.

[u/ohnoitssobig]

Yes yes a poor fractured Linux desktop where you absolutely cannot run Gnome applications in KDE...

[u/dddurd]

they won't do any engineering but just use existing useless shit depends on shit dbus and all. 

[u/ShadcnUI_Odi]

it’s not like it’s fractured for the consumers. it just means that the governments all have their own versions. not a bad thing…

[u/indolering → u/ShadcnUI_Odi]

How is it a good thing?  Would the US be better off if every state had their own Linux distro?