A petition has been created by an Austrian EU rep. to replace Windows with GNU/Linux in all Europe

It would definitely prove interesting

Didn't even have to open the link to know it was red star. I've heard rumors of others as well.

We exclusively use Windows on our user's devices (over 10k devices!) and don't have to support anything else. We end up with problems like those all the time.

• occasionally all installations become blocked no matter what means or which user, requiring reimaging to resolve.
• DisplayPort connections mysteriously failing and requiring reboots of the device and sometimes also the dock or monitor. Sometimes we even have to swap the cable out, even though the cable will continue to work in another setup just fine.
• using a different brand of dock than the ones we have at our hotelling stations and disconnecting for any length of time causes wifi to fail until reboot
• wifi at the office mysteriously stops working as you move around the building, requiring restart

None of our Linux test devices experience any of this.

In an enterprise imaged Windows laptop they and you probably wouldn't have superuser privileges in order to keep yourselves from doing stuff like deleting core Windows dependencies. Maybe they give you full administrative access at your company but if you deleted the Program Files folder to save time you'd be blamed by pretty much everyone.

You guys obviously have root privileges or else you wouldn't have been able to delete the system's core Python2 installation. And frankly you must have literally manually deleted it because the package manager would have told you what havoc you were about to enact and made you tell it to do it anyway.

But what's even weird to me is that most python devs I know, including myself use python virtual environments (venv) to use different versions and package bloat control from something like pip but keep it all nice and neat.

If you wanted python3 to be the default you have to change the PATH in Windows or if you don't know what you are doing I guess reinstall whichever python with a .MSI an hope it does it for you.

Meanwhile, in Linux you can just use the alternatives utility to literally pick your preferred versions and it takes care of the paths for you.

And with the HDMI issue? You must not be using the same graphics drivers and someone is using proprietary graphics drivers (won't have the issues you've described) and the other is using open source versions (you'll have the issues you've described) because companies are shitty about their proprietary closed standards.

Which brings up another point. You say you all use the same laptop model and OS but you don't all use the same drivers? There's no baseline? There's no control?

This sounds like a Hell of your own making. This is why users in general should never have full administrative privileges and they should be tailored down to just what you need. Epecially if they haven't yet learned the basics of the OS they are using because they are at best a danger to themselves and at worst a vulnerable laptop inside the network.

If you were having issues why did you stay on Linux? It sounds like you were constantly fighting it. It is best not to waste work time trying something new.

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.

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.

That uninstalling python2 bit reminds me of stories of users deleting their system32 folder to free up disk space.

The insecure parts of Linux is mostly on the DE side opposed to the core OS part that servers use. We absolutely will see more vulnerabilities in the future as Linux grows.

Well, servers don't generally run Thunderbird and Firefox

Since installing applications on Linux is usually done through some centralized package manager or app store (Flathub), it almost entirely eliminates this attack vector.

xz moment.

Yes, I see that weasel word "almost" in that sentence. I expect it's going to be doing increasingly heavy lifting as Linux becomes a more lucrative target to attack over time.

Your point generally stands, though. Even if they're fallible, at least someone is vetting it at all somewhere in this pipeline.

They have, snaps

This petition is for developing something dubbed "EU-Linux", so if implemented as is will be pretty uniform

That is mostly false. Most of the code that faces the network is the same. As is most of the background running code. Linux is still more secure.

It lets you sign up as a country outside the EU and sign it

The latter, and it is good from an organisational perspective, but its never a nice experience, and for many, this will be their first real experience with a Linux.

Right now Linux is "That nerd OS", if this goes badly, for millions it could change to "That OS they forced on us at work, where I can't XYZ"

Edit: on the GPL front, GPL doesn't require that you publish your code to everyone, just to the recipients of your binaries. And you only have to give it upon request. So they definitely could keep it somewhat under wraps if they wanted to. If they are smart, they'll follow the Munich model and stick to upstreaming any changes they make.

Then they went back to Linux a few years pater

Yeah, that's the one. Gnome 2 in 2017 would have felt pretty dated. And the political reasons can't have helped either.

Apparently they are back on the Linux train as of 2020, so thats good news.

National governments should be harder to bribe than local ones, at least. Also harder to get them to adopt it in the first place though.

Precisely the city of Munich had its LiMux system.

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.

Yup, exactly, which is kinda my point. The OS given to users is gonna be heavily restricted, so no one is going to use it and then run home to install it on a home PC. Government OSs are just not good ambassadors.

That argument would be fine, if only the Linux community could actually agree on what is a good distro.

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.

You think that Microsoft lobbyist would have had any traction if the user experience was any decent?

Of course not. They wouldn't have had any reason to switch.

That is the biggest issue with Linux at the moment. It takes more maintenance than Windows. And there are a lot less people with the knowledge to setup and maintain those environments.

At the end of the day, the point of those environments is to allow the user to work in them. But if the user is unable to work properly because of the environment, then that environment must be changed. It is as simple as that.

Sigh. Guess I'll have to do it

Right now public institutions are paying for proprietary software. If they would invest the same money into FOSS, the FOSS option would not be behind proprietary software for long.

I think the point is to invest the money into the continued development and improvement of the foss software instead of giving the money to businesses who shield their proprietary codebase. In theory.

Switzerland already did it. Its brilliant. Instead of the gov pouring money into proprietary solutions to meet their needs, they can fund FOSS and benefit from the same software being funded by other governments and companies too.

Proprietary is crippling. Its only chosen due to corruption

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?

This was helpfull but Its in Italian so here is the English version LINK

The problem is dealing with the application side.

Just one feature that's massive - how many systems have automatic import/export using Excel file formats. Converting those processes will be a huge undertaking themselves, let alone how many other things that will require re-engineering. The scope and scale of this is staggering.

A better effort would be to convert a single, small organization in government, then the scope is limited, but you get to build the fundamentals, and gain the experience of interfacing with extant systems.