EU OS Aims to Free the European Public Sector Desktop

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

EU OS is a proposal for an immutable KDE-based Linux distribution with a Windows-like desktop, designed for use in European public-sector organizations.

Rather than a new distro, it's a website that documents planning such a thing, what functions the OS might need, how to deploy and manage it, and how to handle users. Its aims are relatively modest, saying:

In the scope is everything that is necessary to deploy a Linux-based operating system to an average public body with few hundreds of users.

The proposed base OS - Fedora - is what gave us pause, though. In these times of heightened tensions between the US and - well, frankly, everyone, including large parts of the US itself - why pick the Red Hat-backed Fedora, an American distro, rather than one of European origin such as openSUSE? To be fair, the immutable Fedora KDE version, Kinoite, is among the most mature immutable distros out there. The Register first looked at it over four years ago now.

The project is the brainchild of Dr Robert Riemann, whose day job is at the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), which has been around for a while. He seems to know his stuff. We're rather impressed by the level of detail of the website, considering that it's only just launched. It discusses project goals, some use cases, and an outline of functional requirements.

Significantly, it also addresses some previous efforts at doing similar things. The Register has looked at some of the ones it mentions over the years, including Munich's long-running LiMux project, from the early days of 2004 to its replacement in 2017. Our coverage of this also mentioned the French Gendarmerie's GendBuntu, as well as the Linux Plus 1 project in Schleswig-Holstein. We gather that Astra Linux is doing well in Russia, too.

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