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EU Open Source Linux

'The Year of the EU Linux Desktop May Finally Arrive' (theregister.com) 69

Posted by BeauHD from the digital-sovereignty dept.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes in an opinion piece for The Register: Microsoft, tactically admitting it has failed at talking all the Windows 10 PC users into moving to Windows 11 after all, is -- sort of, kind of -- extending Windows 10 support for another year. For most users, that means they'll need to subscribe to Microsoft 365. This, in turn, means their data and meta-information will be kept in a US-based datacenter. That isn't sitting so well with many European Union (EU) organizations and companies. It doesn't sit that well with me or a lot of other people either.

A few years back, I wrote in these very pages that Microsoft didn't want you so much to buy Windows as subscribe to its cloud services and keep your data on its servers. If you wanted a real desktop operating system, Linux would be almost your only choice. Nothing has changed since then, except that folks are getting a wee bit more concerned about their privacy now that President Donald Trump is in charge of the US. You may have noticed that he and his regime love getting their hands on other people's data.

Privacy isn't the only issue. Can you trust Microsoft to deliver on its service promises under American political pressure? Ask the EU-based International Criminal Court (ICC) which after it issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes, Trump imposed sanctions on the ICC. Soon afterward, ICC's chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, was reportedly locked out of his Microsoft email accounts. Coincidence? Some think not. Microsoft denies they had anything to do with this.

Peter Ganten, chairman of the German-based Open-Source Business Alliance (OSBA), opined that these sanctions ordered by the US which he alleged had been implemented by Microsoft "must be a wake-up call for all those responsible for the secure availability of state and private IT and communication infrastructures." Microsoft chairman and general counsel, Brad Smith, had promised that it would stand behind its EU customers against political pressure. In the aftermath of the ICC reports, Smith declared Microsoft had not been "in any way [involved in] the cessation of services to the ICC." In the meantime, if you want to reach Khan, you'll find him on the privacy-first Swiss email provider, ProtonMail.

In short, besides all the other good reasons for people switching to the Linux desktop - security, Linux is now easy to use, and, thanks to Steam, you can do serious gaming on Linux - privacy has become much more critical. That's why several EU governments have decided that moving to the Linux desktop makes a lot of sense... Besides, all these governments know that switching from Windows 10 to 11 isn't cheap. While finances also play a role, and I always believe in "following the money" when it comes to such software decisions, there's no question that Europe is worried about just how trustworthy America and its companies are these days. Do you blame them? I don't. The shift to the Linux desktop is "nothing new," as Vaughan-Nichols notes. Munich launched its LiMux project back in 2004 and, despite ending it in 2017, reignited its open-source commitment by establishing a dedicated program office in 2024. In France, the gendarmerie now operates over 100,000 computers on a custom Ubuntu-based OS (GendBuntu), while the city of Lyon is transitioning to Linux and PostgreSQL.

More recently, Denmark announced it is dropping Windows and Office in favor of Linux and LibreOffice, citing digital sovereignty. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein is following suit, also moving away from Microsoft software. Meanwhile, a pan-European Linux OS (EU OS) based on Fedora Kinoite is being explored, with Linux Mint and openSUSE among the alternatives under consideration.

'The Year of the EU Linux Desktop May Finally Arrive' More | Reply

'The Year of the EU Linux Desktop May Finally Arrive'

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  • Seriously, never underestimate how low MSFT may go to keep its installed base.
    Since they have O365 now there's really really no reason not to adopt Linux.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

      O365 is a hot pile of garbage. Online Word does not replace Word. But since Word is also a hot pile of garbage, things now get interesting.

      • Re:Don't hold your breath (Score:4, Interesting)

        by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Saturday June 28, 2025 @08:11AM (#65482014)

        Indeed, it is. Example: As soon as you have 4 or more accounts, a lot of stuff becomes really cumbersome. This is a toy, not a professional tool.

        From my IT audit side-job, I know that the things keeping people on MS Office are 1) document templates and 2) FUD.

        The first one is only a matter of time to go away. One reason is reulation and KITIS. Turns out, you are legally required to have a replacement strategy for any outsourced service and o365 is that. If it were still Office on your own machine, no cloud connection, that requiremetn would nto be there or much, much weaker. But with o365, it is something you _must_ do. And you must alos be able to implement that strategy on short notice, which means having those document templates for anything critical ready for a different Office product. My customer went for LibreOffice, and they estimate since they got to clean up all the document templates when making them dual-plarform, they may actyually have saved money. They definitely like finally having an inventory of these and having descriptions and backups now.

        Now, what about FUD? Well, nobody really believes anything MS says anymore these days, but the fear of changing things is strong. It will get progrssively weaker when others do it and it actually works.

        My take is MS is toast. They will just take a decade or two to die. What, "They earn so much money, they must be doing well!" is your counterargument? Here is mine to yours: Boening. Intel. And some others.

  • ... it's servers in the US (and therefore, rooted by the NSA), then why haven't they moved the EU branch of their services to local servers?

    The obvious inference is that the NSA won't let them - or will require them to root such servers for NSA surveillance. And the obvious next step would be that the NSA then gives this data to US corporations that bribe the Executive appropriately.

  • No, it won't be anything of the sort. Because bureaucracy never dies and that goes for all of Europe, too.

  • IPv6 (Score:4, Funny)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Friday June 27, 2025 @09:35PM (#65481464) Journal
    Which will arrive first, IPv6 everywhere, or Linux on the desktop? Viva la revolucion1

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by chill ( 34294 )

      This could have been even funnier if, instead of French for "Viva la revolution", you used the Esperanto "Vivu la revolucio!".

    • For the case of IPv6, I find it amusing how the market has collectively decided it's cheaper to trade IPv4 addresses as rare commodities (the price of an IPv4 address has risen 10x during the past 10 years, currently sitting at around $60) and also put home users behind a CGNAT (and charge home users who want a real IPv4 address -dynamic or static- extra fees) than move to IPv6.

      Something, something... backwards compatibility. But hey, we are told those EU bureaucrats will spend the time and effort to con
      • Apparently people are actually connecting to Google via ipv6 [google.com]. Maybe those are all mobile users.

        As for my ISP, it doesn't even assign me an IPv6 address. I have to use a proxy or something if I want to do that.
        • Sure, but Google is reachable by an IPv4 address too. Which is the problem with IPv6: If you go IPv6-only, your service is unreachable by users whose ISPs only assign IPv4 addresses to users. Which means your service needs an IPv4 address too in order to not lose those users. Which makes some businesses wonder why they need IPv6 in the first place when their service needs to have to have an IPv4 address and being IPv4-only doesn't cause any adverse consequences.

          And the cycle perpetuates itself.

  • A few years back, I wrote in these very pages that Microsoft didn't want you so much to buy Windows as subscribe to its cloud services and keep your data on its servers. If you wanted a real desktop operating system, Linux would be almost your only choice.

    Almost. Like, there's only one "real desktop operating system" that's not Windows, is Unix-based, focused on the desktop and userspace, and has about 15% of worldwide desktop OS market share, compared to 6% for Linux.

    But pay no attention to that, this is

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Shades72 ( 6355170 )

      I have been exposed to MacOS when it needed PowerPC CPUs, when it needed Intel CPUs and when it needed the M1 CPU. Not one of the iterations were appreciated by me. Even iOS on iPhone and iPad. That is even worse than MacOS.

      Commodore 64 with Geos cartridge was my very first introduction to a GUI, then the GUI from Windows 3.1 and Amiga 1000 , Windows 95/98 and Amiga 2000, Windows Server NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 and beOS and Amiga 1200, Windows XP till Windows 11 and Windows Server 2003 till Windows Server 2

    • Re:Is SJVN getting forgetful? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Saturday June 28, 2025 @05:08AM (#65481806) Journal

      The other operating system is not in the same category. It's limited to a very small range of hardware exclusively from one company. And the hardware they sell is often intentionally limited in ways that hamper serviceability.

    • I was finished with Apple when the GPU died and a replacement was 4x the price of the PC version.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Universities here are starting to tell CS and STEM students "you are on your own" when they get Macs. Because, as it turns out, a lot of stuff is more difficult on a Mac. For example, there are massive issues to get VMs runnign reliably for the students. Yes, I had one student with a Mac in my IT security class that just used GCC and GDB for the buffer overflow analysis on the Mac commandline and while the results were a bit different, they were fine and we discussed the differences. But 4 others did not ma

    • Never mind that even Windows can be set up with a local account, aka be set up as a "real OS". Yes, even Windows 11 if you know how. And you can uninstall all the online service-oriented (cr)apps it ships with. Don't get me wrong, Windows has degraded since the Windows 7 peak years, but it's nowhere near bad enough to make me abandon all the backwards compatibility with software and hardware drivers it offers, for now at least, I can't speak about how Wine and Proton will be in the future.

    • Apple is as an american corporation as microsoft is.

    • So you think people should migrate off a company for being American owned and subject to political pressure from the current US junta by switching toanother American company? The merits of your plan are a little bit elusive.

  • Hey Satya (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RitchCraft ( 6454710 ) on Friday June 27, 2025 @10:26PM (#65481530)

    Hey Satya, great job on turning Windows into a steaming pile of shit. No, I really mean that. It's high time the world starts looking for alternatives to your spyware disguised as an "OS". If it wasn't for Windows 8 and then 10 and now the diabolical 11 I would have never made the switch to Linux. I absolutely loved Windows 7 and would have been a customer for life if not for the hate you have for your user base. Sincerely, thank you for setting me free.

    • Windows is a pile of shit, but it's the devil we know, to be honest. I've learned hundreds of Windows work-around the long hard way over the years. Linux might be a cleaner OS, but still has a learning curve for certain "edge case" things.

      Call me lazy, but I'm a creature of familiarity and habit these days. Go ahead and take away my Slashdot Card, but Satya can stay on my lawn for now.

      • I get that. I held onto Windows 7 for as long as I could because of the familiarity. I knew the day I would need to ditch Windows 7 was coming so I installed a few flavors of Linux on some boxes I had laying around and started the process of seeing what it would take to transition over. It wasn't easy, but was fun nonetheless. I still maintain a Windows 7 box for a few software packages I still use.

  • You need to do something about antitrust law violations

    And if you want that, then you need to make political trade-offs. You are going to have to give something up if antitrust is important to you. At least if you are a typical slashdot reader.

    It's unlikely that folks are going to give that up so we're not going to see antitrust law enforcement or Linux on the desktop.

    Because every single time Linux on the desktop is a threat Microsoft will take some office money and use it to give Windows away f
  • I'm not sure that comparing Linux to Windows 10 (or 11) is fair in the sense that most 'normal' users are not willing to jump through all of the hoops required in order to get a usable desktop environment without much effort and tinkering

    The beauty of Linux, the fact that it is endlessly customizable and can be altered to fit an advanced power user's needs perhaps also remains its Achille's heel as most people out there who just want to turn the box on and for it to work, with simple, widely-accepted solu

    • Re:For this to happen, it needs tighter focus (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BeaverCleaver ( 673164 ) on Saturday June 28, 2025 @12:41AM (#65481612)

      If a laptop bought from a shop didn't come with an OS pre-installed, Linux already wins.

      Insert USB, turn on computer, click OK a few times. Boom, a desktop, office suite, web browser, ready to go. No need to have a "Microsoft account," or to give it an email address or any of that shit. Though if you give it internet access it will automagically update the OS for you.

      But yeah. as long as the computer you buy at the store already has windows installed, then that's what the average user will stick with.

    • France sort of did something like this 30 years ago with their 'Minitel' which was a small form-factor dumb terminal computer that made using the phone system pretty amazing back then.

      Preparations for Minitel/Télétel started in 1978, it launched in 1980 - a lot earlier than 30 years ago.

  • For most users, that means they'll need to subscribe to Microsoft 365. This, in turn, means their data and meta-information will be kept in a US-based datacenter

    Is that really how it works? Don't they have multiple regions and special arrangements for US Gov+military and for China? I certainly have noticed in product docs that some services are not available or arrive late if your tenant is in one of these "special clouds".

    • Where the company is domiciled is the issue. American companies apply American law, no matter where your data is. Also, read the TOS. Amazon, for instance, may by algorithm, store your data anywhere in the world.

      That screws you 2 ways, because other countries also impose data sovereignty laws, so they legally can access your data too. For cloud data, full disk encryption could likely mitigate snooping by LEOs, but who knows if they have any zero days up their sleeves.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      They pretent to have. But MS needs to deliver all data it has to the US government on request, no matter where teh servers are.

  • Perpetual (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Fons_de_spons ( 1311177 ) on Saturday June 28, 2025 @01:06AM (#65481626)
    For Linux to become a popular desktop OS, it may have to starve off part if its identity. (sorry tux) I think it would need to be shaped by the fat greasy fingers of marketing people. It would move to become more (ordinary) people centered instead of tech centered.
    If that happens, a fork will be made to keep the original identity alive. Let's call it lunix. The next headline would become "Is this the year that the lunix desktop may finally arrive?"

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by MightyMartian ( 840721 )

      Having spent a whole hell of a lot of time lately on Gnome, configuring it and testing various configurations for rollout at the company I work for, all I can say is that it just works. There's a browser, and bizarrely, printers just work on Linux now in a way they just used to work on Windows, and it's now Windows, at least in an enterprise environment, where printing has become the technical equivalent of having your teeth filed down. Where work does need to be done is on accessibility, so we have one sta

    • Re: Perpetual (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Big Hairy Gorilla ( 9839972 ) on Saturday June 28, 2025 @08:13AM (#65482022)
      <cough>Ubuntu <cough>
      Ughh... some is reaaly caught in my throat
      <cough>RedHat<cough>

      Found the fat greasy fingerprints on the microsoft(s) of linux.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      That is really not hard: Just create a window-manager with some default apps. Like Gnome. Like KDE. And safely ignored by the real power users.

  • "Microsoft, tactically admitting it has failed at talking all the Windows 10 PC users into moving to Windows 11 after all..." Sheesh, I am WAITING for the CHANCE to upgrade to Windows 11! I keep my ASUS laptop fully updated via Windows Update all the time. At the top there is a colorful invitation to upgrade to 11. I try it regularly, I've gone down the "see if you system can support Windows 11" path, the answer is yes, but finally I must wait until "Windows 11 update is ready for your model". When, WH

  • SJV saves me SO much time. All I have to do is see his by line and I immediately know that the article is useless and clueless dreck from a useless asshat. So I can skip reading it entirely and save so much time.

    The year of the Linux desktop is not 2025, 2026, or 2027. This is unequivocal. I can not see past 2028, but I do feel that it is safe to guess that 2028 - 2035 is out as well.

    The Linux Desktop is a niche product that will have to overcome the inertia of both Windows and Mac OS. Even if Microsoft dis

  • This, in turn, means their data and meta-information will be kept in a US-based datacenter

    Does it though? Microsoft has quite a few data centers spread around Europe. https://dgtlinfra.com/microsof... [dgtlinfra.com]

    • Those are still subject to US surveillance laws though. The US government does not care where a server is located as long as it is operated by a US bases company.

  • I don't think that Desktop Linux is going to take over as a result of these things, but I am seeing SOME small movement for people that went looking as soon as the ads started showing up in Windows. A lot of these went to Mac, but a not-insignificant number jumped to Linux on their existing hardware. Not earth-moving numbers, but it's one step closer to a threshold where Windows loses it's 'defacto' status.

    Plenty of time for Microsoft to adjust for sure, but I think the ads are enough to turn more serious

  • That's my big use case, and I think a lot of people's. Also, a good PDF editor. Notepad (I know Notepad++ works on Linux but notepad is as simple and quick as it gets).

    If MSOffice could run seamlessly on Linux, that would seriously accelerate Linux desktop adoption.

    Also, automatic OS updates would be big.

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