The events of the last few years have caused many in Europe to re-evaluate their reliance on large offshore technology companies, with a corresponding move to home-grown EU-based alternatives. It’s one thing when individuals or companies do this, but another entirely when it’s an entire country. So the news that the Netherlands is building their own Linux distribution to replace Microsoft Windows in government installations, is not inconsequential. The Tweakers site linked actively breaks out of Google Translate, so you may have to rely on your browser’s translation tool if you are not a Dutch speaker.
The Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid, or Digital Autonomous Work Environment, is a distro based upon NixOS, itself originally a product of a Dutch university. It comes complete with all the office and collaboration applications needed to replace Windows, and is reported to have been tested already by a small group of Dutch government workers.
The influence of this move is likely to be a huge one for Microsoft, given that governments have huge numbers of operating system seats. But perhaps more important than the OS itself are the extras that Microsoft would like to sell to its OS customers, such as AI services. We’d expect that there will be managers in Redmond paying close attention to Europe in the wake of this move.
Meanwhile the Netherlands has a vibrant hacker community, and we can imagine that this move will be welcomed in those quarters. All Netherlands government online services are accessed through an ID verification app called DigID, and it’s a lament we’ve heard from our Dutch friends that this only works with Windows, Android and Apple platforms. If this means a Linux version will appear on the back of an NL government Linux distro, we know some people who will be very happy indeed.
NL flag: SpinnerLaserzthe2nd, CC0. Tux: Larry Ewing (lewing@isc.tamu.edu) and The GIMP. Attribution.
In Europe, I think the development in this area is quite welcome.
Open Source in administration as such seems like a good thing,
because everything that has to do with society should be transparent and comprehensible.
Now to the “but”: The fixation on Linux might be a deceptive security,
because many big players from the IT industry have their fingers in the pie and also finance/support the Linux development.
Linux runs the risk of becoming a puppet of the big ones or runs the risk of developing a monopoly position like Windows had, formerly.
A fixation on Linux only can also become a technological dead end.
Some platform-independent things are sacrificed in favor of Linux-specific things (e.g. X11 vs Wayland etc).
It would therefore perhaps not be so wrong to question Linux as strictly and critically as Windows.
There should be backup systems available running on other OSes, maybe. Except Windows, of course. Just in case.
Not sure this makes all that much sense. Linux can not become “a puppet of the big ones” as it’s FOSS.
The whole benefit of using an OS that isn’t publisher owned is, well, exactly that.
And it terms of alternatives, this is also a bit of a misunderstanding. Linux is already the alternative. Aside from even more niche projects like FreeBSD, there really aren’t any reasonable alternatives beyond Windows and Linux. Very small pools of devices may be run on MacOS, but for larger organizations that’s really not feasible in terms both compatibility nor in terms of IT management (and MacOS being prohibitively expensive).
I’m also not so sure if your point about Linux possibly becoming technological dead end. The whole point is that Windows already is a technological dead end. It has the best software compatibility of all the OSs, but it is also perpetually looked both in expensive perpetual licenses and, more important for the EU, it is forever tied to a US company.
On the contrary, the main issue is that everyone has their own variant of it, which turns out to create friction and problems because one is not quite like the other. Even just application software support and version control is going to be cumbersome when different governments and organizations “standardize” on their own solutions over distribution and dependencies. For example, which teleconferencing or team messaging software are you going to use? Okay, you picked one, but is it compatible with whatever those other guys are using? Can you message anyone outside of your organization without falling back to endless email chains? That’s the fundamental reason why just about everyone is on Microsoft Teams instead of a gaggle of open source alternatives.
Here as well, the governments end up supporting their own distro, multiplied by how many branches or even offices within the government, which is just pointless. What is needed is a proper competitive alternative to Microsoft, in Europe, instead of the tower of Babel where everyone’s trying to roll their own without any sort of common coordination.
Btw. this would be much less of an issue if Linux had standard base API/ABI compatibility where distributing software for users didn’t depend on centralized repositories, so each organization could switch to using different application software as needed without first having to go through the trouble of porting it to their own variant, and the software vendors could compete on a level playing field where they don’t have to play politics with the distribution maintainers to get their software included.
IF that was the case, then the problem of a myriad variants of Linux would be reduced to just supporting Linux, not supporting the entire universe of software on top of it.
It would be good, but in practice it is not much of a problem.
We sell one proprietary program for linux. Our only problem is that we need to compile and test it for multiple CPUs.
I’ve used different linux distributions as my only desktop since 1998, with the exception doing some consultancy work for a big company. There they packaged all windows programs themselves too, so it wouldn’t have been much different with linux if they had the same policy.
I’ve rarely had problems with commercial software during that time. Its rare that they don’t provide their programs as rpm, deb and tar files, working on all distros professional users use.
Netherlands standardization on NixOS will make it harder for them, on the other hand they will have departments that can package needed programs too.
It works if your demands and requirements for the surrounding software environment are limited.
But try something seemingly simple, like providing a tray icon for the user, and the difference between distros and different versions therein becomes apparent because there’s no agreed upon standards.
C/C++ source code and APIs are the standard compatibility layer. Binary compatibility is full of compromises and risks because there are about 5 architectures that Linux is popular on (x86-64, ARM64, RISC-V, IBM Z aka s/390, and IBM Power) and numerous well-supported but less popular architectures.
If people can’t provide source code and wire up their release process to package for key distros, then getting working binaries into end-user’s hands will be hard. That’s the Linux way and it doesn’t solve the problem of architecture support, backward compatibility, and app distribution the same way that Windows does. Different OS, different process.
Turn every distro into Slackware.
Exactly, I wonder why they’re going through all the work and trouble of creating and maintaining their own distro rather than rebranding rock solid Debian or using something like Ubuntu, which sells professional support services and can handle something on a big scale like that and is based out of the UK which is still Europe although not EU anymore.
I fear that this project is going to end up costing a lot of money and possibly failing for being based on such a niche Linux distro, and the cost and scale of maintaining a distro is not cheap or easy.
Governments can save a lot just by going with something turnkey, a vendor who is already maintaining a distro for millions of users worldwide. Ubuntu would seem to be the obvious logical choice, or european-based SUSE.
It’s NixOS, it’s not really much trouble to make your own distro fork from it. It has recipes to build everything and generate your installable image. Different organizations could have their own ready-to-run images built on top of a base OS. It could be done with Debian, Ubuntu, or SuSE in the same way but those are a little less flexible for that use case. It’s a source and recipe based distro more like Gentoo or Arch. Nix still has a package format (.nar) but you generally ignore it and just let the tools download and install them through its caching system.
I do prefer Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE, etc as a base for these kinds of institutional distros because the big distros tend to get critical security fixes rolled out the same day.
I do think that this is a false argument. Because when only a few people were using Teams, in the beginning, they had exactly this same problem: nobody was using it.
But what they did was to say: “Too bad if you can’t communicate with us. Make it happen one way or the other, or it’s your loss.”. And people and companies scrambled to make it happen because they wanted to do business with them. And so Teams spread (also helped by Microsoft’s slightly less-than-legal upselling strategies).
These are governments. If they support some tool, and you want (or need) to do business with them, YOU will have to be the one to adapt. Even IF the new messaging system is not distributed freely with your Windows distribution, you can still download, install and use it.
And if the messaging system doesn’t exist on Windows, then for sure our government will actually CREATE it for Windows.
Dutch people are largely computer-literate by now. And even our government is becoming quite computer-literate.
The issue with Microsoft is that they have aggressive sales tactics. They give decisionmakers incentives to help them make the decision for Microsoft software. Oracle does the same. SAP too. And very, very often, contracts are being signed, but no work comes out of it. Ghost contracts, whatever you want to call them. But the government organisations still keep paying, even if no work is being done and the other party is not upholding their own obligations. You have no clue how common this is. No idea of how rich companies like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft have become with these kinds of contracts, and how much taxpayer’s money has been wasted because of it. I do have some idea about it, and it’s not a pretty picture.
This already enough reason to choose for something other than those big corporations. I don’t think I have to mention how the US Federal government has been continuously trying to gain access to all the data stored in data centers of those companies, which would include data on all Western European citizens and governments.
A friend who’s relentlessly trying to read my most private diary is not a friend.
I do not have Teams on my computer. Did you know that Teams has a web interface? You don’t need Teams at all to message with someone who is using Teams.
Exactly. I do a lot of work for my company on my private devices. The only programs/apps that I use are Parallels (a virtual desktop) on ky computers and the Microsoft authenticator on my phone.Teams, Outlook, Sharepoint and Office are all accessed through my browser. Excel on the web is way faster than the desktop program on big datasets.
The only real business applications I need are all accessed through Parallels, and even that can run 100% from the browser.
So I’m platform-agnostic, given a recent enough browser.
Before that, they were all on Skype for Business, then there was a big kerfuffle to migrate everyone to Teams because Skype support was ending, and now everyone is on Teams.
Point is, I doubt the governments can even agree on what messaging app they’ll standardize on. Do you think the French would agree with the Germans about which, or more crucially, whose platform to use?
I know, and sometimes I’ve been forced to use it, and it just adds extra hurdles and problems to an otherwise seamlessly working app. Turns out, it works best on one browser and not so well on the other, so it’s just kicking the compatibility problem one abstraction layer higher.
And even then, users from a mother org do not magically get to use your orgs infra do they? Here they show up as ‘external user’ iff it has created an account for them, otherwise they just get to dial in as a one off. Not sure if the desktop version is different (doubt it, its all the same electron stuff), you need to still connect/login elsewhere. So no,its not easy to talk to someone else on someone roses teams. It just looks the same, but that’s true for any solution.
And people are already familiar with this concept. ‘My meet or your teams’ is nothing new. Extending that to ‘your whatever else’ with the assumption of course theres an easy to use web interface you can use when clicking the join this meeting button.
Not to be that guy, but considering I live in “Europe”, Europe is a continent with at least dozens of cultures, dozens of different languages, ideas etc, where countries are completely opposed and some are in a hot war. It’s like saying “Well, in Asia, you have x” because in one of the countries you have a law or culture. Sorry it grinds my gears when people use Europe for anything else but talking about maps.
“because many big players from the IT industry have their fingers in the pie and also finance/support the Linux development.”
That’s amazing. I’m really happy about that as it results in Linux getting the support it needs to progress.
“Linux runs the risk of becoming a puppet of the big ones or runs the risk of developing a monopoly position like Windows had, formerly.”
Yeah I don’t think being a puppet can be a thing. There are still distro’s like Devuan pushing back against SystemD because of that reason. Monopoly, I highly doubt it. Might be, but people are less and less likely to use computers. Most young people barely know how to turn one on. Linux is a kernel and you can design your own operating system around it. And you can even take a Linux distro and run another kernel. It has been done.
“A fixation on Linux only can also become a technological dead end.” I see it as the end of the dead end. We were in a dead end only recently with Microsoft dominating everything with a near 100% market share but it’s now getting out of it. Microsoft’s market share is dropping fast with some statistics having it near half of desktop users. Isn’t that great?
Europe has a long history with changing borders and trade.
Stating that various European countries don’t share certain values, language or traditions would be just as superficial as saying that Europe is a country. IMHO.
Ah yes, I see, the often predicted post-PC era!
I just wonder how offices, the doctors’ practices or pharmacies or government offices or accountant will do their business without PCs.
And will software developers use their smartphones to develop applications?
I’m really wondering about these things. It’s not about it’s possible without a PC,
but if its comfortable and it makes sense in daily life.
Being a consumer relying on a smartphone for daily life is no achivement, I think.
Many companies have thin clients, many small offices work on a tablet-like computer.
Hm. Thin clients often are used to establish a remote desktiop connection to a server running a virtualized desktop OS, I assume.
There are also notebooks in use, still, I hope.
Because “multitasking” on an Android device isn’t exactly fun.
It’s like running MS Windows 1.0 with tiled windows.
Long ago we entered the era where someone can drive a car without owning a set of wrenches. So, I believe we are at a stage where most ordinary people can use the Internet on a daily basis without owning a PC or Mac.
People who do specialized work own wrenches or desktop PCs, but it is clearly not required for participation in society.
No, it’s clearly not required in a society of decadent people.
Mobile device are excellent for consumption of TikTok videos or asking ChatGPT how to tie shoes.
It’s certainly a progress. Not sure in which direction, though.
Agree with your thinking, here. Keeping the OS distributed (i.e., decentralised) is essential. And, the focus should remain on open-sourced applications and OS’s.
Good. But for different reasons.
I’m no Linux wizard, but I switched to Ubuntu years ago and will likely ditch windows entirely when 10 is actually done for.
There is absolutely no reason for everything from the mundane to critical infrastructure to be sold as a service, license, cloud, subscription, insert corporate buzzword here model. When the cloudflare, crowd strike, and azure outages hit over the past couple years that should have been everybody’s wakeup call to look for alternatives.
One bad line of code should not have the ability to bring the planet to a literal standstill. We keep learning that it can, the hard way, and keep paying these monopolies for their services anyways.
Is Linux the answer? Who knows. Tried many flavors, never been much of a fan of any of them. But it just works, for the most part, and I don’t have to replace everything I own every few years for no reason.
“Linux” is actually only the kernel. All the rest around it is software that is compiled for that kernel.
Anyone can make a brand new, but different, kernel. And if they do a good job, then all the software that compiles and runs on the Linux kernel will run on their brand new kernel.
I’m just stating this point because everyone and their mother seems to think that Linux is the whole distribution. It’s not. Theoretically you can run the whole Ubuntu distribution on a whole different kernel, and then it’s not Linux anymore.
It’s funny, I just realise that Ubuntu used to be referred to as “Ubuntu Linux”. So, “Ubuntu Linux” is the correct term. “Ubuntu” is actually meaningless. Basically, there could even be an “Ubuntu Dos”, if someone would make a fully pre-emptive multitasking version of ms-dos that would support a 64-bit flat memory architecture. :)
Hi, I think that the desktop environments such as KDE and GNOME also used to shape the personality of a Linux distro a lot.
Because each of them had libraries that certain GUI applications did rely on.
So there was a split between KDE vs GNOME vs something else, basically.
Nowadays, there’s also X11 vs Wayland.
Linux GUI applications that don’t use X11 via Wayland’s X11 emulation but use Wayland natively aren’t really that portable anymore.
Not in the sense that they could still run can on other Unix like systems such as Minix 3, Unix System V or QNX or Mac OS X, DESQView/X etc.
That is very true, and I didn’t consider it when I wrote that. Before Wayland, the desktop and the kernel were more or less separate. It’s almost a necessity to intertwine those, for performance reasons. Apple realized that early, and if Linux-based systems are to compete with Apple, they will have to do the same. I am Apple developer, but also run Ubuntu at home (actually still using X11), and that always feels archaic, even though the desktop developers really have been doing their best and did amazing things.
I guess that Wayland native is going to be quite an impetus for commercial software.
I wonder what that will lead to… No office application really needs the performance of Wayland. Wayland has its dangers too (Apple has, for instance, had to add a whole new security layer on top of the already existing BSD/Unix security layer). I can imagine that we will end up with two separate kernel paths: one without Wayland support and one with Wayland support.
Going two ways, i.e. Wayland but with an X11 emulator, is imo a dead-end road. Actually, thinking of Apple, they walked that same path. They kept X11 support for a while in macOS, but then dropped it completely and now you can download an X11 emulator (XQuartz, excellent piece of software) if you want.
is that true? i haven’t run into it. maybe there is an extreme case where it might seem true?
in practice, most applications — especially “GUI” ones — target something like GTK or SDL that provides a high degree of portability. and even the tiny minority that uses libwayland-client directly, you can still run it under X11 using a wayland compositor that targets X11. this is basically the same approach i used back in the day to port X11 programs to macos x. i just used an x11 server that ran under Aqua.
in practice, where there’s a will, there’s a way. compatibility layers are so cheap compared to what computers are capable of these days.
Hi, I had to double check.
I think it’s also true that modern releases/still updated of those OSes are eventually gaining Wayland support. Such as QNX 8, it seems.
So it’s mainly classic and niche OSes that are affected,
such as Mac OS X or AndLinux/Co-Linux (Linux kernel and KDE on Windows 2k/XP).
The focus on Wayland might noticeable limit the porting efforts of Linux/BSD applications to Mac OS X (Darwin/X11) via Mac Ports or Brew.
To some Mac users, this might be a real deal breaker unless there’s an open source Wayland to X11 wrapper.
Or maybe, except if middle ware libraries (QT, GTK, SDL, Allegro etc) are used by the applications.
Because these libraries usually know more than just one output method.
That being said, less powerful platforms (ESP32, Pi Pico etc) might not have a Linux/Unix with Wayland available.
They’re more likely to have an “simple” X11 server,
because X11 dates back to the 80s when computers were moe limited.
There is no Ubuntu DOS and never will be.
There was Debian GNU/kFreeBSD – https://wiki.debian.org/Debian_GNU/kFreeBSD – but it is abandoned.
It is hyperbolic to claim “Ubuntu is actually meaningless”. When clearly it has a meaning that we understand and the company that owns it also understands. And it gets worse for you. “Ubuntu” was ALWAYS the official product/project name. And users and journalists tacked Linux onto the end to create the term “Ubuntu Linux” which is the informal and not official name.
Some state in Germany tried the same thing and it failed badly.
Turns out free software is actually very expensive when you move past karma farming on
r/homelaband try to get some actual work done.All software is very expensive when you look into it.
It was Munich, and they started in 2003, rolled out in 2013. Since then almost all services have moved into the browser, making the operating system much less important. The free office systems have also improved a lot since then. A big part of the failure was that it was introduced very top heavy, not involving the users. That tends to be at the heart of many failed IT projects.
Schleswig-Holstein on the other hand is rolling out linux desktops to its users now. They say they learned from Munich. They involved the users from the start of the project and migrated as each department was ready for it. They first switched to ODF standards, then migrated users to LibreOffice, which they finished last year.
This is incorrect. For one, NixOS was never run in Germany by public institutions.
Then there were really only two states that implement large Linux deployments. Schleswig-Holstein is still at it and likely to expand the use. And in Bavarian, Munich’s municipal administration ran a specific homebrewed Linux version (LiMux) from 2004 to 2017 (longer than other Windows OSs (aside from WinXP which is GOAT)). They did phase it out, however, they are now in the process of moving even more services to open source software.
Overall the program in Munich suffered from very specific HW issues, but also laid the groundwork to move even more administrative services to custom FOSS. It really doesn’t matter that much if the endpoint is running a Win11 E3 license, if all the servers running services, websites, mail, and file hosting are running Linux. The user says they’re working on Windows, but they really aren’t. This is the actual result of the LiMux.
And the point about cost is just wrong. IT admin always costs money – this is true for all OSs – and while the admin cost of custom Linux versions may be high, administration of enterprise Windows fleets is just as pricey. Between license costs and inevitable manufacturer outages, whether an environment is more or less expensive is mostly due to the way the admin is set up.
And in terms of getting actual work done, choice of OS is actually negligeable. Just like about any service in the last two decades was pushed off the endpoints to some degree. If you’re working an office job today, 9/10 actions you do are in a browser or a remote application.
The Netherlands had several projects/pilots also. But I don’t believe they failed on cost, rather about adoption. Where every individual (home) user can fairly easily switch to another operating system or ecosystem, is it more complicated to switch complicated systems and migrate many users at once.
Do you have an example of the expensive open-source? A fairly standard Linux with Open office, Tunderbird, and a webbrowser is likely enough for most office needs. While I understand replacing something is more expensive, as you have redundant systems. But eventually, everything which is not spent on Microsoft, you can use to fund whatever you need. A conservative estimates put the Microsoft product for the Dutch government to €500 million (185 million for just the municipalities, was in recently news). Even if most of it is hardware/infra it may still be possible to fund 5 million man-hours a year (approx 2500 FTE).
I wouldn’t say “badly”. I’m no die hard fan of Linux, but I would say LiMux worked as good as a Linux system possible could.
Sure, the employees didn’t like the switch to what felt like beta software (think of Open Office or Gimp etc).
But the mayor change was a “nail in the coffin” – LiMux was affected by a political change in Munich.
The story also involved MS promising to build a big building in Munich if the city would switch back to MS products.
To get an idea of the symbolic value/political weight here,
Munich is the capital city of Bavaria,
which in turn is a bit like a German counterpart to Texas. ;)
Munich switch to Linux was designed to fail because they had to maintain the whole lignage of windows (3.1…) for some critical infrastructures.
When they switched back to Windows they ditch all those dependancies (because software was updated or hardware was replaced) and it was presented as a victory for windows. Which some will call unfair.
Sure, but the promise of moving the Microsoft HQ made a huge difference. Also politics, the leader at time was a Microsoft fanboi so was super excited to get both the HQ and change back. AFAIK the reversal never really happened, just slowly and once that corrupt goon was gone, LiMux continued on to be improved and rolled out.
But any Munich/Bavarian native can chime in with the details.
I believe this may be much less consequential going forward than it would once have been. With the general shift towards web based applications on the user side, it barely matters what OS the client runs on, as long as it can competently run a browser. Linux, Mac, or Windows add or subtract little. On the backend, a shift from IIS to some other technical framework would be transparent if executed correctly. The bigger differentiation would be a distinction between an externally provided server, running on a Microsoft or Google or SAP or OpenAI data center, vs. one run by the government on government infrastructure, vs. one run for the government on 3rd party servers (e.g. Hetzner.)
Are there already self-booting browsers with network stack and printer drivers? :)
Well people don’t use windows for the OS, but the ecosystem around it. Just like the x86.
With Linux, the software ecosystem is tied with the operating system because of the distribution model.
It’s like Windows in a sense, where you have to use Windows to have access and proper support for the applications, except it’s fragmented into smaller balkanized islands, so you have to pick distro X to have proper support for software Y, but then you need distro Z for the same point over software Q since the maintainers of X don’t like Q and they’re a couple versions behind…
And then the entire country is brought to a halt when upgraded kernel panics because of a wireless Logitech USB mouse. Why? Possibly because some obscure kernel API changed, this makes
libcock-893.935.67.666.69incompatible withlibarse-abcdefgh.5920-3505.xand that’s enough to bring a whole system down during boot, turning a $2000 computer into paperweight.It’s 2026, only idiots still roll out new versions of software and libraries to their whole company without validating them first.
And only even bigger idiots do not have a way to fully roll back immediately after problems arise after a distribution of new components.
sed 's/idiots/governments/g'Oh.
Like that time a Windows update hosed the explorer and nobody could login to the hundreds of PCs in the schools where I worked.
Like that time when a Windows antivirus program deleted parts of the operating system, leaving the systems unbootable.
Like the current fiasco where Windows 11 users are greeted with a black screen of death because the desktop doesn’t start.
You mean things like that? When Microsoft includes “Insert(Head).In(Ass)” in the program code?
To be fair, on Windows it used to be possible to attempt a repair installation.
On *nix systems someone can try to rescue the /usr and /home directory and redo an installation from scratch.
In reply to Joshua:
I’ve rescued broken Linux systems as well. It’s not like a repair installation is somehow a unique, Windows only thing that the gods of Microsoft gave you
On a Linux system, it is usually enough to rescue the /home directory then copy the contents to the /home of a newly installed system. /usr contains all the system binaries, so not usually what you need to rescue.
Yeah, Microsoft makes breaking changes and then rolls it out to the entire world without testing sooo……. I think I’ll stick with Linux and OSS. At least bugs get fixed, and if they don’t you can fix them yourself, especially now with AI coding assistants.
From grub you can repair your entire file system if an error is preventing a boot with Linux. I’ve never been able to do that with Windows.
A live USB image is also a much better way to get back into your system and fix things than safe mode. Safe mode disables functionality to make sure the software boots. That often prevents you from being able to fix the problem (in my experience).
I moved completely to LInux, and I curse at my computer FAR less than I used to. My quality of life has improved and likely my life expectancy as a result. Seems like Linux will make you live longer and Windows will send you to an early grave. I’d like to see some statistics on that!
You seem to forget that flathub/snap installs mitigate this issue completely. Using a contemporary up to date distro helps keep packages newer. Also library dependeciea are mainly used in compiling not running said software unless it is a daemon for an api
Yet still it are the Win32 subsystem and the Win32 PE EXE files that’s most important parts of Windows.
The RISC versions of Windows NT always included an x86 emulator to run DOS and Win32 applications.
It was an 80286 processor emulation initially, then an 80486 emulation.
Third-party emulators such as FX!32 provided Win32 x86 compatibility on Alpha, for example.
Nowadays, Windows 11 on ARM has emulation of x64 processors.
It can run both Win32 and Win64 applications for ARM and x86/x64.
By installing OTIVDM it can run Win16 app,ications, as well.
So Windows nolonger needs physical x86/x64 processors, it comes with an emulation of them.
An ARM Windowd can run all Windows applications, except MIPS, Alpha and PPC executables.
Windows 11 even still has msvbvm60.dll shipped,
because Visual Basic 6 is running the software of the world.
Windows automatically and without permission activates OneDrive with the free plan. If you exceed the quota with a massive movement you can lose all the folders on the desktop.
The average user does not want Linux because it is difficult by definition. Although they don’t even know how to install an application on Apple
All the open source projects in Spain have failed miserably and it is no longer politically cool
The officials only need a word processor and a browser so it is easy to implement Linux
All they do is open a browser…
I’m Dutch and although I disagree with their reasoning, I applaud the move to Linux. But this is like to be another failure. Government IT in this country is a running joke. I’m not being hyperbolic, people use government IT as a joke, even in businesses. If something takes way too long and the costs got way out of hand and you don’t know if you will succeed, it’s called a government IT project. When my boss asks me how it’s going with testing different new models of offshore solar panels I can just tell him it’s going as a government IT project and he knows exactly what’s going on. That’s why I doubt this is going to work. If they took an off the shelf available distro, they could run it, and the project will likely succeed. But even in this article it says they are modifying a distro. Just grab a standard one and give the people behind the distro a bunch of money for maintenance and things they want to improve. It’s much cheaper, much quicker and much more effective. They could gone for any of these standard Linux distro’s, like Ubuntu, Mint or OpenSuse. All EU based. Grab a stock distro and roll it out. The more government IT touches it, the worse it’s going to get and the the chance it will fail increases, resulting in people thinking less of Linux. Considering the market share of Linux is increasing rapidly (already crossed 10% in some metrics, others hover above 7%), I don’t want to see another failed Linux project. I want them to succeed but points at everything.
“All Netherlands government online services are accessed through an ID verification app called DigID, and it’s a lament we’ve heard from our Dutch friends that this only works with Windows, Android and Apple platforms.”
There is an app? I don’t have a DigiD app. I’m using a username and password with SMS code verification. I don’t need an app and I don’t want an app. The last thing I want on any of my devices is to install an app from my government.
Nix/NixOS is particularly well-suited for customization and 60% of contributors are from EU. Also, NLnet foundation (partly funded by EU program) supports lot of Nix projects. Finally, French government agency Dinum is also working on Nix/NixOS solution with customization (Securix and Bureautix).
That’s just perception. Because in other countries they don’t even HAVE government IT. Can’t have bad IT if you don’t have IT at all.
I remember when I, being Dutch, had to deal with the German government when my dad passed away, some 4 years ago. WTF? They wanted to do everything through effing FAX!
I of course still had a few fax modems…
But we had phased out our analog telephone lines in The Netherlands… :X
Thank God for email, scanners, Gimp (to watermark everything), Adobe PDF and password protected .zip files (and I know they can be hacked, which is why I watermarked literally everything).
Netherlands:
You’ll get a website link where you can privately and securely upload all your necessary documents to. Simple. Done. (but do hope that that server is not located in the US, and that Elon Musk was not able to get his hands on your private data when he still was ‘special government employee’).
I like the telefax machine, it’s so straightforward!
Just grab a typewriter or a pen and some paper and send everything from a to b.
It’s as easy as writing a mail letter, except that it’s near instantly on the receiver side.
Applying a signature or a stamp mark is very easy, too!
Someone can even make notes on a form when filling out by hand or typewriter, something that a static PDF form doesn’t allow.
Fax is just as fundamental as a phone call, it’s a part of culture!
And the papers have to be physical in the end, anyway,
because they wander into the lever arch file in the shelf or wardrobe.
Personally, I do have both an analog telephone and a late 20th century fax machine hooked up to my Fritz!Box internet router.
It’s very easy to do, because the internet router has either RJ11 or TAE sockets. If G.711 codec is supported, things usually work.
Some not so old models had an S0 port for ISDN telephones/fax machines, too.
Until that Spartan 6 FPGA nolonger was available, I think.
The S0 port on the router basically replaced the traditional NTBA in the cellar.
Speaking of good old ISDN, audio quality was great!
And ISDN fax machines were super fast!
Makes me shed a tear that the latest internet routers nolonger have S0 bus.
But maybe it’s possible to hook an older Fritz!Box w/ S0 up to a more modern model via RJ45 ethernet port?
Would be a workaround to keep older ISDN PBX systems alive.
That’s not how FOSS works. You see, the idea is that you pay the developers and maintainers money so they get to do whatever they want, because the software is Free as in freedom of speech. Money has no power over it. You may pay someone to change it, but the community has no obligation to accept your modification, so you end up making a fork and maintaining that all by and for yourself.
The other thing is, you’re supposed to donate the money, so there wouldn’t be any contractual obligations, and also for tax reasons. Next, if you’re buying actual support, that doesn’t mean you get to tell them to change or fix things. You’re paying them to tell you how they think it should be done, just so you know. If you reject that, you’re Free to use any other software or make your own.
As in most relationships you need employees if that’s what you want. The contract states what’s expected and the agreement exists under your governments rules governing such things.
Or sure, you can throw money at someone and pray. But I wouldn’t suggest doing that.
Also, here in the USA at least, you can’t donate money to random people to obsolve your tax obligation. And, as an ancillary, if you’re dealing with a corporate entity (which a non-profit must be) then that entity can be contracted with. I thought that was true of some European nations too but YMMV.
You can also set up a fund that pays for specific features. Whoever implements the feature gets to claim the allocated money. FreeCAD has such a fund that was donated by someone connected in someway to the Ondsel fork that went under. Every so often they put out calls for people to apply for the work that needs doing. Clearly they don’t want shoddy work or redundant and wasted effort, but they’re open to anyone willing and able.
Hmm, most IT projects are a failure because they are outsourced to the lowest bidder (as per rule), so you usually end up with some shitty outsourcing company that has no idea what they are doing and when they fail to deliver (on time and at cost) the project is failed. And to make things worse, then the extra costs start to drip in, because they well knew they couldn’t so what was promised at that cost anyway, they just wanted this contract.
“standard Linux distro’s, like Ubuntu, Mint or OpenSuse. All EU based”
Ubuntu is based in London. Now I know they regret Brexit, but they are not yet back in the EU.
I honestly love the decision, but is switching from an american company to an operating system with its tools, that is maintained by practically the whole world a better idea?
Linux and Libre Office don’t have a kill switch, I assume.
That’s one important feature, I think.
US companies can take the whole world hostage if they wanted to or if thry were being forced to.
Considering the current situation in the world, it’s a realistic worry.
“Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid, or Digital Autonomous Work Environment” – you forgot the last word, “Government”.
Het spijt me, mijn Nederlands is nog steeds een beetje slecht. :)
Ah, you’re from close, right?
Always assumed you (and/or other writers/staff) were from Gemany.
Note that DigiD is an authorisation thing that is always initiated in a browser. I never saw any reason to install the app, it works with an SMS too. I wonder why people feel safe having an authorisation app installed (or even save logins in a browser!). What happens to your hardware/harddisk when it breaks? No thanks, no apps for me.
I’m from Oxfordshire, in the UK. So sorta close.
When Google obediently renames bodies of water at ever fit of infantile rage by a would-be dictator who clearly has the ear of large multinational companies who have made the fiscal decision that pleasing him is a better strategy than building better products, the products of those companies can no longer be considered benign. I expect all of Europe and probably Canada to do similar, and it is one of the best developements in software since the discovery of recursion.
Exactly. Freedom has a cost, and it’s much more important than convenience of bad habits.
Based on NixOS?
That had me thinking of this https://lsub.org/nix/
That would be a far more interesting story.
This is not really an OS problem, but a trust problem.
The recent utterances of the POTUS have made it clear that European countries can no longer regard the USA as a friendly ally, but either as unreliable, or worse a potential enemy.
Any govt computer software sourced from the USA then becomes a worry. Uncertainty as to whether or not it has a backdoor, or worse (in the case of military assets) be turned off or data made available to an enemy.
That may sound extreme, but right now in the UK there’s concern following POTUS’s encouraging support of Argentina’s claim for the Falkland islands that the UK may end up fighting an enemy backed by the USA, eg will the software in UK’s F-35s continue to run? Meanwhile other countries are cancelling or considering cancelling F-35 order in favour of the European built SAAB.
Suddenly the need to roll your own looks imperative. It’s too risky wait to find whether your concerns were justified.
yeah I love people bleating on about just how bad the USA is and then forgetting how much worse China is on all the things you mentioned.
but the UK and the EU is cosying up to China saying Orange Man Bad.
That’s going to end well…
You have a pattern of malicious, bad faith and not well thought comments. If you don’t like the EU just say it.
Nobody really likes the EU, except those who are trying to turn it into a federation, and those who use it to bypass their own governments and drive politics their own people didn’t vote for. Sometimes it is useful for constraining the governments from doing stupid things, but then the EU turns around to make equally stupid regulations in return.
Maybe. But without the EU, the European countries would have no united voice or economic weight.
Our opponents likely would like to see the EU being dismantled, thus.
And that’s what “patriotic” citizens in the European countries seem to forget.
They’re so focused on being anti-EU and being proud on their own little country each that they forget what team work means.
The anti-EU people largely don’t want to dismantle the EU, they want to return it to a simpler economic union like it was in the beginning.
The system simply encroached its purpose and started regulating things it didn’t need to, and the obtuseness and bureaucratic density of the system means that people who the regulations affect badly are barely aware of what’s going on until it’s too late to complain.
The interrelations and the reasons for many of the dumb regulations in the EU can be summarized by the parable: A monkey once saw a fish flapping in the water, and thought it was struggling. “Kindly let me help you or you’ll drown,” said the monkey, putting the fish safely up a tree.
I dont like the EU or what it stands for, it’s history, it’s corruption and it’s future destructive path for the poor people who are going to suffer within it.
European countries as individual nations are an entirely different matter.
Obviously you disagree. I’m sorry for you.
I can understand the aversion against the EU, really.
It has too much focus on money for one, rather than being there for the citizens.
But without it, where would we stand?
Both China and the USA are a threath in their own way and Russia is going crazy right ahead of our front yard.
Without the EU none of them would take us Europeans seriously.
They would run all over us.
The EU’s economic power and set of rules make sure that these, uhm, neighbours have to negotiate contracts that they otherwise wouldn’t.
Because of the EU, we still have human rights, poison-free food and labor rights.
No, really, I’m serious! The EU is all about trade, not about making war.
Selling weapons, sure. But not actively declaring war or participating in it.
The EU is bound to its own rules and the constitutions of its member states.
Let’s just think of it. Russia wants its empire back,
China is on the rise and puts citizens in the neighbour countries in re-education camps
to make them surrender to Chinese customs and language.
And the US.. Let’s better not speak much about it.
Let’s just say that country exports its culture and religion ($).
To the US everything is a business, even the life of their own citizens.
So far, the EU is about the only big other “nation” that still upholds the positive values of former western civilization.
Not counting Australia or Canada. Or parts of South America, maybe.
They’re important and huge, too, but they’re not such a heavyweight of an economic power.
And that’s probably also why the de-stabilization of the EU is in the interest of certain nations.
Because, if the EU would eventually evolve into something like the USE, they’d be in serious trouble.
Exploitation then wouldn’t be so easy anymore and that scares them.
China would be under much more pressure in terms of human rights and labor rights, for example.
That’s why they would rather like to see us Europeans being scattered into a dozen of small countries again.
European countries that constantly fight and argue with each others.
So the big players can make deals in their own best interests.
There’s an old saying that comes to mind : “To be America’s enemy is dangerous, but to be its friend is fatal”
China is not trying to invade Greenland, Canada, Cuba, and any other place that buffoon dreamed of last night.
Only Taiwan and part of Japan when they can get away with it.
I mean they literally are trying to, but dont let that get in the way of your critical thinking.
China is smart, however. And it is very good at being diplomatic.
It’s dangerous and has ulterior motives, sure, but it also knows the value of international contracts.
It doesn’t declare crazy tarrifs, either. It’s at least possible to reason with China, long story short.
And it has a culture and long history, unlike some other nation(s).
China does it’s own thing in little bites, without any regard of what anybody else thinks of them. And I don’t really believe they would stop after Taiwan, Vietnam, north India, Tibet, south east of Russia and whatever else they can lay their paws on.
Or probably closer: they do regard what others think of them, and they use it to set their pace, but not the end goals. Just boiling the frog slowly.
Odd that there is no mention of the trigger event, that woke up the Dutch government.
In early 2025, the United States government imposed targeted sanctions against the ICC (International Criminal Court) in The Hague. Because major tech infrastructure is heavily centralized in the U.S., Microsoft complied with the sanctions by cutting off the ICC Chief Prosecutor’s access to vital IT services, including corporate email.
This event served as a sharp wake-up call for all Dutch officials. They realized that because their public administration relied almost entirely on American cloud and software providers, a shift in U.S. foreign policy could abruptly freeze core Dutch government functions. To eliminate this vendor lock-in and vulnerability, the Netherlands decided to build an independent software ecosystem.
Microsoft have burned their bridge.
Who are they gonna sue now when the coffers run dry? Our tech companies and litigation can’t prop them up forever lol.
Government mandated OS.
Soon to be EU mandated OS.
yeah, I mean no historical precedent’s as to why that might be a bad thing.
i think a lot of the handwringing about this sort of thing ignores the reality that nothing ‘just works’ anywhere ever. things work when people bother to put in the effort to make them work. depending on what platform / ecosystem / apps you use, the process of making it work can be different. you can displace that labor in different ways, for example using microsoft word on microsoft windows means microsoft does a lot of the labor for you. but one way or the other, the labor needs to be done.
if enough effort is expended, it can succeed. and if it becomse an unfunded mandate, “use the software we just procured for you, and no we won’t fix any of the problems you run into” golly we’ve all lived under that sort of slow-moving catastrophe before!
Whenever I find myself wondering why Linux hasn’t overtaken Windows on the desktop, I’ll come back and read this comment section.
I have run Linux for more than 30 years and Linux-only for more than 20 years with ups and downs, glorious victories and epic defeats, happy days and sad days, and an increasing number of grey hairs — but returning to Windows will never happen.
I have been distro-hopping, starting with Slackware and going through (not necessarily in this order) Gentoo, Suse, Red Hat, Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS (very friendly lot, if slightly culty), and now Debian.
The distro-hopping has happened due to idiosyncrasies that grated upon me (Slackware and Gentoo, particularly) or update problems like the whole carrousel that was Red Hat’s change of the RPM format some years back where I ended up having to reinstall the computer from scratch. PCLinuxOS suffered the same fate when their change from apt to dnf kept throwing hissy-fits when I tried to get it to work.
And Debian is a good bit behind the vanguard and still has some unexplainable peculiarities (maybe not Debian as such but its packaged programs) like NumLock being cleared after screen locks (using XFCE4) — I’m sure there is a workaround I haven’t found yet, but why on earth do they have such a silly and well-documented, long standing problem?
But back to the actual article …ish.
My brother (Windows-only apart for a RPI4 in the basement that mostly I use) has rightfully pointed out that Linux suffers from the plethora of choices, numerous distros (with or without systemd) and numerous desktop environments (with or without Wayland). For most people choosing, let alone choosing right, would be a problem.
This leads (at long last) to the point: why does the EU member states not pool their resources around a single distro, a single desktop and a single Office solution? They could even start developing domain-specific solutions for tax administration, schools, police forces, the military, and so on. It would be extremely cost effective — and they would have an immense bargaining power with the suppliers … Oh wait, they don’t need that as they own their solutions.
TL;DR: The EU member states should join forces and standardise when it comes to digital sovereignty with Linux for better and cheaper solutions!
There is an EU Interoperability Act. Its quite new. It created an interoperability organisation that should help member states with such matters. Maybe when it matures it will be able to take on a common linux distribution.
EU wants to move to digital sovereignty, so it would make sense, but EU moves slowly by design.
I hope that Microsoft is making a lot of dough on the telemetry, because they sure are losing lot of well-paying and very reliable government business over it.
This is, unfortunately, only halfway true. Yes, there is a government project.
But it’s badly funded. There aren’t any users. There is no migration plan. In its current form, it is a Potemkin village, meant to distract from the fact that nothing is meant to change.
Dat is goed, nietwaar?
Absolutely. The Dutch government does not want a US company to disable them like Microsoft did to the International Criminal Court. Because the US government did not like the arrest warrants issued.
I agree. I think everyone should do the same. Self-reliance is the ultimate form of freedom.
Several years ago the Dutch and other EU nations also said they were going linux.
Then in reality it did not happen and after some time they just scratched that they decided that.
Meanwhile they are still embracing MS for everything, including things where only a complete madman would allow anybody from MS near it.
In short, talk is cheap, and political promises are even cheaper. Politicians are all chuck full of it. Bunch of mofos.
Meanhile the EU and UK politicians are suddenly all about how wonderful Palantir is..
Yeah they for sure will stop MS, the kind of people who LOVE palantir.. right.
Maybe MS is about to release a version of linux though, and that is the one they will go with for real….
These are good arguments, but one should by no means underestimate the symbolic value.
Politicians constantly observe how things are handled elsewhere.
And if something works well there, they often decide to emulate it.
So, if a country or region can point to a success story, politicians can cite it to justify a corresponding measure.
Success story is you make a Windows 11 pendrive with Rufus and 30 minutes later you have a working OS.
With Ubuntu you spend 3 weeks apt-geting packages, installing config files and building from source only to realize the software won’t work at all because it was designed only to support Fedora. This is the idiotism of Linux and the main reason why it fails at everything except playing Tux Racer.
I’ve been in this game for a long time and after trying using Ubuntu for work at many workspaces I almost got fired many times so now I avoid it like fire.
Oh, you are the one who got Tux Racer working …
Sorry, just joking.
Windows has a great advantage over Linux, there are so many places where you can get help … and unless you use a bog-standard installation you will need help — and even with a bog-standard installation you will probably need help.
To be honest, a recent installation of Debian lead to some interesting problems that challenged my search-fu, and still a couple of minor things that need to be ironed out.
I run my own mail server — on Linux, obviously — and got a call from my sister in law (Windows user) who couldn’t get her new Outlook to connect to my mail server. Apparently Microsoft wants the delightful job of relaying everyone’s mail through their servers when using Outlook, which does not work well with many plain IMAP servers like mine. I persuaded her to install Thunderbird instead and now she’s happy as a finch in a big bowl of berries.
Linux and its eco-system is not perfect — far from it — but of all the evils, it seems to be one of the lesser (with FreeBSD and NetBSD). Using it I do not have to promise my firstborn away, I do not have to opt out of training LLMs and having my E-mails read and interpreted by some organisation, and I don’t pay a penny for my software unless I want to.
Or create a pre-packaged Linux pendrive, and less than 10 minutes later you have a working OS.
I think the discussion often ends up in turf war instead of facing the realities that most people use Windows because that is what they automatically get when buying a computer these days unless they know to ask for Linux. On top of that, Windows seems to be used by most educational institutions from schools to colleges and universities, so people have learnt the intricacies of the programs … until Microsoft changes the UI again again. But then you normally have to pay a licence fee, again and again.
Linux has the disadvantage that people have to seek it out, and if they are not computer people, don’t have the right friends or are willing to challenge their search skills, it can at times be difficult to get it to work. Some distros are better than others. But you can easily and legally get a Linux version you do not have to pay for (technically, where you pay, you don’t pay for the distro but for the support, which is on top of the price in Windows).
Been there, done that.
It all works or falls with the support of 3rd party vendors and users.
MS Office is used by many external applications, and if most of these do not work with your L-office, it is never going to take off.
So you need to support Macro’s, API’s etc so that it will work out of the box, or supply an easy path for migrating.
You also need to have all the important functions and the slick interface sorted.
I remember a project where OpenOffice didn’t even support simple but important functions that I had to add myself (and contributed to the project)
If you cover those, I will take another look.