3mo ago

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

www.europarl.europa.eu Home | PETI | Committees | European Parliament

Main page of the Petitions Portal. General information, most recently uploaded petitions and further links to procedural pages. Further links to the European Parliament website.

The petition is open to all EU resident. The goal is to replace all Windows in all public institution in Europe with a sovereign GNU/Linux.

If the petition is successful it would be a huge step forward for GNU/Linux adoption.

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144 comments

It’s ridiculous that governments don’t use customized Unix/Linux builds.
- well that's what this law proposition is about... Better late than never but for it to be passed a maximum of EU resident should sign that petition
- Funny enough, I'm working in IT in government exclusively with Linux for the past 20 years, which shows that indeed it's possible.
  There are a few reasons I don't believe a petition like this will change a thing though
  
  It would definitely prove interesting
- Ahem...
  
  Didn't even have to open the link to know it was red star. I've heard rumors of others as well.
- I expect 100% already do. Its ridiculous that they're not forced to, though
- Why? I've worked in two companies where IT allows Linux as an option and people are constantly having issues (including me). And these are highly technical people. Two people who are not stupid managed to break their laptops by uninstalling Python 2 which Gnome depended on.
  Yes that's technically a UX issue, but there are plenty of good old bugs too, e.g. if you remove a VPN connection that a WiFi network autoconnects to then that WiFi network will entirely stop working with no error messages to speak of. Took me a long time to figure that out. Or how about the fact that 4k only works at 30fps over HDMI, but it works fine over DisplayPort or Thunderbolt3. The hardware fully supports it and it works for other people with the same OS and laptop. I never figured that out.
  That's just a taster... I almost never have issues like that on Windows or Mac.
  Windows may cost more than "free" but the additional support costs for Linux are very far from free too.
  Maybe something like Chromebooks makes sense if everything is in the cloud.
  
  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.
  
  I don't think that's the reason. It works for other people.
  
  It's literally the reason
  
  So why does it work for other people with the same laptop and OS?
  
  They're using a proprietary driver, not the open source one
  
  BUT HOW COME THIS THING I DONT UNDERSTAND IS HAPPENING?
  
  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.
  
  They could have opted to build and use the eurofighter but didn't, instead choosing to rely on the expertise and good relationships between EU and US. At that time.
  
  Assuming they don’t already have all your internal data
  A devotee of Our Lady of Assumption, i see.
  
  you are telling me they can’t do better than hitting subscribe on Office365?
  Yes I am absolutely telling you that.
  
  That uninstalling python2 bit reminds me of stories of users deleting their system32 folder to free up disk space.
  
  Yeah except that uninstalling Python 2 is a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do.
  
  Since Gnome depended on it, they would have had to intentionally push past warnings to force the uninstall, assuming they're using a distro with a dependency mapping package manager... So, no, that's not a perfectly reasonable thing to do
  
  they would have had to intentionally push past warnings to force the uninstall
  Go and learn some basics about UX. Two different very smart people made this mistake.
  IIRC there are no warnings. It will just list gnome in the list of packages to uninstall that you often get when uninstalling things, and can easily ignore.
  Again to reinforce the point because many people do not understand it. Just because it was possible to avoid the issue if you were careful does not mean that it is not an issue. People make mistakes. Seatbelts exist.
  
  No OS idiot proof. You can delete critical files on Windows as well. Next up you will be complaining registry edits break Windows. You straight up removed a dependency of the desktop.
  In the future you can run software in containers so you don't have to care. Just install distrobox and podman.
  
  Windows will actually stop you from deleting Program Files.
  Nobody is asking for idiot-proof, just mistake-resistant. It's ok, most people don't understand this point.
  
  Not if an essential part of the OS depends on it (your "UI")
  
  Which the package manager would have warned them about.
  Meaning they deleted it manually instead of using the package manager OR just ignored all warnings and forced the uninstall.
  These were too intelligent but too dumb for their own good user errors lmao.
  
  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.
  
  Do you have 10k Linux laptops though? The places where I worked saw issues like this for a significant fraction of the dozens of Linux laptops (most people used Macs). There's no way you could scale that issue rate to 10k machines.
  
  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.
  
  Because my current company is too cheap to buy Macs, and the project I work on is full of Docker and bash scripts and obscure EDA tools. Would be a nightmare on Windows. WSL is a possibility I suppose.

144 comments