r/linux • u/smilelyzen • 19d ago
Alternative OS Now Dutch government developing a sovereign Linux desktop on top of NixOS after France plans to replace Windows with a hardened configuration built on NixOS.
https://tweakers.net/reviews/15334/nederland-maakt-soeverein-alternatief-voor-windows-en-office-op-basis-van-linux.html224
u/CobaltIsobar 19d ago
They recognize that Windows systems and AI are exposing them to serious security and privacy issues. Individuals should take note.
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u/Zomunieo 19d ago
Microsoft has helped themselves to untold petabytes of user data by “accidentally” turning on OneDrive from time to time.
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u/Roguepapaya427 19d ago
Hmm, migrated some time ago all my machines to linux (well, all except one, wife's laptop). Never considered nix. But last night installed it on my main PC. Managed to install almost all my stuff, but did not manage to set up a working printer and scanner .... need to deep dive into the wiki and manuals. I still have to get use to it, but it's rather interesting so far.
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u/tukanoid 19d ago
Here you go good sir https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Printing
Just enabling the service should work, did for me at least without additional setup
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u/Roguepapaya427 19d ago edited 19d ago
Ty very much, good Sir! Will have a crack at it after work.
Fun fact: didn't even know that KDE 6.6.6 exists 😵 I thought KDE jumped from 6.6.5 to 6.7 directly.
LE: cracked printing both lan and usb, quite straightforward. Scanning is resisting ......
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u/cwo__ 18d ago
All Plasma versions since last year have a .6 version that's released after the .0 of the next series. Most people use a distro with rolling Plasma though, so relatively few people see it as they're on the next minor version. Debian uses older Plasma, but they don't update patch versions. Kubuntu does, but I couldn't say whether they update to 6.x.7 for non-LTS reelases, and 26.04 is the first LTS since this policy. I'm not sure about OpenSuSE Leap.
Plasma 6.6 is the first one that will keep going after 6.6.6, thanks to Kubuntu Focus sponsoring the LTS development of this version.
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u/Roguepapaya427 18d ago
Thanks! I never thought to be this fragmented ....... used to cachy, fedora, solus, manjaro, opensuse tw sr, I was thinking everyone is at around 6.7.x, while the likes of leap and debian hover around 6.4.x. Anyway, thanks for your comment!
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u/KickedInThePaduach 17d ago
I paid for VueScan it has Linux, Mac and windows versions and includes 10 seats in its licence. I'm in a mixed household so that cross platform feature helps.
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u/vazark 19d ago edited 19d ago
Can the EU countries just come together to create a shared base (distro and open file formats; not apps) please?
Germany, France and now the Dutch are all repeating the same thing over and over again. It feels like the old school distro wars all over again XD
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u/burning_iceman 19d ago
Germany is struggling to try and unify or standardize the jungle of different software solutions used by local and state governments. It's a huge task and progress is incredibly slow. Trying to coordinate with other countries in addition is a bit much to ask.
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u/vazark 19d ago edited 19d ago
I'm not implying it should be a shared app ecosystem.
I wish they either supported something like Debian or built a shared base distro (Nix or something else immutable). Then fixes and security patches can be identified and updated with the help of a much larger ecosystem.
Right now, everyone seems to be building their own downstream. I don't think politicians even know that this is a possible route.
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u/burning_iceman 19d ago
No point in discussing distros when almost all the systems are running on Windows and moving away from that is slow and tedious.
The distro choice is almost irrelevant in comparison. I don't even see much point in all going with the same choice. Security patches would hopefully be upstreamed and available to all distros regardless.
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u/skilltheamps 19d ago
The package manager / composition is not the hard part of creating a digitally sovereign government. Rather you have a lot of applications that need to support the necessary features as well as communication standards, APIs, identity management and stuff like that. These things land in (Libre-/Collabora) Office, (Next-,Open-) Cloud etc, and everybody benefits from that. So these efforts are shared anyways.
The bigger Problem is that public authorities have accumulated a ton of custom small applications. Like for many of the tasks they have to do (handle some tax, registering whatever, .. ), there exists some little obscure tool, that they had some software company program for them ages ago for windows (in german they're called "Fachanwendung"). In the worst case, it communicates with other obscure small tools via esoteric or proprietary protocols. It's like a abandoned vendor lock-in hellscape. That is not covered in the article. But with the idea of open source established, lets just hope that municipalities for further small tool needs contract the creation of open source tools. And instead of every municipality purchasing their own proprietary tool, they purchase work on the open source one some other municipality started to integrate their usecase too. That ofc won't result in 100% deduplication, but it would create a healthy ecosystem with a resonable number choice, just like thebl rest of open source. After all, some degree of nonuniformity also creates resilience, because you avoid single point of failures (like everybody being down due to some bug, or everybody being extortioned through the same zero day at the same time for example).
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u/dthdthdthdthdthdth 14d ago
If it happens on the national level that is already a great win. Also I believe no state should really build their own distribution from the ground up but just pick one with a set of applications that it supports for their agencies to use and that it sponsors development for. Like if a bunch of them end up choosing nix they could all sponsor a bunch of developers for nix that ensure that it works smoothly for their needs and cooperate via upstream contributions. And they could setup some resources for supported components, hardware, etc. That's fine to do on a state level and it keeps the political overhead small. If you want to coordinate that on an EU level you have to first build EU structures to do that, agree on priorities and requirements etc.
Use the open source model as it works best.
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19d ago edited 11d ago
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u/nem8 19d ago
I doubt that's any major part of the reason, the hostility we see from the US is tho. Being dependent on US companies and cloud solutions is just not a good thing at all.
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19d ago edited 11d ago
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u/1369ic 19d ago
If it's not a prime part of the reason they decided to switch, they're not paying attention. Whether you think it's a good negotiating strategy or whatever, we've proved ourselves to be unreliable partners. And it's happeneing when the AI race is taking off, U.S. companies being more intrusive with ads and data collection, stories about illegal use of data, AI hacking, etc. I was stationed in Germany three times while I was in the military, and we're doing a 180 on them. If that happened to us, we'd make the move. I don't see why Europe wouldn't.
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u/tommyTurds 19d ago
If it's not a prime part of the reason they decided to switch, they're not paying attention.
I think you misread. They said linux desktops actually being good isn't the major reason. The major reason is the US hostility. The move just has a better chance of being successful because linux desktop experience is actually usable now. In previous attempts, it wasn't remotely usable in an enterprise setting.
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u/hardolaf 18d ago
The move just has a better chance of being successful because linux desktop experience is actually usable now. In previous attempts, it wasn't remotely usable in an enterprise setting.
That's just a lie. The Linux desktop is as usable now as it was during the last attempts for enterprise settings. The reason the switch failed before was because users mass complained about their office applications going away and European governments got cold feet because of that and cancelled the switchover.
I really don't know where this idea that Linux desktop was bad 16+ years ago comes from. It wasn't bad. It was just different. And lots of average users in government didn't want to bother learning it so they just complained over and over again until they got their preferred toy.
Also, trying to get away from the US by switching software is hilarious when Europe still doesn't have its own processor or GPU companies (ARM doesn't count as they're in the UK and not the EU, and they don't actually make processors but rather just license out their IP to other companies which are almost all American or Chinese).
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u/pickle9977 18d ago
You know what the funniest thing about this is, 90% of what people do is on the web, like the browser is the desktop, the rest is just bloated trash.
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u/hardolaf 18d ago
And it was what 14 or 13 years ago that Microsoft published a study showing that OpenOffice was more compatible with Office than Office installed on different Windows PCs?
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u/tommyTurds 18d ago
The Linux desktop is as usable now as it was during the last attempts for enterprise settings.
If you honestly think that, you are fucking delusional. I guess you could also be 8 and have no idea what Linux was actually like. Either way I’m not going to bother reading the rest as they are the ramblings of a mad man or a child.
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u/hardolaf 18d ago
I've been using Linux in desktop enterprise settings since RHEL 6 came out. Outside of not looking as nice as Windows right out of the box, it was perfectly usable for almost every task.
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u/hardolaf 18d ago
The attempt at a switch failed last time because actual users in governments complained when their Microsoft programs disappeared and were replaced with OpenOffice.
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u/donnysaysvacuum 19d ago
For those on this sub that don't have to use Windows, I don't think they understand how bad it has gotten. The windows experience has never been great, but it was stable and did normal stuff fine.
I had to switch to windows 11 at work this year and it falls apart on basic tasks like suspend and monitor switching. The office suite is laggy and inconsistent. My powerful workstation is a constant laggy mess. Linux has slowly and consistently gotten better and has more choice than ever.
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u/zabby39103 19d ago edited 19d ago
The weather app in the start menu takes 1GB of RAM. It's crazy what slop it has become, apparently Microsoft can't even make Windows-native apps anymore?
It's not like RAM is cheap nowadays, how hard would it really be for Microsoft, literally one of the biggest companies in the world, to do a proper job and save a billion people the RAM?
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u/hardolaf 18d ago
No one has to worry about viruses.
Companies running Windows and creators using Windows get compromised constantly. The ones running MacOS and Linux rarely do.
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u/NullReference000 18d ago
I still use Windows for a home PC (dual boot for anti-cheat games that only work on windows), and I only swapped to Linux a few months ago. Windows has absolutely gotten much worse the last two years.
My windows would not let me make or use a local account, no matter what workaround I tried. It kept resetting my settings, like re-enabling OneDrive and silently moving my default folders (like THE DESKTOP) inside of OneDrive versions of them, replacing the folders with symlinks pointing to OneDrive. Updates are more common than I remember them being in the past and you can not turn the computer off without updating for most of them.
Sure it’s stable, but it’s also sluggish. My complaints might be over nerd stuff, but it was becoming genuinely frustrating for me to use it. Linux is also stable now. I tried to swap in 2016 and again in 2020, I ended up going back to windows both times after a week or two. I have had zero issues at all this time. At this point I boot into it once a week to play Battlefield 6 with some friends, my other steam games Just Work on Arch now.
I don’t expect my complaints to be legitimate for a random non-tech person, but for me Windows is now worse to use than my Arch setup.
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u/donnysaysvacuum 19d ago
No, these aren't problems that Windows 10 had on the same network and software.
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u/baronas15 19d ago
Most of Microsoft suite is horrible. Yet it's used for work and people can't escape it. Similar to oracle products 🤢 So I don't think it's a good argument
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u/pickle9977 18d ago
It’s been polished for a decade plus, frankly Linux desktops have been higher quality than windows since like windows me, and without a doubt windows vista.
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u/Lawnmover_Man 19d ago
To be honest... Linux has gotten worse as well. There are quite a number of things that just worked 10 years ago, but now... are for some reason riddled with small bugs and weird behavior.
No project is immune to the process that is behind enshittification. Not Windows, not Linux, nothing. Sadly.
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u/FatalFrameGal 19d ago
This is the year of Linux in the Dutch government desktop
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u/DDOSBreakfast 18d ago
2034 will be the year of Linux in the Canadian government. Sorry, we take a long time to do anything.
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u/delocx 19d ago
The US continuing to weaponize their tech platforms could be a strong incentive to continue projects like this. If the tech stack becomes an active, ongoing threat to sovereignty and security, that's a strong incentive to migrate away.
Those threats existed during past attempts, and were even cited as motivating factors, but were much more abstract and academic. They are now a much more clear and present danger, and one the US seems more than willing to exploit.
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u/Edubbs2008 19d ago
The Linux foundation is located in the U.S, and as per Joe Biden’s executive order, Russia was banned from making contributions
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u/beryugyo619 19d ago
It's not just US. at least UK and Germany are starting to do similar. All the foreign electronic products and foreign accesses are becoming country risks to governments and large corporations.
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u/a_library_socialist 19d ago
yes, I'm sure come November Chuck Schumer is going to march right up to the White House and issue a VERY sternly worded letter!
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u/EffectiveEconomics 19d ago
Elections no longer matter to anyone outside the US. That's moral capital now spent. The only safe place for US products is for US customers.
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u/ijzerwater 19d ago
Trump got into office twice. Nothing learned after first time, means it can happen a third time also.
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u/EffectiveEconomics 19d ago
Correct. This is ias actually a very quick pivot if national security is invoked. It's being planned in Canada right now. There are major issues in bridging the lost capability, but guess what? Claude Code is helping accelerate that, too. And it's working.
Ubuntu is ramping up bug/incident processing and is seeing back-channel interest in supporting an enhanced sovereign platform identity.
Anywhere you see accelerated feature introductions and focused attention on hardening, expect some movement off the major platforms.
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u/tommyTurds 19d ago
Claude Code is helping accelerate that, too
Remind me again, where is that made? Who owns that company?
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u/wasdninja 19d ago
Claude isn't accelerating anyone's anything if the goal is to cut ties with the US. No sane person feeds that service anything of importance.
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u/TheRealMisterd 19d ago
Before it was a way to save money on Microsoft licensing.
Now it's for sovereignty and data security. Why? Any data you have in the ANY U.S. company is not safe:
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u/Dr_Hexagon 19d ago
Governments have very good reasons to want "digital sovereignty" since the US has demonstrated repeatedly that they will pull cloud services from anyone they don't like. eg the ICC judges.
Various countries had linux programs underway already but the US showing they are willing to pull cloud services in this fashion accelerated these plans.
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u/ghost103429 19d ago
What's particularly interesting about this move is that Nixos + Ansible forms a very solid foundation for replacing windows MDM and group policy for managing Linux workstations.
Something that past attempts failed at doing.
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u/wasdninja 19d ago
I'm not holding my breath while I wait either but the really big difference now is how well Linux works on the desktop and just how bad the connection to the US has become.
USA didn't use to be that shit but now it is.
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u/NullReference000 18d ago
I think there’s real pressure right now to move off of hosting government services on US based software as US foreign relations becomes increasingly erratic. If you take a look at which countries have successfully made their own distro and then moved their government onto it (North Korea, China, Russia) you may begin to notice a pattern.
Countries which have probably taken their technology security for granted, because they’re friends with the US, may be reevaluating this attitude given what’s going on with Canada and Denmark.
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u/pickle9977 19d ago
It’s market factors now man, these proprietary software guys got greedy as hell.
Think about this, Linux kernel about 2k contributors per release, kde / gnome about 6-800 each , gnu tools let’s call it another 1k. Thats 4600, let’s double it for good measure and round up, 10k.
Microsoft has 223k employees and they have been working on the same software for forty years writing and rewriting it but it’s the same buggy, bloated, unsafe software it’s always been.
The cost of their software is a function of their bloat, your license fees pay the salaries of a massive number of paper pushers that do nothing but read and write documents about features, they have feature cancer and its terminal.
It’s like office space but with more zeros and less heroes
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u/iamapizza 19d ago
I'm filing it away with all those much vaunted 4 day work week trials reports which are often just a small department who did it as an experiment and were never heard from again.
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u/SmileyBMM 19d ago
I do wonder if Guix would be better suited for this, it's also European in origin.
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u/SexyJapanties 17d ago
Seeing as how Guix uses Shepherd rather than SystemD, it's probably best that they just Nixos instead just for the network effects.
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u/rude__goldberg 19d ago
what are the reasons they're selecting nixos over say suse for example?
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u/Yodo9001 19d ago
Well according to the Tweakers article, they first used openSUSE, then Fedora, and finally switched to NixOS. No clear reasons mentioned though.
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u/twicerighthand 19d ago
distrohopping lol
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u/TeutonJon78 19d ago
Fedora doesn't make sense if the goal is to avoid US companies.
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u/fat_kaiju 18d ago
I've pointed this out a few times on here and got utterly eviscerated and then left in a ditch for it but yeah its links to RHEL/IBM are hugely problematic since it would not solve the issue of disconnecting from the US.
I only wish universities would get more on board...
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u/TeutonJon78 18d ago
The only major non-US, non-Chinese distros are Ubuntu and SUSE/openSUSE. People tend to hate on Canonical. And SUSE seems to like injure itself every decade or so by selling itself. And there seems to be a growing rift between SUSE and openSUSE.
Fedora is probably one the most stable organizationally wise with lower levels of drama (and Redhat controls most of the modern OS stack).
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u/Dangerous-Report8517 16d ago
Fedora has pretty public community governance though so it's still far better than running RHEL, or Windows for that matter
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u/victoryismind 18d ago
It's open source if they like it they could just fork it, they probably have the resources to reproduce the infrastrucuture.
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u/Baardmeester 19d ago
One of the things they mention is that Nix packages are signed. A other one is that NixOS is not reliable on a commercial party.
It also mentions that Nix's properties make it easy scalability, manageable and you can verify the security. Making the clients easy to manage is a must for enterprise environments.
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u/Dangerous-Report8517 16d ago
Can't help but notice that those are the 3 most prominent immutable distro vendors (for want of a better word)
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u/darwinpolice 16d ago
I think the concern with openSUSE is the possibility of SUSE SA being acquired again. And as for Fedora, others have already pointed out that its reliance on REHL defeats the purpose of getting away from American tech companies.
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u/DFS_0019287 19d ago
NixOS has its origins in The Netherlands, so maybe they have home-grown talent and developers?
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u/Metro2005 18d ago
Arch linux also has its roots in the Netherlands and is far more popular than nixOS but i'm sure there is a reason they choose nix.
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u/krustyarmor 18d ago
They are protecting the meme. "I use Arch, btw" doesn't quite hit the same if the entire government is using it by default.
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u/Papa_Hube 17d ago
But the first sponsor that appears on their Page is AWS. Thats somewhat... Concerning tho.
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u/DFS_0019287 17d ago
Why? AWS is giving money. They're not controlling development direction.
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u/Papa_Hube 17d ago
They don’t give money. They stepped in with recurring monthly service credit for their services. So, no "independence" of Murica either here. Everything you pull from nix lies on AWS Cloud infrastructure.
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u/DFS_0019287 16d ago
That can probably be changed easily enough if need be. I expect there are European cloud providers who could provide similar service.
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u/Cylian91460 19d ago
It's the best if you want to have similar config across multiple different hardware
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u/Indolent_Bard 19d ago
Even better for that than atomic systems?
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u/Resource_account 19d ago
For this particular use case, yes. Not because atomic distros can’t share configuration, but because NixOS has a configuration model specifically suited to it.
I can define a shared baseline, combine it with role-specific and hardware-specific modules, and compose each machine’s configuration from those pieces. That covers packages, services, users, kernel settings, etc., through the same module system. These aren’t just files being layered over other files: options have types, merge rules and explicit overrides, and modules can reference the resulting configuration from other modules. NixOS Wiki
You can absolutely bake configuration into custom atomic images; I’m not arguing otherwise. But bootc’s model is still fundamentally image-oriented: configuration is built into an image, and more specialized systems are derived from that image. Bootc
That’s the distinction for me. Atomic systems give you a very good way to ship and update a system image; NixOS also gives you a first-class model for describing how a fleet of similar-but-not-identical systems should differ.
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u/Marce7a 19d ago
Doesn't nixos have problem with sandboxing apps?
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u/the_abortionat0r 18d ago
This doesn't make any sense.
How would nix have sandboxing issues? Just configure sandboxes. Its Linux not some alien tech.
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u/Marce7a 18d ago
"Configure" on systems like suse, fedora, rel you don't need configure anything. SELinux and apparmor are out the box.
Not to mention on arch and debian you just install apparmor and you are good to go.
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u/Resource_account 17d ago
That’s a fair criticism of NixOS. Fedora and RHEL have much more mature SELinux integration, and openSUSE has a stronger AppArmor story out of the box.
I just wouldn’t treat that as a general limitation on application sandboxing. NixOS still has the usual Linux mechanisms available: namespaces, cgroups, seccomp, systemd sandboxing, bubblewrap, Flatpak, and so on.
The weaker point for NixOS is really the lack of a similarly mature, distro-wide MAC setup by default. That’s a real gap, but it’s a much narrower one.
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u/Marce7a 17d ago
But can you use presets automatically or configure everything by hand?
Flatpak and firejail have out the box sandbox permissions, rest I don't know.
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u/Resource_account 16d ago
Yeah, some of it is already handled for you. Flatpak and Firejail have profiles/defaults, and many NixOS service modules already apply systemd hardening.
The real gap is that NixOS doesn't have anything comparable to Fedora's mature SELinux policy ecosystem.
Long term, I think the better fit is probably something Nix-native. SELinux and AppArmor assume much more conventional filesystem layouts, while Nix is built around immutable store paths, derivations, and closures. A MAC system that can use that information directly seems like a more natural fit.
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u/krav_mark 18d ago
Nixos systems configuration is in code. That makes it easy to rollout large numbers of standardized, locked down systems. My guess is that that is the reason behind it.
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u/daddyd 18d ago
nixos was created in the netherlands, university of Utrecht
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u/taxrelatedanon 17d ago
my guess would be that the administering an entire office of computers with a declarative configuration could be a big time saver for IT.
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u/victoryismind 18d ago
In nixos you can also choose to install software in userland instead of root, which is good for security. I think you can also elect to "try" software in a container before installing it.
I wish that nix was better with bandwidth, it requires a very fast connection.
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u/newhacker1746 18d ago
If you follow the link in the post it goes to a paragraph that explains that it’s for the practical/pragmatic benefit of the configuration model:
> The choice of NixOS as the technical foundation would not be a coincidence. Unlike a traditional Linux distribution, NixOS allows for declarative management. In other words, the desired state of the system is described in a configuration file, and the machine builds itself in the same way, every time. For the State, this makes it possible to have a controlled, auditable and, above all, sovereign IT equipment.
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u/ivanatorhk 19d ago
I was wondering that too. I suspect it’s the simple configuration file structure?
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u/bubblegumpuma 19d ago
If you're buying hundreds to thousands of the same computer and trying to configure and deploy them in some complex contexts that might include some custom software, you could do a hell of a lot worse than NixOS. It's got its problems but if I were an enterprise or large institution looking to fully move off of Windows, I'd strongly consider going for NixOS.
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u/RalfN 14d ago
NixOS is weirdly suitable for these kind of setups. I don't think it was intentional, but completely declarative and reproducible is exactly what you need. All other distro's still become "artifacts".
It's also very flexible in terms of being able to specialize or adjust for specific departments or organisations while maintaining a single ecosystem.
I also am running NixOS. I used to think its too much effort to bother, but now with LLMs the ability to adjust a single file (or set of files) and keep those source controlled and just have any tweak or customization be properly reproducible across my machines is a godsend. I get the freedom of personalisation to a crazy extent (from custom logic that opens a different shell depending on the monitor it is, to a steam-tv setup where steam big picture mode goes to my HMDI and sends the controller there but never the mouse or keyboard, so i can use my PC while someone is playing games). It's the kind of customization where you would maybe default to Arch for normally, but then it becomes this unique artifact that is hard to reproduce or update.
The distro nobody wants to mention doesn't really live up to its own promise. NixOS weirdly does, but never claims it does. It's very agent friendly. If i'm outsourcing the effort, every tweak i make can be reproducible, documented and in GIT. It's no longer a choice between effort, maintenance and my pick needs. I can get it all.
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u/gtrash81 19d ago
SUSE is garbage.
SLE is too slow for desktops and OpenSuse breaks every other week.
Fedora is mainly developed by Redhat, a US company.
NixOS has sort of hype behind it, like config written in YAML (Ansible and automation are used in the same sentence).
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u/Sweettooth_Banana 19d ago
Bring it develop it and send it.
The less we rely on the U.S. the better.
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u/halvacoffee 18d ago
nixos is really nice for fleet management since you can keep all of computers in lockstep with perfectly identical configurations without ever touching a single one of them
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u/DemonInAJar 18d ago
nixos is kind of annoying for fleet management because there is no good established pulled based reconciliation in the ecosystem. Comin is pretty much the only inplementation and the dutch heavily vibe coded distro kind of goes its own way to build this on top of comin with questionable results.
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u/potetos420 18d ago
nixos declarative configuration and remote deployment features are awesome for managing 100s of machines with the same default apps and config
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u/chin_waghing 19d ago
The EU needs to come together and make one collectively
Call it EUR-OS, pronounced Euros.
Or at least the member states need to have a knowledge sharing platform
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u/ManyHatsAdm 19d ago
NixOS awesome sponsors - AWS, Github. Not very sovereign when upstream is just as in hoc to the US tech companies as the alternative!
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u/tremby 19d ago
If I understand right, Nixos relies heavily on Github, to the point of it being a potential single point of failure. I could be wrong about that but if I'm right I hope some work is being done to mitigate it.
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u/granadesnhorseshoes 18d ago
It's dependent on git the protocol, but not necessarily github. your self-hosted git repo could go down preventing deployments and updates but the machines will still boot and run fine otherwise.
What WILL bite them in the ass sooner or later is all the binary patching shenanigans NixOS employes to make all the instantiated library pathing work.
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u/Recent-Ad5835 18d ago
I think they meant that nixpkgs is hosted at least to some extent on github
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u/potetos420 18d ago
the reasoning is that no other git forge and issue tracker today can handle the huge influx of PRs commits and issues. mirroring the nixpkgs repo elsewhere is a-okay
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u/kaipee 18d ago
OS is one thing.
What about the Software? Usually that's the driver for reverting back to Windows (from past similar efforts).
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u/Zoddo98 18d ago edited 18d ago
More and more LOB tools are getting web-based. When your people just need libreoffice and a few web tools on an intranet, it's becoming easier.
In France, the "gendarmerie" (one of our Police forces) migrated to Linux (precisely, to a custom version of Ubuntu called GendBuntu) about 15 years ago, and it's considered a success. And it was definitely harder back in the days than in today's world of everything-is-a-website.
They still have some Windows computers for specific needs/software than can't be replaced (mostly scientific investigation teams, and some administrative services), but latest numbers says that about 98% of their computers are running GendBuntu.
Of course, not everyone can migrate to Linux. But if you have serious plans or alternatives for the Windows software you need, why not do it?
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u/dragoneye 16d ago
I'd guess that most people can get away with using a web browser for essentially all their work these days which makes their job completely OS agnostic.
This is really one of the biggest drivers making Linux feasible for a wider range of users. Its much easier to get someone to switch OS if most of what they actually do on a computer doesn't change as they spend all their time in a web browser anyway.
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u/kaipee 16d ago
Office workers, particularly government, don't often run Software via their browser.
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u/dragoneye 16d ago
Do you have examples? There are some small minorities of users that need software like Adobe Suite or 3D Modeling that aren't really web based (but even that is slowly shifting), but all the common business functions I can think of use web based software pretty much exclusively. It might be on-prem rather than cloud, but end users still access through the web browser. IT departments generally prefer to mange a server rather than supporting applications on end user PCs, paying a subscription for users to have an account for a service is far easier than managing application licenses and ensuring users have the correct versions installed, etc.
I'm thinking stuff like Office 365/GSuite for general office and email, Salesforce for sales/marketing, Atlassian for project management, SAP/Oracle for PLM and ERP, etc. All of this stuff has long been accessed through a web browser. I'm sure finance is similar but I'm not familiar with the software they use.
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u/lilacomets 19d ago
Fun fact: Nix = niks in Dutch, which means "nothing" in English?
Anyone has in idea what they chose that name?
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u/MevrouwJip 19d ago
NixOS is a thing that already exists, they're just using it as a base. They didn't pick the name.
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u/my_name_isnt_clever 18d ago
That name was picked over two decades ago:
Eelco Dolstra explained it in a footnote in his 2004 LISA paper: build actions in Nix do not see anything that has not been explicitly declared as an input. So the environment is, by default, nothing.
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u/V2UgYXJlIG5vdCBJ 18d ago
I’m happy EU is pro-Linux. But the whole “age verification” surveillance state agenda they’re pushing really yanks my chain. They just wanna doxx everyone. Wouldn’t surprise me if they try to push it into Linux with some made up new laws.
100% guarantee everyone’s passports are gonna end up leaked/hacked sooner or later.
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u/Kaz_Altezza 18d ago
Honestly I like that theyre moving away from windows, but knowing the EU laws you might have to put your damn Birth Certificate in to use it.
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u/iHarryPotter178 19d ago
Why are all the government choosing nixos.. I mean, what's the benefit like not choosing another mainstream distro..?
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u/GOKOP 18d ago
Because NixOS is perfect for fleet management. You can deploy the exact same configuration on hundreds of computers easily
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u/iHarryPotter178 18d ago
never tried nixos. is that usable for noob's in personal laptop?
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u/potetos420 18d ago
yep and if you keep a maintainable configuration it makes moving to a different device super easy
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u/_AACO 18d ago
The IT department at my workplace does that with Ubuntu. What makes nixos special?
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u/joshguy1425 18d ago
Your IT department does so by layering on numerous other tools and even with those tools they can’t accomplish the reproducibility of NixOS.
NixOS is what happens when someone has dealt with the myriad of problems with older ways of fleet management and asks “how can we make all of this easier?”
Strongly recommend looking into it. It’s a super cool project and does things in a fundamentally different way than traditional Linux distros.
You can build a perfectly good house from scratch using hand saws and hammers, but there are far more efficient tools available.
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u/the_abortionat0r 18d ago
You could just Google nixos. Yeah saying "Google it" is a shitty answer but it'll take too long to type vs just reading a doc or watching a YouTube video.
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u/my_name_isnt_clever 18d ago
NixOS is completely unlike every other distro. It's basically it's own category.
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u/Vis0n 18d ago
Given that NixOS is heavily sponsored and partly developed by Anduril, it is a shame than the French and Dutch governments didn't manage to fully disentangle themselves from the US Miltech ecosystem.
It's not really tech sovereignty if you stick a Linux sticker on your US-provided Operating System, not to mention the fascistic, chudded out smells coming from one of the NixOS foundation's prominent members.
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u/mimd-101 9d ago
In gov it, they eventually either require a third party support/someone else to do the kernel/low level software maintenance for drivers, long term support, bugs, etc. That's not nix's cup of tea. But I fear this will be a case of cheap out at the front/shiny, later gnaw to the bone on the cost (which is I think the primary interest) which destabilizes the model, then being forced back to whatever thing they're trying to escape. They should just pony up and start getting suse/similar to not being a pale shadow of rhel if the goal is really sovereignity.
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u/00pirateforever 18d ago
In other words, add some spyware and some other exploits in the background.
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u/the_abortionat0r 18d ago
Exploits for what? Its for government desk job usage, is this the brain rot that click bait YouTube videos produce?
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u/Felfedezni 19d ago
They should be using an atomic distro.
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u/daemonpenguin 19d ago
NixOS is atomic, it's just not immutable.
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u/susanthenerd 19d ago
It is immutable
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u/Kemichal 19d ago
How is it immutable? I can change files under /etc on my nixos system. /nix/store is read-only for me, but not for the nix-daemon, which can write to it. I modify the store indirectly every time I build something.
AFAIK Nixos is atomic and can be setup to be impermanent, but not fully immutable.
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u/smilelyzen 19d ago edited 19d ago
Denmark, Netherlands, France currently running NixOS-based pilots . his move mirrors similar strict digital sovereignty paths across Europe, such as France's Interministerial Digital Directorate (DINUM) moving to its own NixOS-based desktop configurations ("Sécurix" and "Bureautix"), and Denmark launching a NixOS-based pilot for its Road Traffic Authority