EU OS drafts a locked-down Linux blueprint for Eurocrats

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

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

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

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

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

If it were us, we would have made some significantly different choices. We feel that KDE Plasma is overly complicated for a desktop environment that would need to be strictly locked down. Immutable Fedora is quite mature, but European alternatives do exist, notably the openSUSE-based Kalpa Desktop.

More importantly, the concept of the rich local desktop OS is getting old and stale in this era of ransomware attacks. We feel that the FOSS world needs to build its own equivalent of ChromeOS - a simple, stripped-down stateless client desktop, with at least dual failover local partitions, which can talk over open protocols to sovereign cloud servers that organizations can host themselves. All the tools are there; it just needs someone to put the pieces together.

However, that is a whole other argument. The EU OS project is hosted on GitLab, and from the source code we can see that it started on Christmas Day. For an effort that's only been in development for quarter of a year, it's plain that a lot of thought has gone into it. We really hope this grows into a significant and influential effort. ®

Bootnote

Before anyone writes in, yes, we are well aware that ChromiumOS exists, and it is open source. However, it's designed and built to authenticate and synchronize only to Google's cloud. What we would like to see is something that could not only authenticate against open standards such as LDAP or OpenID, but also sync files over WebDAV or the like, as well as bookmarks, passwords, profile settings, and so on. At least for now, ChromiumOS doesn't qualify - and neither do ChromeOS Flex or FydeOS.