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Comment by apatheticonion | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see the EU aggressively expand investment in the Linux desktop. I'd absolutely drop my job and jump on FOSS projects if there was financial incentive to do so - I'd even take a hit on compensation to participate.

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Windows is making people annoyed more and more (saying this as a guy who grew up with it and is still not anti windows) and with the recent trump 2 / use-european-tech .. it might be a clear enough narrative for people to try linux distros. Fedora 41 on a 2015 laptop is lean and cute.. enough for most normies IMO. It could be a boost for everybody, no need to buy a new laptop, simpler times without Microsoft pulling shenanigans every year, more open source market share.

ps: just in time for https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1kc074t/linux_us_mar...

Yes, the are making consumers more and more annoyed. The are not making enterprises annoyed. All the bloat and ads that we hear about again and again is not present in their enterprise offering.

They are investing in FOSS, it just needs Linux desktop folks to apply for funding from them, which is happening to some extent.

https://nlnet.nl/ https://www.sovereign.tech/ https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources

Same, I'd love if the EU sponsored the development of open source alternatives. I'm tired of the American tech industry and how it's towing the (anti-European) party line - just give me a way to make a living while building competitors!

They do https://nlnet.nl/core/ with https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101092990

What they already contribute is amazing, honestly. My concern is that, in order to build a genuine competitor to Windows, investment needs to increase substantially.

As it stands, getting into kernel development or working on something like a desktop environment (or adjacent software like Firefox or Chromium) is quite difficult in a way that supports you financially.

I mean, as individuals, we still invest personal time into public domain projects because we love to tinker and build stuff - but sadly we can't afford to do that full time.

This is where governments need to step in. We need grants to open source contributors as a national security priority. If you're helping build alternatives to American Big Tech, the state should sponsor that.

The way Linux kernel stuff works, is you do a Linux internship with GSoC or Outreachy or LKMP , and then core Linux contributing companies like Intel, AMD etc gobble you up. Or you join FOSS consultancies Like Igalia, Bootlin, Collabora etc. Or you go the rockstar Patreon way like Asahi folks, trading off money for independence.

https://lwn.net/Articles/997959/ https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources

Igalia is probably the best option for getting into core browser/etc work, they are hiring for WebKit/Chromium and are also working on Servo.

https://www.igalia.com/jobs/open/

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