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Comment by aplanas | Hacker News Reader

What I do not understand is why not to work with the openSUSE community, or fork from them. But instead use a USA based distro like Fedora.

openSUSE has all their tooling based in EU ground. For example, OBS that is the build service, has the machines around Germany or Prague. A big bulk of the community is EU based, (with very relevant contributors from many other places), and SUSE, the company that is helping (via infra and some packages) is from Germany.

I do not known if sovereignty makes sense in the open source world, as at the end is a joint effort of multiple developers from many (and some times confronted) places, but if it does make sense then I would value more those other criteria.

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Especially weird since the dude behind it is professionally situated in data protection policy work.

Going with effing IBM is a really weird thing to do for his "Proof-of-Concept". Debian for its robustness or openSUSE for being distinctly european would have been much more inspiring.

https://blog.riemann.cc/resume/

I agree. I use both and have a slight preference towards Fedora these days, but nevertheless I believe that the foundation for the EU OS should be a European distro. Practically there is very little difference between OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Fedora.

nowadays, it's board is 3/5 American too

As of February 2025, the Board has the following members:

    Dr. Gerald Pfeifer (Austria), Chair
    Ish Sookun (Mauritius)
    Jeff Mahoney (United States)
    Rachel Schrader (United States)
    Shawn W Dunn (United States)
    Simon Lees (Australia

> I do not known if sovereignty makes sense in the open source world

It doesn't. I read stuff like this as a way to ride jingoist currents.

Especially not in a software sense as compared to hosting where as a general rule someother jurisdiction than your own is prefarable.

Maybe there is a need for some sort of "Programmer without borders" soon if FOSS turns too much to nationalist quarrel.

And there's no clear value-add here. I am particularly adamant that Linux needs to move towards reproducibility yesterday, since the ability to inject spyware in Linux is first and foremost a process risk.

That is a key area too. I know that most of the distros are working in that direction[1], and in the case of Fedora, openSUSE or Debian they are reaching high level of reproducibility.

Those distributions are making huge efforts in keeping a core that is 100% reproducible, working upstream to fix issues, and providing reporting and tests tools to detect regressions (for example [2])

This is why a fork is usually a bad approach.

[1] https://reproducible-builds.org/who/projects/ [2] https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Reproducible_Builds

There already is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Univention_Corporate_Server

Not a fan. When I tried it a few years ago, I acquired significant painful scar tissue. It was very Windows-centric, and Linux support was an afterthought. It was more arcane than Active Directory.

After I left Univention behind, I migrated to JumpCloud. It has its faults. Linux support is also secondary to Windows support, but for me, it was several orders of magnitude easier to work with than Univention or Active Directory.

I miss NIS. It made many aspects of managing a collection of Linux machines much easier than anything to date. I hope that the future EU project does not adopt Univention, or anything like Active Directory. Instead, look to where NIS was successful, where JumpCloud is successful, and come up with a better solution overall.

Hrrm. I mentioned them, because I've used parts of their stuff in the past. Never their full distro, though I know people who did in the field of schools.

So they seem to know the stuff necessary to integrate in larger orgs with heterogenous systems.

Scar tissue seems to be unavoidable from Linux POV having to play well with Windows as it is, and has to be deployed in larger orgs.

Whatever. I doubt that this EU-OS people even have a clue about the basics of that.

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