The spat with the OBS devs was due to a fedora package maintainer refusing to package OBS with an older library for their own Fedora Flatpak repo, despite the newer library causing severe breakage with OBS (which is why the OBS devs held it back in the flathub release).

I don’t think there are many distributions that are truly free, at least not in the eyes of the FSF. Fedora is not one of them.

but for what benefit? […] fedora is going to have off the shelf solutions

Yes, but that’s my point: fedora is already fully featured… the work needed is trivial, to the point that directly using an installation of fedora by itself (along with tools like ansible) wouldn’t be very different from doing he same with EU OS… at that point you don’t need a whole new distro, just Fedora and maybe some trivial scripts (which you are gonna need anyway in any large scale installation, even if you went with EU OS).

Imho, there would be more value if something actually novel was used, and new guides and howtos were created to simplify/clarify things that used to be hard. What would be a pity is to spend a lot of euros for something that is trivial to do, and that only helps filling the pockets of some corrupt politician’s friend. I mean, I’m not against a simple thing, but then I’d hope they at least showed how they will be spending the budget on some other way (marketing? …will there be actual custom software? …are they gonna maintain the entire repo themselves?).

well, the actual software and configuration i’d argue aren’t the important part - owning the infrastructure is the important part…

But I was not arguing against that. And if they did promise to do that, then that would be different. The problem is precisely that I’m expecting them to NOT own most of the infrastructure and instead rely on Fedora repositories, because from experience that’s how these things usually go.

I repeat the full context of the section you quoted: “I guess we’ll have to see how much they customize it, but in my experience with previous attempts, I’m expecting just a re-skin, just Fedora with different theme”

Maybe you have a different experience with government-managed distros, but there have been some attempts at that in my (european) country that were definitely not much more than a reskinned Ubuntu (and before that, Debian) from back in the day. They used Ubuntu repositories (ie. Ubuntu infrastructure), and the only extra repo they added was not a mirror, but just hosted a few packages that were actually produced by them and were responsible for the theming, reskining and defaults. They used metapackages that depend on upstream packages to control what was part of the default desktop environment, there might have been a few more extra packages (mainly backports), but very few and always lagging behind alternative backport repos. Uninstall the metapackage (which you might do if you wanna remove some of the preinstalled things) and it literally was Ubuntu straight from Ubuntu official repos. There was no filtering, no veto, no replacing, no mirroring.

Also, just to keep things grounded in the initial point: do you really think that Fedora / Red Hat would not benefit at all from it?

Government is only in the clutches of MS because MS bribes officials to maintain their cancerous software as a staple everywhere in Europe… Hungary is one of a few quite famous cases of bribery.

There’s no depth to my loathing of MS and its illegal and anti-competitive practices.

If they are honest about what they are suggesting … the first step would be to be explicitly clear about who THEY are and WHO they represent.

I really don’t care that much about the technical side of things because I’m not that technically knowledgeable. However, I am more apt to trust the judgment or recommendations of prominent people in the industry (that are not corporately attached or controlled) … I would also trust public institutions or journalists or academics with a track record of social advocacy and wanting to represent people instead of corporations or businesses. I would also trust politicians or political advocates that mostly represent people and public institutions.

I really don’t put my faith in any one person no matter who they claim to be to just say they want to build something meaningful and give me no information on their background, who they worked for, who they represent or what kind of people or organizations they associate with. There have been far too many ‘good natured’ technocrats and technology people from the past decade or two who claim to say that they want to change the world for the better and then end up wanting to burn it all down for a profit.

Nah, just going along with Ukraine war and letting it get to and pushing to the point of war is a testament that Washington and Brussels are a foreign policy monolith. That finally sold it for me. EU is ready to sacrifice it’s interests to drive their perceived transatlantic interests that the two political classes mostly share. EU political elite and media mainly hate Trump because he showed that EU capitals and Brussels are bunch of losers with no real political agency, who got conned into supporting and prolonging this unwinnable war to the hilt and are now being left to hold the bag.

First concrete move towards EU independence would be to stop this war and normalize with Russia, but in this fucked up world Trump wants both and EU wants neither. That is the fucked up world we live in. EU wants further conflict on it’s continent and US doesn’t want a war in Europe.

I do personally want European independence, but I see that EU in it’s current state is not a force for it, nor is it good for Europeans.

They’ll stop receiving updates, but we don’t have to switch over in a week right?

Ubuntu is just an example {{insert any Debian based distro here}}