LET’S GO DEEEEBIAAAAAAAAAN!
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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Are the numbers real?
annual revenue of backing company:
- ubuntu/debian: ca. 300m$
- suse: ca. 700m$
That's astonishing
I fully support the choice of fedora with bootc. It's an amazing technology. But it's somewhat sad that it's not a European linux base for European institutions.
Edit: Nunbers for suse are correct: ARR FY 664.9
Ubuntu is also correct
Oh imagine if canonical gave even a fraction of that back to Debian.
You mean like by hiring a significant chunk of Debian maintainers, including the most active apt developer, by having their employees maintain a significant chunk of Debian packages, and by explicitly upstreaming their patches to Debian?
Jep, SUSE is quite big. Ubuntu is only more popular among private users
I guess suse has big profitable gov contracts
Fedora Kionite because no one likes gnome 3. Suse ane ubuntu are also good choices. SELinux or Apparmor? That is the question.
I prefer Silverblue & its minimalism. That said I just jumped back on Fedora Atomic Cosmic and is far enough along I will use it as the daily going forward & watch it develop. Its nice.
I do like cosmic. XFCE also works on wayland now. Lots of options.
Corollary from the article: if every major distro uses Red Hat tech, it's a sign that there's a lack of funding from other sources for the core OS development. The goal of an "EU OS" project should be to identify and push forward the yet-unexplored or resource-lacking areas of such development, with EU funds. To be a friendly competitor and collaborator to Red Hat. Not to rebrand whatever distro for local usage.
Exactly. Linux is often held high as an example of how to realize tech sovereignty. Most of it is repackaged work by Red Hat. That’s still a dependency. If the US made a law restricting export of source code, this would have immediate consequences to Linux use in Europe.
Interesting that the straightforward answer of "obviously open suse" isn't it. I'd need to dig more into the technical restrictions they want to understand this situation better.
I'm surprised suse has jumped in and offered their expertise.
Well, I prefer Arch, but a major factor in that preference is the fact that some software I rely on for my work is very hard to find on other distributions and that creates unnecessary hassle for me.
Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu are both pretty solid choices for a base OS, but Fedora might be more robust in the long run.
Fedora is not really a community distro, the way Debian is.
Fedora is also one of the most US-cocksucking distros of the bunch, what with being RedHat-derivative.
It's not a Red Hat derivative. It's upstream of Red Hat.
In a way Fedora is like interim Ubuntu releases, CentOS Stream is like LTS Ubuntu releases, and RHEL is like Ubuntu Pro. So if you want to stay away from a US company, Fedora isn't a great idea.
What software for example?
The main example I'm thinking of is SageMath, which is available in the default Pacman repositories but is not maintained as a package in Debian or Fedora.
You can build it from scratch, and I've done this before on Fedora systems, but it's much easier to install the latest version with a single command.
Its nice seeing a comparison of linuxes like this. Honestly it just seems to me that opensuse would make the best starting point. Government can fund filling holes and its pretty much the redhat of europe.
To get our answer, has the meme sub done "which Linux distro is your European country" yet?
Germany seems like an Arch user.
I think that is confirmed as Sovereign tech agency (as an initiative of ministry of digital transformation and government modernization) donated to Arch in 2024.
From my knowledge it was the only instance of any such donations by a government to a community project.
FYI, RH Satellite doesn't support deb, but Foreman does (state from 3 years ago). RH has no interest in fixing this, for some strange reason.
It’s not in Red Hat interest to accommodate other package managers.
Exactly. Despite on the tin saying they support rpm and deb both. Official reaction (to a major gov customer): wontfix.
If you’re big enough, interoperability still costs and provides little benefit. Vendor lock-in is also a thing between distros.
If you want to provision a mix of different VMs in a sizable environment using Satellite and can't, it's a strike against a RH ecosystem. Another strike is susceptibility to US sanctions. And a third one: you should see what RH consultants charge, and aggregate cost of RH licenses.
These days any sane mid-sized government should encourage local open source ecosystem and talent. And be it just for the sake of souvereignity.
Fully agreed.
The problem is that most of the GNU/Linux ecosystem - the kernel, GNU, systemd, GNOME - are largely developed (thus, dominated) by U.S. companies. Repackaging U.S. software in the EU does not make the software "made in EU".
European operating system projects, like 9front (mostly German), aren't really for the light-hearted.
Sounds like a pretty good argument for ditching both gnome and systemd in one swift go, which can only sound like a win. Perhaps we'll be seeing a supervisord- or openrc-based Linux distro for the EU.
Or we could finally have a good OpenBSD desktop distribution.
Now that would be an interesting outcome.