Interview about EU OS: ‘Most public servants have never used something else than Windows’

The Spanish techblog ‘MuyLinux’ has interviewed Robert Riemann on EU OS. Find here the English version of the interview.

The interview has been conducted by Jose Pomeyrol and published originally in Spanish on MuyLinux. Find the English version here below.

EU OS logo The other day I noticed something curious: after updating one of the apps I use regularly, it now shows a bold message when starting up — “Made with ❤️ Europe.” It’s similar to the tagline on the credits page of EU OS, a new Linux distribution being discussed in various tech-focused forums these last days. What do these two projects have in common? Among other things, they are both developed in Europe — or at least, their final form is.

Europe, and the European Union in particular, is preparing to face challenges unprecedented in recent history: tensions with Russia and calls for rearmament among Eurozone members; Trump’s return to the White House and a new wave of protectionist policies; and China’s technological rise, especially in AI. Europe must respond on multiple fronts — and the complexity of these issues doesn’t make things any easier.

To explore all this, we exchanged via email with Robert Riemann, master in physics and PhD in computer science, Head of Digital Transformation in the Technology and Privacy Unit of one body of the EU, and project lead of EU OS, a Linux distribution with institutional ambitions… proudly “Made with ❤️ in Brussels.”

I recently read a headline suggesting that EU OS is “the EU’s official Linux distribution” — which isn’t quite accurate. According to the project’s website, it’s a proof of concept for implementing a Linux operating system […] in a typical public sector organisation. The existence of such a project raises several questions: what motivated you to propose something like this? Has the current geopolitical situation influenced your thinking?

Indeed, some writers only see "EU OS" and believe it must be from the Commission. Let me clarify that this is currently a community project that as of now has no support from the EU institutions and is not used by them. So when I get aware of misleading articles, I write them an email and ask to be clear about this. I hope of course that EU OS will be adopted officially in the future.

In my day job, I work for the European Data Protection Supervisor and I often hear that there are no alternatives to Windows. Given the geopolitical situation, I think alternatives are very valuable. Even if you do not use them, they give you more leverage and decrease your exit costs as an organisation. I am already a Linux user for over 15 years. I think the Linux user experience improved drastically during this period. If the administrations in the EU (meaning both on member state and EU level) have not enough phantasy to imagine how using Linux would be, someone needs to build a pilot, so they can try it out themselves. I’ve been building previously pilots in my professional capacity to convince decision makers and had some success. This is how the project EU OS was born. As this project is larger and resources are scarce at work, I work on it in my free time. I think it is too important to not even try due to lack of resources. If you are a Linux admin, please subscribe to our issues tracker and join our Matrix channel. EU OS needs as much help as it can get.

Although EU OS is described not as just another distribution but rather a common base upon which tailored solutions for different countries or use cases could be built, in the end it is still a distribution. Specifically, it’s based on Fedora and KDE Plasma. Why this combination? And more importantly, why not a European-origin distribution such as Debian or SUSE?

I received this question often and answered in great detail on the project website. If organisations want to actually assume control, they need to in-source the development and maintenance of the operating system. Already today, public sector organisations struggle to recruit IT talent. So the two options to deploy Linux at scale in the public sector would be to outsource to an Enterprise Linux company or to collaborate for the development and maintenance with the community and with other public sector organisations. The latter already works quite well for Docker/Podman containers. When I learnt first about how the bootable container (bootc) technology permits to build containers with Kernels included, so that those containers are bootable on desktop machines, I thought that this matches the collaboration style of the public sector quite well: sharing Containerfiles and building customisations locally to stay in control and maintain autonomy all while reusing existing container IT infrastructure.

bootc builds on top of rpm-ostree, which is stable for some time and also used by e.g. flatpak applications. The ecosystem is quite vivid, but all its adopters belong to the fedora family: fedora, CentOS stream, universal blue, AlmaLinux and few smaller more. SUSE does not support bootc. SUSE’s Kalpa is only in alpha and their technology is less suited. I acknowledge that Debian is popular, but Fedora has apparently thanks to Redhat Linux more consistent tooling for enterprise users. This is important for enterprise users.

However, as far as I understood SUSE also offers professional services for fedora-like distributions. Their build service supports also fedora. So EU OS could still leverage some tools and know-how from SUSE. Maybe SUSE manages in the future to support bootc as well. Then it would be easy to switch to opensuse base images in EU OS.

KDE is mostly a personal choice. Schlewig-Holstein apparently also selected KDE for their desktop. This gave me some confidence. For the piloting of EU OS, the choice of the desktop environment is not so important as long as with one bootc command, one can easily switch between KDE and Gnome based images. Of course I hope, that we can agree on one desktop environment later on and do not have to support both.

Redhat Linux, RockyLinux, and AlmaLinux compete currently for similar use cases. This keeps the exist costs down from any of those and offers a competitive market. That’s important. Redhat and SUSE have both business in the US and the EU. These are global companies. Many FOSS projects rely on contributions from all over the world and I think this is international collaboration is very inspiring. It would be unfair to judge and select FOSS projects by the origin of their core team or office address only.

Looking deeper into the choice of base system, I noticed you’re not just referring to Fedora, but specifically to Fedora Kinoite, the immutable KDE edition. And when someone suggested Kalpa (openSUSE), you dismissed it citing a couple of technical reasons. Beyond the detail: wouldn’t it be reasonable for a project with EU OS’s aspirations to aim higher? I mean: if something’s missing, we make it happen — but we build it in-house.

I totally agree. Unfortunately, it is not happening already and I don’t believe I can make it happen now for two reasons:

  1. EU OS does not have enough volunteers who contribute in code. With many, EU OS could be more ambitious.
  2. The public sector is not convinced and resources are scarce. To justify more resources for something like EU OS, EU OS first needs to build some traction. Most public servants have never used something else than Windows. I assume it is no different for most IT decision makers.

I invite the readers to ask themselves what they have done so far: Have you talked to your local, national or EU parliamentarians? To political parties? How many have signed the recent European Parliament petition? Only 2500 people in the entire European Union. It was maybe not the best text, but nobody submitted since then a better one. It seems to me the Linux community hasn’t learnt yet how to organise campaigns. Commenting on tech blogs and Mastodon resonates in our own echo chamber, but does not reach the average politician, IT decision maker or user in the public sector.

On the project’s motivation page, you explicitly mention campaigns like Public Money? Public Code! launched years ago by the Free Software Foundation Europe. You also reference similar initiatives to EU OS. In Spain, there have been some interesting success stories. For example, in the region of Valencia, public primary school students have been using LliureX, an Ubuntu-based system adapted to their needs, for years. And there are more examples. But whenever these initiatives are discussed, the same criticisms usually arise — especially regarding supposed resource waste, arguing that existing solutions could be reused. What’s your view on this criticism? And what do you think are the real chances of implementing an operating system at a European level, even as a shared base that different institutions and public bodies could adapt to their own needs — which is exactly what EU OS aims to offer?

The added value of EU OS is not to use Linux is some public sector organisations. As you point out rightly, Linux is already used in Europe and also Spain specifically, so this has been proven to work.

However, all those projects are very much isolated from each other. EU OS offers an added value as it proposes to use bootable container technology (bootc). bootc has security advantages and eases the collaboration, so that organisations can mutualise the efforts of a migration from Windows and the operations afterwards. Given the scarcity of budget and IT experts in the public sector, this collaboration could be decisive to start a migration in the first place.

Initially, EU OS could be setup in 3 or 4 specific organisations that require (for some users) more control than Windows 11 may be able to offer.

To achieve further than more control also cost savings, scaling effects must be achieved through replacing licensed Windows computers with EU OS (or other Linux distributions) on a large scale. To pay a team of 10 IT experts (est. 160k€/a) one would need to replace Windows 11 (est. 100€/a)1 on 16k workplaces. From the 80k people working for or in an EU administration, this would mean 20%. From the 2.9 Mio people working in the Spanish public sector,2 this would mean 0.6%. Higher adoption would then lead to savings. These are of course just some basic estimates that do not factor in IT support yet.

You currently work for the EU as Head of Digital Transformation in the Technology and Privacy Unit. Can you explain what your job actually entails? And beyond that: to what extent can your position help push forward a project like EU OS within EU institutions? What would the path look like for it to be considered officially, receive funding, and ultimately grow under the EU’s wing?

Until the Commission is recruiting me to speak publicly about EU OS, I shall keep separate my work and this personal project. Only that much: Obviously, my work experience helps me to understand how I need to position EU OS to make it appealing. It doesn’t mean though I cannot be mistaken.

The path is entirely unclear. At best citizens would ask their members of the European Parliament to discuss this in the European Parliament and their governments to discuss this in the Council of the European Union. Meanwhile, I look for partners to support the piloting.

At MuyLinux we’ve followed several EU open source initiatives in recent years — from bounty programmes to evaluations of open source applications and services like Signal, or more recently, Nextcloud and Collabora Online. Since you work for the EU: how well is open source software actually adopted in EU institutions? Not just on the server side, but also for end users. What’s the overall picture? And what about your own case — or your department’s?

I can point your to a press release: https://www.edps.europa.eu/edps-inspection-software_en

For more information from public organisations, you need to ask them, not me.

I recently interviewed Gerald Pfeifer, CTO of SUSE, about the new geopolitical context and its implications for Europe. He’s confident that Open Source will be key to Europe’s digital future — and I agree. But we don’t fully see eye to eye on one issue: the balance between digital sovereignty and economic competitiveness. If the EU is known for one thing, it’s regulation — sometimes fragmented across member states, even if unification efforts are underway. The aim is to protect citizens, but it often slows innovation. What’s your take on this?

I think the Draghi report written for the European Commission offers some answers answer. I do not think this balancing act is so important for the ambitions of EU OS.

Following up on that: I can understand the benefits of having a community -on a european community sense- OS for Europe. But we’re missing big tech players: we don’t have a Google, a Microsoft, a Meta or an Amazon in Europe. How independent are we, really? Or how independent can we hope to be, when 90% of Europeans rely on Gmail and WhatsApp to communicate, use Microsoft Office for work, and shop on Amazon?

Important is that with EU OS, the EU would be more independent than before. EU OS could be considered as a building block of another, broader initiative to increase the strategic IT sovereignty in the European Union: https://euro-stack.eu is a proposal backed by some members of the European Parliament and the industry. The proposal considers the entire digital supply chain. People should translate their worries or hopes into actions. Everyone can join a political party or non-partisan initiative and promote change. People who can subscribe to the ideas of the euro stack initiative should promote it.

Beyond global tensions, various EU member states have for years tried to spy on their own citizens, or at least to push for more control over communications systems, encryption, and so on — all in the name of national security. Are we perhaps a bit too self-righteous in Europe when comparing ourselves to foreign powers? How much trust can we really place in our own governments?

EU OS focuses on corporate computers only that the government distributes to their own staff. Already today, people have a lot of choice of alternative operating systems. In this context, I like to mention the initiative https://endof10.org that promotes the migration from Windows 10 to Linux for non-corporate private computers.

Then, it is not my role to judge the trustworthiness of governments. The EU grants a lot of rights to citizens to protect their privacy from both the private and public sector – most famously the GDPR. Use these rights!

And finally, just out of curiosity: you're not just a technocrat. From your social media, it’s clear you have a genuine interest in free and open technologies. Tell us a bit more about that. On a personal level... what do you run on your PC? What free software projects are you most passionate about, and why?

I guess I use the same tools on my private computer that most physicists or scientists working with data would use on their Linux computer. The only difference is that I joint after my PhD the public service. So I have to use a Windows computer as well during week days – let’s see for how long still! ;)

Since my first semester in 2007 (maybe even a bit early), I used opensuse (back then they called it differently) on my own computer and Debian in the university. 2024, I switched to opensuse Kalpa and then to Fedora Kinoite.

I am a member of the Chaos Computer Club, of KDE, of Matrix and lend a hand to keep OpenStreetMap updated. They all help to shape the IT infrastructure for our democratic societies. However, I do not hold formal roles on these projects.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this interview are personal and do not represent directly or indirectly the views of the European Data Protection Supervisor.

  1. Microsoft offers various bundles and reductions to governments that are mostly confidential. So this is only a very rough estimate based on a 3^rd^ party website: https://m365.de/en/ ↩︎

  2. Based on data from https://thecorner.eu/news-spain/spain-economy/historic-record-of-public-employment-2-9-million-with-22840-more-in-1q23/105699/ ↩︎