I read the sovereign to mean something like an unified platform for EU institutions, that you can dev and train people on.

dependent on the whims of a US defense contractor like RedHat/IBM

A very good point.

I was wondering the same when I came across it a few hours ago and decided to look into it, apparently it’s because it was decided to use an atomic distribution as a base and Suses is apparently not considered stable enough by them. (I can not argue the validity of these statements given either way, that’s just what I found in one of their gitlab issues . if someone wants to look at it for themselves, searching for Fedora on the issue tracker should bring it up)

Mint and Ubuntu have Debian as an upstream, don't they?

Debian is a US legal entity, so if it was required to sanction countries, it feels that software built with it would likely be restricted.

For me, it's a perfectly fitting compromise, because Fedora is a community that is detached from RedHat and IBM, but it is also the best distribution out there.

They are pushing the envelope and have been for some time. If it weren't for Fedora devs we wouldn't have seen Wayland, PipeWire, Nouveau, etc be pushed to the general public. Also Fedora a libre distribution built by community. If that were ever to change they'd hemorrhage devs.

Compare that with Ubuntu. They want a vendor lock-in via Snaps (and in one point in time Mir), they're currently replacing coreutils (copyleft) with uutils (copyright) and have what I would say is a pretty bad and convoluted GPU stack.

OpenSuSE could probably be a better alternative, if they took the Linux desktop seriously. But they play second fiddle to Fedora and have not even been close enough to push the envelope like Fedora has.

In conclusion Fedora is the best libre Linux distributions out there.

Now if Eelco Doolstra wasn't fucking around, we could have had a super LTS NixOS - but NOOOO.

As far as I'm concerned, open-source has no nationality, even for a public-sector project. Yes, Red Hat is American. They also don't own Fedora.

From the very start, we've been built on the contributions of people from every corner of the globe, why should we care about petty geographical squabbles like this?

Probably since it's the main redhat upstream and they want the advantage of already widespread usage.

Although at that point why not OpenSUSE for the same reason you mentioned.

They should call it EUROS.

This is specifically for the public sector. The fact that it is open source make it adaptable to different scenarios.

From the subheading on the ReadMe.

Community-led Proof-of-Concept for a free Operating System for the EU public sector 🇪🇺

So it's made by the EU in the sense that the maintainers are likely citizens of the EU, I guess.

As a Swede we claim all of linux to be finno-swedish :)

I mean Fedora is open source but if they really wanted a european base, they could have gone with opensuse. AFAIK opensuse is the only fully european linux distro plus they use many of the same tech that redhat/fedora does.

Ultimately I think it doesn't matter too much since even the linux foundation is based in the US and large parts of what makes the linux desktop are maintained by non-EU companies (on top of all the major projects hosted by Github, Gitlab including most of Flathub). If its all open source, I think the risks are pretty low e.g. huawei was able to use Android despite all the restrictions.

The Qt foundation tried to get fucky once already, and KDE and some other major companies that rely on it were about ready to fork it if they persisted. Qt seemed to calm down after that.

Not a great relationship to be in though, constantly suspecting that your toolkit might do a rugpull at some point if the shareholders demand it. But I think they could pull off a fork if they ever did.