FYI - I did some contracting in a fairly large Australian commonwealth govt agency - and - Fedora was one of the available desktop choices… I’d imagine probably mostly only for scientists (the agency did “the weather”) and IT staff… but all the same - it was great!
I started using a RHEL 7 desktop - then it was replaced with a brand new desktop machine running Fedora - fairly current version too (this was in 2017).
And part of the contract role was some basic desktop linux support for “power users” around the country…
I’d love to have stayed on there - but the funds for contractors died out at the end of that financial year with no renewal…
I’m also aware of another government (commonwealth) quasi-government (they’re called Quangos - I think I remember “Yes Minister” using that term) org that use Linux desktops (Ubuntu).
Same in Australia, it is piecemeal adoption, not a policy
" Yes, the Australian government does use Linux. Several government agencies have adopted Linux for various IT infrastructure needs, including the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, Centrelink, and the Bureau of Meteorology. Additionally, the Australian government has developed and uses govCMS, a Drupal-based content management system, which runs on Linux."
What users of it get for the money is that this versions ingredients are tested more thoroughly and beyond that those users get technical support in case of a problem. This means of course the code base is more mature (maybe called “older” just like with Debian), so lacks the bleeding edge shiny new features.
So they don’t pay for the binary packages, but for the testing of the components, and for the support in case of a question - no need to wait for an appropriate answer from a forum member (uncertain amount of time), but get a prompt answer from a well paid expert…
Same with Red Hat Enterprise Linux - it’s still opensource… But if you’re registered with RHN - you can open support tickets for issues… And their engineers are very good too - I’ve only ever logged a case once with Red Hat - that was earlier this year. Was having trouble getting SSSD to authenticate Active Directory users… Never actually resolved the case 'cause a “developer” using the system basically broke the whole thing (moved /usr/lib and /usr/bin somewhere else) - so I had to trash that VM (it was an AWS EC2 instance) and start all over again…
Most people just say SUSE these days - when they probably mean “OpenSUSE”…
Right now, EU OS is not a project of the European Union. Instead, EU OS is a community-led Proof-of-Concept. This means it is lead by a community of volunteers and enthusisasts.
The project goal is to become a project of the European Commission in the future and use https://code.europa.eu. For this EU OS is in touch with the public administration on member state and EU level. So far, EU OS relies on EU OS · GitLab.