I work in the administration of the EU in Brussels, but I write here in my personal capacity. From my observations, it is now high time to offer a proof of concept (POC) “plasma workstation” as an alternative to the pending update from Windows 10 to Windows 11.
As nobody is working on this in an official capacity to my knowledge, I try to steer this in my free time without budget hopeful of the involvement of the free software community to lend a helping hand.
Note that the region of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany has decided to migrate to a Linux work space (according to rumours with KDE Plasma). Their project is “Linux + 1” and it is extremely difficult to get any details on the project status.
KDE already has one distro in production and one in development which could be used as a base for it, KDE neon and KDE Linux.
I would think the first step is to define what would be the needs of the distro which weren’t already satisfied by an existing one. I imagine it’s to do with security and how long support is available.
This is very exciting. If you need any assistance from us in the Fedora KDE team, feel free to reach out. @siosm and myself are happy to provide assistance where we can.
I’ve made many Fedora derivatives over the years (the most famous one today that I’ve made is the Fedora Asahi Remix), so I’m happy to guide on building/branding them.
at first, i’d like to suggest to think in a similar direction like jriddell and clearly investigate the requirements.
I’d suggest to build a kanban-board to collect and track the to dos.
If a institutional “client” is our “customer”, there may be certain obligations to take into account. Plus, at some point an “offer” like this may have to satisfy specific formats, to have it recognised.
Besides this “elementary” parameters, it makes sense to understand as much as possible during the “requirements engineering” to be able to choose a path that finally leads to a “product” which can be placed. And one of the key questions could be to understand how to reach this POC the most efficient way. Is it by building something from scratch with KDE on it, or taking something existing et cetera.
So, since i work a lot with institutional obligations (e.g. DORA etc.) feel free to point me out to documents or links to analyse to support this.
Dear @jriddell , I am convinced Fedora Kinoite (Atomic) would tick most boxes. It is a matter of configuration and customisation, which could be done with the layering technology that these Atomic spins offer.
Then, if it comes to support, the base image could be replaced by something from Redhat for enterprise support. Or any other company willing to help. For me, this aspect is not part of the POC.
@tuxaddict, very true, we need to map the requirements. Unfortunantely, I am not an expert, but only a by-stander in such discussions.
In any case, I have created already a project website with a repo and its issue tool can serve as a kanban.
I will attend the 38c3 and talk to people at the fedora and kde booth and whoever else I can find to fill the project with life.
Will the OS be remotely managed and if so how? At least in Latin America most computers in government are remotely managed using active directory from my understanding
Dear @jriddell, i was already in discussion with the KDE Board members to discuss about our project W2LE (Windows to Linux Environment Project) here at our local authority “Saint Martin d’Uriage”, a small city above Grenoble, France. I can forward to you our emails.
I got an answer from Nate Graham saying that some french organization like Enioka Haute Couture already paid developers to improve functionalities in KDE.
On our side, we believe that KDE4&5 (I am using Kubuntu for 14 years now for a private usage) are stable enough to deploy in the profesionnal environment. Some barriers are still there (administration of linux computers, usage of libreoffice vs msword…) but with a group of European people and developers, i think we can achieve great product.
As public organization, we have little money to invest for some developments but still we have some budget.
We would like to :
replace Active Directory by Microsoft towards an open-source Identity and Policy Management Solution called FreeIPA (https://www.freeipa.org/) made for Linux (derived from RedHat).
develop some automatisation to mount (at sddm startup) shared folders using for instance NextCloud solution
maintain Kmail as primary email client
save/restore kde profile of each user every day
make sure that printing service is efficient and compatible with all application (Okular, Libreoffice…)
make sure that package manager is configured to avoid updates that have not been tested on hardwares before to avoid bad experience after uncontrolled updates.
make sure that hard disk encryption is enforced without making user enter a boot up password
make sure that we can configure/force Brave or Firefox browser settings through the OS
configure SELinux to provide better security
make sure that OS can handle certificate manager for applications
If you have any contacts of politicians in EU who can support with money this project to go through, i am interested to be in contact with them.
It will save a lot of public money in Europe avoiding expensive licensing costs, extend end of life of end-user device and providing better efficiency or Quality of Experience for everyday workers by designing new functionnalities on our own.
What i know from France National Gendarmerie, their system is based on gnome. I prefer using KDE to migrate user from Windows to Linux with the killer app Dolphin (far more straigh forward to use compared to Nautilus).
Do you have any contacts or anything in writing about Linux on government computers in Latin America? I remember that Brazil is a vivid user, but don’t know much in detail!
I have met people from La DINUM. I know La Suite in and OpenDesk in . I would like to learn more about this project W2LE. Are you in touch with Inria Grenoble then?
I would appreciate if you can share with me on our Gitlab or in private your requirement catalogue. (j’ai étudié en France – alors si c’est en français – pas de problème !) In anyway, let’s stay in touch!
The petitioner calls for the European Union to actively develop and implement a Linux-based operating system, termed ‘EU-Linux’, across public administrations in all EU Member States. This initiative aims to reduce dependency on Microsoft products, ensuring compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and promoting transparency, sustainability, and digital sovereignty within the EU. The petitioner emphasizes the importance of using open-source alternatives to Microsoft 365, such as LibreOffice and Nextcloud, and suggests the adoption of the E/OS mobile operating system for government devices. The petitioner also highlights the potential for job creation in the IT sector through this initiative.
@emmanuel_charruau, others and myself have established stable contacts in the French and Valencian public educational system and have had frequent in-person meetings with representatives.
This would be another area of the European public administration worth bringing to the table: all those machines in underfunded schools that need renewing every time MS update their version number. Leaving the education of our children in the hands of US multinational tech companies is probably not a sound strategy
Hi RRiemann,
We may have a key to make KDE a key component for EU computing infrastructure. After reading your post and after some discussions with Paul, we decided to give the official start to a project that took live this summer at Ludovia, a major french education event.
We met there some of the Primtux developpers. Primtux is the french National Education Linux distribution, based so far on Linux Mint.
Primtux is a very convenient education distribution, just watching the video presentation on their main website page will give you a taste of how easy it is to use for pupils. www.primtux.fr
We asked them today if they agree that we port it to KDE, internationalise it and make it “The European Primary School Computing Environnement”. They agreed
We all know that bottom class computers will in a very large proportion not be renewed in octobre 2025, letting city computing teams in needs of alternatives, and we are talking there, if we take one PC for 22 pupils from 1 million PC.
That is where KDE Linux could become indispensable to EU.
One plan to make KDE a European tool would then be to start with the development of a KDE Primtux
Today at the conference 38C3 in Hamburg, I met some people with experience of managing staff workstations.
They recommended that EU OS should take good care about device management:
patch management
inventar function (end-of-life, software versions etc.)
software distribution
Lifecycle management
Is primtux mostly an ISO file with useful software well configured, or does this project also offers a system to install updates to e.g. all pupil computers in the school and check who has not yet the update?
The use case sounds very solid to me and I am sure schools outside of France face the same challenge!
I think pupils should use a different interface than staff members in the EU institutions. With Linux, having different interfaces should be no problem. However, we should strive to collaborate on the challenges that are common to both groups:
having a secure base that fulfils the compliance requirements (testing, regular updates, various security measures)
having orchestration tools to build the iso automatically, deploy the iso easily to large numbers of devices, keep all devices updated and monitored
Happy to help in any way!
and 
. I would like to learn more about this project W2LE. Are you in touch with Inria Grenoble then?