this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2025
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Hopefully the French will also endorse Fedora, Red Hat, and Valve's SteamOS. Microsoft is a huge security issue, since it isn't clear whether MS would bend to DOGE's whims. The NLRB and other aspects of the US government had DOGE set up accounts, which were accessed within 15 minutes by Russia.
Why Steam OS? It does what it sets out to do, and probably makes Valve a ton of money.
Donations should go to projects that need it. Valve seems to be doing fine.
Making an OS easy to use in everyday life is the key to mass adoption. If the EU wants to get away from Microsoft's garden, that means advertising valid options to people who aren't attuned to Linux.
Money isn't the issue for SteamOS, it is awareness and making it available as an pre-installed option on consumer PCs. The EU could create standardized pamphlets about Fedora, Red Hat, and SteamOS, mandating stores to present that digestable information to consumers so that they know what flavor is best for their usecase.
I don't see any reason to have SteamOS preinstalled on anything other than a Steam Deck or Steam Machine. Valve is only motivated to ship what it needs to run games, it has no motivation to make a general purpose OS.
That's why projects like Fedora, Debian, and openSUSE have value, they are motivated to make a general purpose OS. The difference between those and Steam OS for running Steam games is minimal, and the overall experience on those distributions will be better.
There IS reason for preinstallation, there are many people out there who lack the passion to research Linux, and would gravitate towards the familiar - Steam, in the case of gamers. The point is to make a switch away from Windows as unproblematic for as many people as possible. Also, Valve is developing a desktop version of Arch SteamOS.
That project already exists for those than want it: Bazzite and Nobara. Both of those are about as simple as you can get to get up and gaming.
on another note.. Microsoft export their software and OS to almost every one of our users' pc while US doesn't buy any of our OS. Using Trump logic of fairness, we need to tariff US, to balance the trade deficit.
Why RedHat? I thought it's a bad version of Linux and generally disliked (similar to Broadcom and ESXi).
Why not prefer something based on Debian. As it's being regarded as very stable I don't feel like it would interfere with the employees daily job as they don't need a cutting edge distro like arch.
Or why not SUSE? I forget who owns it now, but at least for a while it was owned by an EU firm.
So, I love Debian, and it's an excellent distro.
But personally something like suse makes more sense, it's more user friendly and is so German it's painful.
Can confirm, I use openSUSE and it's glorious. AFAIK, they don't accept donations, but they probably would from someone like the French government.
It has some wobbly bits, but it really exposes the most powerful parts of linux.
And it's still somehow more user friendly than basically anything else in linux. Or windows for that matter.
Yeah, they did a really good job. I use Tumbleweed on my desktop, Aeon in my laptop, and Leap on my NAS, and I'm testing microos on my VPS. They're all solid.
Linux isn't very good for the casual person at this time, due to conflicting, dated, or missing documentation. If people are to be encouraged to adopt Linux, it should be toward distributions that have official technical support.
Isn't that the point of donating to it? If the French government wants a specific thing done (say, documentation), they can make the donation go towards that.
Ideally, that would be part of their initiative. There are multiple angles that can be taken to encourage Linux adoption. Standards for formal documentation and technical support options are two prongs on the same trident.
Regular people don't read documentation.
Oh, let's all use FreeBSD then. Please? Please?
are you suggesting there is documentation for Windows?
It's sufficiently documented.
It's just spread across a fuck load of different pages (learn vs. msdn vs. support vs forum).
And the articles are so unnecessary distributed across those pages. And so much articles are missing links to related topics that it's comically bad.
At least the powershell has a partly sound documentation. But very hit or miss.
Windows documentation is an absolute mess. The only reason you can claim it is "documented" is the sheer volume of users, but that's not necessarily a good thing when suggested fixes include registry edits, disabling security features, and running everything as an admin.
Just sudo everything /j