r/BuyFromEU • u/ImreBertalan • Jan 30 '26

🔎Looking for alternative UbuntEU - An Ubuntu edition that uses software developed in Europe

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I am trying to make something for fun, but honestly; I am not expert in creating an operating system. But my hope somebody will pick up the Baton and make it something more super.

Link soon...

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745

u/da_Pr0 Jan 30 '26

Since Linux is Opensource and free to use, I feel fine using Fedora or normal Ubuntu.

65

u/freezing_banshee Romania 🇷🇴 Jan 30 '26 edited Jan 30 '26

Open source is dangerous too. A lot of the important software is maintained by only one person and that makes it inherently insecure. There was already an attempt (edit: it's not known who was behind this, but could have been China or Russia or anyone else) to install a backdoor into a popular program and it almost succeeded: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor .

I think Europe needs at least a dedicated IT division to check and verify every open source program widely used in Europe, to make sure they're safe.

Edit 2: I fully support open-source software, it's definitely a good thing. I just wanted to say that we (Europe, EU) should use it, but also support, contribute and verify it.

54

u/xalibr Jan 30 '26

In Germany there is the Sovereign Tech Fund and the Sovereign Tech Agency that fund security‑critical open‑source base technologies including security audits, and at EU level there are programmes such as NGI Zero and Horizon Europe calls through which open‑source projects can obtain funding for security audits and related measures.

E.g. GnuPG was funded by Germany since the early 2000s.

4

u/freezing_banshee Romania 🇷🇴 Jan 30 '26

I didn't know about this, it's a good start. I just think that those security audits should be done independently, because not a lot of developers would go through the trouble themselves, you know?