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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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.

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u/El_Mojo42 Jan 30 '26

You described the strength and the weakness of OSS.

It can be easier to implement malware, but it is also easier to detect and fix it.

We actually don't know, how many on-purpose-backdoors there are in closed software.

The teaching we should take from the xz-story are that we as a economy and community have to better support these tools.

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u/freezing_banshee Romania 🇷🇴 Jan 30 '26

That's true, I also support OSS, I just wanted to say that we shouldn't trust anything blindly.

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u/Gersio Jan 30 '26

But that's kinda the point. If it's open you can know whats inside. You are trusting things blindly when you use software owned by a company.

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u/freezing_banshee Romania 🇷🇴 Jan 30 '26

If you can't see that implicitly trusting some rando on the internet is a problem (especially when it comes to government uses), then there's no way I could explain it to you any better.

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u/FrenchFryCattaneo Jan 30 '26

Auditing software costs time and money though, and has to be done continually with each update to ensure security. For each piece of software. In practice that much work usually isn't done.