this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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I don't think there are many distributions that are truly free, at least not in the eyes of the FSF. Fedora is not one of them.
Yes, but that's my point: fedora is already fully featured.. the work needed is trivial, to the point that directly using an installation of fedora by itself (along with tools like ansible) wouldn't be very different from doing he same with EU OS... at that point you don't need a whole new distro, just Fedora and maybe some trivial scripts (which you are gonna need anyway in any large scale installation, even if you went with EU OS).
Imho, there would be more value if something actually novel was used, and new guides and howtos were created to simplify/clarify things that used to be hard. What would be a pity is to spend a lot of euros for something that is trivial to do, and that only helps filling the pockets of some corrupt politician's friend. I mean, I'm not against a simple thing, but then I'd hope they at least showed how they will be spending the budget on some other way (marketing? ..will there be actual custom software? ..are they gonna maintain the entire repo themselves?).
But I was not arguing against that. And if they did promise to do that, then that would be different. The problem is precisely that I'm expecting them to NOT own most of the infrastructure and instead rely on Fedora repositories, because from experience that's how these things usually go.
I repeat the full context of the section you quoted: "I guess we’ll have to see how much they customize it, but in my experience with previous attempts, I’m expecting just a re-skin, just Fedora with different theme"
Maybe you have a different experience with government-managed distros, but there have been some attempts at that in my (european) country that were definitely not much more than a reskinned Ubuntu (and before that, Debian) from back in the day. They used Ubuntu repositories (ie. Ubuntu infrastructure), and the only extra repo they added was not a mirror, but just hosted a few packages that were actually produced by them and were responsible for the theming, reskining and defaults. They used metapackages that depend on upstream packages to control what was part of the default desktop environment, there might have been a few more extra packages (mainly backports), but very few and always lagging behind alternative backport repos. Uninstall the metapackage (which you might do if you wanna remove some of the preinstalled things) and it literally was Ubuntu straight from Ubuntu official repos. There was no filtering, no veto, no replacing, no mirroring.
Also, just to keep things grounded in the initial point: do you really think that Fedora / Red Hat would not benefit at all from it?