The rallying call to put European tech first — backed by companies including Airbus, Element, OVHCloud, Murena, Nextcloud, and Proton, to name a few — follows the shock of the Munich security conference, where U.S. Vice President JD Vance tore into Europe like an attack dog, leaving delegates in no doubt that the post-War international order is in tatters and all bets are off when it comes to what the U.S. might do under President Donald Trump.
Key tech infrastructure that’s owned and operated by U.S. companies doesn’t look like such a solid buy, from a European perspective, if a presidential executive order can be issued forcing U.S. firms to switch off service provision or terminate a supply chain at a pen stroke.
“Imagine Europe without internet search, email, or office software. It would mean the complete breakdown of our society. Sounds unrealistic? Well, something similar just happened to Ukraine,” Wolfgang Oels, COO of the Berlin-based, tree-planting search engine Ecosia — one signatory to the letter that was already taking steps aimed at reducing its dependency on U.S. Big Tech suppliers — tells TechCrunch.
They went through the effort of creating their own fork, Limux. It has nothing to do with money (cant find the amount of money invested on the implementation btw) or deferring anything. No need to attach the process there. Yes, i’m sure there were some issues with printers and other stuff but that could be solved by replacement.
The problem was not Limux. The problem were the users as i pointed out. The Gray people and the “touchscreen” people that are stuck on something are going to rebel. As said before, your users need to be able to work with it and like it.
I consulted on multiple implementations and the main thing that matters to people for acceptance is: “is it sexy?”. If its sexy, people will adopt it easier. Linux at that time was generally looking blegh.
Users have to get used to something different, big hurdle. When looking at it, it looks like garbage, no interest.
It all depends on acceptance.
It could be that it would succeed now because the UI has come a long way.
All you say is true but not impossible to solve with adequate funding. I’d argue that Windows and Office is so user hostile these days that the barrier to entry is much lower than usual. Have you tried to save a file in Excel in the last year or so? It’s like Office Guantanamo and people are increasingly fed up