This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
US: Let's sanction everyone everywhere all at once!
Also US: Why don't people want to be dependent on US systems? π
Yea we got a bit of the βinmates are running the asylumβ situation over here.
In the immortal words of the joker(paraphrased) this country needs an enema
we would lose about a third of our human biomass
Oh well
Couldn't undermine the country more if they tried, which makes one wonder.
Yep. Trump's actions are no different than what any bad actor would do if they wanted to destroy the USA without invading it.
Destroying what (appearance of) democracy they had as well
Finally. Been saying for years, NixOS is the obvious choice for a gov distro.
Now we need to convince Canada to do the same. If everyone leaves Microslop, that would make a huge impact.
Why?
Honest question.
My guess would be the deterministic configuration management. If it's for a personal machine then do what you want to make it your own but if it's an organization (e.g. government) you want the machines to be as similar as possible to reduce maintenance. Think cattle, not pets.
from a sys admins perspective it's painfully easy to deploy across hundreds of machines. NixOS is declaritive and immutable. you can take one system configuration of NixOS and throw the same config on as many machines as you want. packages, dotfiles, whatever are all replicated the exact same way on each machine. You can lock all the packages/apps, configs, kernels, etc to a specific version therefore a sysadmin may only need to upgrade the lot once a year. if a user some how breaks their system it's as easy a fix as rolling back to the previous generation with a single menu option.
So basically say you have your computer and you want to replicate your exact setup to hundreds of other computers. with NixOS it's as simple as setting up a git repo for your nixos config, pushing to it, installing nixos on every other computer then cloning your repo to all the machines and rebuilding. done. now you have hundreds of other computers that all behave and work the same way your computer does.
If something needs updating or a fix needs to be rolled out all a sysadmin has to do is fix it on one machine, push the change, pull it for every other machine and rebuild. done.
I am curious, what makes NixOS such a good choice?
From the article:
Its use of the Nix package manager means that each package is installed in its own directory with immutable and signed contents. That alone means that the setup is incredibly easy to reproduce across multiple machines, something that is an obvious benefit when dealing with different facets of a government.
Id argue an immutable distro would likely serve the same purpose but maybe its also because nixos isnt as "locked down" so itd be easier to configure for a specific purpose?
The big draw is probably that it's declarative, so you can define installations as code much the same way as you would do with Terraform. Instead of needing a pile of messy Ansible playbooks running custom scripts to change anything (and which can break if the target machine has an unexpected config), you'd just have one that pushes a new version of the config and runs nixos-rebuild. Rollbacks are just as easy if anything breaks. What's not to like?
Foreign countries using Google, Microsoft, or Apple, would be suicidal not to change platforms. Right now, the U.S. has incredible leverage: it can turn off their government servers, delete their data, and is certainly spying on them right now.
The only reasonable move is some kind of self-hosted setup, at least for a large chunk of critical infrastructure, with some cloud options for backups, maybe, who knows, if the country is too small or centralized.
I am in a large (couple thousand staff) company and I cant get why we dont selfhost everything. Like yeah it would have an upfront cost but the savings stack immediately. We spend like 30-50 a user for office access.
Copilot is so shit and we could build an alternative with relative ease and never pay again. It wouldnt be baked into teams but who gives a fuck.
All middle powers need to align and collaborate on this. There is limited programming talent and gaps and especially security (ai) gaps need to be filled. EU, UK, Canada, Aus, NZ, SK, Japan should actively pool resources.
The U.S. imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court
...fuck this place.
US has been building soft power like this for decades, and Trump is pissing it all away.
If this process to get rid of dependency on US gets well underway, there's no turning that ship. US won't recover the position it had in fifty years or more.
US won't recover the position it had in fifty years or more.
This is not a bad thing. Over dependency on any one nation or even a bloc of nations is a bad thing.
I canβt help but think the dependency on the US that has been created played some role in whatβs happening now.
Nope. The US isn't teaching people to fish, its forcing them to learn How to to feed themselves. In the past they handed them the fish so they could control them. That power is lost now.
Windows is basically a zombie OS at this point, shambling along and eating brains.
Windows as a home user desktop is definitely coasting on momentum, though it is also the OS deployed on most new PCs which keeps it going.
I think the only thing really keeping Microsoft relevant is Active Directory (and Azure by extension) because a lot of organizations are dependent on AD internally, and there still aren't really any good alternatives that check all the same boxes. You could probably cobble together a working solution for ~90% of it with open source software, but it would be clunky, fragmented and feature-poor compared to an on-prem AD system. It would require a lot more administrative overhead to configure and maintain it, and user management would be a mess.
never trust the americans again
I will be so pissed off when a democrat is elected and every single EU country will try to go back to business as usual
Neet, if NixOS get used more and more then the skills I acquired making my config will become marketable.
And nothing of value was lost
in fact, things got better
This might just be the best thing that happens in tech (for me) all year.
I daily drive debian just because boring and reliable. However, fancy package managers like flatpak and appimages and nix have made debian much more vibrant - it's easy to install new versions of things now.
That said, nix package manager on debian is just freakin amazing. Being able to just nix-shell -p <obscure cli tool> and exit when I'm done with it is magnificent.
That's the gateway drug anyway. The nix based home-manager is pretty cool.
While I've been tempted to jump in with NixOS my experience with nix packages and home-manager has felt kind of bleeding edge or experimental. Loads of things that don't work as intended on debian.
A sophisticated well funded user base like a federal government has really good implications for the stability of the project in the future. I'm really stoked about this.
US: You want to cut us off? No! We cut you off!
NL: How petty are you?
US: Yes.
I'm in a local administration in France, it's rapidly getting closer to home... Our higher-ups somehow decided a thourough Microsoft integration was a good idea like 5 years ago.
Seems like we're just one political comment about support to the ICC to be in the same situation. And I mean, fuck it, we should be. But I am not happy about the shit we'll have to go through to purge it all now.
I can explain a major reason why public services and administration are begrudgingly moving to FOSS or OSS at all. They need to apply security standards like ISO 27001 and when they start going through what the documentation requires they realize that most OSS let alone FOSS make it very hard to have any say in the development of the software.
How do you make sure that the security flaws are patched promptly? Do you open a ticket on GitHub and simply hope it gets picked up by the devs? I can tell you from experience that some OSS devs will tell you to make your own merge request if it's so important to you. GDPR makes having vulnerable public facing services very unattractive. What about support for the product when you need something fixed or have an issue with running the software?
You can definitely get a license for an OSS, or get a legal agreement for support from the OSS devs for money. I can guarantee you that when managers in public services look at either patching together and managing a bunch of separate OSS or using Microsofts integrated infrastructure, they see the advantages right away.
That is the sad truth... It's resource intensive and a regulatory problem to create and manage a whole infrastructure. It's much easier to use integrated and centralized solutions.
How do you make sure that the security flaws are patched promptly? Do you open a ticket on GitHub and simply hope it gets picked up by the devs?
No you dont expect free labour and pay them.
There is absolutely nothing preventing them from hiring a firm to develop a feature in FOSS. Hell, they can even keep it proprietary if they wanted to.
With non-free software, you have no say at all.
The problem you point out has been known in the Linux community for literally decades and is the reason why Red Hat Linux was created and any company can, right know, get an Enterprise version of it with an Enterprise support contract.
That said, over the years I worked in seriously large multinational companies which used Linux and other open source products like Apache extensively on the server side (pretty much all such machines had it) so at least on the server side things did change massively from back in the day when companies would get Sun servers with SunOS or IBM server with Minix rather than generic server PCs with Linux due to that rationale you stated.
In fact, it has also become a common thing in much smaller companies, though maybe not the small and micro-sized ones.
The reality on the ground at least on the server side and for infrastructure software is that companies did find a way to deal with the problem of not being able to get support contracts from many of the OSS apps makers, and did so either by just paying some company specialized in supporting it or by having their own developers - after all, it's exactly the thing with OSS that any developer can change it hence you're not limited to paying for support from a specific company that makes the software.
Considering the Dutch have ASML, this seems an unwise move for the US. But then, the Dogey Confederates are working towards the destruction of the USA. π
This great news! Away with USA!
So we did this because we didn't like what the court said not about us but Israel and its war crimes? This is the hill the admin is going to die (and drag us with them) on?
Microsoft: "No, not like that!"
Netherlands: "Let's make The Netherlands great again."
United States: "What have we done."
I've been doing a project https://themildtake.com/articles/2026-07-04-a-declaration-of-independence/ ever since Independence Day and I have been shocked by how insane the open-source tooling out there is now. NextCloud and Collabara alone solves 90% of company's needs. ERPNEXT covers a huge swath in mid-range needs. I combine it with a mailcow server and Authentik for SSO and I am not sure how much else most businesses need. The whole stack is zero cost.
