So, for the next talk, I'd like to welcome Olga Dürhov, he's been one of the very first
employees of Souser, founder of Unclied, Uncloud and since 2025, he's a manager at B1 systems.
He's talking about Linux on the desktop while digital sovereignty starts here.
Give him a warm applause.
Thank you.
Thank you so much as Souser was founded in 1992 and I joined in April in 1993.
It's almost 33 years now in the open source business and of course also in the world
of open source communities and that's great.
And the virtual sovereignty was not really known back then, but now it gets so important.
Even more so because there is somebody in the White House which makes us very every morning
what's the new thing.
And at the same time, the Americans right now serve as a great single person for us
because everywhere we have huge interest in all of Europe, in all of the world about digital sovereignty
and we'll talk a little bit what that is and how it relates to Linux and how it relates to the desktop.
Short interaction to my company were about 200 people, really all focused on open source.
180 open source Linux experts, about 25 people focused on just Linux desktop working with corporations
as well as governments to monitor, to support and keep things running up to 24 by 7.
We're independent service providers who are not catering to particular Linux distribution.
We support really mostly all of them including Nixon's and other things which are rather modern
and I will also introduce to some even more modern ways of Linux distributions today.
And of course we're all in the European Union subject to the European Union and data protection regulations which is a big part of digital sovereignty of course.
So looking at digital sovereignty, it really starts with all of you.
Everybody is involved in digital sovereignty with its technology choices and in regards of the desktop and really the interface between a human and the information technology is that piece of technique we have in front of us and we're logging in in the morning.
So normally I ask the question who is running Linux but here that's not so helpful.
So who is logging in the morning into a Microsoft account, hands up?
That's quite a bit of people who is logging into a Google account in the morning.
And who is logging into something digital sovereign like a keyclog with something his company who is organization is running.
Okay, so it was about a certain, very, very good.
And really that's where digital sovereign starts because if we're starting in the morning to give up our data to large corporations that's already where the challenge is start.
So all of us are asked but also the organizations we work with, we work for are so important in that regards to provide us that digital sovereign technology.
That allows us to be independent and take independent dependencies away from vendors including regular price increases.
We see this very often if we look into Microsoft 365 as an example, the price is well increased by about 25% as of July 1st this year.
So prices can increase if you are independent if you run digital sovereign you have choices.
If many choices of course sometimes too many but in any case it gives you the financial independence and the freedom of choice and also the decentralization.
And we see this very often when certain parts of the internet suddenly go down because some very centralized services have still a single point of failure.
And we can't log in or we can't get our work done and that's also a challenge which we can solve with freedom of choice and decentralization.
And that's some of what we want to provide and of course this needs a complete workplace.
It needs an open source environment.
It starts as a logical choice of course with a little desktop and then if we are an organization we however need to manage that.
In order for a desktop to stay secure they need to be managed, they need to be controlled, they need to be somewhat monitored because this little client management.
And that includes then the ability to brainstorm certain applications including a VPN.
It includes the capability to preconfigure our secure browser to go to certain places in the internet which are secure but not to others.
And of course we can tailor all of that to specific use cases.
We also can enforce required security guidelines.
We might have in our organization.
One of the easy ones there I always come up with is USB devices on a classic mobile system.
You can just disallow those or you can allow those if it's somebody who has to do it very regularly.
And of course we can add all types of local software on top of that if needed.
So what does Linux client management mean?
Again we're starting with Linux as a software operating system governed by communities.
Many here at Boston and it's not governed however by single corporations which is the huge difference.
It's highly customizable and it has very low hardware requirements in the talk before we were talking about end of 10 which means that Microsoft Windows 10
which is to 11 needs new hardware.
We can continue to run that hardware with Linux which is great because it allows to eliminate electric waste and those types of things.
And however there are quite some challenges here.
There are many different Linux distributions.
I think roughly every month and you want shows up.
Everyone does what he want because I'm rude.
I'm king I can do whatever I want to do.
Desktop installations can be quite complex.
They can be time consuming in regards of their configuration.
An often that difficult integrations with the infrastructure.
And a Linux desktop typically does not have building infrastructure built in management.
So other operating systems commercial ones or an Apple or an employee device.
They have built in management APIs sometimes from the original provider sometimes from specialized providers who are using that.
And of course lots of IT security policies we want to make sure we can enforce.
So what does Linux client management mean?
What does it consist of?
It's really many different open source technologies.
It starts with four men.
They have a great proof here just outside of the room on the lower level here.
So four men is the main management console we're using.
We also have things like a sort stack which we are using because we think for some desktop use cases.
It's just the better choice.
But you can also do configuration management with Ansible or Puppet.
And we support many types of Linux distributions.
Our typical choice is Ubuntu LTS.
But other choices are also possible.
And I will talk about immutable operating systems and some new choices later on.
And that combined with Git and a way to do GitOps in a totally reproducible way.
And as a single source of truth, we call Linux client management.
And that's what we provide on top of a Linux operating system.
And as said, it's all open source components.
It's delivered as container images.
So it can be very easy set up.
However, on your own premises, it's not so easy to install yet.
So one of the things we're working on is to make a software as a service available.
Where each of you can manage one to 10 systems through the internet with your own organization.
And we hope to have this available in the next two to three months.
So if you want to be part of the alpha or better testing,
there is my email on the slides.
Please don't hesitate to reach out, find me here outside.
And we get you on the list for testing that type of stuff.
Yeah, so that's what we do there.
And now I have a couple of examples.
What we do for different types of client different types of industries.
And how Linux on the desktop, which in the main time has increased in market share to about L.
11% globally is so important for different industries.
One of the projects we have done is in cooperation with Sendis.
Sendis is the sender for digital sovereignty of public administration in Germany.
Our main task for them is to actually do open source applications.
Integrate into a stack called Open Desk, which is a secure open source all in one office and collaborations read,
which is designed specifically for the public sector.
So when we brought people those type of web applications,
and those web applications include Colabora Online,
a chat service called Element, next cloud, which is likely known to almost everybody here,
open pro-checked, schizzi for video conferencing,
XV key for email, open exchange, and for identity management,
a solution called Nubus from Univention.
When we brought all of those web things together,
the first government agencies were coming to the same question I had at the beginning of the talk.
Okay, but if we use this web browser from a Microsoft Windows environment,
are we then digital sovereign, or is there something still missing?
We did a first case study with them for one customer,
where we also provided a Linux operating system with a secure browser,
and we chose AUOS, which is a community effort as a proof of content for,
in this case, a fedora-based operating system with a bootable container technology.
So we chose that as a base, and then, of course, it's using KDE++,
our KDE was right before, so perfect, good fit in that regard,
and then it's integrated with the Linux management solution we provide.
And of course, the challenges in a public organization are a little bit larger,
because they have about 200 applications which are running on Windows today.
So for each of those applications, we need to think with them together about running
on a terminal server, putting it in the web-based environment,
or what to do with those applications for the future,
but at least the main worksuite, the main collaborations suite,
the identity management system, and the operating system and browser is already covered.
And that's roughly how this looks like with free e-par keyclog,
and open disk, and then open VPN, and managed by Linux client management,
and each of the people can now run Linux,
this top, of course, this was a very small project right there.
A little bit of a larger project we're doing together with a German government research organization,
and there we have deployed Linux to about 200 systems,
and for them, it's very important to stay secure.
They also have, as they are part of some,
thing where confidential documents of the government are taking care of,
they have what's called a Sinoverk station, which is a tightly controlled workstation,
where Linux can be installed as a VM.
And as part of the security policies they have,
virus and vulnerability analysis must happen all the time.
So once we do with Linux client management,
we ensure that a anti-virus system is always running on the system.
Of course, we all know for Linux that might or might not be so important,
so we just choose a claim maybe in this case an open source anti-virus scanner,
but it's important for the security policy that a anti-virus system is running.
So check done, and in the front end of Linux client management,
we can see every day that the anti-virus has nicely run through
and has not detected any challenges, or if it has, then it can be taken care.
And then we talked already about this USB functionality, which is part there,
so the operators can very easily switch that on and off,
so people can call their help desk and say they need USB support today,
or it can be switched off again in a nice and graphical environment.
Another big part of our daily work in the team is clients in the automotive industry.
Linux is important there for developers, developers for Android,
developers for signal processing, developers for AI,
AI locally runs about 30% faster on Linux than on any other operating system,
so that's great.
However, of course, they need to somehow integrate into what everybody else does.
And that picture is kind of a mess unfortunately.
So in the automotive industry, they have to have access to teams,
they have to have 365, they need a certain VPN,
so here very often we have a Linux operating system,
we have a in this case, a known desktop environment,
but then the challenge with integration of proprietary technology starts,
we're installing Microsoft Edge, on Linux, it's fully supported by Microsoft,
we're installing an outstack from Microsoft and Intunes,
and with that we're able to get conditional access,
and only that brings us into the corporate network.
So very challenging environment in that regard with those different proprietary integration,
but that's the reality we live in.
Unfortunately, people don't have this full sovereign stack from Linux to the event,
they see it, they need to integrate in all of those different things,
and that's a big piece of our work.
Another great case study from France,
where we're unfortunately not involved,
but we try to be involved in future brochures from Ministry and others,
but this one I bring because it's a huge success in Europe.
They have over 85,000 work stations on Linux,
they have done this starting in 2005,
originally with open office later with Libro office,
they migrated to Linux based operating system in 2008,
and have reached by now about 97% coverage across the organization.
So that's where we want to go with all the large government organizations
to deliver that type of digital sovereignty,
and the savings they estimate is about 50 million,
and savings is of course also an important thing for the government.
But it's our stretch, we have another great example in Germany
with the state of Schlitzwig-Holstein,
they are already out there publicly saying that they have started to save 50 million euros
in license costs every year,
and more and more organizations can join in to this saving experience.
So that's where we are today,
and I wanted to show a little bit about an outlook
in certain areas where we have to improve technology further
to get to that stack we need.
One is what's called immutable operating systems.
A Linux desktop must be really, really secure.
We don't want that any challenges from state actors
or other malicious people happen.
So one idea the Linux community came up with
is those immutable and unchangeable operating systems.
Except we have used a fedora-based environment here,
where we're booting basically an image,
a container image with what's called bootsy,
and with that we have the advantages that we can do AB updates,
that we can do rollbacks in a very easy way.
And again, all of this can be controlled with Linux client management
and provides additional security.
And then in regards of the digital sovereign identity management solutions,
when we look into those,
we need to make sure that from our Linux desktop
we can already directly reach them.
That's easily possible with LDAP and technologies like SSD.
However, we also want that we don't need to type
always our 25 digits long password.
So we need some more modern ways,
like past keys or challenge requests for this two-factor desktop look in.
So we're working quite a bit on that.
We've patched some SSSD things to make that happen.
And again, in a world where the already systems out there,
we also need to integrate.
We need to integrate with Microsoft Entra ID.
And that's what is now done from a great project
from Zumba called Himmel Blau.
And that's another item we are doing packaging for
and other things which we want to promote
and make sure it goes into future Linux distributions.
And again, this is what we want.
A complete stack with sovereign identity management,
sovereign identity access management,
Linux desktop, a secure browser,
and then all the great workspace software we can get
from many, many contributions, communities,
and also commercial providers.
Both is possible.
We need to integrate those things.
And that's how we can get from 11% market share today.
For world domination,
Linux was already asking for him 93,
and that world domination is what we want to do
and get Linux out there everywhere.
Thank you.
We can get three questions, maybe.
Yeah.
All right.
Many things are the great talk.
I guess they're quite some questions.
So, I'll start on the left.
Thank you very much for your talk.
My name is Nikola Petu.
So, just to inform you the French administration
is today developing also a personal Linux desktop
based on Debion because Ubuntu is a pain.
And Ubuntu is a pain because if you have more than 25 clients,
you'll stack with pain a lot.
So, the Ministry of Interior is developing
as a two-year-old project already.
It wants to deploy 3,000 by the year,
by the end of the year, and 30,000 within three years.
The Ministry of Finance in France wants to deploy 50,000 within three year,
and the Ministry of Education 1 million.
Great.
That's what we need more of.
And some of the great most of our customers,
we do UN SNAP Ubuntu 4.
So, we get rid of all the SNAP things,
and then we already have more fun with,
but we're also happy to use Debion as a base
of course in the future.
Appearism, we have several customers interested
in digital sovereignty for their mobile phones,
as well as PCs.
Have you seen us with your customers also?
We haven't seen mobile match yet.
What we see is internet devices,
it's spark stations for AI,
all of those type of things.
Mobile, we have not seen much to be honest.
I think that's theoretically the stack we have
for Linux client management should work with mobile as well.
I saw in the talk before that
the game station is running Katie already,
so we have to see if we can do something with that,
but not yet we'll have to check with the format
and other people if that's possible.
Hello.
I work for university nearby and for university.
I managed to convert to physics department.
He said me for example,
the department mostly to Linux obviously
with the service and desktop.
But the IT departments,
they went from more or less self hosting everyone
to moving all the way to the US,
Microsoft 365,
also helped us with all the sport in Windows.
What do you advise?
How can I educate him?
It's a university, but still.
Yeah.
I think we need to start with
that digital sovereignty story.
Of course, that's complex and sometimes difficult.
We, however, that's the way we need to go
as a European society.
There is no other way.
So that's where we need to start.
And I would hope that in a university
there must be some Linux desktop somewhere.
So we need to start with this integration.
And yes, that's a little bit difficult.
There is work in that note out,
but we need to show them that Linux
can integrate into their workplace,
into their security speed,
into the identity management,
and then step by step,
make those changes towards a 100% digital sovereignty.
That's all I can recommend.