> No. There is no vendor for this.

You seem stuck on this model and not at all open to those commentators who are saying the single product vendor model itself is the problem?

My observation is that, regardless the myriad solutions based on strongly enforced interoperability standards, no government has ever had the courage to directly go up against US technopoly. I can see that changing at last. And my goodness, what a long, long, dark time it's been coming.

It may be the problem, but it's also become the standard. If you want Microsoft, you know where to go. If you want Apple, you know where to go. If you want Linux or open standards, there's hundreds of companies that will help you, but which are good? Which are bad? Nobody knows.

Just ask for their certification? Almost every distro that's big enough to need an org to maintain it, has a professional certification program.

>> hundreds of companies, but which are good?

most of them, since there is a lot of competition. Competition is good for businesses.

>You seem stuck on this model and not at all open to those commentators who are saying the single product vendor model itself is the problem?

Because there seems to be no alternative.

> seems to be no alternative

That feeling (you invoke "seems" and thus the realm of appearances) is now common in all walks of life. It has rather little to do with the reality of change. Mostly it means when change comes it's as a surprise. One of the ways to unblocking is to challenge assumptions.

I think as entrenched tech people we get even more stuck in a set of assumptions that the world is moving beyond.

Like the idea of "an OS that becomes popular" Does anybody (except us tech sorts) want that? If API interoperability exists then popularity is actually undesirable and is the root of many failure modes. Why care about popularity? People want and need at least adequate functional utility.

In many ways tech never got off the starting blocks.

50 years of commercial IT and has significantly failed to achieve many of the basics. If being able to copy a simple text file from one computer to another in 2025 is still a struggle, that's failure by any reasonable standards, and BigTech companies are right at the heart of that failure.

I've got decent challenges to many of the other seemingly "no alternative" stuckness I see in this thread, but no need to labour the point - which is to clear ones mind of unexamined assumptions.

I don't particularly care.

This is not a nice to have. It is about European security.

I think we agree. But security is also very much about examining assumptions.

There are many vendors. There are no vendors large enough to handle it at government scale, but there are many vendors. If someone was serious about wanting a vendor it wouldn't be hard to become the single vendor. It isn't hard to hire a bunch of technical people, training them on whatever new desktop and set them loose - it is just expensive.