If they had chosen something more mainstream like say Ubuntu or Debian, I don't think there would've been as many complaints. You can't have each city develop o

If they had chosen something more mainstream like say Ubuntu or Debian, I don't think there would've been as many complaints. You can't have each city develop or maintain its own custom version of a Linux distro, I think that should have been obvious from the start. If anything, there should be an EU-version of Linux that's stripped of all American backdoors and constantly audited, because I think this is also a national security issue, not just an issue of vendor lock-in and long-term costs for taxpayers. But certainly it wouldn't make sense to have anything less than that, even a country-specific Linux distro doesn't make sense. I do think ultimately it was Microsoft's politics that convinced the city to move away from LiMux, but I think the problems were also real, which pushed them over to Microsoft more easily. If it had been an EU-backed Linux distro, I don't think they would've switched nearly as easily.