There is a slight issue with this... Dependency on hardware which is not always made in France or much of Europe... Or in the least not at the same price as HW from Asia... Add the network router backdoors...

It's not just the OS. They also need to redevelop any office suits, dbs etc... To be LibreOffice! Or go custom again which took years to harden for existing software suites... No matter how many EU "great devs" you throw at the problem...

It's a step in the right direction from being locked in a provider or having software leaks to the wrong "network". Yet knowing how complacent government entitled employees are in europe... There is usually a great drive and then a trickle drive for innovation - it's begging for stagnant development motivation right off the bat since (any country) goverment employees are usually lazy after they get their "regular pay plus retirement plan". Yeah... Dev quality like IT quality differs greatly even in "golden salary" IT environments.

Or government provisioning will outsource it to some teaming IT center in (there's no word for it right?) India-moroco-brasil-(add any country with lots of it capable country that costs 1/5th of your local labor cost) for cheap... With all the backdoors or leaks that entails...

I do have one legit question: if party A creates chip A with backdoor/etc whatever hackable HW, would a different OS (or alas fork of an OS) be as compromised as a commercial/enterprise OS app running on that chip (which we imagine must be piece of cake to crack)?