As Europe talks up “EuroLinux” and digital sovereignty, Turkey’s Pardus has already spent two decades quietly running in its public sector.
As much of Europe makes moves to develop something that qualifies as “EuroLinux” — along with a stack of office and public facing software to run on it — they might be advised to take a hard look at EU member state Turkey’s efforts. Its Pardus project appears to be much more successful than other better known EU projects. Some in Brussels, of course, may find it awkward that one of the clearest national Linux success stories in the EU sits just outside the club they like to call “Europe proper.”
So far, European efforts to ditch Microsoft for something more open — and developed a lot more locally — have produced more losses than wins. Munich’s once lauded LiMux is now mainly a historical artifact. Vienna’s Wienux, developed at about the same time, has long been abandoned, evidently due to the city’s addiction to MS Office, which doesn’t run on Linux well when you can get it to run at all. EU OS, the current big effort to design a Linux distro by committee, appears as if its going to be a long slog.
There have been some successes. The French have GendBuntu, a custom Ubuntu‑based desktop used by the French National Gendarmerie, which is reported to be installed on something like 100,000 workstations. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein, which is in the process of moving all government workstations to open source software running KDE Plasma, is continuing to run Windows for the time being — although it’s said to be evaluating KDE‑centric Linux options such as Kubuntu, openSUSE Leap, and maybe even SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.
Meanwhile, and much ignored by “Europe proper,” Turkey has been developing and deploying Pardus for its public sector since 2003.
What Is Pardus
Pardus is Turkey’s contribution to the effort to replace proprietary software from elsewhere — which not only can be costly, but which can contain hidden components — with something open and developed locally, to meet local needs. It was designed from day one for its public-sector needs for centralized management, predictable releases, Turkish‑language support, and curated apps.
The project began in 2003 — at about the same time as Munich’s city council voted to migrate to Linux — with a first release in 2005 based on Gentoo. Early on the project looked at comparable international initiatives with a goal of meeting public-sector needs and national strategic objectives. This led to the project’s goals eventually shifting to prioritize adoption of free and open source software within the public sector.
Although the project initially followed a strongly centralized, state-run governance model, in 2012 the focus changed and the project aligned itself more closely with Debian’s principles. This both reduced maintenance and made it easier to tap into a wider ecosystem. This helped address sustainability concerns by making the project less isolated from mainstream Linux development while keeping a national flavor and institutional championing.
This might be where other EU efforts should start taking notes, since some have pointed to this flexibility by the Turkish government as a reason why Pardus is still around while some European “city Linux” experiments stalled or failed.
It’s also produced a Linux distro that’s used outside the public sector. This morning, Larry Cafiero reviewed it on FOSS Force and in a sidebar said this about what he didn’t like about the distro: “Nothing really – I liked it all.” This was a first. Cafiero’s good at finding something wrong with even the best of distros.
Pardus in the Public Sector
The fact that adoption of Pardus in the public sector isn’t 100% is probably a good thing, because it probably means that the operating system isn’t being forced on government users. That being said, adoption is widespread.
Inside Turkey, Pardus is deployed on thousands of workstations in ministries and agencies that include defense, disaster management, religious affairs, municipalities, hospitals, and more. A European Commission report on open source software in Turkey noted that in 2021 the Presidency of Religious Affairs reported 9,938 computers running Pardus, and several other central bodies, including AFAID (Turkey’s national disaster‑management agency), health institutions, and numerous municipalities, had multi‑thousand‑machine Pardus rollouts, making total public‑sector desktop installs certainly in the tens of thousands and likely into the low hundreds of thousands.
The largest Pardus footprint is in education, with over 220,000 interactive whiteboards and more than 250,000 lab computers in schools reporting that they’re currently running Pardus. The Ministry of National Education has plans to eventually migrate all of its lab PCs and whiteboards.
Official development and dissemination teams within the Pardus project report on‑site training at more than 100 institutions — mostly universities — plus thousands of users taking online courses, signifying a broad uptake in higher education.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Turkey is not an EU member state.