That prevents the site from knowing your identity, but I’m not convinced it prevents the government from knowing you visit the site. The government could keep track of which document corresponds to which individual whenever they issue / sign it.

So if the government mandated that each signed proof of “age>18” was stored by the service and mapped to each account (to validate their proof), then the government could request the service to provide them copy of the proof and then cross-check from their end which particular individual is linked to it.

if you don’t want the government to know what sites you visit, have sites route the request through a proxy.

I feel a proxy would not really make much of a difference. If the government keeps a mapping of which eID corresponds to each real person from their end (which they would do if they want to know what sites you visit) then they can simply request the services (and/or intermediaries) to provide account mapping of the eIDs (and they could mandate by law those records are kept, like they often do with ISPs and their IP addresses). The service might not know who that eID belongs to… but the government can know it, if they want.

The government needs to want to protect your privacy. If the government really wants to know what sites you visit, there’s no reason why they would want to provide you with a eID that is truly anonymous at all levels and that isn’t really linked to you, not even in state-owned databases.

While it’s true that Debian installation used to make use of a TUI and it did not have a nice GUI “live-CD” installation image for a long time (I think until 2019), Debian installation process included a default DE for way longer than that (2000). And before they did, the installation offered a choice between different window managers (back in the days before well established DE suites were even a thing).

They don’t customize the DE much, but neither does Archlinux which is a very popular distro nowadays (and the installer on that one is arguably even less friendly than Debian used to be).

Personally, I feel it has more to do with how other distros (like Mint, Ubuntu, Knoppix, etc.) have built on the work of Debian to make their own variants that are essentially Debian + extra stuff, making them better recommendations for the average people (if one thinks of those as Debian variants then I wouldn’t say Debian is “left out”). And for the not-so-average people, rolling release style distros (or even things like Nix/Guix) might be more interesting to experiment in.

At least for the German one, it’s essentially a rebranding of existing open source products packaged/adapted to work as a suite.

For example, for editing documents they are using Collabora online (Libreoffice-based), for chat it’s Matrix, for storage Nextcloud, email & calendar from Ox Cloud, etc.

This just applies to the French government, unless you land a public job it’s likely you’d still have to deal with that shit.

Still, it’s good news and lets hope it sets a trend.

Isn’t CachyOS more of a general purpose distro anyway?

I expected the OGC was mainly targeted to gaming-first distros, which in my mind are meant for an entirely different kind of devices with different interests and goals. I don’t think there should be much value in CachyOS joining it, regardless.

And specially for Microsoft, they would be shooting their own foot if they were to spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt in the development community over the legality of the use of AI tools like Copilot, which they themselves promote and sell.