Earlier this year at FOSDEM, EU OS presented the lessons learned from its first year of developing and advocating for a common Linux-based desktop for the European public sector. Since then, the initiative has entered a new phase: moving from architecture, consultation and Proof-of-Concept towards testing in real public-sector environments. C-Smart from Belgium helps EU OS to take this next step.

The C-smart Innovation Lab explores EU OS in the concrete context of Belgian local administrations. The work goes beyond testing a Linux desktop. It examines how a sovereign workplace can integrate with existing identity and access management, government services and APIs, office applications, municipal software, device management, networks and security policies. It also recognises that migration will often require pragmatic hybrid environments rather than a simple replacement of Windows.

At the same time, this is not only a Belgian challenge. Public administrations across the Benelux face many of the same questions around digital sovereignty, interoperability, security, legacy applications and dependency on a small number of technology providers. Bringing the EU OS community and C-smart together in Luxembourg creates an opportunity to connect these experiences and explore how Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands can learn from one another, share practical solutions and contribute to a stronger open-source ecosystem for the European public sector. This talk therefore brings together the European, local and Benelux perspectives. EU OS will present the evolution of its architecture, Proof-of-Concept and the feedback gathered from public-sector stakeholders and open-source communities. C-smart will complement this with experience from translating that vision into a practical municipal workplace: identifying technical, organisational and ecosystem gaps, testing real-world integrations, and exploring how existing applications, infrastructure and hardware can remain usable during the transition.

The objective is not to present EU OS as a finished product, but to show how open source, interoperability and digital sovereignty can move from policy ambition to a testable and operational public-sector alternative. The session will highlight what still needs to be solved — technically, organisationally and collaboratively — and how cooperation between public administrations, open-source communities and suppliers, including across the Benelux, can help make a sovereign digital workplace a realistic choice for European governments.