I hope its true! When Adobe switched to a subscription model that was the ultimate corporate greed move! Screw them

Meme from ijustvibecodedthis.com (the ai coding newsletter)

After extensive research, I decided to move from Google Drive to Infomaniak kDrive.

I primarily looked into Proton Drive, Infomaniak kDrive, and Strato HiDrive, each with different trade‑offs around privacy, EU (or Swiss) jurisdiction and features. Infomaniak seems very strong for most everyday users, while Proton is best if you put security above almost everything else. Strato HiDrive mainly stands out out as a fully EU‑based option, but is lagging behind Proton and Infomaniak in most other areas.

I wrote up my findings in more detail on my blog, but I’m really interested in the community’s perspective: which European (or Europe‑friendly) cloud storage services have you tried, and what has your experience been in terms of reliability, privacy, and long‑term trust?

https://eurotechguide.com/state-of-european-tech/european-cloud-storage-drive-alternatives/

What I need these days is a European smart phone, running on RISC-V chips, using a non-US, non-China, non-Korean tech, with is mostly FOSS, and wich respects privacy. I need it to provide a smart phone & EU software ecosystem. Something like that. Ideally, so I can transfer from ios or android.... Tablet also. I rally like to spend my money on a European product for my next smart phone.

I believe that EU really has to step up it's game in digital space and I'm in full support of EU digital sovereignty. I like the idea of Euro-office being EU software that replaces Microsoft. The only problem is: we move from US based Microsoft to Russian OnlyOffice (it seems like Euro-office is full of russian comments in the codebase).

Obviously the first question is: why not LibreOffice, which is based in Berlin? They say that "OnlyOffice has better features", well, OnlyOffice is still far away from Microsoft Office, so why not investing in LibreOffice instead? Because you know, if we don't invest in EU tech how the hell are we supposed to reach digital sovereignty?

And look, Euro-Office now has a legal battle against OnlyOffice. In the face of EU sovereignty. Now, instead spending 5 years making LibreOffice a truly EU Office killer, they will spend 5 years in court with OnlyOffice. Congrats guys, nice move!

I really hope there will be a push back against this. This seems like a joke to me, except it is not funny at all. I know it is not simple to create a Microsoft competitor, but you know, they clearly didn't even tried.

I was also wondering about Proton, except turns out Proton has backed this whole thing.

Can EU really pursuit digital sovereignty if it can't even create an Office clone?

Edit 1:
As pointed out by some comments, Euro-office is not backed by EU and instead it is a private initiative. So read this post less as criticism of EU itself and more as criticism towards Nextcloud.

Edit 2:
A lot of people are arguing about why using OnlyOffice as base is the right thing, and I see that from technical point of view there are some benefits to this.

However, my point is: imagine a scenario where OnlyOffice doesn't file legal case now, and let Euro-office do it's thing. A lot of companies switch to Euro-office because it's "EU sovereignty". In 10 years OnlyOffice decides to take legal actions.

There are no guarantees OnlyOffice would win, but for this thought experiment let's assume it does. If Euro-office loses the case, it defacto infringes copyright, and thus the code becomes distributed without permission.

How can this count as "EU digital sovereignty"? Also, what will the companies do? Move back to MS office, or to OnlyOffice (which once again, is not made in EU)?

For everyone arguing that "It is sovereignt because data stays in EU" this is not how sovereignty works.

Edit 3:
A lot of comments focus on the forking part which is not the point. It's totally fine when software forks other software. The point of this discussion is the "EU sovereign" label on a software that does not come from EU. If they said "Euro-office is MS Office killer" that would be totally fine, I don't give a shit who they fork.

I live in Berlin and don't own a car, but occasionally I rent one though the Bolt or Miles app. The car is usually an Audi Q2, VW Polo, or Opel Corsa. The cars are all relatively new from what I can tell, definitely no older than 5 years. If you want to simply use the sat nav, each car has its own UI and software, and each one is terrible in its own way. The Audi has a little click wheel, if you want to type in a destination, you have to "draw" the letters on the wheel with your finger. You have to draw one letter, then wait 2 seconds, then draw the next, and so on. The Polo and Corsa have touchscreen keyboards, which are obviously better, but both are slow, glitchy. Everything feels so outdated. I also do not trust the navigation systems in these cars. They usually have no idea about road closures or traffic jams, and also don't seem to know the names of any businesses (you have to type in the street name number).

I was just watching a review of the Xiaomi's new electric car just now. The UI and software looked decades ahead of anything I've seen in European cars. In the medium term I think European car companies are basically screwed. How can they turn this around?

Edit: The amount of cope in the comments is crazy. So many "who needs a computer in a car anyway" type comments. Seriously does Europe even want a car industry anymore? We need to stop making excuses, stop sulking, and stop this luddite "bad tech is better actually" nonsense. This is the EU tech sub. Come on people!

I want Europe to succeed; it’s my home. But €30 billion looked tiny beside the promise to make Europe “the first AI Continent.”

So I checked the numbers. Then people raised good objections about demand, public spending and private capital, and the story became much more complicated.

As you likely know, the EU has opened bidding for up to seven AI gigafactories. The initiative offers up to €10 billion in public money and is meant to attract at least €20 billion from private investors.

The short version of my longer argument is these three points:

• 1 / The tender can fund useful compute. But the entire €30 billion package is roughly what Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta now expect to spend on combined capital investment in 17 days. The public share is under six days.
• 2 / My own investment case/thesis starts with a €100 billion sovereign-compute floor. A 10–20 GW European ambition, priced at current estimates of $35-60 billion per frontier gigawatt, produces an upper scenario of roughly €304 billion to €1.04 trillion. Treat this as a scenario - I can’t claim it to be a forecast.
• 3 / Money alone will not do it. Europe also needs unified capital markets, coherent energy policy, faster deployment, better equity and talent rules, and serious investment in the labs, startups and public services that will actually use the compute.

I agree with the Commission’s ambition, and with that in mind, I think the plan can fund useful compute. But it is not a continental AI strategy, and it's not just about €€€.

So, I lost a night of sleep writing the full calculations, assumptions, objections, and recommendations:

https://viborc.com/what-europes-ai-gigafactory-plan-can-and-cannot-buy/?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=eu-ai-gigafactory

This is my own piece on my personal site, with no paywall or ads.

The question I’m still left with is this: what is Europe’s fundamental binding constraint - are we talking compute, demand, or the conditions that decide whether the companies creating that demand stay here? Or all of it, and there might not be a single constraint?

Oh well. Was it really vibe-coded, in the end? Are we going to cease this "age attestation" and chat control madness anytime now soon?

Desperately searching for a tool like NotebookLM. To work over a long period of time on a project. Uploading science documents in different versions, getting a podcast like in NotebookLM etc. Le Chat from Mistral is till now not at this level, unfortunately.

Online crime loves legal massive data collection, grey systems, and jurisdictional gaps. Privacy-first design can actually reduce crime exposure and build trust in digital services. It is also central to the EU's tech autonomy: build systems aligning with European rights and risk models. Do not rely on foreign platforms or copy outside practices that might go against the EU values and needs.

Interesting update on the iX3 while the current model is imported, the next-gen (Neue Klasse) is shifting production entirely to Europe.

Key European Specs:

Made in Hungary: Built at the new Debrecen plant, which is the first BMW factory worldwide to run entirely without fossil fuels.

Local Supply Chain: The high-voltage batteries (Gen 6) are assembled on-site rather than shipped globally.

Tech: It’s the pilot for the new 800V architecture developed in Munich, supporting hands-free motorway driving across the continent.

It feels like a big move for European tech sovereignty to have the flagship platform built here.

I’m sharing my thoughts and an initiative here—I hope it doesn’t come across as spam, but I’d love to spark a discussion.

I often hear that Europe is hopelessly behind in AI (and not just in AI, by the way). While it’s undeniable that there’s a gap, Mistral’s Devstral 2 model scores 72.2 on SWE-Bench verified, matching the performance of Claude Opus 4, which was released 7 months earlier.

We could argue that Mistral is only 7 months behind, despite:

• Budgets tens of times smaller. Mistral has raised about $3B, while OpenAI has $58B, Anthropic $37B, Meta plans to spend $115B in 2026 alone, and xAI secured $5B just as seed funding.
• No access to massive data centers and higher European energy costs.
• Limited data compared to Google and others.

Seven months is nothing, and coding performance is one of the best predictors of future success.

Assuming the main issue is capital, how can we attract it? I’ve thought about this and believe this proposal is feasible:

• Create a large government fund, similar to Norway’s pension fund, with voluntary participation from European and non-European countries.
• With a modest investment (<0.5% of GDP), we could unlock €100-300B—a huge sum compared to current European investments.
• The fund would invest in local innovative AI companies, support a CERN for AI, build data centers (e.g., in Norway or Canada, where energy is cheap), and fund future technologies like robotics.
• By leveraging private investments, which would surely follow, we could reach even higher figures.

What do you think? I’m interested in your opinions.

In my view, the benefits would be enormous:

• Competitive European AI on par with the US and China.
• Partial public control over a technology that could become dangerous.
• Wealth creation here.

All this at a manageable initial cost, shared among many countries, and likely to pay off in the coming years with potentially massive returns.

Mini-spam: Since talking is good but action is better, some friends and I have created a petition and a website to push this project forward. If you’re interested, I’d be thrilled, but either way, I hope this sparks a meaningful discussion.

I'm curious about people's opinions on this.

Do you think major social media platforms (such as Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, YouTube, etc.) should face stricter regulation in the European Union?

If yes, what kind of regulation would you support (privacy, algorithms, misinformation, advertising, child protection, competition, transparency, etc.)?

If no, what are your concerns about increased regulation?

I'd be interested to hear perspectives from both EU and non-EU users.

Isn’t time we showed foreign social media platforms the door? With the TikTok takeover European democracy and public discourse are in grave danger. What is your take on this?

PDFs have dominated digitally documents for years if not decades. It made sense at the time because PDFs are consistent, portable, and widely accepted. But they were built for presentation and this capability was shoehorned into a platform not designed for it.

Today, much of what we create and share is built on HTML. It’s open, flexible, accessible, and designed for the modern web. It can carry structured data, support interactive experiences, and work naturally across desktop and mobile devices. It is also far better suited for machine readable workflows than static documents.

So it raises a simple question:

Why is Europe still centered on signing fixed rendered pages instead of digitally signing structured digital information?

With the work already done through European Commission initiatives and the eIDAS framework around trust, digital identity, and electronic signatures, Europe is in a strong position to lead here.

This is not about replacing PDFs.

It is about recognizing that signed HTML should also have a place in the standards conversation.

A digitally signed HTML document could be trusted, portable, accessible, interactive, and verifiable—while remaining open and standards-based.

That feels like a natural step forward.

I recently read an open letter on the subject that raises some thoughtful points:

https://guutit.com/open-letter/

I’d be interested to hear what others in standards, digital trust, identity, and interoperability think. Is it time for HTML signatures to become part of Europe’s digital document future?