🇪🇸 9. Spain – Valencia Expands LliureX Beyond Schools
The Valencian Community has long supported the Linux-based LliureX distribution in schools, and now aims to use it across educational administration offices. In 2025, the government announced new deployments in training centers and back-office systems.
By building long-term experience with open platforms, Spain is preparing its public workforce for a broader switch away from Microsoft. This enhances both cost efficiency and cloud computing security, particularly for education sector data.
The Valencian Community’s home-grown Linux distro, LliureX, began in classrooms but is now steering Spain’s wider public-sector shift. Version 23, launched in February 2024, upgrades to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and KDE Plasma 5.27, adding OneDrive migration tools—ironically, to help schools dump OneDrive. By late 2024 the regional IT ministry piloted LliureX on 3 000 back-office PCs in education administration, reporting 98 percent document-interoperability success after installing community-backed MS-Fonts packages. Savings: €3.5 million annually on licences, plus €400 000 on legacy hardware life-extension. The roadmap for 2025-2026 targets payroll and HR systems, with PostgreSQL replacing SQL Server, and Jitsi servers supplanting Teams for internal calls. Because every module is open, the region’s Polytechnic University students contribute patches—turning the distro into a live teaching lab for cloud computing security. The long-term gambit is political: by embedding open tools in early education, Valencia normalises non-Microsoft workflows for an entire generation, smoothing eventual expansion into justice and health departments. Observers liken the strategy to Catalonia’s language policy—gradual, institutional, and ultimately self-reinforcing. If Valencia succeeds, Madrid’s central government could find grassroots momentum impossible to ignore when the next national IT contracts come up for renewal.
