This is an uphill battle in the face of corporate lobbying, learned fixedness, and, let's face it, unintuitive UX that is found in some selection of FLOSS which is often absent in proprietary counterparts: something that people who are not tech savvy (tech-indifferent?) would prefer not to put up with.

However, I think the latter can be mitigated with the right focus and funding from such initiatives.

There have been many such initiatives[0][1] over the years in different countries where they eventually lose steam and fade away.

Also, is there an operating system backed or sponsored by EU that is actively maintained, analogous to BOSS[2] and Pardus[3]?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:State-sponsored_Linux_distributions

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_adopters

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharat_Operating_System_Solutions

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardus_(operating_system)

E: typo