Tested on python-3.2 and python-3.3. platform.platform() looks for a file in /etc/ that looks like it will contain the name of the Linux distribution that python3 is running on. Once found, it reads the contents of the file to have a name for the Linux distribution. Most Linux distributions do create files inside of /etc/ with a single line which is the distribution name so this is a good heuristic. However, these files are created by the operating system vendor and so they can have a different encoding than the encoding of the locale the user uses. This means that if there are non-ascii characters inside the file, user code that invokes platform.platform() may throw a traceback. Test: $ LC_ALL=en_US.utf8 sudo echo ' Café' >> /etc/fedora-release $ LC_ALL=C python3 >>> import platform >>> platform.platform() Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "/usr/lib64/python3.2/platform.py", line 1538, in platform distname,distversion,distid = dist('') File "/usr/lib64/python3.2/platform.py", line 358, in dist full_distribution_name=0) File "/usr/lib64/python3.2/platform.py", line 329, in linux_distribution firstline = f.readline() File "/usr/lib64/python3.2/encodings/ascii.py", line 26, in decode return codecs.ascii_decode(input, self.errors)[0] UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 22: ordinal not in range(128) It seems that the standard method of fixing these that we're promoting in python3 is to use surrogateescape. I'll provide a patch that does that.