Credit: NixOS logo by Tim Cuthbertson / CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons (placed on a background) The Dutch government is building its own open source workplace for civil servants, with a desktop operating system built on the Linux distribution NixOS. Eight municipalities are now testing the project, called DAWO, Dutch tech site Tweakers reported last week. DAWO stands for Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid, or Digital Autonomous Government Work Environment. Its blueprint covers an operating system, an office suite, collaboration apps, cloud services and management tools.
The Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations develops it, according to the project’s website. The code for the NixOS client sits in a public government repository. “The Dutch government is so dependent on non-European technologies that it is vulnerable to, among other things, disruption of critical systems from outside, loss of control over government data, loss of the knowledge to manage systems itself, espionage, and loss of strategic autonomy in IT,” the DAWO website says (translated by TNW). From side project to official order The work began behind the scenes, Tweakers reported. It traced the project to early 2025, when the US imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
At that point the Dutch government realised that access to many essential services depended on US policy, core developer Victor Gevers told Tweakers. In July, the government’s Interdepartmental Commission for Government Operations made it an official task. It ordered the three main central government IT providers, SSC-ICT, DICTU and DUO-ICT, to build a standard, more sovereign digital workplace. Gevers, Rutger Putter and Bram Buijs form the core team.
Buijs leads the pilots with the Association of Netherlands Municipalities. The municipalities of ’s-Hertogenbosch, Zaanstad, Ede and Amsterdam joined in April. The project will name the others later, Tweakers reported. Why NixOS The team first tried openSUSE and then Fedora, before choosing NixOS.
SUSE backs the first, and Red Hat, which IBM owns, backs the second. NixOS has Dutch roots, and no commercial company controls it. Nix stores each package in its own locked folder, which makes setups easy to copy between organisations. “Eighty to ninety percent of your Nix code is reusable,” Putter told Tweakers. Buijs built a graphical tool for managing NixOS, so Windows administrators can switch without learning Linux commands first. “We are not hardliners,” Putter said.
Cheaper hardware, not cheaper software The pilots run on older laptops the government had already written off. DAWO can also run on computers that cannot take Windows 11. The developers warned against expecting big savings on software. “Open source doesn’t cost less, it costs differently,” Putter said. There is no formal timeline.
The team hopes to release version 1.0 some time next year, Tweakers reported. Most large organisations think full digital sovereignty is unrealistic, a Capgemini survey found this month. The ECB’s Christine Lagarde has said Europe risks being cut off if it does not build its own AI.
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