The Netherlands Turn to NixOS to Replace Windows 11 and Microsoft

DAWO is the name of the operating system the Netherlands are working on to get rid of Windows 11 and give a second life to laptops that are already amortized but incompatible with Microsoft's OS. But in reality, DAWO is more than an OS: it is an entire sovereign ecosystem.

DAWO, for Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid (digitally autonomous working environment for the government), is being developed within the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations (BZK). Eight municipalities are already testing it through the Association of Netherlands Municipalities (VNG), including 's-Hertogenbosch, Zaanstad, Ede, and Amsterdam.

The project was born in early 2025, after the US sanctions that deprived the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court of his Microsoft email account. Last July, it became an official initiative: SSC-ICT, DICTU, and DUO-ICT, the state's three main IT providers, must now turn this project into reality in order to roll out a standard and more sovereign workstation.

The official project website highlights the need to rely on sovereign tools: "The Dutch government is so dependent on non-European technologies that it is vulnerable, among other things, to disruptions of critical systems from abroad, to the loss of control over public data [...] and to espionage", it says.

DAWO: Much More Than a Linux Distribution

The project's main repository, hosted on the Dutch government forge, describes a complete work environment that goes beyond the desktop OS. The Netherlands are building a full ecosystem:

• Operating system: DAWO-NixOS, an in-house implementation of NixOS. In parallel, a Fedora Kinoite-based alternative is also being developed.
• Fleet management: DAWO-Sextant is used to manage the NixOS workstation fleet. For mobile devices, the team responsible for the project is evaluating the open source Fleet tool.
• Collaboration: the project is primarily betting on Mijn Bureau, a Dutch collaboration suite, while closely watching the German openDesk and the French government’s La Suite numérique.
• Cloud, identity, and AI: the DAWO-Cloud, DAWO-IAM, and DAWO-AI building blocks round out the platform.

Not to mention DAWO-Core: this is the base component, including the common NixOS configuration from which DAWO workstations are built. Its source code is available on Codeberg, making external contributions easier. DAWO is already running on PCs purchased several years ago that do not meet Windows 11's hardware requirements.

Why NixOS?

The team, made up of Victor Gevers, Rutger Putter, and Bram Buijs, first tested openSUSE, then Fedora, before settling on NixOS. The first two are backed by companies (SUSE and Red Hat, an IBM subsidiary), whereas no company controls NixOS. And NixOS was born from a package manager designed at the University of Utrecht, in the Netherlands.

Above all, NixOS has a technical advantage. With this Linux distribution, the state of the machine is declared in configuration files, which makes it possible to deploy identical workstations based on a common configuration. The DAWO-NixOS repository even generates an SBOM (software bill of materials) for each machine in its continuous integration pipeline.

If this model sounds familiar, that is normal: France is exploring the same path with Sécurix and Bureautix, the NixOS configurations published by DINUM. I detailed this approach in my introduction to NixOS, the Linux distribution the French government could use for its employees' workstations. NixOS therefore seems to be particularly appealing to governments seeking both independence and sovereignty.

To avoid losing administrators accustomed to Windows, Bram Buijs developed a graphical NixOS management tool. "We are not absolutists," Rutger Putter sums up. He is also clear-eyed about costs, and I find this statement quite relevant: "Open source does not cost less, it costs differently". Indeed, instead of paying for licenses, organizations must invest in skills and support.

A 1.0 release of DAWO is expected sometime in 2027 (the DAWO-NixOS changelog is currently at version 0.1.3).

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Florian Burnel Co-founder of IT-Connect

Systems and network engineer, co-founder of IT-Connect and Microsoft MVP "Cloud and Datacenter Management". I'd like to share my experience and discoveries through my articles. I'm a generalist with a particular interest in Microsoft solutions and scripting. Enjoy your reading.

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