Dutch government turns to NixOS for a sovereign desktop

The Dutch government is investing in a project to develop a free and open-source workplace for public administration, which includes a desktop operating system based on NixOS. This initiative, known as the DAWO Project, has been gaining traction and recently received more visibility through a detailed report on Dutch tech news site Tweakers.net.

DAWO stands for "Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid," or Digital Autonomous Government Work Environment. The project aims to create a replaceable set of components for the operating system, cloud infrastructure, AI, communications, and collaborative working. Small-scale pilots are already underway within Dutch public bodies, and the project has gained official status in July when the Dutch government's ICBR commissioned three government IT providers to develop a standardized, more sovereign digital workplace.

The blueprint for the project comes from the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, and includes components such as MijnBureau, a self-hosted workplace suite built from projects like Nextcloud, Collabora, Element, and OpenProject. MijnBureau is collaborating with France's La Suite and aligning with Germany's openDesk. OpenDesk, also a core part of this initiative, is in use by the International Criminal Court due to US sanctions against senior court officials.

The project's code is published through the BZK's government-hosted Forgejo instance, with repositories also available on Codeberg for outside contributors. The project initially experimented with openSUSE and Fedora before settling on NixOS, which offers a non-commercial control structure, declarative configuration, and reproducible deployments, making it attractive for managing and auditing large fleets of machines.