Dutch Government Builds DAWO, a NixOS Desktop for Civil Servants

The Dutch government is building DAWO, short for Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid, a government work environment with NixOS as its operating system, and municipalities are testing it on Linux laptops now. Developers are targeting a first stable release in 2027, according to The Next Web.

The trigger, per Its FOSS, was the loss of Microsoft access by the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor after U.S. sanctions in early 2025. Both outlets say the Dutch government formally tasked three IT providers, SSC-ICT, DICTU and DUO-ICT, in July 2026.

Four municipalities or eight?

The Digitale Overheid announcement of April 3, 2026 names four municipalities, 's-Hertogenbosch, Zaanstad, Ede and Amsterdam, working with the Association of Dutch Municipalities, known as VNG. Its FOSS and The Next Web both say eight municipalities are piloting. The Terminal found the government's list of the other four in none of the pages it read.

The government post describes the test as a Linux laptop running MijnBureau, an open-source collaboration environment that combines components from France's La Suite, Germany's OpenDesk and Nextcloud. The pilot runs through the end of 2026 and is meant to show "which groups of municipal employees can first use MijnBureau in a production environment," in the post's translated wording.

Item	Figure	Source
Municipalities named by the government	4	Digitale Overheid, Apr. 3
Municipalities reported by trade press	8	Its FOSS, The Next Web
Pilot end	End of 2026	Digitale Overheid
Target for first stable release	2027	The Next Web

Why NixOS won over openSUSE and Fedora

The Next Web names Victor Gevers, Rutger Putter and Bram Buijs as leading the core team, and says they weighed openSUSE and Fedora before choosing NixOS. Its FOSS gives the reasons: NixOS is a Dutch project that no company owns, while openSUSE is tied to SUSE and Fedora to Red Hat, an IBM subsidiary.

Its FOSS adds two practical arguments. NixOS runs on older hardware that Windows 11 cannot, so decommissioned laptops can be reused. And its functional package manager, which builds each machine from declared configuration, makes deployments reproducible. Putter told The Next Web, in its wording, "Eighty to ninety percent of your Nix code is reusable."

What the repository shows

The DAWO-NixOS repository is written entirely in Nix and shows 132 commits on 20 branches, with a flake-based layout covering boot and hardware, desktop environments, networking, services and a security-hardening rules register. It had 7 stars and 37 watchers when The Terminal loaded it on Sept. 29.

A notice on the page says the project moved from code.overheid.nl to Codeberg to make outside contribution easier, with backup copies kept on the government platform and on GitHub. Its FOSS describes a Forgejo instance with a Codeberg mirror; the two accounts differ on which is primary.

The ministry's DAWO page defines the goal in translation as an environment "with which end users can work safely, efficiently and autonomously-digitally." On code hosting, it lands where the site's piece on Go import paths and GitHub did: where the code lives is a dependency too. The Next Web quotes the developers on cost: "Open source doesn't cost less, it costs differently." Licence terms move too, as the Fakecloud AGPL emulator showed after LocalStack added authentication. The pilot's next fixed date is the end of 2026.