XDA Developers reported the story on September 24, 2026, based on a Tweakers investigation built on interviews with DAWO developers. XDA placed the Netherlands in a wider European move away from Windows, citing earlier moves by Denmark, France and Switzerland. Those country-by-country claims are not verified here, so this piece covers only the Dutch project. The Dutch evidence is strong on its own terms: the government's code platform hosts DAWO's blueprint and the NixOS code, and the commit history runs through September 2026.
DAWO Puts a NixOS Desktop at the Core of the Dutch Government's Windows Alternative
BZK's own project page describes DAWO as an effort to create an interoperable, digitally autonomous foundation for government workplaces. The desktop operating system is one track among several. The ministry's DAWO repository sets out the rest of the blueprint: DAWO-Cloud aims at an open cloud implementation for the whole government to work on, identity and access management comes through DAWO-IAM, and DAWO-Sextant is the fleet manager for DAWO-NixOS (DAWO-Core). The same page adds that the team is investigating fleet for DAWO-Mobile in parallel and has an AI component called DAWO-AI.
Collaboration software is part of the plan too. According to the blueprint, the main effort is Mijn Bureau, while the OpenDesk and La Suite projects are being watched, and DAWO collaborates with these initiatives at national and European level. OpenDesk comes from Germany and La Suite from France. So DAWO is designed to plug into, or learn from, other European public-sector office suites rather than build everything alone.
The operating system itself comes from a separate repository. Its description says it contains the code to build workplaces automatically and identically using the Linux operating system NixOS. Tweakers reports that the developers tried openSUSE and then Fedora before choosing NixOS. The current repository material lists Fedora Kinoite as a fallback development track.
The blueprint diagram also links specific government IT organisations to specific tracks. It shows a DAWO-NixOS installation labelled as a VNG proof of concept of DAWO-Core, and a DAWO-DWR track linked to SSC-ICT. VNG is the Association of Netherlands Municipalities. SSC-ICT is one of the central government's big shared IT service providers. These are named development tracks, and they are not evidence that any of these organisations has deployed the environment to staff.
Eight Municipalities and a July 2026 Mandate Show How Small DAWO Still Is
Tweakers gives the most detail on DAWO's real footprint. The pilots are small and closed. Eight municipalities are running a practical exploration through VNG, with VNG's IT organisation, VNG Realisatie, also involved. The municipalities were not named in the September report. Earlier reporting named four participants: 's-Hertogenbosch, Zaanstad, Ede and Amsterdam. Tweakers also mentions a municipal council taking part in a pilot without naming it.
Central government made the work official in July 2026. According to Tweakers, the Interdepartmental Commission for Government Operations (ICBR) that month commissioned a more sovereign, standardised digital workplace. The report names three major government IT service providers: SSC-ICT, DICTU and DUO-ICT. This is an order to develop an alternative. It is not a decision to replace Windows on civil servants' desks.
The timeline is loose on purpose. Tweakers reports that the team has code milestones, but the community will decide by discussion and consensus when version 1.0 is ready. Developers hope for 2027 and gave no month or quarter. There is no formal implementation schedule or deadline for general government use. XDA's summary says the Netherlands "begins moving government systems from Windows to Linux". That goes further than the record: what exists is a funded development effort with pilots.
One pilot detail stands out for Windows shops. Tweakers reports that the pilots run on older laptops that have already been written off, and that DAWO could run on computers that fail Windows 11's hardware requirements. The repository shows the kind of hardware involved: one pull request title includes a "T495s host" alongside a hardening opt-in and a 26.05 version pin. The T495s is a ThinkPad model. This is a trait of the pilot setup, not a measured cost comparison, and Tweakers itself warns that open source is not automatically cheaper. Spending can move from licences to hosting, in-house IT staff, development and support for the open-source projects involved.
Why NixOS Flakes Suit a Fleet of Identical Government Workstations
NixOS is an unusual choice for a government desktop. The repository shows why the team made it. Most Linux distributions, like Windows, build a machine's state up over time from installs, updates and manual changes. NixOS defines the whole system in configuration files and builds the machine from them. The DAWO Core repository says it utilizes a flake-based build system to provide reproducible and modular environment definitions across various hosts and services.
The repository explains its main building blocks this way: flakes are the foundation, used for pinning inputs and defining outputs; modules are the main way configurations are organised into composable building blocks; and multi-tenancy is designed to handle roles ranging from desktops to core services. "Pinning inputs" means locking the exact versions of the software the build pulls in. Two machines built from the same pinned configuration should come out identical. That is what a fleet administrator wants, and it is what the repository means by building workplaces "automatically and identically".
The repository's module map covers the areas a Windows administrator would recognise from a managed desktop image and its policies:
| DAWO module | Purpose stated in the repository | Rough Windows-world counterpart (our inference) |
|---|---|---|
| boot | Bootloader and initial kernel parameters | Boot configuration |
| desktops | GUI environments and workspace setups | Shell and desktop policy |
| hardening | Security controls and the rule register that selects them | Security baselines |
| networking | Network interfaces, Wi-Fi and VPN configuration | Wi-Fi/VPN profiles |
| programs | Software package management and configuration | App deployment |
| users | User accounts, groups and sudoer permissions | Local groups and admin rights |
The third column is an editorial comparison to help Windows readers. It is not a claim that DAWO works the same way as Group Policy or Intune.
Recent commits show a project attending to supply-chain basics. The CI pipeline now publishes a software bill of materials (SBOM) for each host, and one commit message says it will also "report what is known wrong with it". The hardening documentation was changed to "write down the register before anything depends on it". The repository also warns contributors about pitfalls when debugging CI or a device managed by comin, a GitOps deployment tool, especially anything that reports success while being wrong. All of this is candid engineering from a team still building. Nothing here shows that the hardening register or fleet tooling is ready for production.
The code's home is also changing. The project notes that DAWO Core has moved from code.overheid.nl to Codeberg to facilitate community collaboration, and backup copies remain on the government platform and GitHub. A separate DAWO.community site presents the project as one where government, industry and open source come together, with public and private parties building the same blueprint.
The ICC Sanctions Episode Turned Microsoft Dependence Into a Dutch Policy Problem
According to Tweakers, DAWO's origins go back to early 2025, when worries about dependence on foreign technology suppliers became acute. Tweakers links this to US sanctions on the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and to Microsoft cutting ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan off from services such as email. The account comes from DAWO developer Victor Gevers, an innovation manager and security expert. In XDA's machine translation of Tweakers' summary, the Dutch government realised then "that access to many essential services depends on the policy direction of the US government." The same summary says there are signs the Trump administration is preparing broader ICC sanctions.
This is the project's stated reason for existing, as its own developers tell it. It does not mean Microsoft's action alone triggered a migration, because no migration has happened yet. It does show why DAWO's scope is so wide. If the worry is that one foreign provider can switch off a mailbox, replacing only the desktop OS changes little. The mail, documents, cloud storage and identity layer behind it are what count.
The policy backdrop is on the official record. The current Dutch coalition agreement says digital autonomy should guide government choices, with targeted work to phase out strategic dependencies in cloud, data and critical systems. It also calls for procurement based on security-by-design, zero trust, sovereignty, open source and supply-chain security. The agreement does not order a switch from Windows to Linux. It does give a project like DAWO political cover and direction.
Replacing Windows Means Replacing Microsoft 365, Intune and Entra Too
For administrators, the main lesson from DAWO's blueprint is that the operating system is the easy part. Look at the component list against a typical Microsoft-managed government estate. DAWO-Core replaces Windows. Mijn Bureau and the watched OpenDesk and La Suite suites cover what Microsoft 365 apps and Teams do now. DAWO-Cloud targets the storage and hosting role of OneDrive, SharePoint and Azure. DAWO-IAM covers what Entra ID handles. DAWO-Sextant covers the fleet-management work usually done by Intune or Configuration Manager. Pairing each component with a Microsoft product is our reading of their stated roles, but it shows the scale of the task: every layer needs its own working, supported replacement before anyone can move a single civil servant off Windows.
The developers seem to understand who has to run this. Tweakers reports that they are building a graphical management interface partly to make the environment easier for Windows administrators. They also say taking part in the open-source community is encouraged but not required. That is a sensible design goal, and it is also an admission of a known obstacle: most public-sector IT staff are trained on Windows tools, not declarative Nix configuration.
The open questions are practical ones: application compatibility for specialist government software, device and peripheral support, accessibility for users and administrators, how quickly security fixes arrive, and migration costs. The printing branch in the repository, "feat/printing-driver-set-and-discovery", is a small reminder that ordinary desktop plumbing still has to be built and tested. Tweakers' warning about costs moving to staff and support belongs in any business case built on DAWO.
What Windows Administrators Should Take From DAWO
Nobody running Windows needs to change plans because of DAWO today. It has no general release, no deadline and no deployment beyond closed pilots. The people who should watch closely are Dutch public-sector IT teams, suppliers to Dutch government, and European organisations writing their own sovereignty strategies. For them, the repositories are open now and the design choices can be inspected directly.
- DAWO is a BZK-led development project with small closed pilots, including eight municipalities working through VNG, and it has not replaced Windows anywhere at scale.
- Developers hope for a 1.0 release in 2027, but there is no formal implementation schedule or deadline for general government use.
- The operating system track is NixOS with a flake-based, reproducible build, and Fedora Kinoite is kept as a fallback track.
- The blueprint also covers collaboration software (Mijn Bureau), cloud, identity (DAWO-IAM) and fleet management (DAWO-Sextant), so any evaluation has to include all of those layers.
- The pilots reportedly run on older, written-off laptops, which is worth noting for organisations with hardware that cannot run Windows 11, but no cost comparison has been published.
- Organisations with a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement in the Dutch public sector should expect sovereignty questions in procurement, because the coalition agreement already names open source and phasing out strategic dependencies as priorities.
DAWO is still a pilot, not a mass move off Windows. It is serious because it is being built in public, with a July 2026 mandate from central government, a blueprint that covers every layer of the Microsoft stack, and code anyone can read. The next real milestone is a 1.0 release, which the community will declare when it agrees the code is ready. Until central-government IT providers such as SSC-ICT, DICTU and DUO-ICT move from building the workplace to issuing it to staff, Windows remains the Dutch government's production desktop.