The Netherlands Is Building a NixOS-Based Government Desktop After Microsoft Cut Off the ICC

A wake-up call from the ICC

When the U.S. government imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) in early 2025, the fallout was swift: the ICC chief prosecutor lost access to Microsoft services, including email, and later saw personal and institutional bank accounts frozen in affected jurisdictions. As It's FOSS reported, the Dutch government watched this unfold and drew a hard conclusion, its access to essential services depended on decisions made in the United States.

Enter DAWO

The response is DAWO, short for Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid, or Digital Autonomous Work Environment for Government. It is a framework covering the whole government digital stack, the operating system, an office suite, collaboration apps, cloud services, IT-management tools, and AI, all built on a NixOS foundation. DAWO became an official mandate in July, when the Interdepartmental Commission for Government Business Operations (ICBR) issued a directive for a standardized, sovereign digital work environment.

Who is building it

The three major IT service providers of the Dutch central government, SSC-ICT, DICTU, and DUO-ICT, are tasked with executing the project. Development is handled by a team associated with the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations (BZK), with figures including Victor Gevers, Rutger Putter, and Bram Buijs named. In a nod to the same sovereignty logic, all of DAWO's code is hosted on a Forgejo instance (with a Codeberg instance as the contributor entry point), echoing the country's earlier move away from GitHub and GitLab.

Why NixOS

Nix, the package manager NixOS is built around, handles configuration through its own functional language, installing each package into an isolated directory with immutable, signed contents. That makes a working setup reproducible across machines, and for a rollout spanning dozens of agencies, reproducibility adds up. Rutger estimates around 80 to 90 percent of a configuration carries over between deployments. NixOS also runs on hardware Windows 11 cannot, which is why current pilots use decommissioned laptops that would otherwise be retired. Crucially, NixOS was chosen because it is a community project with no single company owning it; openSUSE and Fedora were considered but disqualified over commercial ties (to SUSE and to Red Hat/IBM respectively).

Pilots and the wider European trend

Eight municipalities are running trial programs via the Association of Dutch Municipalities (VNG). The Netherlands is not alone: Germany's Schleswig-Holstein went through a similar Microsoft exit, redirecting former license spending toward open-source projects, while Denmark and France have made comparable moves, France reportedly moving 80,000 health-insurance employees to domestic tools. DAWO's team intends to release its first stable version sometime next year, incorporating feedback from the municipalities.

Why it matters

DAWO is a concrete example of 'digital sovereignty' moving from slideware to deployment. The ICC episode gave Dutch officials a first-hand reminder of what vendor dependency can cost, and NixOS's reproducibility and vendor-neutrality make it a pragmatic foundation. Whether it scales cleanly from pilots to a national rollout is the open question, but the direction of travel across Europe is unmistakable.

Related on Skillo

See also: Debian 13 'Trixie' released, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS released.

Sources

• The Netherlands Built a Nix-Based Linux Desktop Because Microsoft Cut Off the ICC (Sourav Rudra, It's FOSS, 26 Sep 2026)

Published date reflects the original event date (2026-09-29). This article is original Skillo editorial written from the sources above; facts were verified in September 2026.