In early 2025, when the United States imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Microsoft cut off the court’s chief prosecutor from services such as email. For Dutch officials, the episode was not an IT problem but a foreign-policy decision that could reach into their own computers. The realization that essential government services depended on the policy direction of Washington set in motion a project that is now quietly replacing Windows on some Dutch government desktops.
The project is called DAWO, short for Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid, or Digital Autonomous Government Work Environment. Run by the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, it is an attempt to rebuild the whole government workplace — operating system, office software, collaboration tools, cloud storage, identity and fleet management — on open-source code that the Netherlands controls itself.
The operating system at the center of it is NixOS, an unusual choice for a government desktop. Most Linux distributions, like Windows, build a machine’s state over time through installs, updates and manual changes. NixOS defines the entire system in configuration files and builds the machine from them, so two computers built from the same pinned configuration come out identical. Developers told the Dutch technology outlet Tweakers that they tried openSUSE and then Fedora before settling on NixOS, and that a Fedora variant remains a fallback track.
The effort is still small. Pilots are running at eight municipalities through the Association of Netherlands Municipalities, on older laptops that have already been written off. In at least one municipality, elected council members use the setup. There is no deadline for removing Windows, and developers said they hope for a 1.0 release sometime in 2027.
The scope extends well beyond the desktop. DAWO’s blueprint lists DAWO-Cloud for government storage and hosting, DAWO-IAM for identity and access management, and DAWO-Sextant for fleet management. Office and collaboration software is being assembled under a program called Mijn Bureau, while the German OpenDesk and French La Suite projects are being watched as European partners. The team is also investigating a mobile track and has an AI component called DAWO-AI.
The catalyst was explicitly geopolitical. Innovation manager and security expert Victor Gevers told Tweakers that DAWO emerged from the ICC sanctions, when the Netherlands saw that access to essential services could depend on a foreign government’s decisions. A broader policy introduced in July 2026 instructs public bodies to evaluate geopolitical risk and vendor dependence before adopting public cloud services, and discourages critical organizations from storing data outside the European Union.
The Netherlands is not acting alone. Denmark’s government moved from Windows to Linux in 2025, and France and Switzerland followed earlier in 2026, part of a European push for digital sovereignty that gathered force after the ICC episode. The Dutch project is distinctive in its ambition: rather than swapping one operating system for another, it is rebuilding the entire stack a civil servant touches in a day.
The choice of NixOS reflects a specific need. Administrators of a large fleet want identical machines and the ability to roll back a bad update, and NixOS records each system generation so a workstation can be returned to an earlier state rather than rebuilt from scratch. The project’s module map covers boot, desktops, hardening, networking, programs and user accounts — the same concerns a Windows administrator would recognize from a managed desktop image and its policies.
The pilots also reveal the hardware realities. Tweakers reported that DAWO runs on machines already written off, and that it could run on computers that fail Windows 11’s hardware requirements. One pull request in the repository references a ThinkPad T495s host alongside a hardening option, a sign that the team is testing on modest, older equipment rather than new hardware.
Analysts and developers caution that open source is not automatically cheaper. Tweakers warned that spending can move from licenses to hosting, in-house IT staff, development and support for the open-source projects involved. A Linux desktop can replace Windows on the screen while a single incompatible device — a printer, a smart-card reader, a VPN client, a line-of-business application — blocks an entire department.
Office compatibility is the harder test. Civil servants rely on Excel macros, proprietary document templates and Microsoft 365 integrations. The DAWO team must provide replacements, preserve file compatibility, or keep a Windows system available for specific tasks, which would blunt the point of the migration.
Microsoft’s grip on government offices is the backdrop. Windows and Microsoft 365 run the back office of much of Western Europe’s public sector, and European officials have pressed member states for years to reduce dependence on a handful of non-European providers. DAWO is the Dutch answer to that pressure, and its progress is being watched by other governments weighing the same calculation.
For now the Dutch state has committed to no date for agencies to stop running Windows. What exists is a funded development effort with working pilots, public code and a commit history running through September 2026. The question analysts raise is whether the Netherlands can move from a demonstration to a working government workplace without disrupting the daily business of its ministries, and the mere option of walking away from an American vendor may matter as much as any rollout deadline.
