Goodbye, Windows: The Netherlands Is Building Its Own Linux for Government
Trending Topics Jakob Steinschaden
The Netherlands is building DAWO, a government desktop and cloud stack based on Linux. It’s a direct bid to stop Microsoft from holding the switch.
Based on reporting by Trending Topics, Jakob Steinschaden — read the original for the full story.
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The Dutch government is trying to do something that sounds simple and is anything but: stop relying on Microsoft for the basic plumbing of public work. Its answer is DAWO, short for Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid, a homegrown digital workplace for government agencies that runs from the operating system to office tools, cloud storage, backups and IT management. Artificial intelligence is supposed to sit inside that same sovereign setup too.
At the core is NixOS, an open-source Linux distribution. That choice is not just technical. It is a political signal from a government that wants its own stack to be free of American tech giants, and one that now has eight municipalities already testing the system. The project is linked to the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and is being carried out by SSC-ICT, DICTU and DUO-ICT, the three state IT service providers that got the mandate in July.
The trigger was a story that spread far beyond the Netherlands: after U.S. sanctions on the International Criminal Court in The Hague, the court’s chief prosecutor reportedly lost access to Microsoft services in early 2025. Microsoft disputes that account, but Dutch lawmakers treated it as a warning shot. If a service can be switched off from abroad, they argue, then it is not really sovereign.
There are practical reasons for picking NixOS too. It lets administrators define a system’s desired state in code, which should make large-scale setups more consistent and easier to trace. It also works on older hardware that Windows 11 no longer supports. The first stable version of DAWO is expected next year, but there is no timetable yet for a nationwide rollout.
The hard part is everything around the operating system. Government offices still depend on Windows-only software, documents have to move cleanly between DAWO and Microsoft Office, and thousands of civil servants will need training. Then there is the unglamorous stuff: drivers, security certification, and the question of who pays to keep the whole thing alive over time.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the right kind of boring rebellion: not a manifesto, just procurement with a backbone. Europe has spent years talking about digital sovereignty while renting the keys to its own office door; now the Dutch are trying to change that with code, not speeches. The real test is whether civil servants can keep working without noticing the switch, which is exactly why this matters.
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