Dutch government turns to NixOS for a sovereign desktop The Dutch government is backing an effort to build a FOSS workplace for public administration, including a desktop operating system based on NixOS. The DAWO Project has been gestating for some months, but it just got a lot more visible thanks to an in-depth report on Dutch tech news site Tweakers.net. DAWO stands for "Digitaal …
The FOSS community has been able to supply a replacement desktop OS for at least two decades.
The fact it hasn't happened is more about the fact they didn't really want to, rather than couldn't.
And the only reason I have repeatedly encountered seems to be a total and utter failure to actually understand how big corporations work, and instead try and shape them to the FOSS offering, rather than vice versa
"The FOSS community has been able to supply a replacement desktop OS for at least two decades."
If you think that it hasn't that's because you haven't looked.
Personally, I'm using one right now on my own laptop, having spent a good chunk of the afternoon helping someone get his printer working on a non-FOSS desktop. That was not a pleasant use of an afternoon with some pop-up appearing on almost every click telling us that the browser or whatever wasn't secured because it didn't have anti-virus - and at one stage Coprolite invited itself into the proceedings. My SiL keeps getting locked out of her new laptop by Microsoft who seem to think they own it.
I certainly don't want the FOSS community to provide a replacement of that sort of desktop.
"And the only reason I have repeatedly encountered seems to be a total and utter failure to actually understand how big corporations work, and instead try and shape them to the FOSS offering, rather than vice versa"
Big corporations have already shaped themselves to the likes of Microsoft, SAP, Oracle etc. If that's not working for them then they need to reshape themselves to something else. That's the whole point.
What do you think the sentence you quoted means? They clearly indicated that they think the FOSS desktop OS has been fit for decades. I agree with them. What hasn't happened (very much) is widespread adoption of that. You're also correct that users will need to reshape themselves to change, which is one of the reasons that widespread adoption hasn't happened. If reshaping was less painful, more adoption would happen, so if we care about people adopting, it would be helpful to do, as the Netherlands are trying, things which reduce the difficulty getting that reshaping done.
FOSS isn't a magic bullet and Linux was a pain in the arse for a long time. It often still is, as documented by El Reg in articles on culture war cat fights, forks and software that is no longer supported. I'm sure it has improved, but for a long time, installing Linux on any random system would fail. That would not be acceptable in an enterprise.
If you are an enterprise, getting all your stuff from Oracle gives you one dependency. When it doesn't work, everyone shouts FOSS. But FOSS offers multiple dependencies that might fail, many of which are difficult to account for. Companies now have to account for everything but the tea lady's pet cat in their supply chain, courtesy of endless performative Govt. rules. And many entities have no techies on hand. Their stuff is installed and they expect it to then work.
FOSS is simply not an answer to sovereign capability. Torvalds is American now, the Foundation is in the States, and many FOSS projects are based in the States, placing them all under US law.
Most governments would be happier with a non-FOSS single entity producing an OS and software in their own country. But they have never handed the cash to anyone to do that. It doesn't have to be as complex as Windows (or Linux) and it could be a whole lot more secure, if both the OS and mobo was redesigned.
So yes, FOSS offers an alternative, but not one that ticks all the boxes. It has different issues to MS or Oracle or whomever. We think it is better, but we don't have purchasing processes like larger users.
Given the way GAFA are behaving with AI, non-AI Linux may be the best solution for ordinary users. But its more complex for larger users. They do seem here to be trying to inch toward a solution, but Linux will come with different problems for them..
>And at the beginning is Active Directory/Entra. If you need to use MS for user authentication and authorisation then you may as well use the products it works with, OS and Comms and Office.
We have tens of thousands of servers/instances across the globe in various data centers & AWS. Bare metal, KVM, Proxmox, VMWare [being decommed], Kubernees and OpenStack. The vast majority of these run linux of some form.
All of it using FreeiPA hooked back into AD/Entra. All of the groups managed by the central team, and when a request come in for adding a user or whatever, they just do it and it replicates out. So AD/Entra is _not_ a blocker for auth on other platforms.
Widespread adoption hasn't happened because we have a lot of weirdos in FOSS land that let opinions get in the way of a sensible choice.
For the vast majority of users, Debian or Ubuntu are perfectly fine. The minute I saw NixOS in the article, I could instantly picture the techie that was advising on that choice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02a723LsoFA
Whilst NixOS is very good and if you're into that sort of thing, it is extremely granular and you can get a result that is exactly what you want...but it's at the pretty intense end of the usability spectrum for most folks...and has a pretty steep learning curve for system integrators...you're not hiring cost effective garden variety box monkeys to manage that.
"They clearly indicated that they think the FOSS desktop OS has been fit for decades."
No, they clearly think that a FOSS desktop could be produced. The next sentence expresses an opinion that it it hasn't actually done that of which it's capable. That, of course, is nonsense.
The reason it hasn't been widely adopted is because any change from what businesses have would be perceived as painful but, of course, the reality is that they are subjected to change on a regular basis by whatever commercial entity has their balls in its grip and will keep on squeezing to extract money from them.
Occasionally the squeeze is hard enough to force a reappraisal - e.g. VMWare - but on the whole they just put up with the pain their existing suppliers inflict.
Frankly, if the Netherlands are intent on adopting a seriously non-mainstream Linux the difficulty isn't going to be reduced - far from it. There are plenty people about who have been supporting Unix and Unix-like systems for decades. By adopting something build on top of FOSS to yield an as non-Unix-like system as possible they're cutting themselves off from that support. If they'd wanted to support local produce they need have looked no further than Dyne.org based in Amsterdam and Devuan.
You and I are reading their comment very differently. I think they're saying that the OS has most of what it needs, and the parts that are missing are the parts that makes it easier to adopt which people apparently don't have an interest in writing.
Part of what they're building is utilities around Nix OS, and those will be unusual compared to distros most of us use. Another part is the application stack for their workers which makes it easier for nontechnical employees to adopt the OS. Whether it's Nix OS or Devuan below those applications, their availability and maintenance is important to a migration, and when they're trying to reshape their desktop systems across a big government, that's probably more important than which software installation process they use to install those applications.
“The Manufacturing WEG is not intended to communicate the Windows Minimum Hardware Requirements or OEM Policy Document (OPD). The WHCP and OPD documents take precedence over any information in the Manufacturing WEG. You must comply with WHCP and OPD.”
It's like trying to decode a Scientology HCOB (Hubbard Communications Office Bulletin) /s
The FOSS community has been able to supply a replacement desktop OS for at least two decades.
The fact it hasn't happened is more about the fact they didn't really want to, rather than couldn't.
The FOSS community isn't a 'thing', it's a grouping term for a collection of many many many separate projects, each with their own goals, ideals and aims.
It doesn't operate with a single collective direction in a way a company such as Microsoft does.
"FOSS" as a concept is either half or fully dedicated to serving corporations, as the intention is to be neutral between the freedom of free software and serving corporates; "open source".
One issue is that it fails to be neutral; floss-and-foss and also another issue is that it's extremely popular to refer to proprietary software that isn't gratis, that isn't even source-available, as "FOSS".
GNU has provided everything needed for the free software (and proprietary) community, to supply a replacement desktop OS since 1995 (30+ years).
Big corporations don't seem to have any issue installing GNU/Linux - it doesn't need to be damaged further by adding more proprietary software - what needs to happen is for all the proprietary software to be taken out and replaced with free software (for practical reasons alone, it's the only way you're going to get a properly working OS after all).
"The Elves of Valinor, creators of the popular Palantir devices used throughout Middle-Earth to view distant lands, announced today that the seeing stones contain a critical security flaw which could leave users open to being taken over by malicious Dark Lords.
The vulnerabilities, according to the Elvinor monthly bulletin, could allow malignant gods to monitor the location and activity of users, or allow persons peering into the Palantir to be taken over and used to execute remote actions. Elvinor urges those in possession of a Palantir to contact the Order of the Istari and request a magic patch to address the issue. Critics have seized upon the announcement as further proof that Elvinor hardware is inherently insecure and urged consumers to switch to Mithril products. "You’ll never get this kind shoddy craftsmanship from a dwarf" said Thorin III Stonehelm of Khazad-dum."
> This is useless unless you get the American regime hyperscalers out
Are you commenting without reading the article?
Not that many English language outlets have picked this up yet. Those I saw are getting excited, as usual, about a new distro.
I carefully pointed out that the distro is a relatively small part of this, and the more important part is MijnBureau, which seems to be essentially a Dutch version of ZenDIS openDesk: it's a suite of FOSS apps, accessible over the web, that does email, scheduling, contacts, text chat, voice chat, video chat, group videoconferencing, and of course the boring old "office" apps, all open source and all free from US "cloud" vendors.
And, significantly, Schleswig has shown you can import your entire multi-thousand-user MS Exchange site into it, keep the mails and address book and all those diaries, and work with your existing MS desktops and MS apps while you're getting ready to migrate the desktop PCs.
DAWO is being piloted on old laptops. Presumably the Dutch government has a very large pile of laptops that can't run Win11, are therefore totally deprecated, and count as free hardware for the test migration.
I can personally attest that it is perfectly possible to do 100% of my day job on 10-15 year old hardware: it works fine, it's fast and responsive, it can run current apps on a current OS, no problem.
Without digging in, it's honestly a good idea. If this is due to the US sanctioning the ICC, I say "sanction more!"
I had to laugh at how this project is set up though. Not just one shop, like they did in the LiMux project. No, three civil servantry outfits. One of which is "DUO-ICT", and the DUO has a legendary poor reputation regarding performance, including its ICT. Second probably only to the taxman. So we'll have to see how it pans out in the cold hard light of the day.
As to NixOS, ISTR they used to use xml for everything, which was a major reason to turn away. Looks like they've fixed that. But really, having a software suite that you can easily roll out into the required configuration for a given role is a good idea. It would be even better if they first standardised on open protocols, so you can seamlessly swap out clients rather than have to do "flag day" upgrades. This is usually implied in using "FOSS", but it would be better to make it explicit. Protocols first, approved-and-tested clients lists building on that.
If this is due to the US sanctioning the ICC, I say "sanction more!"
There's nothing better to kick people out of their complacency, have them realise they've put their eggs in one basket, than someone taking that basket away. The worse Trump gets the more awake others are becoming.
He Made China Great Again and he can do it for the rest of the world.
It's always been obvious to me that all government IT should be FOSS and as others have noted be based around open protocols. That approach might well have saved Birmingham City Council a few quid!
So I guess we have to thank the Pumpkin Führer for initiating the stampede away from M$ et al. Just don't get trampled in the rush.
Thank you for your reply. I did read the article.
I absolutely take on board all the information about FOSS apps, and so on. But I will hazard a guess that, at the scale required there will still be extensive use of third-party cloud infrastructure. Unless they are building their own? If there is any dependency on hyperscaler clouds it's a weak link.
I agree about old hardware being perfectly functional for most tasks. I have an old MacBook which can't be updated unless I chose to go down the OpenCore route. But for my use, an old OS on aging hardware still works perfectly well.
> I absolutely take on board all the information about FOSS apps, and so on. But I will hazard a guess that, at the scale required there will still be extensive use of third-party cloud infrastructure. Unless they are building their own? If there is any dependency on hyperscaler clouds it's a weak link.
There will be.
It is far from ideal but at least European cloud in an EU state under control of an EU business is better.
Frankly: the small relatively poor countries will do it first, and the small poor states of the big powers. And it'll work and their big neighbours will come asking.
A few contractors are going to get fat. That's capitalism.
But once it's been ripped out of the Trumpanian cloud, the dependency will be much much weaker.
Nextcloud can be ripped out and replaced with Owncloud.
Open-Xchange can be replaced with Grommunio.
LibreOffice, EuroOffice, Collabora, OnlyOffice, Softmaker, all interchangeable if you're facing invasion.
> Liam, could you please do a follow-up on Schleswig, Denmark etc. News articles on this or that project get attention but the goldfish need the occasional reminder.
Only if the various jurisdictions doing it make some public noise about how it's going!
My impression is this:
Bureaucrats are timorous nervous little things and fear changes. Most civil servants everywhere are not very tech literate and just use what they're given.
Most of 'em are too scared to move.
But now, Trumpistan can't be trusted, and the threat of Putin is real and close. Their trembling hands are being forced.
Schleswig and Denmark jumped first. They landed the jump. Their IT still works.
The others would like to wait a decade, write 1000 reports and studies, but they are terrified that the Trumpistanis will pull the plug, and now the money is there and the tools are rapidly evolving and the impetus is there. You can hire the people.
It'll happen. At first it'll happen badly and it'll use European cloud but if there is a "limited nuclear exchange" or a "cyber attack" takes out a Eurocloud provider they'll go back to running their own damned servers in their own armoured bunkers.
Side-note
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Real tech knowledge is rare.
Cynical side-note from over 35Y working in the tech industry... the majority of mainstream business techies have no general IT skills; they _only_ know Microsoft tools. You can find tens of thousands of multi-decade tech experts who know nothing except Windows and Windows tools. They know a tonne about them, but put them in front of a Unix box or a Mac and they are totally lost.
They all stoutly deny it and get angry if accused. My personal take: Unix is 1 OS. All Unixes count as 1. Under the hood this includes macOS. DOS/WinNT is another. That's 2 -- and they are close relatives, compared to IBM z/OS or IBM i or Novell Netware (RIP) or classic MacOS or AmigaOS or RISC OS or Oberon or 1000 others.
Unless someone knows _at least 3_ totally different OSes then they do not know tech.
Most Unix pros know Windows pretty well, and so they are more skilled. So they cost more. The good ones are old. They cost a lot. You can hire dozens of cheap young Windows point-and-drool merchants for the cost of 1 senior multiplatform bod -- but that 1 greybeard can automate away most of what the kids do.
> Real tech knowledge is rare.
And it often as not doesn't get you hired. Not by and of itself.
I'd disagree DOS and WinNT are one and the same. MS-DOS gives you CP/M levels of performance and features out of Unix-capable hardware. (And I like CP/M.) WinNT is Cuttler's revenge, a system that often is vaguely somewhat Unix-like but more often than not gratuitously different for no reason. It doesn't really have a positive character of its own. Negative traits, though... having recently spent some time installing it from scratch after a multi-decade absence, even with the help of third-party tooling to cut down the crap, it still gets me shouting at the screen in minutes. It's like a Zen-challenge for knowlegeable people, that conveniently also keeps the lesser-experienced in a fearful stupor. It's very good at that, so no wonder so many people don't dare look elsewhere.
> Unless someone knows _at least 3_ totally different OSes then they do not know tech.
There really isn't any single third one with much of any traction outside complete niches. Sure, there's Z/OS, or OS/400 or whatever it's called today, but good luck getting your hands on anything to learn. The rest seems to be mostly people's hobby projects. Even that is moving toward mostly linux respins. Or you have to dig into something historic. Which is cool, but not a good basis to get to that vaunted "third" so one may "know tech".
"But all it takes is one word from the orange convicted felon pirate and war criminal to MS or Google: Turn off access."
Yes, getting out from under is the reason they're doing that. Didn't you grasp that?
Your run your choice of S/W on your own hardware. The Whitehouse whimsy can tell MS and Google to turn off access as much as he likes but there's no access to turn off.
I mentioned both projects, and their inspiration, here:
https://www.theregister.com/oses/2026/05/14/kde-bags-13m-as-europe-realizes-it-might-need-an-os-of-its-own/5240562
Big fan of Astérix over here, and I am gradually collecting the albums in French now to go with my English copies. I also bought all the Goscinny et Uderzo originals in Czech, but my Czech isn't up to it yet, so I gave them to my wife as gifts. :-)
I hope in a few years my daughter enjoys them...
or even Mageia, that are European "Distros From Scratch"...
Than using Ubuntu, that depends on Debian. Or ZorinOS or Mint, or the "Gendarmerie Linux", that depends on Ubuntu (that depends on debian).
Is bad enough for the Europeans that many of the components of modern Linux-es are USoA based, but to add salt to the wound by giving the USoA another lever to push by having the base distro be based there as well (redundancy intended) is m0r0n1c indeed from a "Sovereignty" standpoint.
PS: Sovereignty has many layers, from the datcenters (and the ancillaries like AirCon, UPSs and Motor Generators), to the tececom, datacom and compute inside, to the OS and Middleware, to the "Sovereign" clouds, to the client devices and Apps.
Each layer has its challenges, and Europe (both as a continent, and as EU) has different degrees of self sufficiency in each area.
Another way to be "m0r0n1c" about sovereignty would be to use only things that are made by people in a tiny list of acceptable destinations, which increases the amount of software you reject for no good reason because a developer outside the EU who wrote code but doesn't control whether you can run it is not a threat. The more software you refuse to run for pointless nationalistic reasons, the more you have to write from scratch, the more it costs to get the same software someone could easily get for free with exactly the same maintainability and control, the more time you wait to get your capability, and therefore the more time that the people you're afraid will do something to sabotage your system will be able to do that because your replacement doesn't work yet so you're still on the non-sovereign one. Oh, and also, the more cost you have to spend reimplementing software because the Debian donation page goes through a US foundation, even though they do have tons of non-US developers doing some of the maintaining, the more likely a politician decides there's no budget for that and goes with whatever's cheaper, hopefully one of the FOSS versions you suggest but possibly not because more Windows licenses is a simple option.
As the Tweakers article states, the choice for NixOS has a lot of aspects to it, but the main ones are:
1. It's Dutch
2. It's not related to a corporate entity
3. It's got it's own package manager (also Dutch)
4. It's immutable
5. It has great managability at scale
I think the Dutch government made a great choice on this one. If this gets off the ground i might actually consider looking for a job related to it, it looks like an awesome project to be a part of.
[Better] Than using Ubuntu*, that depends on Debian Or ZorinOS** or Mint***, or the "Gendarmerie Linux"**** that depends on Ubuntu (that depends on debian*****).
* Based on the Isle of Man - European
** Based in Ireland - European
*** Also based in Ireland
**** French
***** Citizen of the world as far as I know
Their entire point is that all of those things are based on Debian and they consider Debian to be based in the United States, probably because Software in the Public Interest, the nonprofit which holds assets for Debian, is a US organization. I think this is stupid because there are Switzerland and France-based organizations that are also involved and mostly because a US nonprofit doesn't give the US government control over what Debian users can do. But following the way you assigned countries to the other elements of their list, their raw accusation does work.
Like others in this thread, I was a bit shocked to find NixOS here (I made a joke about "Dutch courage" somewhere else, which was probably a bit exaggerated).
Having RTFA, I'd say NixOS can be great for this task, as long as it's in the right hands. Its flexibility and scalability are good enough, and it will most likely be invisible to clients/end users of the suite.
Of course, that leaves us with a rather typical patchwork of different EU solutions to the sovereignty issue (those old enough might remember the EuroFIghter), but this brave Dutch initiative seems to be a step in the right direction.
