Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
The Dutch government is building a digitally autonomous workplace using NixOS.
The DAWO community is an open initiative where government, industry, and society jointly develop a modular, verifiable digital workplace for the Dutch government. It focuses on digital autonomy, collaboration, security, innovation, and verifiability. The system uses replaceable building blocks for AI, operating system (DAWO-NixOS), cloud infrastructure, and collaboration software. All components are open source.
DAWO operates through a member portal with events, news, a blog, and a forum. The community brings together public and private partners to build the same blueprint. The project's code is hosted on code.overheid.nl and Codeberg.
What commenters are saying
Commenters broadly praised NixOS for reproducible systems like this appliance. Many referenced similar initiatives: openDesk (Germany) and La Suite (France). Some hoped for EU-wide collaboration to avoid fragmentation. A few debated Nix's suitability for rapidly changing software like llama.cpp, with others noting flakes and direnv can handle it.
A secondary thread flagged that DAWO's Codeberg repos may violate Codeberg's policy against AI-generated code, though some noted the government also uses a self-hosted instance. Others discussed federation for forges and data sovereignty concerns.