The Dutch government is building its own desktop out of European open source

The Netherlands is assembling a government workstation that runs no American software. The programme is called DAWO — Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid, the Digital Autonomous Government Work Environment — and it pairs a NixOS-based client operating system with a self-hosted workplace suite named MijnBureau. English and German coverage caught up with it in the last week of September; the work itself started in the summer.

The Interdepartmental Commission for Government Operations Management commissioned three state IT providers in July 2026 to build it: DICTU, SSC-ICT, and the ICT division of the education agency DUO. The Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations supplied the architecture. The team tried openSUSE and Fedora before settling on NixOS, whose declarative configuration makes a fleet of identical, reproducible machines easier to manage.

MijnBureau is where the catalog shows up. The suite is assembled from Nextcloud for files, Collabora Online for documents and spreadsheets, Element for messaging, and OpenProject for project management — projects already listed here as European alternatives to Dropbox, Google Docs and Slack. The source code is published on the ministry’s own Forgejo instance and mirrored to Codeberg so outside contributors can take part.

The trigger was a sanction. After the United States sanctioned International Criminal Court officials, Microsoft cut off the email account of then-chief prosecutor Karim Khan — a demonstration that access to a government’s everyday tools can turn on a foreign political decision. Eight Dutch municipalities are now piloting DAWO through the VNG municipal association, up from four in April.

The pattern is becoming familiar. Germany has openDesk, France has La Suite numérique, and the Netherlands now has DAWO — three national stacks built from much the same short list of European open-source projects. None of them is finished, and a pilot across eight municipalities is a long way from a national rollout. What has changed is that the components are no longer hypothetical: they are shipping products with maintainers, support contracts, and public-sector procurement behind them.