The Netherlands builds its own Linux to move government off Windows

The trigger was blunt. Following US sanctions targeting the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Microsoft cut the chief prosecutor's access to its services, email included. The Dutch government then realized how much its access to essential tools depended on decisions made in Washington, Frandroid reports.

DAWO, an "autonomous digital working environment"

The answer is DAWO, short for Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid, or "autonomous digital working environment for government". The project became an official order in July, on the instruction of an interministerial committee. Eight municipalities are already testing it through the association of Dutch municipalities. They use discarded old laptops that Windows 11 refuses to touch, and NixOS gets them running again.

The choice of distribution is no accident. The Dutch picked NixOS because it is a Dutch project with no company controlling it. openSUSE and Fedora were ruled out because of their commercial ties, notably to the American firm IBM. The project is still at the pilot stage, with no date for a general switchover.

A European movement already under way

The Netherlands is part of a continental trend. Denmark dropped Windows in 2025, and France and Switzerland followed in early 2026. In Switzerland, the Confederation is moving 3,000 workstations to open source by the end of 2027. In France, DINUM is preparing the exit from Windows, and administrations such as Urssaf have chosen Linux.

Private players are following suit. OVHcloud announced on 24 September, through its founder Octave Klaba, the launch of OVHai Workspace, an office suite competing with Microsoft 365. The company will give details on 19 November at the AI Summit in Paris.

Dependence on a single supplier is no longer only a question of cost: it becomes a question of the capacity to decide at home.

The logic is the same in cloud and services. In Germany, the question of European alternatives for storage and computing comes up regularly in public debate, a sign that digital sovereignty is no longer a subject reserved for specialists alone.