The Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations of the Netherlands is developing the DAWO (Digital Autonomous Work Environment for Government) project, aimed at creating a sovereign working environment for public institutions. This initiative seeks to eliminate dependence on foreign technology corporations. The Linux distribution NixOS has been chosen as the operating system for workstations. Three state IT companies — DICTU, SSC-ICT, and DUO-ICT — are involved in the project's development. The first stable release of DAWO is expected next year. Currently, four municipalities are participating in the platform's pilot implementation. Work has been published on the government joint development platform created based on Forgejo and mirrored in Codeberg.
The DAWO platform consists of several components:
- The DAWO-NixOS operating system based on NixOS (with a backup option provided on Fedora Kinoite).
- The DAWO-Cloud cloud infrastructure.
- Collaboration tools MijnBureau based on Nextcloud, Collabora, Element, and OpenProject.
- The DAWO-IAM identity and access management system.
- Centralized deployment and management tools for workstations DAWO-Sextant. Fleet is planned for managing mobile devices.
- The DAWO-Mobile platform, which considers /e/OS, GrapheneOS, and CalyxOS as its basis.
- AI assistant DAWO-AI.
NixOS was selected as the primary distribution for workstations due to its declarative configuration model, support for reproducible builds, capability to run on legacy systems, availability of audit and rollback tools, and community-led development without the influence of specific corporations. The choice of NixOS was also influenced by the fact that the overseeing organization of the NixOS project is a non-profit registered in the Netherlands, and the authors of the Nix package manager and the first version of the distribution have Dutch roots. openSUSE and Fedora were considered as candidates, but were rejected due to corporate influence on their development.
A similar initiative to create a solution for government agencies based on NixOS has been launched in France. The project is being developed by the Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs (DINUM) to ensure digital sovereignty and independence from foreign software. A secure version of the distribution called Securix has been developed for system administrators, while regular users are encouraged to use the Bureautix template, which various agencies can adapt to their needs. A pilot implementation of the platform is planned for around 250 workstations by the end of the year.
Securix implements authentication using hardware keys (FIDO2, TPM2, YubiKey) and boots in UEFI Secure Boot mode. Bureautix is a version of Securix tailored for installation on systems for regular users. To eliminate dependence on network infrastructure and prevent other users from connecting to the system, centralized login via LDAP or FreeIPA is fundamentally not supported. Git is used for managing and distributing the user database.
The basic user environment is based on KDE. Users can choose from office suites such as LibreOffice, ONLYOFFICE, and WPS Office (+ markdown editor Typst), for code editing — neovim and vscodium, for email — thunderbird, neomutt, and aerc, and for messaging — signal-desktop and element-desktop. Chromium is utilized as the browser, vlc for video playback, obsidian for note-taking, and xournalpp for PDF viewing.
Source: opennet.ru
