The Dutch government has officially backed the DAWO project, an initiative to build a free and open-source workplace environment for public administration based on NixOS. The project, officially commissioned in July by the government's interdepartmental committee, aims to reduce reliance on commercial vendors and aligns with similar digital sovereignty efforts underway in France and Germany, partly motivated by recent US sanctions against the International Criminal Court, which is based in the Netherlands.

The DAWO blueprint combines NixOS as its operating system with various open-source components including MijnBureau, a workplace suite built from Nextcloud, Collabora, Element and OpenProject. After initially experimenting with openSUSE and Fedora, the project settled on NixOS for its vendor independence, declarative configuration and reproducible deployment capabilities. Three government IT providers—DICTU, SSC-ICT and the ICT division of DUO—are developing the standardized workplace, with eight municipalities currently participating in pilot trials, up from four at the project's outset in April.