Danish Road Traffic Authority switches from Microsoft to Linux

Announcements
1

Update 2026-02-07: As I’ve done some research on this LinkedIn repost, I have to post some corrections; please read those in my comment below. I’m not a journalist and I didn’t do my research before reposting, so I apologize for misinforming to the extent that I did. I’ve changed the title to say “Linux” instead of “NixOS”.

A Danish consulting company is building an open-source Linux distribution based on NixOS for the Danish Road Traffic Authority. It includes full-disk encryption, VPN, and two-factor login. Functionally it presumably works like most other office Linux distributions that have been tried in governments over time, and it is a reaction to the digital sovereignty wave that has hit European governmental institutions.

What makes this interesting is, of course, that it’s based on NixOS. Historically one might have picked RHEL, or SUSE, because they have service agreements and presumably tools that help administrate fleets of machines.

Here’s the LinkedIn post that revealed this:

Here’s the statement (in Danish) by the consulting firm:

55 Likes
2

LinkedIn post seems to be login-walled, and from the Danish-language post I failed to find an answer.

Is it going to be a «world-facing open-source» distribution as a whole thing, or will public open-source interaction be upstream-by-upstream whenever they have patches to offer and not only configuration? (And the entire system being in the latter case a configuration that one gets together with support, as the configuration being supported)

3

Thanks for sharing. Good to see good news.

1 Like
4

Don’t worry, it contains no useful information if you already know what NixOS is.

:denmark: Denmark isn’t just “switching to Linux.” They are playing 4D Chess. :chess_pawn:

You’ve probably heard the news: The Danish Road Traffic Authority is ditching Microsoft (Windows & Office) for Open Source.

But the most interesting part isn’t that they are switching. It’s what they are switching to.

Instead of picking a “standard” user-friendly distro like Ubuntu or Mint, the pilot project (SIA Open) is built on NixOS.

For the uninitiated, this is a massive flex. NixOS is the “Navy SEAL” of Linux distributions. It’s advanced, robust, and solves the biggest IT headaches in ways Windows never could.

Here are 3 facts about NixOS that make this a genius move for a government agency:
:one: The “Undo” Button for the entire OS :right_arrow_curving_left: NixOS updates are “atomic.” If a system update breaks something (a driver, a setting, an app), the user can simply reboot and select the previous version from the menu. The system rolls back instantly to the exact state it was in before the update. No Blue Screens of Death. No formatting. It just works.
:two: The OS is Code (Infrastructure as Code) :page_facing_up: In NixOS, the entire operating system configuration is defined in a single text file. Want to deploy 500 identical laptops for new employees? You don’t need “disk imaging” software. You just copy the config file. The system builds itself exactly as defined, bit-for-bit.
:three: “Dependency Hell” is Extinct :fire: NixOS stores every package in isolation. Need an old version of Python for one app and a new version for another? They coexist happily without crashing each other. This is crucial for government agencies running legacy software alongside modern tools.

Looks like Denmark isn’t just saving money on licenses. They are building a Self-Healing, Reproducible, and Sovereign digital infrastructure.

I never thought I’d read a LinkedIn-post about NixOS, but I’m happy to see it. It generated quite a reach as well.

11 Likes
5

I’d love to answer this, but I don’t know. Since it’s a consulting company that doesn’t have a large git presence and there isn’t a link to the source code of the distro, I think they don’t fully grasp the idea of open source. They also haven’t made any public statements in English, so their communication clearly targets potential customers in the Danish public sector. Which is to say, I don’t think they will distribute it very efficiently.

So a less optimistic interpretation of this is: “One Danish public-sector institution switched to NixOS, and they might inspire neighbouring institutions.”

Which is still great news.

But I doubt it will benefit the wider ecosystem.

2 Likes
6

The LinkedIn post is AI-generated slop and doesn’t tell anything new or interesting.

14 Likes
7

The LinkedIn post isn’t very informative, and seems to be from a third party with no affiliation with the project or the road traffic authority. The project SIA Open doesn’t appear to have an online presence. And the consulting company I dug up that claims to have authored SIA Open don’t explain it well.

I’ll dig some more to find if the road traffic authority are actually doing this, if it’s actually the same project as previously mentioned, and if they have a timeline for releasing their distro, since it seems to be an internal project.

8

In a sense, it is more interesting whether they have a timeline to submit upstream any executable-source patches, and whether they have a timeline to submit upstream to NixOS any module additions / fixes.

The distro itself is only interesting as a setup having support, and maintaining an own public repo can be annoying in ways they don’t want. Upstream submissions are also sometimes annoying, but at least in ways that also tell you how upstream is going to break your code in the next refactoring.

1 Like
9

Update: I went to the Friday bar of the consulting company most publicly associated with SIA Open and learned what the state of things are. I’ll clarify some mistakes I made by reposting unverified claims. So…

What is SIA Open?

It’s an “open source” Linux distro made in 2019 by Statens IT (the agency for governmental IT services) in collaboration with Semaphor. “SIA” is an acronym at Statens IT and means “Statens IT Arbejdsplads”, so a SIA PC is a Microsoft-based work PC. SIA Open is then their take on a Linux-based alternative: a standard work PC.

I say “open source” with citation because it’s not available anywhere I can find. Maybe I’m not looking hard enough, but I just don’t think this project gathered any community attraction, and is rather an artifact of public sector investment in “open source” (read: Linux-based) closed work.

A summary of what SIA Open is/was is available in this BornHack 2019 workshop description (no recordings available) where they also call it SIA 1 Open, being the first of its kind. This 2019 work was, apparently, based on Linux Mint, so not NixOS.

Where does that leave us wrt. NixOS?

Because of the current political climate (US trade wars, US threats of invading Greenland, and that incident where Microsoft allegedly blocked the email of the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court), Statens IT has decided to open up work on SIA Open again, and Semaphor seem to be involved as a subcontractor.

Since 2019, Semaphor has been switching their internal Linux work distro, LinuxPC, to NixOS. Their newer involvement with SIA Open and Statens IT in connection with the Danish Road Traffic Authority (Færdselsstyrelsen) is still not being disclosed: Partly, they are subcontractors, partly they’re still in the exploration phases. So it’s really too early to tell!

The correct title should have been: The Danish Road Traffic Authority is doing a pilot project for transitioning to a Linux-based PC environment, and one of the main subcontractors has been deeply invested in NixOS since, and Nix might end up as part of it, but we don’t know yet.

Semaphor’s Linux PC is NixOS-based, though…

So since a month ago, the page on Semaphor’s website that describes their workstation Linux distro has been clarified: What they call Linux PC is NixOS-based, is something they use themselves inside their company, and is something they work on distributing to public sector customers at scale.

And as you may also think, “Linux PC” is quite a working title aimed at public sector customers, and not something you’d name a popular distro. Which it isn’t yet, it’s really just a Nix config scaled to a company, at this point.

Internally at Semaphor, we have used Linux on servers since the '90s and fully transitioned to Linux on our workstations in 2010. We have used various distributions (variants of Linux) since then.

Linux PC is not the same as SIA Open—which Semaphor works on for the Agency for Governmental IT Services (Statens It)—but there are similarities and overlapping applications, etc.

Even before the Corona crisis, Semaphor began developing a complete, open-source-based IT workplace for Statens It. The goal was clear: a fully functional platform without dependency on Microsoft or other proprietary technologies—and with digital sovereignty as its foundation. However, the development work was halted due to the Corona epidemic.

At the beginning of 2025, Statens It and Semaphor resumed work on creating a complete Microsoft-free workstation based on Linux and other open-source elements. Michael Ørnø, Director of Statens It, and Semaphor’s Tobias Fonsmark revealed this during Semaphor’s debate at the People’s Meeting (Folkemødet) on June 13, 2025. The debate can be viewed in its entirety here.

So… we’ll simply have to wait and see. The Danish Road Traffic Authority might adopt Linux workstations. They might be Linux Mint-based, or they might be NixOS-based. And Linux PC might turn into a NixOS fork, or it might stay as a “meta-distribution” like Determinate Nix.

6 Likes
10

Technically they would not be lying as long as the customer has everything technically and legally needed to task a different subcontractor with rebasing on top of next Mint/NixOS release…

In a sense «open-source but released only to the customer» final setup but with upstream collaboration on features needed for that setup is better for us. It could get confusing otherwise with a publically-visible privately-developed supported-only-for-supported-confgurations full fork, we would be the most natural place for independent attempts at use to ask for advice, but we would be out of context…

Having a vested interest of Denmark in some part of Nixpkgs remaining usable is probably good if it happens, we’ll see if it does.

2 Likes
11

“Switches from Microsoft to NixOS” is kind of funny to me, nixpkgs is primarily on GitHub, owned by Microsoft. Sure it is less Microsoft, but if GitHub goes down you lose any system updates.

Are there actively maintained mirrors of nixpkgs that are not hosted on GitHub?

3 Likes
12

Thanks for self-fact-checking. It’s appreciated.

I think we should be extremely careful with and probably outright ban fully AI generated content in the announcements category moving forward though.

7 Likes
13

Yeah, the primary NixOS distribution method, the channel tarballs.

Yes, you can also use them with flakes. Just because people have been writing github: in their flakes doesn’t mean alternatives don’t exist. It’s just yet another a vestige of the fact that flakes have been experimental for half a decade and that nobody has taken the step back to improve docs and UX around them yet.

It’s a shame this gives people the impression we’re tied to GitHub for distribution.

Development would definitely suffer, I imagine some poor soul would need to hand-run r-ryantm for a bit. But I don’t think GitHub going down is a doomsday scenario for nixpkgs, sensible consumers would be practically unaffected.

9 Likes
14

If we are talking about poor souls, reestablishing committer/maintainer lists will be quite a bit of work. Although between Discourse, maintainers-list.nix alternative contacts, Zulip, commit emails, voter lists, and ability to do website announcements, it won’t be quite a doomsday scenario, but a lot of work with large non-automatable parts.

2 Likes
15

I’ve been having this on my mind recently. Europe switching to open source makes GitHub access a prime target for the current US admin to sanction or cripple us before a military agression.

Maybe nixpkgs itself won’t be affected, but the packages it builds are mostly hosted on GitHub, and that’s out of our control.

Also the sheer amount of traffic will likely cause a massive DDOS of gitlab and the other small git hosters.

2 Likes
16

In fact, Fastly and AWS are probably both larger exposures for Nixpkgs than GitHub.

(If we get to keep both, tarballs.nixos.org and binary cache cover most of the GitHub-fetched source risks)

2 Likes
17

Technically [it could still be open source]

Right, totally.

Open source does not imply open contribution or global availability.

The kind of open source that pays back to the community and fosters an ecosystem does.

“Switches from Microsoft to NixOS” is kind of funny to me, nixpkgs is primarily on GitHub

The irony struck me, too.

It reminds me of this article:

It mentions half a dozen examples, nixpkgs being one

Are there actively maintained mirrors of nixpkgs that are not hosted on GitHub?

@TLATER mentions how channels aren’t tied to GitHub. I think latest unstable is.

Besides GitHub being a single point of failure for a lot of NixOS/nixpkgs users, running nixpkgs the way we do seems to imply a large operational cost currently covered by Microsoft. I’d be interested in separate deployment where the redundancy is built into DNS.

we should be extremely careful with and probably outright ban fully AI generated content in the announcements category

I don’t think AI was the problem here, although the writing style might have provoked a few readers. The problem was not doing proper research before reposting a half-truth. This is typically what journalists get criticised for; I’m not a journalist, but I don’t like to waste people’s time and hope.

1 Like
18

We actually discussed this on the SC. Thing is, it’s really easy to run a mirror, as long as it’s one way. Doing it bidirectionally however, much less so, but if there are actually good options for doing it, that would be interesting to hear about.

That said I do have a private mirror of nixpkgs, I think a lot of people do, it’s great insurance against enshitification.

4 Likes
19

It isn’t: https://channels.nixos.org/nixos-unstable/nixexprs.tar.xz

In fact, the GitHub branch is downstream from that artifact.

I think AWS backing hydra is way bigger of a risk. Without hydra neither the channels nor binaries get produced, nor do we cache third party repos, and the load on hydra is even larger than GitHub.

Not that GitHub doesn’t deserve attention, but I think people are just more aware of that risk (and I think it is already mitigated significantly better).

9 Likes
20

Is it easy to mirror with the discussions included? This could be valuable for clone-then-search usecase, given where the development of GitHub search UI goes.

It seems untenable to do any non-negligible amount of development work on Nixpkgs without a private clone of all the main branches!

AWS backing Hydra and binary cache. Builders themselves, it’s a question of price/trustworthiness trade-offs (after discounts and sponsorships), cache is what needs actual migration and has historical sources that are not always easy to find again now.

3 Likes