Now Dutch government developing a sovereign Linux desktop on top of NixOS after France plans to replace Windows with a hardened configuration built on NixOS
https://tweakers.net/reviews/15334/nederland-maakt-soeverein-alternatief-voor-windows-en-office-op-basis-van-linux.html
check post at origin
What’s so special with nixos?
Nixos is quite a bit different than other Linux distributions. It is a declarative system, as far as I understand (I am by no means an expert, I have never used it), there is basically one config file where you put in what you want to have installed on the system and how it is configured. The system then will figure out how to reach that declared state.
I imagine this is quite fitting for centrally orchestrated systems in an Organisation.
I am somewhat doubtful that this is a good approach security wise. Such a system also means that you have a huge monoculture fleet that can be compromised in the exact same way.
I think declarative systems make a lot of sense when you run a farm of virtual servers that you often spin up and decomission again, or when you are doing research and want your setup to be replicable by other research groups.
But a fleet of government PCs benefit very little from NixOS (or guix), while increasing the risk of catastrophic failure due to monoculture.
More generalized recovery features like A/B booting of immutable system images, and/or automatic snapshot for easy rollback to a functional state seem like the better idea technology wise.
You could still decide to provision your systems with different browsers, webserveres, whatever even within nixos.
Harder to mess up the system unintentionally
It has reproducible declarative configuration management out of the box, atomic upgrades, and immutability. This makes it easy to deploy and operate a large fleet with similar but potentially specialised configurations, and it makes it much easier to both prevent and recover from several classes of cyber attacks.
Makes me curious to try out. Is it hard to learn?
https://distrosea.com/select/nixos/
Yes, it is hard
Not sure, but the leadership had some issues. I’d recommend Lix instead, but that might be personal taste.
They seem to be using a special package manager, where software seems to be distributed in a similar way to that of Flatpaks.
Gotta say, I’m half keen to try DutchOS.