The fleet is provablebecause the base is.
Sextant could have been built on any Linux. It is built on NixOS because every promise this product makes about proof depends on the operating system keeping it.
A bad update rolls back
Every change is a new generation of the system. If it does not boot or does not work, the laptop starts the previous one.
The same description, the same machine
A configuration builds into the same system every time. A laptop in the field matches the description, or it says it does not.
A very large package collection
What your organisation needs is usually already packaged, pinned to a version, and building.
No vendor decides for you
NixOS is a community distribution. Nobody can change the licence, raise a price per seat, or end of life it out from under you.
A change is a generation, not an edit.
On an ordinary system an update edits what is there, and what is there is the sum of every change since the machine was imaged. On NixOS a change builds a new generation next to the old one and switches to it. If it fails, the previous generation is still on disk and the laptop boots it. There is nothing to restore, and no backup to test.
44 2026-08-12 09:14 current
43 2026-08-05 11:02
42 2026-07-29 16:40
# boots 43 if 44 does not come upThe description is the machine.
A NixOS system is built from a description, and the same description builds the same system. That is what makes a fleet answerable: what a laptop runs is not a claim from an agent, it is a build result you can compare. Two laptops on the same description are the same machine, whatever they were before.
balie-001 = {
hardware = "hp-elitebook-840";
group = "balie";
ring = "broad";
};Software comes packaged and pinned.
The package collection is one of the largest in the free software world, and every package resolves to an exact version. Upgrading is a decision you make and can undo, not a thing that happens to you overnight because a repository moved.
firefox 141.0
sha256-3Fq1x0S9m2kLd8vQ7pWc4Ye6…
openssl 3.5.2
sha256-9aTk2Bv7Rn0Xq4Ls8Md1Ce5…Nobody owns the base.
NixOS is built by a community, not a company. There is no seat price to raise, no licence to change, no end of life announced for commercial reasons. For a public organisation that has to plan a decade ahead, that is not a detail.
operating system NixOS, community project
licence EUPL 1.2
seat price none
end of life not somebody else's callWhat it costs you.
NixOS is not free of trade-offs, and you should hear them from us rather than from a consultant later.
It is a different way of thinking
Your team stops fixing machines and starts changing a description. That is a real adjustment, and it is where our implementation work goes.
A smaller commercial ecosystem
Vendors that ship a Windows agent often ship nothing for NixOS. Where that matters, the integration usually turns out to be an ordinary setting.
Some software needs packaging
Packaging a niche application is work somebody has to do once. We do it, or your team does it, and after that it is in the fleet like anything else.
Open all the way down.
Not just the console. The operating system under it, the packages it installs, and the file that describes your fleet are all things you can read.
"Why is this on my laptop?"
The description is readable by the people who work on the machines, so a setting has a reason somebody can look up instead of a rumour.
Free is not a trial
EUPL 1.2, every feature, no seat count and no expiry. Paying buys support and someone accountable, not the product.
Developed where you can watch
On Codeberg, mirrored to code.overheid.nl. Anything that shapes the product is argued in writing before it is code.
EUPL 1.2.
The European Union Public Licence. Run it, study it, change it, and share it. Built for public bodies, useful to anyone who has ever wondered what a laptop in the field is really running.
codeberg.org/DAWO/DAWO-Sextant
The place to take part today. Issues, pull requests and releases with notes, on a European non-profit forge rather than a company platform.
code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO-Sextant
Where the history is authoritative and the releases are cut from, on the Dutch government code platform. Pushed directly, not mirrored.
Who decides,and what you may call it.
Stewardship is a role, not ownership of what you run. The code is EUPL 1.2, and an organisation that wants to run, support or resell Sextant needs nobody’s permission.
Where it stands.
Feature-complete for its first production use and being prepared for one. The fleet this is developed against runs it: imaging, rollouts in rings, directory login, endpoint security and disk-encryption escrow, on real hardware.
The shape is settled and the APIs and the fleet document schema stay put. There are still rough edges where the first fleets have not pushed yet, and we name them rather than pretend they are not there.
Help wanted: developers, testers and maintainers. What would help most, and how a change gets in, is written out on the contribute page.
One document for every laptop.site.audit.
Take it, run it, help build it.
The software is yours under the EUPL 1.2 and needs nobody’s permission. What the project needs is people: a laptop model we have never imaged, a language nobody has translated, a bug found by running it for real.