KDE bags 1.3M as Europe realizes it might need an OS of its own

"Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund backs the desktop project while public sector interest in homegrown alternatives grows The KDE project turns 30 in five months, but it already got an early birthday present: €1,285,200 from Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund. That's £1.1 million, or $1.5 million in US bucks. The KDE team already has some ideas about how it will spend it, and the project's thank-you note mentions a few:"

"This is not the first time we have mentioned the Sovereign Tech Fund's largesse. In 2023, it gave €1 million to GNOME, and then in 2024 it funded both FreeBSD and Samba. Since then, Donald Trump began his second US presidency, and the push for European digital sovereignty has gained considerably more urgency - as we reported from this year's Open Source Policy Summit in Brussels."

"KDE Linux is the desktop project's technologically radical in-house distro, which is still in development. We have mentioned this a couple of times, when it was announced in 2024 as "Project Banana," and again in 2025, when it reached alpha. KDE Linux borrows some of its design from Valve's SteamOS 3. Both are immutable distros, based on Arch Linux, with dual Btrfs-formatted root partitions. For failover, these update one another, similarly to ChromeOS (and both obviously use KDE Plasma as their desktop)."

"This has required development work - for instance, before SteamOS, Btrfs required unique partition IDs - and for that, Valve partnered with Spanish workers' cooperative Igalia, which is also working on the Rust-based Servo web rendering engine. For that effort, last year Igalia also received STF funding. SteamOS has millions of users, and ChromeOS hundreds of millions - even if its future replacement is coming into view. The resilience of these OSes in frequent, maintenance-free use is about as well established as end-user-facing Linux gets."

Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund awarded €1,285,200 to the KDE project. The funding follows earlier STF support for GNOME, FreeBSD, and Samba. The KDE team plans to use the money for ongoing work on KDE Linux, an in-development in-house desktop distribution. KDE Linux is described as technologically radical and is based on immutable design principles. It borrows elements from Valve’s SteamOS 3, including an Arch Linux base and dual Btrfs-formatted root partitions. Failover is implemented by updating one partition from the other, similar to ChromeOS. Development required changes such as unique Btrfs partition IDs, with Igalia partnering on related work. The funding aligns with growing European digital sovereignty priorities.

Read at theregister