GoKawiilThe 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:
The investment will be used to strengthen the structural reliability and security of KDE’s core infrastructure, including Plasma, KDE Linux, and the frameworks underlying its communication services.
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.
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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.
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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.
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