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

OSes

Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund backs the desktop venture whereas public sector curiosity in homegrown alternate options grows

The KDE venture turns 30 in 5 months, however it already received an early birthday current: €1,285,200 from Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund. That is £1.1 million, or $1.5 million in
US bucks.

The KDE workforce already has some concepts about the way it will spend it, and
the project’s
thank-you note mentions a couple of:

This isn’t the primary time we now have talked about the Sovereign Tech
Fund’s largesse. In 2023, it gave €1 million to GNOME, after which in 2024 it funded both
FreeBSD and Samba.

Since then, Donald Trump started his second US presidency, and the push for European digital sovereignty has gained
significantly extra urgency – as we reported from this
year’s Open Source Policy Summit in Brussels.

KDE Linux is the desktop venture’s technologically radical in-house
distro, which remains to be in growth. Now we have talked about this a pair
of instances, when
it was announced in 2024 as “Venture Banana,” and once more in 2025, when it reached alpha.

KDE Linux borrows a few of its design from Valve’s
SteamOS 3. Each are immutable distros, based mostly on Arch Linux, with
twin Btrfs-formatted root partitions. 

For failover, these replace one
one other, equally to ChromeOS (and each clearly use KDE Plasma as
their desktop). This has required growth work – for example,
earlier than SteamOS, Btrfs required distinctive partition IDs – and for that,
Valve partnered with Spanish staff’ cooperative Igalia, which can also be
engaged on the Rust-based
Servo web rendering engine. For that effort, final 12 months Igalia additionally received
STF funding.

SteamOS has thousands and thousands of customers, and ChromeOS a whole lot of thousands and thousands – even when its future
replacement is coming into view. The resilience of those OSes in frequent, maintenance-free use is about
as properly established as end-user-facing Linux will get. One might interpret
the STF cash as some stage of endorsement of the concepts behind KDE
Linux. Maybe it is going to quickly be a part of this quick checklist of European
alternatives to Microsoft Windows.

Curiosity in transferring European organizations away from American cloud
companies is rising quickly, after all. On the small finish of the dimensions,
digital artist Wimer Hazenberg just lately described How
I Moved My Digital Stack to Europe. Taking a broader view, earlier
this week, the Monetary Occasions reported on Life
without US Tech. It describes how Worldwide Felony Court docket decide
Nicolas Guillou was the goal of US sanctions, and located himself locked
out of every part that relied on American corporations.

In October final 12 months, The Register talked about comparable points
confronted by ICC prosecutor Karim Khan, when reporting allegations that the ICC was kicking
MS Office to the curb. (A couple of months in the past, Microsoft conceded
some “inaccuracy” from its spokesperson in that case.) It appears he
was not alone.

The ICC is transferring to OpenDesk from German group
ZenDIS, each of which we
talked about in our report
from FOSDEM on messaging systems. These are apps and suites, somewhat
than OSes – they go away the query of the host OS open. Which means
organizations with massive current funding in Home windows (and
institutional information of supporting Home windows) can preserve it for
now, whereas transferring to new instruments.

That is not fast sufficient for many who wish to banish American
OSes sooner. Final month, The Reg talked about France’s Directorate
for Digital Affairs, DINUM, which is planning
to adopt Linux.

Some extra data is rising about the way it might do it. Moderately than
constructing a complete new distro of its personal – akin to KDE Linux, or the
Fedora-based EU OS proposal we looked
at last year – DINUM is constructing a Nix configuration, which it could possibly
merely apply to generate a whole bespoke immutable OS picture.

The bottom picture is known as Sécurix. The venture web page describes it as an OS base for safe
workstations, designed based on the ANSSI recommendations
for the secure administration of information systems. As an
instance of find out how to use it, there’s Bureautix. Moderately than authenticating towards
difficult community directories akin to LDAP or the Pink Hat-backed FreeIPA, Bureautix retains it native:
consumer configuration is synced from servers to shopper machines alongside
with the software program configuration, and customers register with a YubiKey.

The names Sécurix and Bureautix are nods to the
well-known indomitable Gauls Astérix and Obélix, created by author René
Goscinny, who died in 1977 aged 51, and artist Albert Uderzo, who died
in 2020 at 92. These historic Gauls have outlived their creators: the
newest album, Astérix
in Lusitania got here out in October 2025, and this vulture recommends
it. ®