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

OSes

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. One could interpret
the STF money as some level of endorsement of the ideas behind KDE
Linux. Perhaps it will soon join this short list of European
alternatives to Microsoft Windows.

Interest in moving European organizations away from American cloud
services is growing rapidly, of course. On the small end of the scale,
digital artist Wimer Hazenberg recently described How
I Moved My Digital Stack to Europe. Taking a broader view, earlier
this week, the Financial Times reported on Life
without US Tech. It describes how International Criminal Court judge
Nicolas Guillou was the target of US sanctions, and found himself locked
out of everything that relied on American companies.

In October last year, The Register mentioned similar issues
faced by ICC prosecutor Karim Khan, when reporting allegations that the ICC was kicking
MS Office to the curb. (A few months ago, Microsoft conceded
some “inaccuracy” from its spokesperson in that case.) It seems he
was not alone.

The ICC is moving to OpenDesk from German organization
ZenDIS, both of which we
mentioned in our report
from FOSDEM on messaging systems. These are apps and suites, rather
than OSes – they leave the question of the host OS open. That means
organizations with large existing investment in Windows (and
institutional knowledge of supporting Windows) can keep it for
now, while moving to new tools.

That’s not quick enough for those who want to banish American
OSes sooner. Last month, The Reg mentioned France’s Directorate
for Digital Affairs, DINUM, which is planning
to adopt Linux.

Some more information is emerging about how it may do it. Rather than
building a whole new distro of its own – such as KDE Linux, or the
Fedora-based EU OS proposal we looked
at last year – DINUM is building a Nix configuration, which it can
simply apply to generate a complete bespoke immutable OS image.

The base image is called Sécurix. The project page describes it as an OS base for secure
workstations, designed according to the ANSSI recommendations
for the secure administration of information systems. As an
example of how to use it, there’s Bureautix. Rather than authenticating against
complicated network directories such as LDAP or the Red Hat-backed FreeIPA, Bureautix keeps it local:
user configuration is synced from servers to client machines along
with the software configuration, and users sign in with a YubiKey.

The names Sécurix and Bureautix are nods to the
famous indomitable Gauls Astérix and Obélix, created by writer René
Goscinny, who died in 1977 aged 51, and artist Albert Uderzo, who died
in 2020 at 92. These ancient Gauls have outlived their creators: the
latest album, Astérix
in Lusitania came out in October 2025, and this vulture recommends
it. ®