Germany cuts Steam Deck desktop devs a $1.5 million cheque, they declare an end to 'insecure spyware-riddled software imposed by the likes of Microsoft'

In a nice bit of news for True Linux Patriots everywhere, Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency has dedicated €1.3 million of its Sovereign Tech Fund (about $1.5 million / £1.1 million) to the KDE free and open-source (FOSS) software community (via Phoronix).

If you know KDE for anything, you likely know it for its Plasma desktop environment, one of what I think of as the Big Two Linux desktop environments alongside GNOME (GNOME, by the by, also got a €1 million injection from the same fund in recent years).

Plasma comes as the default desktop option on Steam Deck and is a first-class citizen on distros like Fedora, Bazzite, CachyOS, Kubuntu, openSUSE, and, uh, KDE Linux. Naturally. But the KDE community makes a whole lotta stuff: the Dolphin file manager, the Kdenlive video editor, Krita art studio, the Discover software store, and most importantly: KMines. Along with a billion other things. Precisely the kind of thing Germany—and Europe—would like to encourage, especially given recent moves by the bloc to escape the embrace of US tech firms.

The new funds are earmarked for specific tasks, named by KDE on social media. They are:

• Improving KDE Plasma & KDE Linux QA Infrastructure
• Improving KDE Plasma’s Recoverability Mechanisms
• Implementing Factory Reset Functionality for KDE Linux
• Improving Security Infrastructure for Organisational Usage across KDE Plasma
• Improving Data Backup and Restore Systems
• Strengthening Configuration Management as Core Desktop Infrastructure
• Improving Network Shares Experience
• Building KDE PIM QA Infrastructure and an End-to-End Testing for IMAP4 and WebDAV
• Supporting IMAP4rev2
• Supporting WebDAV Push Notifications
• Standardising Account Configuration
• Improving KDE PIM Suite Desktop Integration with Flatpak-Based Delivery

Nothing about making kernel-level anticheat work in there. Weird. I guess the German government probably forgot to write it in their notes to the team.

KDE is, as you might expect, rather chuffed to get €1.3 million in the post, and in its announcement wrote that "the world is beginning to turn away from expensive and insecure spyware-riddled software imposed by the likes of Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple, et al.

"KDE offers the world a better way. For 30 years, KDE has been providing the free and open-source software essential for digital sovereignty in personal, corporate, and public infrastructures." No doubt this is at least partially what Germany and Europe writ large like about it.

Plus, any leaps KDE makes as a result of this funding will be usable by anyone: "KDE’s software is competitive, publicly auditable, and freely available. It can be maintained, adapted, and improved in-house or by local software companies. And modifications (along with their source code) can be freely distributed to all users and departments within an organization… There are no subscriptions, no spying on users, no disclosure or resale of data that users choose to voluntarily share with KDE, and no secret training of AI models with said data."

It's an interesting time on the computer, folks. Are we all bound for the sunlit uplands of a fully FOSS future? Well, probably not: Windows is still quite widely used, I'm led to believe. But you're certainly hearing a lot more about Linux than you used to. Onwards Linux century.

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