Germany Hands KDE €1.3 Million for the Linux Desktop That Runs the Steam Deck

Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency has dedicated €1.3 million from its Sovereign Tech Fund, equivalent to about $1.5 million or £1.1 million, to the KDE community, the free and open-source software project that maintains the Plasma desktop environment shipped on Steam Deck. The funding was first reported by Phoronix. Plasma is the default desktop on Steam Deck and a first-class option on Fedora, Bazzite, CachyOS, Kubuntu, openSUSE, and KDE Linux. KDE describes Plasma as one of the two major Linux desktops, sitting next to GNOME, which received its own €1 million injection from the Sovereign Tech Fund in recent years.

The KDE project lists what the new money will fund. Plasma and KDE Linux quality-assurance infrastructure will be improved, along with Plasma's recoverability mechanisms. KDE Linux will gain factory reset functionality. Security tooling for organisational deployments will be reinforced. Data backup and restore systems, configuration management, and network shares are also on the list. On the KDE PIM side, the suite gains new QA infrastructure with end-to-end testing for IMAP4 and WebDAV, support for IMAP4rev2 and WebDAV push notifications, standardised account configuration, and a Flatpak-based delivery layer for desktop integration. None of the line items mentions kernel-level anti-cheat, which was very much not a priority for the German government.

Image credit: It's FOSS

KDE makes a lot more than the Plasma shell. The community maintains the Dolphin file manager, the Kdenlive video editor, the Krita art studio, the Discover software store, and a long tail of utilities that includes KMines, the Minesweeper clone that ships with practically every KDE install. The Sovereign Tech Fund pays for upstream maintenance on infrastructure that European institutions and private users rely on, regardless of whether they ever open the donation page on kde.org.

KDE's announcement framed the grant in political terms. "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," the project wrote.

"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."

The project pointed to its licensing terms, which it argues are why governments are putting money in.

"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."

— KDE

I think the timing of the grant matters as much as its size, because the wider European push to reduce dependence on US tech firms has now reached the point where governments are funding the desktops they intend to run on. Earlier this month, the French government switched to Linux, with the Directorate General for Enterprises (DINUM), the Directorate General for Enterprises (DGE), the National Cybersecurity Agency of France (ANSSI), and the State Procurement Directorate (DAE) announcing the state's "exit from Windows in favor of workstations running on the Linux operating system." David Amiel, the Minister of Public Action and Accounts, framed the move in the same terms.

"The State can no longer simply acknowledge its dependence; it must break free. We must become less reliant on American tools and regain control of our digital destiny."

— David Amiel

He added that the state can no longer accept that "our data, our infrastructure, and our strategic decisions depend on solutions whose rules, pricing, evolution, and risks we do not control." The French plan involves moving 80,000 agents in the National Health Insurance Fund onto sovereign solutions by the end of 2026.

Consumer interest has shifted alongside the institutional one. According to PC Gamer, Linux installs jump to over 5% of Steam users on the March 2026 Hardware Survey, up from 2.13% in February. That puts Linux ahead of macOS at 2.35%, though still well behind Windows at 92.33%. Arch Linux leads the Linux breakdown at 0.34%, with Linux Mint 22.3 next on 0.27%. SteamOS 3, the OS Valve ships on the Steam Deck, is built on Arch, which explains part of the share. Windows 11 also gained more than 10% on the survey while Windows 10 dropped by 15%, suggesting a forced migration as well as a voluntary one.

Hardware vendors have started moving accordingly. NVIDIA released a native Linux client for GeForce Now in beta, with official support limited to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS at launch. The native client unlocks features that the browser version cannot reach, including higher resolutions, higher frame rates, and stability that matches Windows in most titles. Vulkan H.264 or H.264 decoding is required, AMD GPUs are supported through Flatpak-managed drivers, and the recommended driver stack is the 580 series. The 590-series driver is currently flagged as unstable with the beta. Ray tracing, DLSS, Reflex, and low-latency presets work as expected on Linux, though AV1, HDR, and Cloud G-Sync have not yet shipped on the Linux client.

NVIDIA also told PC Gamer that the company is evaluating distributions beyond Ubuntu for official support. "Nvidia does want to bring it to further ones and is actively evaluating them," the company said, with the qualifier that other distros may already work via Flatpak. That announcement landed alongside the Open Gaming Collective, a coordination group involving Bazzite, Nobara, PikaOS, ChimeraOS, Asus Linux, and other gaming-focused distributions that span Fedora, Debian, and Arch families. The collective is not trying to merge those distros into one. The goal is to align their gaming layers and submit shared patches upstream, so that hardware vendors and game developers stop hitting different behaviour on each distro. The group is building a shared kernel configuration, the OGC kernel, designed for upstream Linux review.

"Operates on an upstream-first approach, meaning all patches shipped by the OGC will be at least in review for eventual inclusion into the Linux kernel. This means better hardware compatibility, fewer duplicated efforts, and a more unified Linux gaming experience for everyone."

— Bazzite Developers

Bazzite has also switched its input handling from Handheld Daemon to InputPlumber, the framework already used by SteamOS, ChimeraOS, Nobara, Playtron GameOS, Manjaro Handheld Edition, and CachyOS Handheld Edition. The cumulative effect is fewer one-off implementations of the same controller, suspend, and driver behavior across gaming-focused distros.

Storefront politics moved in the same direction. GOG's owner Michał Kiciński, the CD Projekt cofounder who took full ownership of the platform earlier this year, was willing to call it "such poor-quality software" in a recent PC Gamer interview.

"I'm really surprised at Windows. It's such poor-quality software and product, and I'm so surprised that it's so many years on the market. I can't believe it!"

— Michał Kiciński

Kiciński added that he has personally moved to macOS and dreads dealing with Windows on his parents' machines. GOG managing director Maciej Gołębiewski confirmed that Linux compatibility is part of the company's strategy for the year, telling PC Gamer that it is "one of the things that we've put in our strategy for this year to look closer at" and that GOG could "do better on that front." The storefront has not committed to a dedicated handheld or a specific Linux client, but its game preservation programme, which restores and re-releases older PC titles in playable form, is the part of the catalogue most likely to benefit from improved Linux support. Many of those games already run under Wine or Proton with minimal effort; the gap is on the storefront side rather than the compatibility side.

I see KDE as the cleanest beneficiary of this wider shift, because the project sits underneath both ends of it: it powers the Steam Deck desktop that pulled Linux gaming into a measurable Steam share, and it is the desktop most likely to land on European government workstations that need an alternative to Windows. KDE's thirty-year codebase, its Plasma shell, its KDE PIM stack for email and calendaring, and its broader application catalogue cover the actual deliverables a public-sector migration needs. The €1.3 million grant goes toward the back-of-house features that block adoption: factory reset, organisational security, backup, network shares, and mail and IMAP standards. Without those, "use Linux" is a slogan; with them, it is an option a procurement officer can sign off on.

Whether the wider trend translates into long-term market share depends on factors well outside KDE's control. Microsoft still ships Windows on 92% of Steam systems, the Hardware Survey is noisy, and government procurement cycles move slowly even after public announcements. Hardware vendors like NVIDIA are still on a "beta on Ubuntu" footing. Anti-cheat compatibility remains the loudest blocker for live-service titles. The funding side of the equation has changed in a way that did not exist a year ago. KDE has €1.3 million from Germany, GNOME already has its own grant, France is rebuilding its agency workstations, and the people writing storefront strategy decks have stopped pretending that Windows is the only target worth shipping.