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...