FreeBSD The Power to Serve

KDE on FreeBSD

Links:
KDE FreeBSD URL: https://freebsd.kde.org/
KDE Community FreeBSD URL: https://community.kde.org/FreeBSD

Contact: Adriaan de Groot <kde@FreeBSD.org>

The KDE on FreeBSD project aims to package all of the software produced by the KDE Community for the FreeBSD ports tree. The software includes a full desktop environment called KDE Plasma, graphics applications, instant messengers, a video-editing suite, as well as a tea timer and hundreds of other applications that can be used on any FreeBSD machine.

The KDE team (kde@) is part of desktop@ and x11@ as well, building the software stack to make FreeBSD beautiful and usable as a daily-driver graphics-based desktop machine.

Organisational

The KDE-FreeBSD team has moved its primary communications channel (on IRC) in with the rest of the FreeBSD world. You can now find us on Libera.Chat, in the #freebsd-desktop channel.

Why the rename? We’ve been #kde-freebsd since 2003 or so. However, changes in the IRC Network landscape have caused us to migrate to Libera.Chat and join up with the rest of the desktop folk — we have a lot of shared concerns, after all.

Big Picture

  • The new KDE Gear release — all the KDE software products that are not specifically KDE Frameworks or KDE Plasma, which release in a coordinated fashion on a regular schedule — arrived in ports the day it was released. Albert Astals Cid has a good blog post explaining the rationale behind KDE Gear.

  • Wayland support has arrived for KDE Plasma. It is now possible to run a KDE Plasma Wayland environment on FreeBSD machines with a DRM-enabled graphics card (Intel iGPU or AMDGPU).

  • There is slow-but-steady progress in reducing the dependencies of KDE Applications. Most FreeBSD ports are "batteries included" and that includes all the build-tools to create the application, but really, an IDE should not be a dependency of your photo-gallery application.

  • X11 was made optional in some of the Qt ports; this opens up possibilities such as "Wayland-Only" Qt, or "Framebuffer-Only". X11 remains enabled by default.

  • Qt6 is stuck in the "it builds, and parts of it run, but not enough" stage and has not landed in ports; it will probably wait until after the next quarterly is cut.

Highlights

  • Poppler, CMake, polkit .. these underpinnings of the Free Desktop on FreeBSD all received their regular updates.

  • extproc/kdiff3 had some serious issues with 3-way-merges. This was reported by Ed Maste, and turned out to have fixes upstream.

  • x11/konsole, the terminal emulator, would not accept /bin/sh as a shell; this is more of an issue on FreeBSD than on Linux where bash is a very common choice. This was resolved upstream and landed in ports.

  • The regular KDE Frameworks releases (monthly) and KDE Plasma releases (monthly) and KDE Gear all were announced upstream and landed in FreeBSD ports without a fuss. Upstream CI continues to be updated with the latest FreeBSD ports so that CI reflects well what the KDE-on-FreeBSD team delivers to FreeBSD users.

Last modified on: July 24, 2021 by Daniel Ebdrup Jensen