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 almost all of the software from the KDE Community for the FreeBSD ports tree. The software includes a full desktop environment called KDE Plasma (for both X11 and Wayland) and hundreds of 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.

Q3 is summer in the northern hemisphere: bicycles were biked and mountains were hiked and the team was psyched to chase the software we like. And there were plenty of things to chase:

  • Three CMake releases landed, ending up with CMake 3.21.3 and libpkg support that once again works with CPack to produce FreeBSD packages.

  • Monthly releases of KDE Frameworks, KDE Plasma, and KDE Gear kept the exp-runs going. kde@ would like to thank Antoine for overseeing our many exp-run requests.

  • The KDE Plasma applications for monitoring the state of the system — ksysguard, Plasma system monitor, and supporting libraries — received a number of updates. FreeBSD support code has been merged upstream.

  • Across all of the Qt and KDE packages, an attempt was made to reduce how "heavy" the dependencies are. In general this means removing developer-only dependencies, avoiding the installation of test-code, etc. The underlying idea is to cut down the size of the installation when specific ports are installed, while preserving the "developer batteries included" character of the meta-ports.

  • A runtime-incompatibility was introduced by MySQL 5.7.34, which affected KDE’s personal-information-management applications and email. This was patched in the Qt ports.

  • The mixer application in KDE Plasma now defaults to using pulseaudio.

  • accountsservice was updated, and then patched with code from OpenBSD.

  • kdiff3 was updated to 1.9.3, now with upstream patches for some corner cases originally reported on FreeBSD.

  • kimageannotator and ksnip were updated, for nicer screenshots.

  • kraft, the small-business support application, was updated to version 0.97.

  • krita had an upstream release to address a performance issue, which then landed in FreeBSD.

  • kstars, the interactive planetarium and sky-watching application, was updated to 3.5.5.

  • latte-dock, used as an alternative launcher, updated to 0.10.2.

  • libphonenumber, Google’s library for dealing with all the ways phone numbers are represented around the world, received multiple updates.

  • maliit-framework, for on-screen keyboards, as added to the ports tree.

  • pipewire was kept up-to-date. This is a next-generation video-handling framework, and is being increasingly used in Wayland environments for efficient passing of video data between applications.

  • poppler was updated to version 21.09, with significant speed improvements.

  • sddm was made a little more robust when installed on its own, with xinitrc support.

  • math/eigen2 was removed.

Last modified on: November 15, 2021 by Daniel Ebdrup Jensen