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 the software from the KDE Community, along with dependencies and related software, for the FreeBSD ports tree. That 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.

  • Just two CMake updates this quarter, ending up with CMake 3.22.1. Some more patches have landed upstream, and CMake is soon to switch to share/man for manpages on FreeBSD. When it does, there will be plenty of pkg-plist churn.

  • 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. We are now at KDE Frameworks 5.89 (latest release as of December 2021), KDE Plasma Desktop 5.23.4 and KDE Gear 21.12.

  • Qt 5 is not receiving any open source updates from the Qt Company, but the KDE Community maintains its own set of patches that backport many fixes from Qt 6. Work is underway to import the KDE patch collection.

  • Qt 6 remains tantalizingly close. There hasn’t been real progress on the crash-on-exit problem, though.

  • deskutils/kalendar is a relatively new port that uses KDE technologies for a desktop (appointments) calendar.

  • deskutils/latte-dock, an alternative launcher for KDE Plasma (and other environments) was updated to each of its bugfix releases.

  • devel/qbs and devel/qtcreator were updated. Qbs (or "Qt Build System") is a declarative build system styled along the lines of declarative QML programs. (Note that Qbs is not used by Qt itself).

  • graphics/digikam was updated to the latest release and now supports both ImageMagick 6 and ImageMagick 7. Speaking of which, a new USES=magick was introduced to simplify ports that depend in ImageMagick.

  • graphics/ksnip, one of several screenshot-applications for KDE Plasma (and other environments) had a lots-of-bugfixes update.

  • graphics/skanpage is a new port that scans multiple pages and produces a PDF of the whole.

  • multimedia/qt5-multimedia now ignores gstreamer-gl (rather than implicitly building with it as a dependency if it is installed a build time).

  • net-im/ruqola is a Rocket Chat client, updated to the latest release.

  • security/qtkeychain has a new release.

Elsewhere in the software stack, kde@ also maintains ports that support the desktop in general. Some highlights are:

  • devel/libphonenumber keeps chasing changes to the world’s phone numbers (the FreeBSD foundation can be reached at +1.720.207.5142).

  • graphics/poppler updated this much-used PDF-rendering library.

  • multimedia/pipewire, the audio-and-video successor to pulseaudio, was updated and now supports SSL as well.

  • net/py-pytradfri got several updates so you can control your lights from FreeBSD.

  • print/freetype2 was updated to the latest release; relatedly, there was am update to x11-toolkits/libXft.

  • print/harfbuzz, the text-shaping library, was updated for more font type support.

  • sysutils/bsdisks is an implementation of DBus interfaces for examining disks (drives, partitions, etc.). It is also used for removable-disk notifications.

  • x11-themes/adwaita-qt, which connects the adwaita theme engine to Qt-based applications, was updated.

Last modified on: March 10, 2022 by Joseph Mingrone