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 packages CMake, Qt, and 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@, building the software stack to make FreeBSD beautiful and usable as a daily-driver graphics-based desktop machine. The notes below describe mostly ports for KDE, but also include items that are important for the entire desktop stack.

Infrastructure

  • The Qt5 ports were updated to the KDE patch collection release 5.15.8.

  • The Qt6 ports — these are not used by KDE yet, but there are many ports that can use Qt6 and have Qt6 flavors — were updated to release 6.4.2. Python bindings for the Qt6 release of WebEngine were added.

  • The cmake ports were updated to release 3.25.1 and the CPack generator for FreeBSD packages was repaired.

  • The graphics/poppler port — used by many PDF-viewers — was updated to release 23.01.

  • The sysutils/bsdisks port — used as a shim for applications that expect Linux udisks, which means most desktop environments — was updated to release 0.29.

KDE Stack

KDE Gear releases happen every quarter, KDE Plasma updates once a month, and KDE Frameworks have a new release every month as well. These (large) updates land shortly after their upstream release and are not listed separately.

  • KDE Frameworks updated to 5.104.

  • KDE Gear updated to 22.12.3.

  • KDE Plasma Desktop was updated to version 5.27. This was a long delayed update, due to unresolved issues in the support stack and a misplaced patch from an earlier release of KDE Plasma. Thanks to arrowd@ and Serenity Cybersecurity, LLC for sorting that out.

  • New port devel/ktextaddons was added to the tree. This is part of the KDE PIM suite, and slated to become a new KDE Framework in some future release.

Related Ports

  • audio/amarok, one of the most popular KDE audio players of the early 2000’s, has been marked deprecated in the ports tree. It is no longer maintained upstream.

  • astro/kstars, an interactive planetarium, was updated to release 3.6.3.

  • devel/gitqlient, a graphical user interface for git, was updated to release 1.6.1 with support for new git commands.

  • devel/okteta, a hex viewer and editor for binary files, was updated to release 0.26.10.

  • devel/qcoro, C++ coroutines with Qt support, was updated to release 0.8.0.

  • graphics/krita, an application for painting and graphical work, was updated to release 5.1.5.

  • graphics/quickqanava, a graph visualization library, got a real release and an update in the ports tree.

  • irc/kvirc, an IRC client, was updated to the latest commit; there is no real release but there are bugfixes.

  • multimedia/haruna, a video and audio player, was updated to release 0.10.3.

  • net-im/neochat, one of a handful of Matrix clients, was updated to chase a new release of net-im/libquotient. There are continuing troubles with compatibility with older FreeBSD releases, leading to the KDE-FreeBSD team to declare FreeBSD 12 releases "effectively unsupported".

  • net-im/ruqola, a Rocket Chat client, was updated to release 1.9.1.

  • security/keysmith, a two-factor-authentication support application, was updated to release 23.01.0.

Last modified on: April 14, 2023 by Lorenzo Salvadore