FreeBSD The Power to Serve

KDE on FreeBSD

Links:
KDE/FreeBSD initiative URL: https://freebsd.kde.org/
FreeBSD — KDE Community Wiki 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 graphical desktop workstation. The notes below describe mostly ports for KDE, but also include items that are important for the entire desktop stack.

Infrastructure

Qt5 ports had various updates:

  • devel/qt5-webengine was repaired when building with Clang 16. This is in preparation for the upcoming release of FreeBSD 14.

  • devel/qt5-qmake was repaired to deal with an edge case where installing qmake on an otherwise Qt-less system would cause weird errors.

Qt6 ports had various updates:

  • devel/qt6-tools was repaired when building with Clang 16. This is preparation for the upcoming release of FreeBSD 14.

The accessibility/at-spi2-core port — essential for accessible technologies on the desktop — was updated to release 2.48.0.

The accessibility/at-spi2-core port now has better support for non-X11 desktops. This is an improvement for Wayland-based systems. Thanks to Jan Beich for landing that.

The graphics/poppler port — a base for many PDF viewers — was updated to 23.05.

The ports-mgmt/packagekit-qt port is a new addition to the tree to pave the way for graphical package managers on FreeBSD.

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 5.105, .106 and .107.

  • KDE Gear updated to 23.04.0, then .1 and .2 with bugfixes.

  • KDE Plasma Desktop was updated to version 5.27.4, then .5 and .6 with bugfixes.

Related Ports

Deprecations:

  • graphics/ikona, an icon-viewer written in Rust with Qt bindings, has been abandoned upstream.

  • polish/kadu, a chat application once popular in Poland, is deprecated and upstream has disappeared.

  • sysutils/plasma5-ksysguard, a system monitoring application, is deprecated upstream and will no longer update.

Updates:

  • astro/kstars, an interactive planetarium, was updated to release 3.6.4.

  • devel/qcoro, a C++ coroutines implementation, was updated to 0.9.0.

  • devel/qtcreator, an integrated development environment for Qt, C++, and more, was updated to release 10.0.2.

  • games/gcompris-qt, an education suite for children aged 3-12, was updated to release 3.2.

  • graphics/kphotoalbum, a photo album and display utility, was updated to release 5.10.0.

  • net-im/tokodon, a Mastodon social network client, joins KDE Gear.

  • textproc/kdiff3, a text-differencing utility, was updated to release 1.10.1.

New Software:

  • devel/kommit, a Git client, was added. It is a rename of previous package gitklient.

  • multimedia/kasts is a new podcast-listening and enjoyment application from the KDE community.

  • textproc/arianna is a mobile-oriented e-book reader from the KDE community that makes reading FreeBSD documentation a joy.

Last modified on: July 17, 2023 by Graham Perrin