kde.adoc

=== KDE on FreeBSD

Links: +
link:https://freebsd.kde.org/[KDE FreeBSD] URL: link:https://freebsd.kde.org/[https://freebsd.kde.org/] +
link:https://community.kde.org/FreeBSD[KDE Community FreeBSD] URL: link:https://community.kde.org/FreeBSD[https://community.kde.org/FreeBSD]

Contact: Adriaan de Groot <[email protected]>

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.