Pushing towards mid-year here with the fourth octant, and me freshly “wed” (there’s a good Dutch word for “not-married partner” which is “nepgenoot”), here’s some KDE-on-FreeBSD news. It includes some desktop@ and x11@ items as well, because the things we do together are tangled up closely.

KDE Software

  • KDE Gear 21.04.1 landed in ports mere hours after I published the previous octant. 21.04.2 landed mid-june.
  • KDE Plasma 5.22 arrived and then a few days later 5.22.1 with some useful bugfixes and a better weather applet – something that also seems to be a headline feature for Windows 11. 5.22.2 arrived just before the end of the octant.
  • textproc/kdiff3 updated to latest upstream.
  • devel/git-lab is a convenience tool from the KDE software-development-kit to provide a command-line interface to GitLab instances (like KDE’s Invent).
  • deskutils/latte-dock was updated for compatibility with newer Plasma releases.
  • astro/kstars now supports INDI for instrument control (aiming your telescope).
  • textproc/kdiff3 had some serious issues with 3-way-merges. This was reported by Ed Maste, and turned out to have a duplicate upstream. An partial solution has been committed in ports, while a complete solution is constructed upstream.
  • net-im/neochat was updated to 1.2.0 with many new features.
  • graphics/krita jumped to 4.4.5.
  • x11/konsole the terminal emulator would not accept /bin/sh as a shell; this is more of an issue on FreeBSD than on Linux where bash is a very common choice. This was resolved upstream and landed in ports.
  • There is slow-but-steady progress in reducing the dependencies of KDE Applications. Most FreeBSD ports are “batteries included” and that includes all the build-tools to create the application, but really, an IDE should not be a dependency of your photo-gallery application.
  • X11 was made optional in some of the Qt ports; this opens up possibilities such as “Wayland-Only” Qt, or “Framebuffer-Only”. X11 remains enabled by default.
  • Qt6 is stuck in the “it builds, and parts of it run, but not enough” stage and has not landed in ports; it will probably wait until after the next quarterly is cut.

Non-KDE Software

  • graphics/ksnip and family updated to new releases with more annotation tools for screenshots; this carries over into KDE spectacle.
  • x11/kitty minor updates; there’s a lot of different terminal emulators for X11 and Wayland out there, with varying feature sets.
  • Lots of Haskell updates from Gleb Popov, who also does various bits of KDE@ and desktop@ work (like sysutils/bsdisks).
  • Wayland got one CVE-fix.
  • devel/cmake landed 3.20.3, and then 3.20.4, the latest upstream release.
  • x11-themes/adwaita-qt is a popular theme for Qt applications, and was updated to 1.3.1.
  • graphics/poppler, the PDF-viewing framework used by many desktop applications, was updated to 21.06.0 and 21.06.1.
  • sysutils/consolekit2 and sysutils/polkit aren’t really desktop-things, but they are important for desktop users, wrangling access to devices and system services. Both received updates.
  • www/cutelyst was updated to version 3.
  • net-im/nheko had some dependency issues fixed.
  • devel/qbs is still being updated (although Qt6 switches to CMake, so then we’ll have three Qt-related build ssystems lying around).
  • devel/libphonenumber releases regularly, and lands regularly as well.
  • multimedia/opentoonz handed off to another maintainer.

Organisational

The KDE-FreeBSD team has moved its primary communications channel (on IRC) in with the rest of the FreeBSD world. You can now find us on Libera.Chat, in the #freebsd-desktop channel.

Why the rename? We’ve been #kde-freebsd since 2003 or so, when Lauri Watts and .. um .. tap and lofi and arved and mdouhan formed the core crew, in my memory at least (clearly IRC nicks stick in my head better than real names). In all that time we’ve been doing “KDE on FreeBSD” stuff. However, nowadays the KDE folks – not the same human bodies anymore – maintain essential parts of the desktop stack all over the place, and have close contacts with the X11 and Wayland people and coordinate with GNOME and XFCE and other environments; there’s enough technology overlap, and sufficiently few bodies, that we decided to throw it all on one heap to reduce the number of silo’s we build.