This is the website for using, installing and building KDE® software on the FreeBSD® operating system. You can find documentation for applications that behave differently on FreeBSD than on Linux®. The installation and compilation instructions are specialized for FreeBSD administrators. In 2018, most of the content of this site migrated to the KDE community wiki. This site continues to operate as a news page and to point the way into the community site.
The KDE® community is an international technology team dedicated to creating a free and user-friendly computing experience, offering an advanced graphical desktop, a wide variety of applications for communication, work, education and entertainment and frameworks for building new applications.
FreeBSD® is an advanced operating system for modern server, desktop, and embedded computer platforms. FreeBSD's code base has undergone over thirty years of continuous development, improvement, and optimization. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX® developed at the University of California, Berkeley.
The KDE/FreeBSD team hopes this site will be a valuable resource for all who are interested in maintaining the high level of compatibility between FreeBSD and KDE Software (KDE Frameworks 5, KDE Plasma and Applications and Extragear) that has been seen to date. The goal is to facilitate the discussion of patches, finding bugs, suggesting features and hopefully becoming a valuable member of both the KDE and FreeBSD communities.
A full KDE Plasma 5 Session, with KDE Frameworks underneath, Plasma Desktop, and KDE Applications, can be had directly from ports or packages. For details, see the KDE-FreeBSD community wiki.
The long-, long-awaited up-to-date KDE Plasma Desktop and all of the KDE Applications have landed in the official ports tree. The x11/kde5 metaport installs KDE Frameworks, KDE Plasma Desktop, and KDE Applications (all of those are metaports as well, do take a look at the configuration options to get the applications you want).
The long-awaited QtWebEngine -- the Qt port of the Blink engine that also powers the Chromium browser -- has landed in the official ports tree. This completes the portfolio of Qt5 modules on FreeBSD, and paves the way for browser- and application updates that depend on a reasonably-modern web-rendering engine.
The first applications built on KDE Frameworks 5 are beginning to arrive on FreeBSD. The Calligra suite of office and productivity applications and Krita, the painting application, have been updated to their respective 3.0 releases.
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The latest release of KDE Frameworks 5.35 has been added to the plasma5/ branch of the Area51 repository. Users of the experimental ports repository can upate and rebuild KDE Frameworks as usual.
The repository used by the KDE-FreeBSD team for preparing KDE (related) ports has migrated to GitHub, alongside the XOrg@ and gnome@ ports trees. The first updates from that repository have been integrated into the main ports tree, with CMake 3.8.2 and fixes for Qt4 on ARM leading the way.
Two parts of the KDE/FreeBSD initiative have migrated to other homes this week. The website has largely moved to the KDE Community Wiki. This will make it easier to keep the website up-to-date and for incidental contributions by users. The source repository for the unoffical KDE ports -- which is where they are developed before being added to the main FreeBSD ports tree -- is now in github, alongside similar ports trees from xorg@ and gnome@. This simplifies the workflow of contributing updates to the KDE ports in the tree and unifies that workflow with the official ports tree.
The KDE ports affected by CVE-2017-8422, x11/kdelibs4 and devel/kf5-kauth, have been updated with the fix for the identity-spoofing bug. Users are advised to update the affected ports.
The Oxygen icons which have colored the KDE4 desktop on FreeBSD for a long time are updated regularly upstream. However, they are no longer the Oxygen icons for KDE4, but for KDE Applications with KDE Frameworks 5. This means that icon updates do not happen for KDE4 from ports.
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Although KDE4 software -- based on kdelibs4 -- is no longer actively developed upstream, KDE4 is the only complete version of KDE software currently available from ports. It receives occasional updates upstream, and therefore occasional updates in FreeBSD.
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