KDE Plasma 5 Desktop Will Enter FreeBSD "When It's Stable & Usable"

Written by Michael Larabel in KDE on 16 December 2015 at 08:07 AM EST. 31 Comments
KDE
While many Linux distributions are in the process of stopping to support the KDE Plasma 4 desktop, FreeBSD isn't yet ready to make the move to the "KDE 5" packages.

While there are outside repositories to experiment with KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5 on BSD systems, the "KDE 5" set is largely not found in the official FreeBSD ports tree. FreeBSD/KDE developer Adriaan de Groot has written a blog post about this: When’s KDE5 going to be available on FreeBSD?

His answer is that "when it's stable and usable" it will be officially available on FreeBSD via their ports repository. He mentions they have been catching up with their turnaround time between when new packages are released by KDE and when they enter the experimental "Area51" repository, but also complicating matters for official support is the lack of backwards compatibility.

Adriaan explained about the backwards compatibility aspect, "One thing that really holds up integration with the official ports tree is the need for backwards compatibility — with all the other bits and pieces of FreeBSD and the ports tree. That means dealing with Qt4-versions of many applications and handling namespacing (of Qt4, but also Qt4 bindings to Python, for instance). Getting all the bits ready for peaceful co-existence is a lot of work and a lot of (re-)building."
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