KDE Plasma 5.25 Delayed For FreeBSD Due To Needing Additional Security Infrastructure

Last month KDE Plasma 5.25 released as the newest feature release to this Qt-based open-source desktop environment. Unfortunately for FreeBSD desktop users, those using KDE will be stuck for a while longer on Plasma 5.24 due to missing security infrastructure.

FreeBSD's KDE packager Adriaan de Groot shared that Plasma 5.25 is currently held up for FreeBSD and thus stuck on the Plasma 5.24 series for the time being. The issue at hand is that KDE Plasma 5.25 expects PAM support for password management. Unfortunately, all of that security infrastructure isn't yet packaged up on FreeBSD... So if they were to build Plasma 5.25 for FreeBSD without that PAM support, it would mean no working lock screen and the like.

There are some packages (ports) currently working toward that necessary PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) infrastructure, including a year and a half old security/pam-pwauth_suid module from NetBSD but with no activity. But until all those necessary bits are in place, for now Plasma 5.24 will be the latest version currently offered on FreeBSD.

KDE Plasma 5.25

More details for those interested on Adriaan's blog.