KDE Plasma 5 Stack Should Now Be In Good Shape For FreeBSD Ports

Following years of work in bringing the KDE Plasma 5 desktop to FreeBSD, it's getting into shape and the x11/kde5 package is now in the ports tree for easing the process of setting up the modern KDE desktop stack.

On FreeBSD installations, from the ports tree it should now be as easy as fetching x11/xorg x11/sddm x11/kde5 for getting the latest KDE Plasma desktop, KDE Frameworks 5, and KDE Applications going for a desktop environment. Up until now this was only possible if using the "Area51" repository on FreeBSD.

Adriaan de Groot has been largely leading this "KDE5" on FreeBSD charge the past few years and in recent months has been nearing the ports tree. Today he announced via his blog about x11/kd5 being the meta-port now in the FreeBSD ports tree for making this effort a reality.

Moving forward, the KDE4/Qt4 packages for FreeBSD will likely be dropped unless there are any active maintainers wanting to continue maintaining this older support still for FreeBSD.

Moving forward, they plan on getting Qt 5.10 into the tree, improving the system integration and addressing various bugs, bringing Wayland support up on FreeBSD, and fixing other issues as they arise.