14 DAY TRIAL // On December 29, 2016, KDE developer Adriaan de Groot reports on the latest work done by various engineers to port the latest KDE technologies to the FreeBSD operating system.
Today's news comes a little over two months after Adriaan de Groot's last report on the branded KDE wallpaper for FreeBSD, which looks to be based on the well-known Flying Konqui wallpaper, and shows us KDE Plasma 5 running on FreeBSD in a VirtualBox virtual machine.
According to Adriaan de Groot, it looks like the KDE Frameworks 5 open-source and freely distributed collection of add-on libraries for Qt 5 is now successfully ported to the FreeBSD operating system, but without the next-gen Wayland display server, which appears to require a Wayland port to build against.
"On the official ports front, KDE Frameworks 5 have landed. All except Wayland - which requires a Wayland port to build against, and that is currently in the almost-but-not-quite state from the FreeBSD graphics developers - and Bluez - which is just hopeless with the FreeBSD Bluetooth stack," said Adriaan de Groot in his new blog post.
KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment also landed
The good news continues with the fact that there's now a usable KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment port for FreeBSD in the plasma5/ branch of the area51 repository, where the development of the Qt and KDE ports maintained by the KDE on FreeBSD teams take place. Some work on KDE Plasma 5 on FreeBSD port is also ongoing in FreeBSD Phabricator.
However, you shouldn't get too excited because two more layers of the software stack need work before an official port of the latest and modern KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment is available on FreeBSD. Meanwhile, the KDE developers are working hard on pushing things upstream and improving the KDE4 port as well as they can. We'll keep you guys updated as soon as we know more.