Happy New Year, hackers! I started the new year 2024 with a personal milestone of mine.
The KDE Plasma 5.27 is available on OpenBSD -current and will be part of the next release 7.5.
I’m sure not very many people would understand how large this work. It started
so many years ago that I don’t even know how long I’ve been working on it.
Definitely years and not just 1 or 2. I remember that before I joined the OpenBSD community,
Vadim Zhukov did a lot of work in the Qt/KDE area. In the early days, it was
good to have someone to talk to, or just to know “you’re not alone”. This has
not been the case for a long time. I’ve been doing it alone for years, just
like Vadim did it alone for years. It’s probably the burden of the project, we
are a super small team of OpenBSD kernel and ports developers.
It should be mentioned that last year kn@ – Klemens Nanni helped with a lot of
reviews and thus made it possible that we have KDE as packages.
I’m beginning to wonder as I write. What happens now? What happen next? Do I
have plans? Sure I could just continue to maintain the whole thing.
What will definitely be interesting is the KDE switch from Qt5 to Qt6. This
should not be a big challenge for OpenBSD. All dependencies like all Qt6
modules are ported. So this will just be a task of hard work.
Here are some thoughts on what we could work on.
Fix KWin compositor
KDE Wayland
NetworkManager (It’s based on glib and GObject. I don’t like it)
SDDM – QML based X11 and Wayland display manager – Does that really still make sense?
Discover support for pkg_add(1)
Perhaps it is normal that after such a big achievement, a period of reflection
begins. Let us be surprised what 2024 will bring.
OpenBSD KDE Plasma 5.27 Screenshots:
You can super easy install KDE Plasma and KDE Gear on OpenBSD:
# KDE Gear
$ pkg_add kde
# KDE Plasma
$ pkg_add kde-plasma
# KDE Plasma extras like power management
$ pkg_add kde-plasma-extra
A special thanks to all who support my work with a small donation on
GitHup.
