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.