Last year marked a significant milestone for both myself and the OpenBSD desktop community, as we successfully ported KDE Plasma 5 and all dependencies to OpenBSD. With the release of
OpenBSD 7.5on April 5, 2024,KDE Plasma in version 5.27.10has become a part of our lovely operating system. This success is the result of years of development work and commitment to achieving this goal.KDE launched version 6 of its Plasma desktop environment on February 28, 2024, bringing numerous updates and features as well as the major switch to Qt6. I am immensely proud that the OpenBSD team has managed to prepare for this major update so swiftly. All necessary components have been committed to our CVS tree, and the packages will soon be available.
↫ Rafael Sadowski
Excellent news for OpenBSD users who don’t wish to be using GNOME, Xfce, or one of the smaller build-it-yourself desktop environments. My dual-Xeon workstation, which I switched over from Fedora KDE to OpenBSD, runs Xfce, because I feel a smaller desktop environment is a more natural fit for OpenBSD, but I’m very happy to know that I have KDE to fall back on in case Xfce turns out not to be a good fit for me in the long term.
I’ll give the OpenBSD developers an other experts in that community some more time to iron out any wrinkles, and then I’ll probably give it a go to see just how well KDE will be integrated with the OpenBSD base system.
I’ve been using KDE 6 on Nobara, after years of swearing off KDE (because it’s terminally ugly). It’s finally, not so bad, and it doesn’t have all that “different to be different” strange Gnome stuff that has been a bit off putting in that space. I think I’m finally a convert.
CaptainN-,
Change for changes sake is a big turn off for me. Just as windows was going through that horrible UI phase, gnome developers seemed determined to do the same thing. As a happy gnome 2 user, I hated what they were doing. It pushed me towards KDE and XFCE. The later has been one of the best for consistency IMHO.
KDE is themable, you can make it look like whatever you like. I like kvantum qt theme+glassblocks plasma theme.
I set the bar to the right, and change the wallpaper to a very dark one, then i turn on night mode hours. Very nice experience.
It is almost impossible to make gnome look good at all, unless you are really into flat and oversized elements that waste space.
I try KDE from time to time to go back to Cinnamon or Mate.
Great for OpenBSD. When I was a teenager, KDE on BSD was all the rage.
I know these days the meme is base + a browser on an old ThinkPad (and I did this myself for many many years) but having KDE as a viable option for OpenBSD users is great moving forward while the other desktop environments figure out their messy relationship with Gtk/Adwaita.
If this helps a few KDE devs migrate to the platform or even start considering it when they write software, even better.