This year, 2025, the KDE Community held its yearly conference in Berlin, Germany. On the way I reinstalled FreeBSD on my Frame.work 13 laptop in another attempt to get KDE Plasma 6 Wayland working. Short story: yes, KDE Plasma 6 Wayland on FreeBSD works.
↫ Adriaan de Groot
Adriaan de Groot is a long-time KDE developer and FreeBSD package maintainer, and he’s published a short but detailed guide on setting up a KDE Plasma desktop on FreeBSD using Wayland instead of X11. With the Linux world slowly but finally leaving X11 behind, the BSD world really has little choice but to follow, especially if they want to continue offering the two major desktop environments. Most of KDE and GNOME are focused on Linux, and the BSDs have always kind of tagged along for the ride, and over the coming years that’s going to mean they’ll have to invest more in making Wayland run comfortably on BSD.
Of course, the other option would be the KDE and GNOME experience on the BSDs slowly degrading over time, but I think especially FreeBSD is keen to avoid that fate, while OpenBSD and NetBSD seem a bit more hands-off in the desktop space. FreeBSD is investing heavily in its usability as a desktop operating system, and that’s simply going to mean getting Wayland support up to snuff. Not only will KDE and GNOME slowly depend more and more on Wayland, Xorg itself will also become less maintained than it already is.
Sometimes, the current just takes you where it’s going.
drm-kmod basically implements the Linux graphics stack. Since, kwin is its own display server, Xorg is just a pointless middle-man between kwin and drm-kmod when drm-kmod is used. I am sure KDE would prefer to focus their efforts on Wayland only.
GNOME is even further down that road. But they drag in not only DRM but also Systemd. More and more, Linux is replacing POSIX as the minimum target platform for free software. You need DRM to support the GUI and other Linux kernel features to support containers. FreeBSD not only support DRM and OCI containers but other Linux system calls via Linuxalator. It is almost becoming an alternative Linux implementation.
Good to see KDE Plasma 6 with Wayland now running on FreeBSD. It’s a big step since X11 is being phased out, and having clear documentation from Adriaan de Groot will help more BSD users adopt it smoothly.
Setting it up is fairly straight-forward. Technically using SDDM as a display manager works, but there’s currently a bug that kills Wayland desktops if ctrl-c is pressed, which is why it currently isn’t the recommended setup.
I have given it a go, and it generally works quite well. Unfortunately all my PCS are laptops and laptops are a less than optimal setup.
It is getting close to the point I could use it as a daily driver again, like I used to
@Drumhellar
FreeBSD has been making quite a serious push towards laptops lately. Perhaps it will begin working again.
Somebody on a FreeBSD FB group I’m in gave me instructions for enabling the lid switch on Dell laptops, which I promptly forgot, but I’ve always had issues with WiFi in FreeBSD anyways. Even 14.3 with its much improved WiFi stack still gives me issues on my current laptop.
So Linux for me i guess.
“published a short but detailed guide”
What does adjust and create a script mean? The average user being turned away again because no clear instruction that kills the curiosity!
@RemusRM
It says create a script “with this content” and then shows you exactly what it needs to contain. These are pretty clear instructions unless you do not know how to edit a text file on Linux. If that is the case, perhaps you should not be running KDE in Wayland on FreeBSD just yet.