Expect to see more and more articles like this one, as more and more people discover that FreeBSD’s desktop/laptop support keeps improving rapidly.
FreeBSD 15 really feels like a breakthrough release.
It’s always been my favorite operating system for servers, but with the arrival of pkgbase, massive improvements to the LinuxKPI drivers, and the launch of the Laptop Support and Usability Project, it’s become my primary desktop, too.
↫ Cullum Smith
Since Smith tried FreeBSD 14.0, there’s now KDE Plasma 6.x, you can leave legacy X11 behind and use Wayland on FreeBSD now, and support for Intel Wi-Fi chips has greatly expanded. Apparently, battery life has improved as well, which is one of the hardest problems to solve for an operating system, especially with the wide variety of hardware combinations in the x86 world.
The rest of Smith’s article is a guide to setting up FreeBSD 15 with KDE and Wayland. It’s quite detailed with a ton of low-level tuning and fiddling, accompanied by clear and concise explanation of what the changes do, which I really like. Definitely a bookmark for anyone who wants to try out FreeBSD with KDE.
I wonder how current KDE is. I submitted a bug to KDE that affected Dolphin, about a month and a half ago. The bug was patched in a a day or two, but it took 3-4 weeks to make its way into Fedora.
Since (IME) Fedora usually updates KDE software right away, I guess it depends on where the fix landed inside KDE. Unless Fedora backports it, you have to wait till KDE makes a new release of Plasma, or Frameworks or Apps and a bit more to allow for testing in Fedora land.
Taking all of that into acount, 3-4 weeks doesn’t seem that much.