FreeBSD Foundation Flounders on 15 with Rust, pkgbase, and KDE

Well, that blog entry has no date, and the Github link (provided by the author) is dead... And FreeBSD is supposed to be a professional OS for professionals... 😩 This looks harsh, but somebody at the Foundation needs to get their act together.
Looking at article source:
<meta property="article:published_time" content="2024-09-09T17:04:05+00:00" />
<meta property="article:modified_time" content="2024-09-09T17:05:22+00:00" />
 
Looking at article source:
<meta property="article:published_time" content="2024-09-09T17:04:05+00:00" />
<meta property="article:modified_time" content="2024-09-09T17:05:22+00:00" />
That's good, but any date still needs to be viewable in presentation mode. Hardly anyone knows to look there. That's a year old, but could still be relevant, especially due to the major version number.

Forgot to mention, it references AsiaBSDCon 2024.

Aside from that, so many videos from reputable sources don't put dates in their caption or subtitle.
 
That's good, but any date still needs to be viewable in presentation mode. Hardly anyone knows to look there. That's a year old, but could still be relevant, especially due to the major version number.
I agree with you that all articles (and anything and all else published online) should have dates of publication clearly stated, and article author name (or a handle at least). Article provides contact information about graphical installer project, but it's not clear is that the person who wrote this article?
 
What I'm curious about is what is gonna be used as backend for Gtk+? Linux has GtkFB, "an implementation of GDK (and therefore GTK+) that runs on the Linux framebuffer. It runs in a single process that doesn't need X. It should run most GTK+ programs without any changes to the source." /q, but what IDK is how it will be done on FreeBSD?
A huge advantage of using GTK as a base layer is that it has a variety of back-ends. In addition to X, Wayland, Windows, and Quartz (MacOS), it also supports web browser windows using HTML5, and frame buffer on Linux. That's nice. But it doesn't support iOS and Android. In contrast, Qt supports deploying apps on Android and iOS, but has no HTML support; when I looked recently, I couldn't find any frame buffer support for Qt either. See below: vmisev found frame buffer support for Qt in Linux. I know of no GUI toolkit that supports all of these back-ends. The only major one that supports the subset I care about (frame buffer on Linux, iOS, Android, and Quartz) happens to be Kivy, a minor league GUI toolkit specific to Python.

In addition, GTK is supposed to have a "chip on the shoulder", attitude problem, and is difficult to work with; many of the complaints are centered around violating POLA when doing version upgrades.
 
In contrast, Qt supports deploying apps on Android and iOS, but has no HTML support; when I looked recently, I couldn't find any frame buffer support for Qt either.
AFAIK Qt on Linux does support framebuffer only, please see "Qt for Embedded Linux" and even has "Virtual Framebuffer", but this will not help us much, FreeBSD and Linux framebuffers are two very different beasts. Please, don't get me wrong, I'm all for using Qt for this purpose, I just don't know how can it be done?
 
Correct. My problem is frankly session restore, and having the DE respond adequately to those 5 minutes of idle... I don't want my session crashing after 5 minutes of idle. What if I have something in Konsole or Firefox? This is where Pipewire comes in.

I'm on KDE now; I Win + L locked my screen, it went to lockscreen, and in less than a minute powered off my display. It woke up when I moved my mouse; it looks like basic display power management works at least! I haven't let it idle by itself or tested locked longer than a few seconds yet though.

I'm giving Plasma 6 a go for the first time since Fedora 40's launch of it around April last year:
  • openSUSE TW defaulted to X11 session (latest 20250905; Wayland selectable from log-in too)
  • X11 session only presented resolution and scale; Wayland presents RGB range, Color profile, Color accuracy, and "Limit color resolution to" (8/10/12-bit/Auto); it lets me select 12-bit like Windows and it's in EDID, but not sure how to really test it (display doesn't report color bit changes; Intel driver Windows re-connected the display/reinitialized but Linux didn't change display state and just applied 8 -> 12)
  • Guild Wars 2 installed no problem, had higher FPS at char select than Windows (100+ vs 80-90 same settings), and input latency felt fine with a quick dungeon as Weaver and action cam on Wayland
  • X11 session let me disable compositor with a hotkey; it didn't do anything to glxgears (disabling compositor Xfce is ~1000 FPS difference), but was out-the-box significantly higher than Xorg GNOME or Xfce Linux and FreeBSD (16K Plasma Wayland, 9K Xorg Intel DDX Linux/FreeBSD no compositor, 7K modesetting); it looks legit in intel_gpu_top but that's a wild boost :p
So far I'm liking it and wouldn't mind seeing it as a default in FreeBSD :D

Code:
Operating System: openSUSE Tumbleweed 20250905
KDE Plasma Version: 6.4.4
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.17.0
Qt Version: 6.9.2
Kernel Version: 6.16.3-1-default (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 8 × Intel® Core™ i5-8400H CPU @ 2.50GHz
Memory: 16 GiB of RAM (15.4 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor: Intel® UHD Graphics 630
Manufacturer: Dell Inc.
Product Name: Latitude 5591
 
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