What happened to desktop environment on FreeBSD right now?

K

KarnRedsun

I would like to ask, what happened to desktop environment package in FreeBSD right now, it's really odd. Around a few month ago everything still working properly but I just try installing fresh copy of FreeBSD 13.1 again today but there's something really wrong about desktop environment.

For KDE Plasma, where is kde5 package? I can't install that meta package as it showed as "No packages available to install matching 'kde5' have been found in the repositories", and the same thing happened to plasma5-plasma package as well but there's no change in how to install in the documentation. And when I tried to install every packages begin with "plasma5" alongside kde-baseapps and kf5-frameworks, it look like it's working fine when using startx but when I login via SDDM it will just go back to SDDM login screen and can't enter the desktop environment, and Iif I tried to launch Plasma Wayland from SDDM the login screen will freeze and only way out of it is go to TTY.

For GNOME, it can be installed just fine, but after that, both GDM andGNOME desktop itself only show mainly grey screen with mouse cursor and that's it. On GDM login screen there's no login prompt show up and it didn't respond to anything. If I tried to bypass that by launch GNOME desktop from startx the GNOME desktop will show only grey screen and some button on the shell (it's a system tray on the top side) but none of those buttons have any response to click, there's no wallpaper, workspace, or icons showed up. It can't do anything unless launch a tty session.

And for XFCe, it's working fine at first, but after using it for sometimes, I don't think it's even half an hour, the desktop just freeze, mouse pointer still can move but the desktop is not going to response to any click when it become like this as well.

I tried 3 different graphic card and it's doing the same thing. Freshly reinstall several times and nothing change.

Right now there's no one talk about this in any platform as far as I know, so please clarify me what's going on in the maintenance of desktop environment for this operating system right now. It seem like no one have face similar problem in this time. I know there's similar situation already get discussed in this forum a long time ago about the kde5 package missing from repo, but that's around 2 years ago and if the package really get removed for some reason like that time, the instruction on document should have change but a few moonth ago I still can install any of these just fine. I don't understand why it become like this.
 
"mate" works fine.
PS: I use "awesome".
PS2: There is alot of code in KDE. And the more code, the harder-intensive it is, to move the software to a freebsd-port.
 
pkg search kde tells you quite a bit. Looks like there is a kde5-5.24.7.22.12.0 in quarterly, so I don't know what you are experiencing.
plasma5 stuff seems to be somthing different, perhaps "kde for wayland".


"desktop environments" are simply ports that someone gives time for free from their life to make build on FreeBSD.

Things missing from package repos are usually no maintainer eventually won't build so gets dropped or a temporary build failure that gets fixed (Libreoffice has done this a couple of times)

Why it becomes like this? People involved in creating and maintaining ports are offering time from their lives to do something for the FreeBSD project. You run out of hours in the day to do anything, and volunteer work gets pushed away.
I've not had any issues with my simple WindowMaker graphical sessions in a very long time (last problems were around the FreeBSD 3.x timeframe)
 
KarnRedsun said:
And for XFCe, it's working fine at first, but after using it for sometimes, I don't think it's even half an hour, the desktop just freeze, mouse pointer still can move but the desktop is not going to response to any click when it become like this as well.
Click to expand...
I have used Xfce4 on FreeBSD since 2015. I can say it has been good to me.
Desktop freeze like that I do not see. I do have a power state problem when no activity.
Also occasionally(monthy) when I resize an Xfce terminal window it freezes.
That seems fixed now with latest updates.

So packages. Quarterly or Latest. That is a good question. Latest can be bumpy.
 
This is just the motivation I need to keep chugging at my Poudriere-based project to address the upgradability headaches.
 
I still didn't switch from whatever default. So I think I'm still at quarterly. Yesterday, there's indeed no kde5 package when running pkg search. If there's one now it means it just make it back somehow after 10 AM ICT yesterday. Indeed, there's a package in ports tree but it failed to build, not that the main package is failed to build but something else in the meta package failed to build around 3 hours after start building it.

And Plasma for Wayland, I mean if I select 'Plasma (Wayland)' from the selector at the bottom left of Plasma's theme SDDM's login screen, it will result to what I've said. For Plasma X11, it can be launch from startx command, though, and it's look like it's working just fine, but I don't understand why it can't be launch from SDDM login screen like normal and I can't confirm if it's due to some packages have been absented due to I have to install it in a way I have describe and I can't know if it is complete for sure as the meta package kde5 isn't available from repo.

For XFCE, I'm sorry that I have said that, the freeze happened on my end because my SSD somehow detached itself while I tried to post this entry, it freezes everything and after I reset my PC then I found out it's not detected as the PC didn't boot into FreeBSD and that SSD disappeared from BIOS despite still connecting. After reseated cable it's working properly. So XFCE didn't have any problem to begin with.

What's left is GNOME.

P.S. I still didn't try again after yesterday. If there's indeed a package updated after that and you all said it's back to order then everything's good and whatever happened yesterday and a day before is just my bad luck for install those in that day. But if everyone insist that it's in order all along during that time then the problem might be my test system itself.
 
I have a newish KDE Plasma installation from 5. January 23. Works just fine with no problems at all.
Only a few days later I got the quarterly upgrades with upgrades for kde from 5.24.6 to 5.24.7. This one was also no problem.
I run plasma on X11. Wayland does not work for me.
The package is plasma5-plasma and I start it with sddm on system start.
Seems for me your problem is something else but not the kde package.
 
KarnRedsun said:
And Plasma for Wayland, I mean if I select 'Plasma (Wayland)' from the selector at the bottom left of Plasma's theme SDDM's login screen, it will result to what I've said. For Plasma X11, it can be launch from startx command, though, and it's look like it's working just fine, but I don't understand why it can't be launch from SDDM login screen like normal and I can't confirm if it's due to some packages have been absented due to I have to install it in a way I have describe and I can't know if it is complete for sure as the meta package kde5 isn't available from repo.
Click to expand...
I have tried investigating that, and it looks like there is an answer on SDDM's github pages (https://github.com/sddm/sddm). I last looked about a year ago, though, so this may or may not have changed since. What I found can be summarized as:

SDDM's aim is to play well with Wayland. Unfortunately, we're not there yet...

In the meantime, I use a command I gleaned from the blog that a FreeBSD/KDE dev (Adriaan deGroot) runs at euroquis.nl: % /usr/local/bin/startplasma-wayland.sh...
 
I learned that for a smooth Desktop experience we had better sticking with quarterly, eventually everything will arrive... For instance I got the newer XFCE 4.18 so I can I say my FreeBSD is a quasi-rolling OS... 😎
 
The Gnome thing is a bug with DRI3, (I was told), and you have to add an entry to xorg to use DRI2 instead. I think it effects AMD cards.

Code: 
❯ cat /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-driver-amdgpu.conf 
Section "Device"
    Identifier    "Card0"
    Driver        "amdgpu"
    BusID        "PCI:14:0:0"
    Option        "TearFree" "On"
#    Option        "DRI"    "2"
EndSection

Try that. (mine's commented out cuz because not using gnome).

And Kde5 is ok right now, just checked. There was a change in Quarterly branch from 2022Q4 to 2023Q1, so maybe things were being build and patch or something. But afaik we don't have wayland for both desktops and that just shows because the packages install the desktop files along with the others (for X11). I could be wrong.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
BobSlacker said:
I moved to latest a couple of weeks ago, can I move back to quartely without a problem?
Click to expand...
Yes, but be careful if you use Firefox. If reverting to quarterly involves going to an earlier version of Firefox it might refuse to use your profile to avoid corrupting it so you'd loose all your favourites, history etc. You might also hit compatability with some other packages
 
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