While the BSDs don’t see nearly as much activity around Wayland as the desktop Linux distributions and they continue to predominantly rely on the X.Org Server by default, the modern KDE Plasma 6 desktop can in fact work fine on Wayland under FreeBSD 14 and the upcoming FreeBSD 15.0 release.
Adriaan de Groot who works on FreeBSD packaging, including the KDE-FreeBSD packages, wrote a blog post about the steps needed to get KDE Plasma 6 working on Wayland atop FreeBSD.
Notably now Adriaan has FreeBSD + KDE Plasma 6 + Wayland working nicely together compared to prior attempts of his that resulted in hangs.
The steps involve ensuring you are using the drm-kmod kernel graphics driver support, enabling the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver for AMD Radeon graphics, booting with D-Bus and seatd support enabled, and some other minor modifications. KDE Plasma 6 can be installed via the pkg system on FreeBSD. After that and a simple launcher script, KDE Plasma on Wayland can work on FreeBSD.
“Short story: yes, KDE Plasma 6 Wayland on FreeBSD works.”
Those wanting to learn more about running KDE Plasma 6 with Wayland on FreeBSD can do so via Adriaan’s blog.
