New version of KDE Frameworks 5 is now ready for download

Sep 14, 2014 11:17 GMT  ·  By

The KDE Community has announced that the second update for KDE Frameworks 5 has been made available and it brings a hefty number of updates and improvements.

The old KDE SC or KDE Software Compilation is on its last legs, and the developers have made some changes to the entire desktop environment. Users will now install KDE Plasma 5 and KDE Applications 5, and both of these major components are actually built on KDE Frameworks, which is actually a collection of libraries.

KDE Frameworks 5.2.0 is host to a large number of changes, but most of them are actually quite small and they don't impact too many systems. If you are using the new Frameworks, upgrading to the new version is advisable nonetheless.

What are the devs saying 

"The Frameworks offer a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. There are over 50 different Frameworks as part of this release providing solutions including hardware integration, file format support, additional widgets, plotting functions, spell checking and more. Many of the Frameworks are cross platform and have minimal or no extra dependencies making them easy to build and add to any Qt application."

"The KDE Frameworks represent an effort to rework the powerful KDE Platform 4 libraries into a set of independent, cross platform modules that will be readily available to all Qt developers to simplify, accelerate and reduce the cost of Qt development," write the devs on the official website.

What has changed in KDE Frameworks 5.2.0

According to the changelog, the file item plugin for linking files to activities has been re-implemented, the handling of uncompressed files has been fixed, a few missing default shortcuts for standard actions, leading to many runtime warnings for KConfigWidgets, have been added, QGroupBox is now better supported in the KConfigDialogManager, the new Kdelibs4ConfigMigrator and KPluginMetaData classes have been included, and the org.kde.kio component has been added.

Also, the DDS and JPEG-2000 plugins are now disabled for the Qt version 5.3 or later, the maximum worker count will now decrease if a lower value is set after workers have been created, the file dialog now remembers its size correctly, and numerous other fixes have been implemented.

You also have to keep in mind that KDE Frameworks 5.2.0 is a sophisticated piece of software and you really need to know what you are doing if you decide to compile it.

You can download the source packages for KDE Frameworks 5.2.0 from the official website. It's likely that some of the distros out there, like Arch Linux, will soon integrate this release into their repositories.