14 DAY TRIAL // The KDE Community has announced that a new update for KDE Frameworks 5 has been released and a number of important fixes have been added.
Now that people have gotten used to names like KDE SC or KDE Software Compilation, they will have to unlearn them. The entire KDE project has been split into three major categories: KDE Frameworks, KDE Plasma, and KDE Applications.
As you can imagine, the KDE Plasma is the desktop, KDE Applications gathers all the apps in the project, and the KDE Frameworks is just that, a collection of libraries and other packages that constitute the backbone, the framework if you will, of the entire project.
So, what are the devs saying about KDE Frameworkds?
"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. The individual Frameworks are cross-platform and well documented and tested and their usage will be familiar to Qt developers, following the style and standards set by the Qt Project."
"Frameworks are developed under the proven KDE governance model with a predictable release schedule, a clear and vendor neutral contributor process, open governance and flexible licensing (LGPL)," note the developers in the original announcement.
KDE Frameworks 5.3.0 has a ton of changes
KDE Frameworks is composed of 60 add-on libraries that offer a stable base for the rest of the KDE project and many important changes are made at this level. For example, a DBus interface has been added and it's now possible to load plugins at runtime, a number of compilation fixes for MSVC have been added, the size hint and positioning of the clear button in highDpi mode for KCompletion is now clearly marked, some unicode characters have been added to the Glass emoticon theme, and all the Perl dependencies have been removed for KI18n.
You also have to keep in mind that KDE Frameworks 5.3.0 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 5.3.0 from Softpedia. It's possible that some distros out there, like Arch Linux or Kubuntu, will have the packages already in the repositories, so make sure you check there first.