14 DAY TRIAL // Today, April 9, 2016, KDE announced the release and immediate availability of this month's KDE Frameworks 5 maintenance release, version 5.21.0, for the latest KDE Plasma 5 desktop and KDE Applications.
KDE Frameworks 5.21.0 has been released to bring numerous improvements to the collection of over 70 add-on libraries to Qt, the open-source and cross-platform GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit used by millions of developers worldwide.
"KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.21.0," reads today's announcement. "This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner."
KDE Frameworks 5.21.0 has been released for KDE Plasma 5.6.2, and the biggest change appears to be the deprecation of support for the old Qt 5.3 branch, requiring all frameworks to use Qt 5.4 or later. The latest stable version of Qt is 5.6.
More Plasma Framework improvements, lots of bug fixes
But the deprecation of support for Qt 5.3 is not the only change in KDE Frameworks 5.21.0, which, according to the changelog, brings more improvements to the usual frameworks and KDE apps, including Plasma Framework, NetworkManagerQt, KWidgetsAddons, KXMLGUI, KTextEditor, KService, KRunner, and KPeople.
Additionally, components like Package Framework, KNotification, KNewStuff, KItemModels, KIO, KInit, KI18n, KGlobalAccel, KEmoticons, KDESU, KDeclarative, KDELibs 4, KDBusAddons, KCoreAddons, KConfig, KCompletion, KCodecs, KActivities, Breeze and Oxygen icons, BluezQt, Baloo, and Attica have also received improvements.
Lastly, it looks like there are extra CMake modules, and several bug fixes for the Framework integration. KDE Frameworks 5.21.0 is a recommended update for everyone using the latest KDE Plasma 5.6 desktop environment, so please check the main software repositories of your GNU/Linux operating system in the coming days for the new version.