KDE Frameworks 5.18.0 has been released by the KDE Community, and its developers have upgraded a large number of packages and fixed a ton of problems.

KDE Frameworks is the backbone of the KDE project, but it doesn’t get as much recognition as it should. With everyone focused on the Plasma desktop, not a lot of users are excited when a new version of KDE Frameworks shows up, even if a lot of interesting stuff happens.

The new organization of the KDE project - in KDE Plasma, KDE Frameworks, and KDE Applications - makes things much clearer, for both users and other developers. The fact that these three are completely separate means that a distribution can integrate various versions, and it doesn’t have to always make sure that they are from the same branch.

KDE Frameworks 5.18.0 is ready for download

"KDE announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.18.0. KDE Frameworks are 60 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner," write the KDE devs.

According to the changelog, several issues with mtime-related search have been fixed, the correct status for folders in Baloo is now shown, and a number of icon updates and additions have been made. Moreover, a workaround has been added for the Qt SQL bug that did not clean up connections properly, kdelibs4support now requires kded, the kdewin dependency has been removed, and many other fixes have been implemented.

You also have to keep in mind that KDE Frameworks 5.17.0 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 5.17.0 from Softpedia.