A month after the previous 6.18 release, KDE announced the launch of Frameworks 6.19, expanding its collection of add-on libraries to Qt and enhancing functionality available to developers across various platforms.
As usual, this version focuses on stability, refinements, and incremental improvements across multiple components.
Among the highlights, the Breeze Icons package saw updates, including the addition of right-to-left versions of the microphone and audio icons, cleanup of outdated third-party icons, and general improvements to the icon generation process.
KArchive, the framework responsible for handling archive formats such as ZIP and 7z, saw a major round of fixes to address malformed files. The update prevents potential infinite loops and crashes when dealing with corrupted archives, improves memory handling, and optimizes lookup operations to reduce overhead.
A significant number of updates also landed in KIO, KDE’s core file-handling and network I/O framework. Frameworks 6.19 deprecates several old APIs and drops legacy code paths related to privileged execution and worker status handling. File operations are now more consistent across platforms, with tests adjusted for better cross-platform stability.
There are fixes for the Trash implementation, which now properly checks size limits before automatic deletion, and improvements to KFilePlaces for better icon scaling. Developers will also notice cleaner handling of worker metadata and improved file preview logic.
In Extra CMake Modules, the KDE team improved documentation for KDEInstallDirs, modernized code for readability, and introduced a new SHARED_PREFIX argument in ecm_generate_headers. This should make life a bit easier for developers maintaining large KDE projects or working on external integrations.
Other smaller but noteworthy changes include a fix for localized config values on Windows and macOS in KConfig, improvements to color scheme management in KColorScheme, and new safety checks in KImageFormats that limit RAW and DDS file sizes to 300,000×300,000 pixels to avoid memory issues.
Lastly, Syntax Highlighting also received attention with new definitions for Snakemake, XKeyboardConfig, and Quarto, plus several refinements to existing themes like Monokai and JSONC.
For those who prefer to build from source, the entire codebase for Frameworks 6.19 is available for download from KDE’s official website. On Linux, the recommended approach is to install binary packages from your distribution’s repositories.
Visit the official release announcement for detailed information on all the changes in KDE Frameworks 6.19, including a full list of updates and bug fixes.
