Almost a month after its previous 6.16 release, KDE announced the launch of Frameworks 6.17, expanding its collection of add-on libraries to Qt and enhancing functionality available to developers across various platforms.
Baloo, the file indexing engine that powers fast search in Dolphin, sees several fixes, including better handling of UTF-16 text encoding. There’s also improved extractor process management, preventing crashes if a parent process exits unexpectedly.
Metadata handling gets smarter, with the PlaintextExtractor now verifying that decoded text contains printable characters before processing it. This avoids junk data in file previews and searches.
File operations see subtle but meaningful refinements:
- Checksum verification now supports comparing multiple files at once.
- KDirOperator now defaults to “newest first” sorting, a small but handy change for browsing recent files.
- Better Xdg-activation support for opening files in external apps.
KDE’s lightweight UI framework gets tighter layout handling, fixing long-standing issues like FormLayout misalignment. There’s also better toolbar behavior in single-column mode and fixes for dialog window styling.
Developers working with niche file formats will appreciate new support for:
- Expect scripting
- WebVTT (for video subtitles)
- JSON5 and JSONC (JSON with comments)
- NFTables (Linux firewall rules)
For those who prefer to build from source, the entire codebase for Frameworks 6.16 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 more detailed information about KDE Frameworks 6.17, including a full list of updates and bug fixes.
