Over a month after its previous 6.17 release, KDE announced the launch of Frameworks 6.18, expanding its collection of add-on libraries to Qt and enhancing functionality available to developers across various platforms.
This release brings a wide range of fixes and refinements across the stack. In Baloo, casing issues in the ecm_generate_headers PREFIX argument were corrected. The Breeze Icons package saw major cleanups, including the removal of outdated or unused icons such as Bomi, Calligra, and Suyu, as well as dropping nonstandard colorful app sizes.
Developers working with Extra CMake Modules will notice better documentation for header generation and new support for MACRO_NAMES in plugin macros, with legacy JSON-based definitions now being phased out. The build system also gained improvements, like enabling unity builds for qmlcachegen files and adding missing RUNSTATEDIR support.
On the integration side, Framework Integration now enables popups for device notifications. KArchive received numerous crash fixes in its 7z handler, better handling of malformed files, and new test coverage for KZip. Similarly, KAuth fixes warnings for applications without windows and improves job execution focus handling.
Several modules addressed compatibility with newer toolchains. KCalendarCore and KConfig now compile cleanly without deprecated Qt 6.10 methods, while KBookmarks, KCMUtils, and others dropped reliance on deprecated KDE Frameworks 6.17 APIs.
For desktop-facing improvements, KIO added safer thumbnail preview handling, moved caching into worker threads for better responsiveness, and fixed long-standing bugs with file dialogs and filters. Kirigami also received multiple fixes for navigation, back button behavior, and form layout consistency.
Other highlights include updated support for Exiv2 in KFileMetaData, crash fixes for broken image formats in KImageFormats, and more stable multi-cursor handling in KTextEditor. KWallet received fixes for DBus integration and now ships with a new portal service file.
For those who prefer to build from source, the entire codebase for Frameworks 6.18 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 6.18, including a full list of updates and bug fixes.
