Almost a month after the previous 6.21 release, KDE announced the launch of Frameworks 6.22, expanding its collection of add-on libraries to Qt and enhancing functionality available to developers across various platforms.
A notable area of work in this release is file handling and system integration. Baloo file indexing and search framework received further cleanup and test coverage for atomic file replacement and file watch behavior.
At the same time, KIO, the framework responsible for file management and remote access, saw multiple internal optimizations, cleanup of legacy code paths, and functional refinements, including a new “Compare Files” option in rename dialogs and fixes affecting file places and preview handling.
Wayland-related improvements also continue to land, as KGuiAddons introduced significant changes to the system clipboard implementation, including threaded read handling and broader Wayland usage, addressing a long list of long-standing bugs.
Encoding detection and text handling received heavy attention in KCodecs. The UTF-16 state machine was refined, BOM detection fixed, and numerous probers were simplified or removed. Additional test coverage was added for several Windows code pages and Hebrew and Greek encodings, improving correctness while reducing complexity in the probing logic.
Kirigami, KDE’s Qt Quick UI framework, saw a large batch of cleanups and behavioral fixes. These include improvements to layout stability, the removal of unused or obsolete code, better property handling, and documentation updates. Several fixes address subtle UI issues, including binding loops, incorrect sizing, and navigation behavior.
It should also be mentioned that Breeze Icons gained new icon variants and improved Flatpak integration. KConfig added new convenience helpers and expanded supported data types. KWindowSystem introduced new Wayland-related APIs for tagging and describing XDG toplevels, while KImageFormats improved AVIF decoding correctness and test coverage.
Finally, many modules adopted standardized test name prefixes, removed duplicate headers, updated documentation, or cleaned up platform-specific behavior. Holiday datasets were refreshed across multiple regions, syntax highlighting gained support for additional languages and formats, and several deprecated components were formally marked for removal.
For those who prefer to build from source, the entire codebase for Frameworks 6.22 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 6.22, including a full list of updates and bug fixes.
