The Plans For KDE Frameworks 5.0 Were Just Announced

There's more news this weekend out of Berlin about the Linux desktop. Beyond KDE on Wayland and primitive talk about GTK4, at the joint KDE-GNOME Desktop Summit, plans for KDE Frameworks 5.0 were announced.

Aaron Seigo right now is giving a talk about the "KDE Platform 4 Roadmap." The talk abstract sounded rather mundane, but right before giving his presentation he published a new blog post... During this talk he's announcing a road-map for the next major release of KDE's libraries and run-time requirements.

"Yes, you read that right. Coming out of Platform 11, we have a roadmap for the next major releast of KDE's libraries and runtime requirements. The emphasis is on modularity, dependency clarity / simplification and increasing quality to the next level. Our goal is to give us better tools for desktop app development, give our KDE mobile projects a leg up and make KDE's libraries something that Qt developers can and will use."

KDE 5.0 will not be disruptive like KDE 4.0 was, but it will be mostly about "under the hood" enhancements to the heart of the KDE stack. In particular, it will make KDE more prominent on the mobile front.

There will continue to be six-month major releases to KDE SC 4.x, but KDE Frameworks 5.0 will be developed in parallel. When KDE Frameworks 5.0 is ready for adoption, the key KDE applications will begin their re-tooling process against the new libraries. Ideally, the porting process to the new frameworks will in large part just be recompiling the code against the new libraries.

Aaron's personal announcement concerning KDE Frameworks 5.0 for those not at the Berlin Desktop Summit can be found on his blog.

On a similar note, for those that are unaware, Nokia plans to release Qt 5.0 next year.