KDE Frameworks 6 will be based on Qt 6

Lars Knoll, Qt’s CTO and Chief Maintainer of the Qt project, announced at the Akademy 2019 meeting that the Qt 6 program will be released in November 2020. After confirming this news, the developers of the KDE project discussed the toolkit update for the next generation framework.

KDE project developer Volker Krause shared some of his thoughts on KDE 6 and what the team has discussed. Volker said that KDE Frameworks 6 will be released within two years of Qt 6.0 launch, or at least one year later. Since Qt 6.0 has been identified, the actual development of KDE Frameworks 6 will probably begin in the second half of 2020. And in the near future, at some stage of development, they may adopt the “Scrum Sprint” approach in agile development.

Although the Qt team has consistently stated that it will do its best to maintain compatibility between Qt 5 and Qt 6, the new major version will certainly trigger KDE changes. To this end, the KDE team will also be prepared in advance. The KDE team migrated the code from the deprecated Qt method to fully build from Qt 5.14 with the deprecated method disabled. The main job in this section is about removing the use of deprecated modules, classes, or methods that are expected to disappear with the release of Qt 6 or KF6.

In addition, there are some tasks that rely on Qt 6 or need to perform actual ABI outages, but these tasks are still rare, and of course, they need to wait until the development phase.

In addition to the goals that are planned to be implemented in KF6, it is equally important to plan how to transition to KF6. Lars proposed the approach taken by Qt, but the KDE case is different in some respects from Qt. KDE is not the main production framework, but building products based on these frameworks (Plasma and hundreds of applications), which allows us to define additional standards for what is allowed to be changed or deleted.