The weekly review: Tumbleweed gets 3.18, Leap RC1 out, new T-Shirts in Shop

Tumbleweed

Work under the hood in Factory allowed for only one snapshot of Tumbleweed in 10 days, but the 20151012 TW snapshot provided two updates keenly anticipated by rolling release users.

GNOME 3.18 has automatic brightness adjustments for a user’s screen. A progress bar for copying files gives users more awareness about the progress of copying files. Updating device firmware is now easier with 3.18 and there are many more additions.

KDE Applications updated to 15.08.1 and provides more than 40 recorded bugfixes. The release also includes a Long Term Support version of KDE Development Platform 4.14.12.

KDE Applications 15.08.2 is in Factory staging and the 4.2.3 Linux Kernel is also in staging, which removes the kernel desktop flavor.

The previous TW snapshot 20151002 had some problems with Virtualbox, but users who booted the old kernel were unaffected. The kernel and systemd updates were checked in at the same time causing the build of virtualbox to be unresolvable. A fix was quickly published to the update repos, which is rare because normally fixes come in the next snapshot, but knowing there would be some days until the snapshot the fix went to the update repos. TW users are reminded to subscribe to the Factory mailing list so users can be aware of TW solutions and participate in the development of the rolling release.

Leap

Once again, developers hit the mark and released the RC1 in alignment with the Leap 42.1 roadmap.

Leap has about 70 known bugs so users, blogger and podcast personalities are encouraged to test Leap before it is official release on Nov. 4 during SUSECon in Amsterdam. Perform one of the tests recommended on this Google spreadsheet and report your findings.

Shopping

Both Tumbleweed and Leap T-Shirts are now available in the openSUSE Shop.

Both look good, yet the shop can always be improved. Reply below and let us know what items you would like to see in the shop featuring Tumbleweed or Leap.