Tumbleweed Delivers New Kernel, Applications, Plasma, libvirt

The past week brought a total of three openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots and a bunch of new features and improvements for KDE users.

Snapshot 20180618 updated just a few packages to include an updated GNU Compiler Collection 7, which fixes support for 32-bit AddressSanitizer with glibc 2.27+. Both perl-File-ShareDir and python-numpy were the other two packages that gave users minor fixes.

The snapshots earlier in the week were more KDE centric. Snapshot 20180615 delivered KDE Applications 18.04.2. The updated applications focused on bugfixes, improvements and translations for Dolphin, Gwenview, KGpg, Kig, Konsole, Lokalize, Okular and many more. KGpg no longer fails to decrypt messages without a version header and image with Gwenview can now be redone after undoing them. The Linux Kernel jumped from 4.16.12 to 4.17.1 and fixed some btrfs and KVM issues. The newer kernel also ported an arm fix for HDMI output routing and fixed an atomic sequence handling with spi-nor and intel-spi. The hwinfo package tried a more aggressive way to catch all usb platform controllers with the 21.55 version. Libvirt 4.4.0 added support for migration of Virtual Machines with non-shared storage over Thread-Local Storage (TLS) and introduced a new virDomainDetachDevice Alias. Lenovo, HP and Dell tablets gaining greater support with the updated libwacom 0.30  package. Add support for PostgreSQL-style UPSERT were made available with sqlite3  3.24.0. Other tools like mercurial 4.6.1, snapper 0.5.5 were also updated in the snapshot.

Tumbleweed users started to receive the updates to KDE Applications 18.04.2 in snapshot 20180613, but the update to Plasma 5.13 was what caught most users’ attention. The KDE Community spent a considerable amount of time optimising the startup and minimising memory usage, which provided a faster time-to-desktop and better runtime performance while using less memory consumption. Plasma 5.13 has a new system settings redesign, a new look and more features with its software and addon installer Discover. Two other notable changes in the 20180613 snapshot were updates to ceph 13.2, which fixed python3 loading module, and an update of the head branch to GCC8. Mesa 18.1.1 and perl-Image-ExifTool 11.00 were also updated in the snapshot.