Tumbleweed Gets Newest KDE Frameworks, Plasma

Updates of both KDE’s Plasma and Frameworks landed in openSUSE Tumbleweed as part of three snapshots released this week.

The rolling Tumbleweed distribution began the week with Linux Kernel 5.10.12 and has ended it with version 5.10.16, which was the latest stable Kernel when the 20210215 snapshot was released.

The newest Frameworks 5.79.0 version arrived in snapshot 20210217. As part of the release, Kholidays package updated holidays for Mauritius and Taiwan. The Kirigami user interface framework had fixes to the controls and enhanced some vertical alignments. Removal of the usage of non-UTF-8 string literals were made with Framework’s kcodecs package update. GNOME had some updates with gnome-builder updating to version 3.38.2, which provided support for an --add-policy for Flatpak, and gnome-software updating to version 3.38.1, which updated translations and ignores harmless warnings when using unusual fwupd versions. Three areas of focus were emphasized for the update of dhcp 4.4.2 with changes for dynamic DNS additions, dhclient improvements and support for dynamic shared libraries; the package is now licensed under the Mozilla Public License, MPL 2.0. Multiple PyPI packages were updated including python-greenlet 1.0.0, which requires setuptools to build from source, and python-numpy 1.20.1, which fixed a random.shuffle regression. A major update of perl-Mojolicious 9.01 added an experimental color attribute and an experimental color log environment variable. Other packages to update in the snapshot were Long-Term Support package subversion 1.14.1, filesystem mounter fuse3 3.10.2, pipewire 0.3.21 and git 2.30.1.

Plasma 5.21 is all about upgrading the looks and usability of Plasma. Snapshot 20210215 brought this Plasma update, which refreshed the color scheme and sports a brand new unified headerbar style with a clean and cool new look. The new Plasma System Monitor app for monitoring system resources is now an integral part of Plasma; the application shows all the running applications along with detailed statistics and graphs. Plasma 5.21 makes massive progress toward first-class support for Wayland. The virtual keyboard in Wayland has been improved and supports GTK applications using the text-input-v3 protocol. The update of Mozilla Firefox 85.0.1 fixed a few bugs like a crash in the browser in case of an unexpected Cache Application Programming Interface state. The trim that was not working in ImageMagick was fixed in version 7.0.10.62 and the GPS info for TIFF images now works with the imaging applications. Terminal emulator xterm 366 corrected the upper-limit for a selection buffer, which fixed a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure. PDF library poppler 21.02.0 fixed a memory leak if saving a file fails. Some other packages in the snapshot were LibreSSL 3.2.4, text rendering package pango 1.48.2 and Linux Kernel 5.10.16.

The Linux Kernel updated from 5.10.12 to 5.10.14 in the 20210212 snapshot, which brought in some KVM fixes. New packages were inherited from GNU Compiler Collection 10 into the GCC 11.0.0+git183291 update. CardDAV address books now support OAuth2 and Google Contacts in the email client update of Mozilla Thunderbird 78.7.1. The glibc 2.33 version optimized dynamic linker loads and the implementations of shared objects from subdirectories under the glibc-hwcaps directory on the library search path; that’s if the system’s capabilities meet the requirements for this subdirectory. The 7.1.0.3 LibreOffice updated bundled dependencies and php7 7.4.15 fixed a Curl bug and core fix that provided a bogus parser error on more than 4GB of source code. The regular expression library re2 had an update from a November release to version 20210202, which addressed -Wnull-dereference warnings from GCC 10.x.