GNOME 40, KDE Frameworks, Plasma Update in Tumbleweed

Two openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots were released since last week’s blog.

The snapshots brought the much anticipated GNOME 40 as well as an update of KDE Frameworks 5.81.0, Plasma 5.21.4 and several other packages.

The 20210414 snapshots was a monster; the amount of packages updated in the snapshot was ginormous. The update to GNOME 40 brought some significant changes to the desktop environment. New visual changes with rounded corners, and gestures like a three-finger swipe to move between workspaces were among the improvements in the release. The app launcher is more customizable and more intuitive to navigate with a mouse. Another desktop environment that was updated in the snapshot was Plasma 5.21.4, which had color scheme fixes and a fix for a broken keyboard configurations with single layout on Wayland. The release also set the preferred aspect ratio to “21:9” over “64:27” with KScreen. KDE Frameworks 5.81.0 added high-brightness and low-brightness Breeze Icons and the user interface builder Kirigami fixed a potential crash in the SizeGroup. Even Xfce had in update in the snapshot; this update in the xfce4-settings 4.16.1 package fixed scaling and updated translations. Dependencies were update in the upgrade to nodejs15 15.14. There was a minor fix for the cups printing package and xterm 367 updated some patches and improved responsiveness of the terminal. Linux Kernel 5.11.12 arrived in the snapshot and had several Advanced Linux Sound Architecture fixes and a commit for a nosy driver with Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE)2021-3483. Both ruby2.7 and ruby3.0 received minor updates to fix an XML vulnerability and GStreamer 1.18.4 fixed mpeg-2 video handling and a memory leak. Several YaST packages also had updates.

A major version update of audacity 3.0.0 arrived in snapshot 20210408. The format to save Audacity projects was changed and a new analyzer called Label Sounds can label sounds and silences for more effective use of the application. Less than a handful of CVEs were updated in curl 7.76.0; the command line tool strips credentials from the auto-referer header field and adds support to read and store the referrer header. An update of systemd 246.13 had some changes to handle large packets more gracefully and rubygem-rubocop 1.12.1 had an enormous amount of fixes jumping from version 1.8.1. Another package that received a large amount of updates was vim 8.2.2725; there were fixes for a memory leak when compiling and a fix for hangs with the terminal when resized. The xf86-input-libinput package moved from version 0.30.0 to 1.0.0 and its biggest change was the change to an MIT Licence. Other packages updated in the snapshot were bind 9.16.12, fwupd 1.5.8 and openssl 1.1.1k, which fixed CVE-2021-3450 that had a problem with verifying a certificate chain when using a certain flag.