Tumbleweed Fast Forwards with KDE Gear, Frameworks Updates

A lot of work this week has been taking place in the background to release openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots.

Documented on the mailing list in the latest openSUSE release engineering meeting was information about some challenges Tumbleweed development had this week building images with the Open Build Service. There were some build failures, which caused some broken builds. These builds aren’t released as a snapshot since these must pass openSUSE’s openQA testing. The size of the ISO media also became too large to fit on a DVD; adjustments are made frequently when the capacity exceeds the size, so let’s get into the snapshot that was released.

The efforts to build, test and release a successful snapshot did come with the release of snapshot 20210817. Users received some much anticipated software with some really cool new features. KDE Gear 21.08.0 was among the many packages for rolling release users. The Dolphin file manager now shows an animated sequence of previews for folders containing a lot of previewable files. Its preview code has also been optimized so thumbnails pop up faster and files inside encrypted locations, such as Plasma Vaults, can show a preview. The PDF viewer Okular made some enhancements in the toolbar that allows for a color design to make reading more comfortable and to help avoid eye-strain. The Konsole terminal offers a preview feature from the command line when hovering the cursor over image filenames. Enhancements were also made for the Gwenview image viewer and the Elsa music player. KDE Frameworks 5.85.0 also came in the snapshot. The developer user interface Kirigami corrected some spacing between the close button and action buttons. It also added a method to push a page as a new window on the desktop. Optimizations for the network mounting performance were made to the KTextEditor and KWayland fixed a check for an mmap system call failure. AppStream, which is a package that provides a standard for creating app stores across distributions, updated to version 0.14.4 and improved text line wrapping. Mozilla Thunderbird 78.13.0 fixed a half dozen Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures; three of those involved fixes for possible memory corruption. Better native Wayland support for handling client-side decorations and other functionality were made to the update of media SDL2 2.0.16. The first major 1.0.0 version for firewalld was released in the snapshot; the dynamically managed firewall reduced dependencies, cleaned the spec file and deprecated the iptables backend. Vector graphics editor inkscape advanced a few minor versions to 1.1 and added a Welcome dialog where the look of Inkscape can be selected and some choices for the new document size or file to open are available. And when pasting a copied object, Inkscape now pastes it directly on top of the currently selected object by default. There is a list of several more packages that updated in the snapshot. Among some of those packages update were apparmor 3.0.3, ipset 7.15, nodejs16 16.6.2, openvpn 2.5.3, vim 8.2.3318, pipewire 0.3.33 and yast2-users 4.4.6, which made an update to allow for the editing of the name of an existing user and another update to remove the password of an existing user.