GNOME, Salt Update in Tumbleweed

The update of GNOME 41 in openSUSE’s rolling release Tumbleweed didn’t take long; the new GNOME landed a day after our last blog post.

Other software updates included in this week’s three snapshots include Mesa, PipeWire, Btrfs, Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird.

Mesa’s 21.2.3 update focused on bug fixing, which arrived in snapshot 20211005. The 3D graphics package fixed a significant performance drop on the Radeon HD 8400 graphics card. Mozilla Thunderbird 91.1.2 now warns if an S/MIME encrypted message includes BCC recipients. The email client update also fixed delivery status notifications, which were only showing for the first recipient. Another email package, mailutils, updated to version 3.13 and fixed semantics of mail sending and saving commands. PipeWire 0.3.38 made various bluetooth compatibility improvements and the audio/video package for Linux now has better description service files for systemd. The only major-version update in the snapshot was sysvinit 3.00. The sysvinit package, which is for controlling the startup, running, and shutdown of a system, now provides better device detection of bootlogd. The btrfs file system updated to 5.14.1; the updated version fixes parsing of compression (option -c) and added a workaround for old kernels when reading zone sizes. Other packages to update in the snapshot were exim 4.95, Kernel-firmware 20210928 and more.

A minor update of Firefox came on the first of the month in snapshot 20211001. The 92.0.1 web-browser update fixed an issue where audio playback was not working on some Linux systems. An update of salt 3003.3 added an enormous amount of patches and made a fix to periodically restart the fileserver update process to avoid leaks, according to the changelog. The update of audit 3.0.5 fixed various issues when dealing with corrupted logs. Roughly 10 other packages were updated in the snapshot.

GNOME 41 arrived in snapshot 20210929. The new release provides significant improvements for developers, a new developer documentation website, new features in the Builder IDE and GTK4 enhancements. The software center has a new look and makes it easier to browse and discover apps. GNOME’s new remote desktop client Connections replaces the remote desktop functionality that was previously found in Boxes. The CD/DVD burner brasero made translation improvements and added some Help improvements in version 3.12.3. There was an update to glib2 2.70.0 in the snapshot and a major update of libsoup 3.0.1 removed unused dependency on libxml. The 18.8.16 version of NetworkManager-openvpn fixed the parsing of incomplete IPv6 configurations pushed by a server. Other packages to update in the snapshot were upower 0.99.13, rubygem-bundler 2.2.27, gupnp 1.4.0, vte 0.66.0 and several other GNOME-related libraries.