Latest Plasma Lands in Tumbleweed, Set for Leap Beta

This week’s openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots delivered exciting news not only to rolling release users, but also brought significant news for users of the long-established Leap release.

KDE’s next Long-Term Support (LTS) release, Plasma 5.24, arrived in a recent snapshot, and it brings the “Perfect Harmony” for both Tumbleweed and Leap users. Plasma 5.24 will be one of the Desktop Environments (DE) in Leap 15.4; the beta version of Leap 15.4 is expected to be released for testing with the new Plasma version within the next couple of weeks, according to the roadmap.

Plasma 5.24 arrived in snapshot 20220207. The release has improvements in looks and ease of use. It is the final Plasma 5 version until the transition to Plasma 6. Breeze, Plasma’s default theme, was changed giving the DE an improved visual consistency. Breeze lets users pick accent colors and the light/dark color preference gives non-KDE apps that respect the FreeDesktop preferences an automatic light or dark switch based on the chosen color scheme. Discover gives users the option to automatically restart after an update is completed. By simply clicking the checkbox at the bottom of the Updates page, users can take a break and come back to a rebooted, updated system. There are several other feature improvements in the update and people can watch the creation of the Honeywave wallpaper that was developed for the release since it was streamed live on YouTube. The 5.16.5 Linux Kernel update brought several changes for semiconductor company and openSUSE sponsor Marvell; most of this centered on fixes and enablements for their OCTEON® TX2 processor family. Facebook’s fast compression package zstd updated to version 1.5.2, did some spec file cleanup and enabled a zlib/gzip compatible backend since compression library zlib is shown to be significantly faster than gzip. There were about 50 RubyGem packages updated in the snapshot and rubygem-spring 4.0.0 was the only major version update in the snapshot.

Some of the daily snapshots this week were large and the 20220206 snapshot had a variety of packages updated. An update of Mesa 21.3.5 and Mesa-drivers 21.3.5 fixed Zink driver bugs. Finnish translations were made with the update of libstorage-ng 4.4.79 and openSUSE’s 0.1.8 opensuse-welcome package also updated translations. A quarterly update of Google’s regular expression library re2 20220201 addressed a -Wunused-but-set-variable warning from Clang 13.x and yast2-storage-ng 4.4.35 improved integration with the yast2-nfs-client to offer a consistent user experience. Other packages to update in the snapshot were xwayland 22.0.99.902, llvm13 13.0.1 and python-Pillow 9.0.1.

A total of six packages arrived in snapshot 20220205. Text editor vim 8.2.4286 states in the changelog that entering a character with CTRL V may include modifiers. The texted editor update also fixed two Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures, CVE-2022-0417 and CVE-2022-0393. File system utility update e2fsprogs 1.46.5 fixed a crash and fixed the handling of resizing the file system, which would exceed inode limitations. Light-weight programming language lua54 5.4.4 fixed some bugs and removed two patches and ncurses 6.3.20220129 added a warning in the configuration script if the file specified for --with-caps does not exist. Both yast2-core 4.4.1 and yast2-country 4.4.11 were also updated; the latter fixed arguments for the localectl set-locale.

The 20220204 snapshot brought KDE Gear 21.12.2. File manager Dolphin improved zooming of the files. Video editor Kdenlive fixed an issue that sometimes could not move grouped clips to the right when only one empty frame was present. It also fixed a freeze when trying to drag a clip that was just added to Bin. Kmail fixed a build issue with GNU Compiler Collection 12 and learning tool kgeography fixed the color of Howland, Baker and Jarvis islands of United States minor. The Universal Command Line Interface for Amazon Web Services, aws-cli 1.22.46 updated requirements in the spec file from setup.py. The release added a new NNA accelerator compilation support for Sagemaker Neo, which is used for optimizing machine learning. A Qt 6 development pattern was added with the patterns-kde 20220203 update. Both findutils 4.9.0 and a git + version of mobile shell mosh 1.3.2 were updated in the snapshot.

The two snapshots starting off the week were loaded with several packages. While snapshot 20220202 was mostly filled with RubyGem packages, snapshot 20220203 had more updates of Python Package Index and YaST packages. Snapshot 20220203 had multiple package updates for a broad range of users. Audio package PipeWire should again be able to play sound in Zoom, telegram and other apps with the 0.3.45 update. The default sink and source names and properties in PipeWire are also improved. Support for seamless and saliency blending of a foreground and background image was made in the ImageMagick 7.1.0.22 update. The screen reader package for individuals with visual impairments, orca, updated to version 41.2, fixed a couple bugs, improved handling performance and added more event-flood detection. The kernel dump helpers package kdump 1.0.2 fixed the network interface naming and added a dependency on kdumptool. Other packages to update in 20220203 were sudo 1.9.9 and a git + update for samba 4.15.5. Snapshot 20220202 updated to the 5.16.4 Linux Kernel, which had a decent amount of improvements for Flash Memory through Memory Technology Device changes. XML parser library expat 2.4.4 fixed CVE-2022-23852 and CVE-2022-23990, which affected the integer overflow. Out of the 26 RubyGem packages to update in the snapshot, rubygem-hashie 5.0.0 was the only package to have a major version update, which added exporting a normal Hash from an indifferent one through the to_hash method.