Tumbleweed Provides Some Stability to 2020

The year of 2020, at least in the openSUSE world, is starting out to be pretty stable. In little more than a week into the new year, there have been five openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots released.

The releases, with the exception of one, are either posting a stable rating or are trending at a stable rating, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

With the release of snapshot 20200107, more OpenGL and Vulkan driver features and improvements came in the update of the Mesa 19.3.1 package. The newer version update also provides better AMD Radeon Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) performance. 

The bluez-tools package that is a set of tools to manage Bluetooth devices for Linux had a minor update from the previous three-year-old package included in Tumbleweed. GNOME’s web browser package epiphany provided some security AdBlocker preferences in the 3.34.3.1 version. Message transfer agent exim reduced the start up process initialization with version 4.93.0.4 and fixed more than a half dozen bugs. KDE’s kdevelop5 5.4.6 version fixed some wrong text in the license. Network detector, packet sniffer, and intrusion detection system package for wireless network kismet updated to its December release in the snapshot. One package update that stands out in the snapshot is the release of the finger reader package for Linux devices libfprint 1.0; this first major release provides better documentation and bug fixes related to restarting a failed verification immediately.The osc 0.167.2 package fixed regression in osc chroot. Other packages updated in the snapshot were rubygem-parser 2.7.0.1 and tigervnc 1.10.0 among others.

Snapshot 20200106 snapshot provided an update of ImageMagick 7.0.9.13 that fixed the a bug for custom profile (CMYK or RGB) conversions and the -layers optimize option now requires a fully transparent previous image. Argyll Color Management System package argyllcms had a new major version update; the 2.1.1 version update removes bundled zlib source, that could trigger a fatal rpm check failure on Leap 15.x. The library for handling OpenGL function pointer management libepoxy 1.5.4 requires only the python3-base package for building instead of full python3 package. GNOME’s photo manager shotwell 0.30.8 updated translations and fixed Tumblr publishing.

Several updated YaST packages came in the 20200105 snapshot. Improved sorting by device name and size in tables were made with the yast2-storage-ng 4.2.67 update and an improved warning when all repositories are disabled were made with the yast2-packager 4.2.42 update. The same version number for yast2-network added support for reading / writing Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU). The libstorage-ng 4.2.44 package improved the sort-key for block devices and libyui 3.9.1 added sort key to the table cell. Python-passlib 1.7.2 added some new features like supports Argon2 and utility program to control and monitor computer storage systems smartmontools 7.1 added enhancements for AT Attachment (ATA) ACS-4 and ACS-5. The snapshot also provided an update to the 2.6.0 version of usb_modeswitch, which added several devices and changed the Makefile to prevent parallel build issues.

ImageMagick also had an update in the 20200103 snapshot. NetworkManager 1.22.2 fixed multiple issues in the internal DHCP client and drop support for BlueZ 4 for BlueZ 5, which has been around since 2012. The  Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) 1.2.1.2 package brought about 30 upstream patches. File searching tool catfish 1.4.12 adds support for running on Wayland and provided dialog improvements, which were introducted in the 1.4.10 version. Flatpak 1.6.0 made a change in the support for OCI and only support the use of labels, not annotations, as labels work with more registries. Pre-existing OCI flatpak registries (like Fedora) may need some changes, according to the changelog. The new major 7.0 glusterfs, which is an open source platform for scale-out public and private cloud storage, provided improved read workload latency in a cluster, especially in a cloud setup along with load balancing with the outstanding pending requests. The library for reading raw files from digital cameras, libraw 0.19.5, fixed a possible buffer underrun in the modern Samsung loader. Improved responsiveness during large file transfers were made with the sshfs 3.7.0 and vim text editor 8.2.0063 fixed several problems. This snapshot is trending at a rating of 83, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer, but most of the issues recorded with the rating were related to the NetworkManager.

Tumbleweed had a New Year’s snapshot this year. Snapshot 20200101 had 13 packages updated. Of those, key ones to point out were the update of diffstat 1.63, which improved parsing for git diffs, and Fast Light Toolkit, which is a cross-platform widget library for graphical user interfaces, had some security fixes with the fltk 1.3.5.