Tumbleweed Gets LibreOffice 7, New Breezy Features

New Breezy Features work with GitHub, GitLab and Launchpad

The newest major version of the open-source offices suite landed in an openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots this week.

LibreOffice 7 beta 2 was updated in snapshot 20200622. The new major version improves the usage of quotation marks and an apostrophe in several languages with autocorrect. LibreOffice 7 adds support for exporting to new versions of Open Document Format, available via Tools > Options > Load/Save > General > ODF format version: “ODF 1.3” and “ODF 1.3 Extended”; the latter is the default, unless the user has previously changed the version in the configuration. Another new (experimental) feature is to make documents more accessible: an accessibility check tool to review common accessibility problems in documents, and support for PDF/UA specifications in the PDF export dialog. To enable the accessibility check tool and the PDF/UA export, go to: Tools > Options… > LibreOffice > Advanced > Optional Features > Enable experimental features (may be unstable). Then restart LibreOffice. A handful of libraries were updated in the snapshot including libzip 1.7.1, which restore LIBZIP_VERSION_{MAJOR,MINOR,MICRO} symbols, and gnome-desktop 3.36.3.1 had some clock and translation updates. The general-purpose scripting language php7 updated to version 7.4.7 fixed a regression in the previous version when yielding an array based generator and fixed a bug that involved hangs when an invalid value was encountered. The microcode updates for Intel x86/x86-64 CPUs, ucode-intel, reverted some code for the processor microarchitecture Skylake in the snapshot that caused some stability issues. The snapshot is trending moderately stable with a rating of 78, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

The previous day’s snapshot, 20200621, brought an update for KDE users with an update to Plasma 5.19.1. The update fixed some unprintable characters and actions for application search results. KDE’s task manager and performance monitor, KSysGuard added units to disk/all/{read,write} and uses a new name for the dbus interface. The CD and DVD authoring application by KDE, k3b 20.04.2, had a fix for when the application does not finish if started without a splash screen. Both YaST and snapper received updates in the snapshot to versions 4.3.8 and 0.8.10 respectively; the graphical user interface yast2 package updated XML.validate arguments, made a change to distinguish between a String argument (containing a XML document/schema) and Pathname (path to a file) and the update also adds a method to determine the default start mode for a system service. Snapper’s update provides a special rollback for a transactional server. A change was made in the yast2-bootloader 4.3.6 version that avoids random failure in unit tests when there is a serial console. The version control system breezy 3.1.0 added several new features including a new brz land command that can merge merge proposals on Launchpad, GitHub and GitLab sites. And pkgconf received several fixes in it’s update from version 1.6.3 to version 1.7.3. Documentation generator python-Sphinx update to version 3.0.4; the new major version adds a new feature C, parse array declarators with static, qualifiers, and variable-length array specification. The snapshot is trending moderately stable with a rating of 79, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

The two snapshots be snapshots 20200618 and 20200617 both recorded a moderate rating of 74. The 20200618 snapshot had handful of packages updated including vlc 3.0.11, which fixed regression with some encrypted HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) streams, linux-glibc-devel 5.7, and nftables 0.9.6, which fixed two AddressSanitizer runtime errors. An update in the 20200617 snapshot brought a fix for some rendering issue affecting Unreal Engine 4 games on i965 with the update of Mesa 3D Graphics Library 20.1.1. The snapshot also brought an update of bolt 0.9, which is the userspace system daemon for Thunderbolt 3, and adds improvements and new features like a ‘generation’ attribute for the manager, an ability to change the policy of a stored device and support for systemd’s service watchdog. Ceph and zypper were also updated in the snapshot.