KDE, GNOME, Audio packages update in Tumbleweed 

Updates for sound, image and system components arrived this week throughout several openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots, and the arm images are rolling again, according to notes from the project’s release engineering meeting.

For those NVIDIA users, testers with aarch64 servers and NVIDIA cards are wanted. Proprietary drivers are now available for aarch64, which is only for the G06 version.

Snapshot 20221214 might bring a smile to people’s face as the GNOME webcam application cheese updated from the 43 Alpha version to 43.0; the transition to the new version involves removing glibc-debug environment variables and updating translation. Online webcam users will also sound better as both pipewire 0.3.62 and wireplumber 0.4.13 updated in the snapshot. The updated PipeWire version fixed regressions in screen sharing that was caused by a race when activating links and driver nodes. Support for bluetooth offloading was added that allows for the reception, decoding and playback to happen completely in hardware, which required some support found in the WirePlumber update. The git control system updated to version 2.39.0. The minor version expanded git grep checkouts and had some changes for get branch for editing a branch before switching. Other packages to update in the snapshot were strace 6.1, dracut, kdump and more.

A couple GNOME packages were updated in snapshot 20221213. Besides updates to the 43.2 versions of gnome-shell, which had multiple fixes including one to the screencasting User Interface (UI) being erroneously disabled, and mutter, which fixed recalculating the viewport after a windows resize for a display server, the snapshot was filled with an enormous amount of RubyGems. Among those, rubygem-ruby-parser 3.19.2 fixed bug parsing array patterns; rubygem-regexp-parser 2.6.1 fixed the scanning of two negative lookbehind edge cases; rubygem-puma 6.0.0 is dropping Ruby 2.2 and 2.3 support; and rubygem-bootsnap 1.15.0 added a read-only mode for environments where the updated cache would not be persisted. Several other RubyGems were updated in the snapshot as well as a couple Perl packages.

If 20221213 was a RubyGems snapshot, then snapshot 20221212 was a KDE Frameworks snapshot. Frameworks 5.101.0 was made available to rolling release users within 48 hours of its release. The bug fixing released deprecated a few aspects of the KWindowSystem package and moved X11-specific functions to a new KX11Extras class. The KTextEditor fixed a default setting mark when ctrl is pressed. The Kirigami UI framework fixed many memory leaks caused by Qt.createComponent. The action button also fixed broken attached properties due to import changes. A few other behaviors were deprecated with the KIO system library that provides access to files, web sites and other resources. The lightweight display manager lightdm updated for version 1.32.0. The package made use of Python 3 in tests and improved upon methods of determining a Wayland session.

Two GNOME packages were updated in the snapshot. There were updated translations in gnome-characters 43.1 and the package also updated to Unicode 15. Translations came in the update of gnome-remote-desktop 43.2 as well, and it removed a stray line of new code. The arpwatch-ethercodes 20221212 package also updated in the snapshot, but lacked any commit messaging. A Common Vulnerability and Exposure was fixed with the rpm 4.18.0 update. CVE-2021-35938 was fixed and would occur when rpm sets desired permissions and credentials after installing a file. A local unprivileged user could have used the flaw to exchange the original file with a symbolic link to a security-critical file and escalate their privileges on the system. A few other packages were updated in the snapshot.

Just one package was updated in snapshot 20221211. The libass 0.17.0 version, which is a portable subtitle renderer for Advanced Substation Alpha/Substation Alpha subtitle format, fixed various parts related to automatic line breaks. The release had a major feature, which appears to be related to LayoutResX and LayoutResY headers.

Snapshot 20221210 had a Linux Kernel update. The 6.0.12 kernel-source fixed a wifi buffer overflow related to cfg80211 subsystem and fixed error handling. An update of systemd 252.3 dropped a patch and added a few backports. Text editor vim 9.0.1040 had a multitude of changes; it had a fix for when kitty keyboard function keys may not work, and it had a fix for when tests may get stuck in a buffer with a swap file. An update of Xen took care of CVE-2022-33746, which added some pre-emptive checks that were needed. Other packages to update were libpaper 2.0.4, wavpack 5.6.0 and yast2-kdump 4.5.7.

Starting off the week, audacity 3.2.2 was updated in snapshot 20221209. The update fixed a crash when editing some macro parameters, and it no longer quietly discards changes but instead asks if changes should be saved before quitting. The package also fixed some play commands getting stuck in play mode. Another KDE update that landed in the snapshot the day after its upstream release was Gear 22.12. A new feature in the release is a Selection Mode; hit the spacebar or tap the hamburger menu and check the select files and folders checkbox and a light green bar will appear. Text editor Kate added a welcome window when launching and the new window allows for the creation of a new file, an opening of an existing file from a list of recent files, and it offers some documentation. Video production editor Kdenlive improved its integration with other video applications, and users can now send Kdenlive timelines as backgrounds to the vector animation utility Glaxnimate. The yast2-users 4.5.3 version was also updated in the snapshot.