Heya folks! It's time for your weekly news fix!
Security Fixes
We have some security updates going out this week:
- The stable channels of both Vivaldi and Opera have been updated to address the following vulnerabilities. These issues all come from Chromium, so make sure to update any other Chromium-based web browsers you are using!
- On top of that, the XOrg stack (Xorg Server and Xwayland) was updated to fix a number of security issues:
- GNUTLS was updated to v3.8.3
- PAM had a security fix back-ported from the new v1.6.0 release (which is a bit too fresh for us to update to just yet)
- CVE-2024-22365 (Which doesn't seem to exist, but that's the CVE upstream provided)
- Qt5-base and Qt6-base:
Definitely apply your security updates!
@joebonrichie updated our GNOME desktop to the latest 45.3 version. This is a minor bugfix release to the 45 series. You can read the full changelog for yourself here. In related news, the new GNOME image viewer Loupe is now available in Solus! Thanks, @Malfisya, for quickly picking up the package request!
On the Plasma front, Qt5 has been updated to the latest v5.15.12, and KDE Frameworks 5 has been updated to v5.114. Both bring minor fixes and improvements™, especially for Plasma users. A lot of additional plumbing work has gone in for the upcoming Plasma 6, so you'll see a bunch of additional updates and -qt5 packages get installed on your Plasma systems (the -qt6 packages will be installed once Plasma 6 rolls out to you). Additionally, @ReillyBrogan got tired of sharing teaser images of Plasma 6 that had a low-res Solus icon in the "About this System" Plasma info page. He did some investigation as to where previous maintainers had configured this, and after a single line change hours of arduous work he was able to change it to a scalable SVG icon so it looks good at any resolution or DPI scaling!
Continuing with Plasma 6 news, @ReillyBrogan and MVP @Justin have both been pouring hours of time into getting it ready. KDE Frameworks 6 has been fully packaged (and updated to RC1 as well), and the entirety of Plasma 6 has now been packaged on a dev branch. There are still a TON of KDE Gear packages that are not yet packaged, and there are a lot of supporting packages that need to be updated for bug fixes, but both of them are now running it on their main machines in order to find as many issues as possible. Take a look at the forum post for more teasers, but here's one of it running on @ReillyBrogan's main machine (note that this is a heavily customized desktop, these are not theme changes that will be happening to the Solus defaults):
(Look at that crisp™ logo)
Speaking of new packages, we now also have the xfce4-places-plugin for quick access to your user folders from the XFCE panel, and nvtop, a terminal application for "GPUs process monitoring for AMD, Intel and NVIDIA." Check it out! In case you're wondering, NVTOP is short for "Neat Videocard TOP", but @ReillyBrogan thinks it's actually short for "We built this for Nvidia GPUs, but someone contributed Intel/AMD support and we didn't want to change the name".
megacmd was also added to the repositories by @Malfisya, for those who use MEGA and would like to access it from the command line!
In other notable news, @ReillyBrogan finished enablement of JPEG-XL support in the Solus repository. Every package that is known to support JPEG-XL has been enabled, with a few notable exceptions (FFMPEG and GDAL) which need to be updated to support it (both will be in the near future). To celebrate, here's a JPEG-XL image of a sailboat that your browser will almost certainly not render unless you use a WebKit-based one like GNOME-Web:
Media Updates:
- The Gstreamer framework was updated to v1.22.8 (@ReillyBrogan)
- Intel-Media-Driver (VAAPI driver for Intel GPUs) was updated to v23.4.3 (@ReillyBrogan)
- MLT was updated to v7.22.0 (@Malfisya)
- Kodi was updated to v20.3 (@Nazar)
- digiKam was updated to v8.2.0 (@David)
- Haruna v0.12.3 (@Joey)
- Streamlink v6.5.1 (@Joey)
- G4music v3.5.1 (@Malfisya)
- LibVIPS v8.15.1 (@David)
- LibJXL (JPEG-XL library) was updated to v0.9.1 (@ReillyBrogan)
- Handbrake had some build-time options added to try to enable nvdec and nvenc support (hardware acceleration for Nvidia GPUs). This is untested as I don't have Nvidia hardware, please give it a try and let us know if it works for you! (@ReillyBrogan)
Gaming Updates:
- Heroic Games Launcher was updated to v2.12.0 (@ReillyBrogan)
- A wrapper script was added to Discord in order to allow users to disable running it in Wayland-native mode. If you need this, please add
export DISCORD_NO_WAYLAND=1 to your .bashrc or similar, and log out and back in. (@ReillyBrogan)
- CEMU was update to v2.0-64 (@infinitydm)
- Lutris v0.5.16 (@ReillyBrogan)
Office or Other Desktop Updates:
- Brave v1.61.120 (@Algent)
- Visidata has been updated to v3.0.1 (@Nazar)
- OwnCloud Client was updated to v5.2.1.13040 (@ReillyBrogan)
- Gnumeric was updated to v1.12.56 (@Algent)
- Protonmail-bridge v3.8.1 (@FriesischScott)
- Focuswriter v1.8.6 (@Algent)
- Bisq v1.9.14 (@Malfisya)
- Signal-desktop v6.44.1 (@Algent)
- logseq v0.10.5 (@ReillyBrogan)
- Element v1.11.54 (@Silkeh)
- VSCode v1.85.2 (@ReillyBrogan)
- qBittorrent v4.6.3 (@ReillyBrogan)
- Telegram v4.14.8 (@ReillyBrogan - I swear, every time I update this they come out with a new version an hour later)
- Calibre v7.4.0 (@Algent)
- qgis v3.34.3 (@Algent)
- Qt6-base had an issue identified and fixed that could prevent Qt6 applications from using SSL/TLS or other crypto (@ReillyBrogan)
CLI Utils
System Updates
That’s all for this week, folks! Check back next week for the next roundup of the news!
