Heya folks! I bring you news of this week's updates!
This week brings the first inclusion of Microsoft's .NET runtime (dotnet). Including .NET enables developers to write cross-platform applications making use of the runtime. It will also make it easier to run C#/.NET applications on Solus. This was made possible by the hard work done by @nelson.
The addition of .NET to the repos means that Pinta can finally be updated, and it's now on the latest version 2.1.1.
@ReillyBrogan enabled a bunch of hardware support in our kernel configs this cycle. All gyroscope and inclinator modules were enabled to better support 2-in-1 devices. All cryptographic modules have also been enabled. Our kernel patch set for Microsoft Surface devices has also been updated, bringing notable improvements to temperature and fan speed sensor support. These modules were also enabled:
- EROFS file system
- QEMU SYSFS support
The BORE Scheduler was updated to 4.1.13, and the CONFIG_EFI_DXE_MEM_ATTRIBUTES option was disabled to potentially work around a boot issue on Surface devices.
The update to Systemd v254 was finally landed this week. We enabled a few systemd features along with it, including idn2 support in systemd-resolve, SBAT support (sets certain variables used in UEFI booting), enabling of the remote-fs.target by default (which allows you to use network mounts in fstab), and switching it to use openssl for all cryptography (previously it used a mixture of gnutls and openssl, depending on the function). SysV compatibility has been disabled.
Additionally, we updated Mesa to the recently released v24.0 series (v24.0.1 specifically). This brings the latest OpenGL and Vulkan driver support for AMD and Intel GPU users, and most notably this comes with improved ray-tracing performance for AMD users with recent GPUs! Edit: This was reverted due to issues for Nvidia users.
And finally, the issue causing PGO builds of Firefox to fail was identified and fixed. You can once again enjoy the full-speed Firefox experience on Solus!
Security updates
As always, this week brings security updates to everyone. Make sure you install all updates for the latest security fixes.
The Opera browser package was updated to 107.0.5045.21 by @Harvey to address the following vulnerabilities:
Vivaldi (stable) was also updated to 6.5.3206.63, and while they don't cite these CVEs, they do pull security updates from the Chromium project.
ncurses was updated to 6.4.20240210 to address CVE-2023-29491.
qt5-base was updated to address CVE-2024-25580.
libxml2 was updated to address CVE-2024-25062.
edk2-ovmf had the UEFI shell disabled in Secure Boot builds, due to a potential issue where the shell could be used to bypass the Secure Boot protection.
unbound was updated to v1.19.1 to address CVE-2023-50387 and CVE-2023-50868
Media updates
Some new features were enabled for FFMPEG by @aleksvor. New filters based on libplacebo have been enabled. shaderc has been enabled, replacing glslang, saving space due to not being statically linked; shaderc provides a more stable API, as well. Vapoursynth and GSM codec support has also been enabled.
Gaming updates
CLI tool updates
System updates
Language updates
@joebonrichie has been hard at work this week updating Python 3 to 3.11. Updating Python is a massive undertaking, requiring rebuilds of over a thousand packages. Huge shoutout to @algent for keeping so many of our Python packages up-to-date, making a Python upgrade much quicker and easier. This effort is still a work-in-progress, but the finish line is getting close and closer.
A bunch of Python packages have also been updated this week by Joey, which will be going out to everyone this sync.
Other desktop updates
GNOME applications were updated to the latest in the 45 series by @joebonrichie. He also updated XFCE packages to the latest in the 4.18 series.
@Justin and @ReillyBrogan updated our KDE Frameworks 5 stack to 5.115.
That’s all for this week, folks! Tune in next week for another news roundup!
