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!

How did the sync go for you?

This poll has ended.

Update went smooth here. 125 packages. Awesome to see Heroic was updated to 2.13, it was notifying me of the new version available in the app, so I was expecting to use that as my guinea pig for submitting a package update request lol

I also notice this (harmless) journalctl error that was there before is now gone:
systemd-vconsole-setup[195]: /usr/bin/setfont failed with exit status 71
Thanks for the coziness guys

    ring0 It's not really gone, but it was downgraded from an error to an info message. It's also normal behavior, it happens because systemd-vconsole runs really early in the boot and the kernel consoles aren't available yet. There were some patches in systemd to improve it but ultimately it's not really something that can be fixed yet.

      Thunar was updated to 4.18.10 (@joebonrichie)
      whiskermenu was updated to 2.8.3 (@joebonrichie)

      the changelog in SC for the Thunar update link (https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/thunar/-/raw/thunar-4.18.10/NEWS?ref_type=tags mentions an "infinite loop" fix for symlinks that I somehow found hilarious

      for whiskermenu:

      now this ^ is interesting. a desktop whisker launcher? win key works for me in this case🙂. never noticed the man thing.

      always appreciate the update outline, @EbonJaeger , thank you.--i'm obviously mucking about in xfce tonight

      Good sync. Everything updated without issue.

      Are you guys still planning on skipping the 6.7 kernel to allow for more current testing for when it becomes the next lts kernel in Solus? Not a complaint but just curious.

        JTCPingas Are you guys still planning on skipping the 6.7 kernel to allow for more current testing for when it becomes the next lts kernel in Solus? Not a complaint but just curious.

        Yes.

        For those reading along:
        The team encourages anyone that may be using the linux-lts kernel (5.15.x LTS branch atm) to switch to linux-current (Default kernel) and report any issues they may have with the 6.6.x kernel branch before it becomes their new LTS. This extra testing and giving 6.6.x time to mature will likely result in our linux-current kernel skipping 6.7.x entirely.

          Still no USB devices available inside the Virtualbox (Windows) guest VMs after today's update (week 6). Having the problem on several different Solus Budgie installations. The VMs worked all well before the update around the week 4 or 5 (sorry was on holidays so I can't give a more precise answer here).

          Hi,

          As it has already happened in the past, my internal wifi isn't recognized anymore (Broadcom-sta stable & current). Fortunately I always keep a wifi dongle at hand.

          ha, now BCM4352 802.11ac works again. Maybe did it need more than one reboot?
          Anyway: solved.

            I just updated my installation of the XFCE-Beta I have installed on this little Dell 3162.

            I had not turned it on for two weeks.

            Everything is till working normally - thanks for your hard work.

            brent always

            I noticed a long time ago that sometimes a reboot wouldn't set things right by itself, but a full shutdown followed by an ordinary statup would. That was at a time when things like audio cards, video cards, and network cards were separate things that were plugged into a motherboard, not just chipsets. Rebooting the OS didn't necessarily cut power to those accessories and cause them to re-initialize.

            The most common example back in the day was a network card that got confused for some reason, and stayed confused after a reboot, but worked fine once the computer was turned off and then restarted.

            Depending on a computer's architecture, that may still be true today. I've formed a habit such that if a single reboot doesn't cure a problem that I expected it to, I'll do a full shutdown and restart. I can't remember a time when that hasn't worked for me.

                WetGeek I reboot everyday but if that dont work I go into coma mode for awhile...rofl

                  Everything went fine on my laptop. I even noticed that a little glitch happening when going into the GNOME session (screen went blue for 0,5sec) is now gone ^^ Thank you for your hard work!

                  WetGeek I noticed a long time ago that sometimes a reboot wouldn't set things right by itself, but a full shutdown followed by an ordinary statup would. That was at a time when things like audio cards, video cards, and network cards were separate things that were plugged into a motherboard, not just chipsets. Rebooting the OS didn't necessarily cut power to those accessories and cause them to re-initialize.

                  The most common example back in the day was a network card that got confused for some reason, and stayed confused after a reboot, but worked fine once the computer was turned off and then restarted.

                  Depending on a computer's architecture, that may still be true today. I've formed a habit such that if a single reboot doesn't cure a problem that I expected it to, I'll do a full shutdown and restart. I can't remember a time when that hasn't worked for me.

                  we used to call that "getting the gremlins out" when you completely unpowered it, no electricity. you are right that is also effective

                      brent The IT Crowd - "Have you tried turning it off and back on again?"
                      😆

                        I am still having issues with the workplace switcher but I also didn't see any Budgie updates. I think the fix is in Budgie 10.9.2. Do we know when we will be getting that update?

                        We just downgraded Mesa to 23.3.6 in order to fix an issue that Nvidia users have logging into a Wayland session.

                          ReillyBrogan
                          Some late changes after Mesa 23.3.6 also broke RadeonSI, so some essential VAAPI decoders got missed on Radeon RX6600:

                                VAProfileVP9Profile0            : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVP9Profile2            : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileAV1Profile0            : VAEntrypointVLD

                          Mesa downgrade to 23.3.6 fixed it.