Heya folks! Happy... Wednesday... Sync? That's right! Surprise Wednesday sync!

Python 3.11 is going out this week, which means every single Python package has been rebuilt. Massive shoutout to @joebonrichie and @algent for getting this done in a relatively painless manner! This is a significant milestone for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it means that Solus is keeping up with large language changes. Secondly, with this update, we could prove that the work we've been doing with porting eopkg to a statically compiled Python 3.10 binary with Nuitka is robust enough to survive Python upgrades.

By statically compiling eopkg, all the required Python libraries are built-in to the final binary, meaning that even if the system package breaks, eopkg still has what it needs to function. This was a significant hurdle before, because a change in Python could break the package manager during the upgrade due to changes in the language.

The work on eopkg is still ongoing and not yet ready for general use, but testing so far has been promising. We are very excited to get this completed, as it is a big step in finally ditching Python 2 for good!

KDE Plasma announced MegaRelease 6 last week, the next major release of KDE Plasma. @ReillyBrogan and @Justin have been hard at work getting everything ready to go for Plasma 6 in Solus. Members of the team have already begun testing the new Plasma 6, along with some brave packaging contributors. Early testing means less issues for everyone when it does go out.

As part of this, our KDE Frameworks stack as been updated to the big 6.0 by @ReillyBrogan. Plasma 6 will land in the Unstable repo for testing after next week's sync, which will also be on Wednesday, so we can bring you version 6.0.2 immediately. Sync next week will be on Wednesday.

On the graphics driver front, the Nvidia mainline driver (nvidia-glx-driver) has been updated to the 550 series, bringing the latest in graphical capability to users of Nvidia hardware. Mesa has been re-upgraded to version 24.0, and had patches for the previous Nvidia-related crashes included, so that should now be good for all users.

Sway, an i3-compatible Wayland compositor, was updated to 1.9 this cycle, bringing with it a bunch of new features. It also brings all the latest improvements from wlroots 0.17, including support for several new Wayland protocols. The full changelog can be found here.

Not technically a new inclusion, but GNOME Maps makes a re-appearance in the Solus repository this sync. It is fully up-to-date for all of your mapping needs. Making a real debut in the repo is tv-lite, for IPTV viewing. Also included for the first time this week are snapshot, gnome-clocks, and kio-admin.

Security updates

Thunderbird was updated to 115.8.1 by @Harvey to fix CVE-2024-1936.

Multimedia updates

  • cadence was updated to 0.9.1
  • cava was updated to 0.10.1
  • Darktable was updated to 4.6.1
  • EasyEffects was updated to 7.1.4
  • Kodi was updated to 20.4
  • Krita was updated to 5.2.2
  • musescore was updated to 4.2.1
  • sdl2 was updated to 2.30.1
  • v4l-utils was updated to 1.26.1

Gaming updates

  • endless-sky was updated to 0.10.6
  • prism-launcher was updated to 8.2
  • sunshine was updated to 0.22.0

CLI tool updates

  • ansible was updated to 1.16.4
  • bitwarden-cli was updated to 2024.2.0
  • certbot was updated to 2.7.4
  • docker-compose was updated to 2.24.6
  • fastfetch was updated to 2.8.7
  • gi-dockgen was updated to 2023.3
  • github-cli was updated to 2.45.0
  • go-task was updated to 3.35.1
  • hugo was updated to 0.123.4
  • iotop was switched from the unmaintained Python version to the maintained version at version 1.26
  • lynx was updated to 2.9.0
  • mu was updated to 1.12.0
  • Neovim was updated to 0.9.5
  • nvme-cli was updated to 2.8
  • powertop was updated to 2.15
  • streamlink was updated to 6.6.2
  • svtplay-dl was updated to 4.69
  • sympy was updated to 1.12
  • thefuck was updated to 3.32
  • thin-provisioning-tools was updated to 1.0.12
  • xauth was updated to 1.1.3

System updates

  • BORE Scheduler was updated to 4.5.0
  • The AMD HDR patches were dropped from the linux-current and linux-lts kernels. The patches were upstreamed in the upcoming v6.8 kernel, and so that support will be present once we update linux-current to that version. Note that HDR will still work with AMD GPUs on the v6.6 kernel, it is just less efficient performance-wise.
  • btrfs-progs was updated to 6.7.1
  • edk2-ovmf was updated to 202402
  • firewalld was updated to 2.1.1
  • fwupd was updated to 1.9.14
  • glibc was updated to latest 2.39 stable
  • linux-current was updated to 6.6.20
  • linux-lts was updated to 6.6.20
  • linux-tools was updated to 6.6.18
  • mesalib was updated to 24.0.2
  • nvidia-glx-driver was updated to 550.54.14
  • nvidia-developer-driver was updated to 550.40.53
  • PostgreSQL was updated to 16.2
  • qemu was updated to 8.2.2
  • systemd was updated to 254.10
  • tree-sitter was updated to 0.21.0
  • wine was updated to 9.3
  • xz was updated to 5.6.0
  • yq was updated to 4.42.1

Language updates

  • gdal was updated to 3.8.3
  • gdb was updated to 14.2
  • git was updated to 2.44.0
  • git-cola was updated to 4.6.1
  • Golang was updated to 1.22.1
  • musl was updated to 1.2.5
  • NodeJS was updated to 18.19.1
  • Python 3 was updated to 3.11
  • vscode was updated to 1.87.0

Other desktop updates

  • Brave was updated to 1.63.165
  • Calibre was updated to 7.6.0
  • dbeaver was updated to 23.3.5
  • Discord was updated to 0.0.44
  • Element was updated to 1.11.59
  • Firefox was updated to 123.0.1
  • gnome-bluetooth was updated to 42.8
  • kcolorpicker was updated to 0.3.0
  • kimageannotator was updated to 0.7.0
  • lemonbar was updated to 1.4
  • logseq was updated to 0.10.7
  • menulibre was updated to 2.4.0
  • nextcloud-client was updated to 3.12.0
  • Opera was updated to 108.0.5067.20
  • pidgin was updated to 2.14.13
  • rapid-photo-downloader was updated to 0.9.36
  • rednotebook was updated to 2.32
  • Solaar was updated to 1.1.11
  • Sway was updated to 1.9
  • syncthing was updated to 1.27.4
  • tailscale was updated to 1.60.1
  • Vivaldi (Stable) was updated to 6.6.3271.48
  • Vivaldi (Snapshot) was updated to 6.6.3271.44
  • Wireshark was updated to 4.2.3
  • wlroots was updated to 0.17.1
  • xpra was updated to 5.0.6
  • yubico-authenticator was updated to 6.4.0
  • Zotero was updated to 6.0.35

That’s all for this week, folks! Come back next week for your weekly Solus news roundup!

How did the sync go for you?

This poll has ended.

I would like to note that Plasma 5.27.11 was released today. Just to set expectations here Solus WILL NOT be updating to that version. There's no real critical bugfixes in it and we're going to be updating to Plasma 6 sooner rather later anyway.

How soon you might ask? 🤫

I'm having an issue connecting with my NAS on the Plasma laptop. When I rebooted after installing the update, I next invoked a mount -a to connect with all the NAS shares, and got an error telling me that "server DiskStation415 not found." Could be a DNS problem of some kind?

To find out whether the NAS was okay without running upstairs to check it, I tried accessing it with my travel laptop, which hadn't been updated yet, and there was no problem. Plasma is the DE on the laptop that failed and the travel laptop that hadn't been updated, so the problem appears to be update-related.

To determine whether it was a KDE issue, I next tested the Xfce laptop (which had also been updated). There was no problem with the Xfce laptop. the mount -a command completed successfully, and I was able to access my ISOs share when I tried. So, this appears to be an updated-related problem that affects only Plasma.

EDIT: On the Plasma laptop where I discovered this problem, I launched a Budgie VM. I was able to connect with the NAS without an issue, and access one of its shares. So no problem there.

    WetGeek what is the contents of your /etc/fstab for this mounted NAS?

        Justin what is the contents of your /etc/fstab for this mounted NAS?

        DiskStation415:/volume1/Videos /mnt/Videos nfs defaults 0 0
        DiskStation415:/volume1/Torrents /mnt/Torrents nfs defaults 0 0
        DiskStation415:/volume1/SourceControl /mnt/SourceControl nfs defaults 0 0
        DiskStation415:/volume1/SourceArchives /mnt/SourceArchives nfs defaults 0 0
        DiskStation415:/volume1/Pictures /mnt/Pictures nfs defaults 0 0
        DiskStation415:/volume1/Music /mnt/Music nfs defaults 0 0
        DiskStation415:/volume1/Keys /mnt/Keys nfs defaults 0 0
        DiskStation415:/volume1/ISOs /mnt/ISOs nfs defaults 0 0
        DiskStation415:/volume1/Downloads/Linux /mnt/Downloads/Linux nfs defaults 0 0
        DiskStation415:/volume1/Documents /mnt/Documents nfs defaults 0 0
        DiskStation415:/volume1/Books /mnt/Books nfs defaults 0 0
        DiskStation415:/volume1/Backups/Linux /mnt/Backups/Linux nfs defaults 0 0

        (next day)

        It gets even stranger. I attempted this backup just before I retired for the night, and I didn't think of everything I could have tested. Here's how it looked at the time in Terminology:

        But this morning, I can access these shares quite normally on that machine using Dolphin, either via smb or nfs.
        And without doing anything else in the terminal, it's now working there as well.

        Sorry to sound the alarm. This is the weirderst thing that's happened to me since I started using Solus. I'll change my survey to indicate no issues. And thanks for responding quickly.

        (later)

        Naturally, I can't stop thinking about what might have happened here. The only thing I did between the mount -a that failed and the mount -a that succeeded was to try accessing these shares in Dolphin. And Dolphin is able to mount things. I suppose it's possible that Dolphin did what the terminal command was unable to do. That's the only possible explanation I've been able to come up with.

          2 comp updated very smoooothhhhhhhhhhhh update!
          Thanks devs

          264 Solus updates (1.66 GiB) today and nothing special to report either.

          Once again, I'd like to salute the @EbonJaeger 's remarkable effort in writing a documented commentary for Solus update each week, which will undoubtedly delight its users.

          Cheers! 😃

          Thanks guys, everything seems to be going well.

          Everything went well. No problems to report.

          Note to Plasma users, if you notice VLC getting installed during these updates then that's expected behavior. Plasma depends on something called Phonon, which is basically a framework that it uses to integrate media into the DE (notably this is used for notification sounds, not the audio output of the sounds but the reading of the files to get the chimes from and whatnot). There are multiple backends for Phonon, previously we were using the gstreamer one however that one is unmaintained and not compatible with Plasma 6. We thus had to switch to the VLC backend. It's on my todo list to split the VLC package up into a package containing just the libraries that Phonon needs and some core codec support so that Plasma can just depend on that and not need all of VLC installed but for now you'll have to live with having the full VLC package installed. Attempting to remove the VLC package will result in a lot of core Plasma components getting uninstalled, so I would not advice trying that.

            ReillyBrogan you'll have to live with having the full VLC package installed

            I really like VLC, and always have. After you split off the parts needed for Phonon, will the whole VLC still be available?

                This was my my first Sync with Solus it was bumpy but I got through it... I think. LOL. I actually had to run the update 3 times, as the first two time the updates didn's "stick: almost like it was done as a dry-run. It was actualyl really weird. I ran the update, then 20 minutes later Software Center is screaming at me that there are 217 NEW updates to install. That's when I went to the command line and rand the update and discovered that my eopkg database somehow got corrupted. Ran the update again as 'sudo eopkg up --debug' and found the issue. A quick sudo eopkg rdb and sudo eopkg rb and everything was fine. The update went through without a hitch on the third try.

                I did notice that the search function on the Software Center was not working for a large portion of yesterday, but the CLI search worked fine. Is that normal for an update or was that a symptom of my eopkg problems? I still have a few unresolved issues, (my application launcher, the Kickoff one, is HUGE and in the center of my screen and I can'[t get it back to normal! LOL) and one major one that is actually going to decide whether I stay with Solus or not (NVIDIA Drivers... Uggh). I REALLY hope we can get it fixed, because I really like this distro (granted, it's the second one I've tried, but still... If I leave it's probably to Manjaro or Garuda). Expect a few new posts from me in the next hour or so!

                Side note, any housekeeping scripts / cleanup scripts / login or logoff scripts / dear god I sound like an addict / general useful things to make life simpler that your guys have and might like to share would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

                  EldrinSMP Sounds like you ran the first update something happened and you ran it again
                  not knowing but then fixed it so the third try worked.
                  This is not typical of updates I would run it from command line next time so you can see
                  whats going on you for a few times can always go back to gui.

                  Best way pick up tricks is do forum searches you can usually find what you want then I put them in a text file.

                    ReillyBrogan Thx for the info. I had to reinstall Solus KDE after having removed VLC . Looking forward to the split so I can remove it without breaking KDE.

                      WetGeek Of course! It will just be possible in the future to install certain components of VLC (like those required by phonon) on their own, without installing the whole player with all bells and whistles included.

                        Freecad Appimage et Freecad Link Branch (RealThunder) no longer works after this update... The appimages launch, we see the Freecad startup image/logo and the scripts load, but after that, no application windows and nothing more. :-( Hum...problem with python?

                        Freecad with the classical installation work! It's only the freecad appimages that no longer work.
                        Here are the errors sent: WebEngineContext used before QtWebEngine::initialize() or OpenGL context creation failed.
                        QGLXContext: Failed to create dummy context
                        Failed to create OpenGL context for format QSurfaceFormat(version 2.0, options
                        /tmp/.mount_FreeCAoi0Qin/AppRun : ligne 43 : 8391 Abandon (core dumped)${MAIN} "$@"

                          I dont depend on appimages anymore with all the changes in the linux world Flatpaks are
                          turning out better and updated better.
                          I dont let one not working mess up my day.
                          Freecad has a flatpak.

                          If its a simple appimage app they usually work