Heya folks! It's Friday, and that can mean only one thing! Sync time!
While the dust has been settling from last week's rollout of Plasma 6, things have been heating up on the development side. In order to keep Solus moving forward, we've been porting all of our old Python 2 tooling and eopkg to Python 3. Python 2 reached end of life in 2020, so by moving to Python 3, we no longer have to worry about using such an old version of software. It brings a pretty nice speed boost, too.
As of now, ypkg, the tool we use to build all of our packages, is Python 3. It doesn't end there, though. eopkg4-bin, the Nuitka-compiled version of eopkg in Python 3, also received significant updates this week. Here are the highlights:
- Fixed a huge lzma compression speed regression
- Ported back to iksemel from lxml due to performance regressions
- Fixed dependency graph resolution regressions
Now, eopkg4-bin is as fast or faster than the old Python 2 version!
If you've never heard of Nuitka, check out their website! It's pretty cool.
In desktop news, we have a couple of fixes for XFCE4 and Budgie Desktop. For XFCE, the freedesktop sound theme has been set by default, and event sounds have been enabled. You'll now get audio feedback when you raise or lower the volume using the keyboard, for instance. Because of how XFCE works, existing users will have to make the changes manually if they wish to. The sound theme can be set by opening the menu and opening Settings Manager and navigating to xsettings > Net > SoundThemeName. Event sounds can be enabled in Settings Manager by going to Appearance > Settings. The xfce4-xkb-plugin has also been packaged for switching the keyboard layout from a panel.
A patch was backported for Budgie Desktop that fixes the problem where closing a notification triggers the notification's default action, resulting in undesired behavior such as a new window opening.
We have some deprecations this week. Probably the most notable is Yuzu, a Nintendo Switch emulator. Due to Nintendo's ongoing attempts to get Yuzu and other emulators removed from online storage spaces, we feel it is in our best interest to remove Yuzu from the repository.
Also deprecated are:
powerlevel9k (replaced by powerlevel10k)lbreakout2 (replaced by lbreakouthd)libquviopenastropyswisseph
Security updates
This sync brings you a security update for capnproto, a data interchange format and capability-based RPC system. They've released an update to address CVE-2023-48230. While most users are unlikely to be using capnproto with the settings necessary to be vulnerable, it is still a good idea to update.
Also coming down the pipe are security updates for xorg-server and xorg-xwayland. Both packages have been updated to address the following CVE issues:
Lastly, WireShark received an update addressing [CVE-2024-2955] and a new Golang update resolves CVE-2023-45288.
Multimedia updates
Gaming updates
CLI tool updates
System updates
Language and programming updates
Other desktop updates
Poppler is now built with additional advanced compiler optimizations (PGO, LTO, and "speed" flags). This gives an improvement of 11% in poppler's perf-test benchmark. Poppler is library used by many applications for PDF support; as such, opening and iteracting with PDFs should generally be a bit more responsive.
That’s all for this week, folks! We'll be here same time, same place next week for another roundup of the news!
