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)
  • libquvi
  • openastro
  • pyswisseph

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!

How did this week's update go for you?

This poll has ended.

    If you are a Plasma user and are experiencing issues since the KDE Plasma 6 update, please head on over to the Plasma 6 Megathread. Your issue may have already been posted and addressed there.

    EbonJaeger xz was updated to 5.4.6-37

    We regressed with xz instead of 5.6.1-2. Interesting strategy. I've read many are doing it. Was 5.6.1-2 ineffective?
    Rebooting now, thanks.

        brent
        I double checked my VM that uses the stable repo before updating, this is not new we downgraded to 5.4.6 last week.

        The additional change was making it so other applications can not statically link against xz as an extra precaution given recent events.

            Harvey yeah I read way too much about that one. you guys see wild cve's all the time and have way better context than me. this to me seems like the entire linux world dodged a bullet--this looks a milestone event. or an over-hyped one? I don't know.

              brent

              I think they are trying to get a version before the bad actors became involved. All of 5.6.x apparently is being considered "untrusted".

                  But python 2.7 is still default? When will that change?

                    riffer 5-6-2 was supposed to be the answer last week--even Arch used 5-6-2 as a patch-- but apparently some of the linux world reconsidered this b/c more sytemd libraries may have been targeted (beyond libzma or whatever its called).

                    FAb7D
                    one of those .gov links goes to the creator Lasse Collin himself, who has revised his page a handful of times to reflect new info: https://tukaani.org/xz-backdoor/

                    you are right. skip down to the last line. He's wrote the 5.6.X line off, it appears.

                        I see no issues with the update(*) and am very glad by the keyboard layout indicator on XFCE. (Also manually enabled system sound and feedback.) Thank you đŸ™‚

                        P.S. Thank you for taking a consideratably and careful care of the security issue(s). It's appreciated.

                        (*) I have some difference with how FF handles CTL/BiDi on this XFCE install compared to previous other DE's, which affects learning on a local site, but that's from before the update and unsure what the cause/nature of it. I am aware the XFCE is in beta and as said the difference could be due to something I did or "didn't".
                        Update on the firefox localization/CTL/BiDi issue on a local site: after some trial and error, replaced fonts to the local version for my local language. This seemed to work.

                        discord 0.0.48 and keybase permissions fix cherry-picked.

                        Plasma, just did updates. Saw this.
                        Failed to record path /usr/share/fonts/conf.d/66-noto-color-emoji.conf.newconfig

                        sudo eopkg check shows all OK.

                        Thought I remembered someone posting after the 6 upgrade that there were emoji issues so I thought I'd share.

                          zmaint
                          It was probably me because it looks like everyone else is unaffected.
                          Yes, Noto Color Emoji fallback config was removed:
                          https://github.com/getsolus/packages/commit/d72a6ca0526022c426ba1fdf29af9a018cc47868
                          To get back Emojis for Plasma and Qt applications instead of blank boxes you had to put the removed config 66-noto-color-emoji.conf and symlink where they was. That's how i fixed it.

                              Synced an old install of mate everything went ok and is working fine.

                              SilverBird775 Oddly enough my emojis are working without issue. I can't say I emoji a whole lot tho lol.

                                discord 0.0.49 cherry-picked.