Heya folks! It's time for another round of the news!
Much of our focus this week has been on finalizing the Python 3 ports of eopkg and ypkg, and coming up with a solution to transition users during a regular update. This is tricky because Python is an interpreted language, and as such, the package manager does not like having its parts ripped out from under it during use. We think we have a solution, however, which will be tested over the coming weeks to ensure as robust a transition as possible.
Somewhat related, we've been working to support multi-character Unicode symbols (such as emoji) in package update commits and changelogs. Such characters would break the package index under Python 2, thus breaking the repo, as was discovered with signal-desktop and polari, meaning neither package could be updated until the problem was resolved. With the move to Python 3, this is now possible in all but one place: the Software Center, which remains Python 2 since it will Soon™ be replaced by GNOME Software and KDE Discover. When encountering one of the aforementioned characters, Software Center will not attempt to decode the HTML escape sequences in which they are presented, but instead display text that looks somewhat illegible to the naked eye. The win here is that this text no longer breaks anything on the code side, at least.
KDE Frameworks was updated to 6.1, which contains many bug fixes following the Plasma 6 release. You can read all about this update on their website. In addition, KDE Gear has been updated to 24.02.2. This release includes fixes for a crash in kcachegrind when opening the history menu, a broken volume slider in elisa, and gwenview will no longer inhibit suspend when viewing an image, and much more. The full KDE Gear changelog can be found here.
ROCm 6, AMD's open-source software stack for GPU computation, has been brought back! We had previously attempted to upgrade from ROCm 5.7 to ROCm 6.0 in January, but it was quickly reverted after discovering a crash with Blender. After 4 months, we've finally pinned down the bug and found a workaround, so you can now enjoy better performance and wider device compatibility (that is exclusive to Solus) when rendering Blender projects or running ML workflows with PyTorch. A Help Center article for more information on using ROCm is coming Soon™.
We have two deprecations this week: evopop-gtk-theme and qt5-pas. Making its debut this sync is fan2go, a daemon to control the fans of your computer.
General updates
Due to the number of updates this week, and the time it would take to categorize them, we have instead opted to create a GitHub Gist listing all the updated packages this sync.
That’s all for this week, folks! Come back next week for more Solus news!
