Heya folks! This week brings us the latest GNOME Desktop, 46.1! GNOME 46 comes with several new features, including a global search feature in Files, an enhanced Files app, upgraded GNOME Online Accounts with support for Microsoft OneDrive, remote login with RDP, and much more. Check out their release post for all the details.
Have you ever tried opening a directory or file, and had it open in the wrong program? Us, too. That's because we never provided a file defining the default program for different MIME types. We're working to address that, starting with the GNOME edition. GNOME users will now have this file installed, so your favorite text editor should no longer open directories, and other similar annoyances. Progress on this issue is being tracked here.
Samba has been updated to 4.19.6. This release contains improvements including mitigating performance regressions due to security fixes, migrating smbget to use a common command a line parser for robustness, removing all in-tree cryptography in favor of relying fully on GnuTLS, and adding a server addresses parameter to smb.conf.
Our entire nftables stack has been updated and rebuilt this cycle. With this update, we now use nftables by default instead of the legacy xtables. This update also removes ebtables and libnetfilter_acct. Users of Docker, lxd, libvirtd and firewalld shouldn't have to do anything in response to the switch to nftables by default. Users doing things more manually may want to make a note of this, however. If you use containers or VMs, please reboot after updating, as interesting things can happen when the kernel mixes xtables and nftables firewall rules.
Docker has been updated to 26.0, with docker-buildx being updated to 0.14.0. The full release notes for Docker 26 can be found here. docker-machine has been removed from the repository as it is no longer maintained upstream.
Minecraft players, rejoice! Prism launcher has been updated to version 8.3, and now uses Java 21 instead of Java 17. This means that Prism will work with the latest and greatest Minecraft versions. Java 17 will remain installed on your systems if you need that version, e.g. for an older version of Minecraft, and/or modpacks.
Handbrake and FFMPEG now work with Intel QuickSync on Tiger Lake and later GPUs! There is a slight catch, though. vpl-gpu-rt needs to be manually installed.
We're now using the iputils version of ping instead of the one provided by inetutils. The ping from iputils is more advanced and more actively developed than the other one, and most Linux distributions have already made the switch. It has also been moved to the system.base component, as a lot of core functionality depends on ping.
There are some font changes this week. Subpixel rendering is now enabled by default. Fontconfig snippets can now be added to the /etc/fonts/conf.d directory to override default configuration files.
Lastly, shim-signed was updated to the latest Fedora upstream version. This fixes running the Mok Management application upon a Secure Boot violation in order to enroll custom certificates or hashes. This only affects users who run custom kernels and wish to keep Secure Boot enabled.
Security updates
There are a couple of important security updates this week:
Make sure to apply these updates to best protect yourself against vulnerabilities!
Other updates
There are too many package updates to sort and list here this week, so the full list has been posted as a GitHub gist instead. It can be found here.
That’s all for this week, folks! We'll be here same time, same place next week for another roundup of the news!
