Heya folks! Lots of goodies are heading your way this week! Let's dive right in.
This week, thy CUPS overfloweth with printing! @ReillyBrogan updated our CUPS packages, switching us to the actively maintained OpenPrinting version of CUPS. cups-filters was also updated to 2.0.0, and was split up into separate packages. As a result of this, you will see file conflict warnings if you update from the terminal. Do not worry, this is harmless and expected; it's just letting you know that files have been moved to a different package than before. If you've had issues printing, they may be fixed after this update. If not, please open an issue on our development tracker.
Our Workrave package has been split up this week. Previously, the MATE applet was installed when installing Workrave, even if you weren't on MATE desktop. Not only does this install unnecessary files on your system, it pulls in unnecessary dependencies, too. To address this, the applets and plugins for different desktop environments have been split into their own packages. We also now build Workrave's XFCE, GNOME 45+, and generic AppIndicator plugins.
Users of zynaddsubfx will be excited to hear that the program now works again. The package broke when we switched to Pipewire by default due to a missing dependency. It now depends on pipewire-jack, enabling the synthesizer to start again.
Nano users will notice that we have updated to version 8, released earlier this week. This release is significant in that it is the culmination of a modernization effort in the Nano project. Some of the highlights include:
- By default
^F is bound to starting a forward search, and ^B to starting a backward search, while M-F and M-B repeat the search in the corresponding direction.
- Command-line option
--modernbindings (-/) makes ^Q quit, ^X cut, ^C copy, ^V paste, ^Z undo, ^Y redo, ^O open a file, ^W write a file, ^R replace, ^G find again, ^D find again backwards, ^A set the mark, ^T jump to a line, ^P show the position, and ^E execute.
- Above modern bindings are activated also when the name of nano's executable (or a symlink to it) starts with the letter "e"
- The mousewheel scrolls the viewport instead of moving the cursor.
You can read the full release news at their website.
If you use the Element Matrix client from our repository, you may be interested to know that it uses Wayland by default now.
Fonts should use slight hinting by default now. This should resolve the remaining font issues with Reddit and the MSI website.
The Solus MATE Transition Tool, or SMTT, has landed in the repository this week! It is not yet recommended to be run unless you want to help us debug any potential issues before we roll it out to all existing MATE users. If you do run the tool, and it doesn't work as expected, please get in touch. @joebonrichie made a video about it! You can watch it here.
We have some new additions to the repository this week. First up is diffoscope, a tool for in-depth comparisons of files, archives, and directories. It tries to get to the bottom of what makes files or directories different. diffoscope will recursively unpack archives of many kinds, and transform various binary formats into more a human-readable form to compare them. The tool can compare two tarballs, ISO images, or PDF just as easily. Check out their website for more information.
Another new addition this week is helvum, a graphical patchbay for PipeWire. It enables creating and removing connections between applications and/or devices to reroute flow of audio, video and MIDI data to where it is needed.
Also making a first appearance is gnome-online-accounts-gtk, a standalone application for setting up online accounts such as Google, Outlook, IMAP, etc., accounts on GTK desktops. Now that GNOME Online Accounts has been ported to GTK4/libAdwaita, it isn't usable in other control centers, such as Budgie Control Center, leaving users of these desktops with no way to configure their accounts. The first application published under the new XApp cross-desktop initiative, users of Budgie, XFCE, and MATE can again configure accounts with this program.
Security updates
We have three packages with security updates this week:
Make sure to apply all updates to have the latest protections!
Other updates
The forum got mad when I tried to post the full update list in this post, so instead, the full list has been posted on GitHub.
That’s all for this week, folks! We'll be here same time, same place next week for another roundup of the news!
