Heya folks! It's time for another roundup of the news! Let's dive in.
The NVIDIA Beta driver was updated to 555.42.02 this week. This release adds support for the linux-drm-syncobj-v1 protocol for Wayland explicit sync in EGL. While this won't be useful until we update XWayland down the road, the support is there for when we do. Read the rest of the highlights here. Note: There is an issue with rebooting directly into a Wayland session with Vulkan using the Beta driver, resulting in Vulkan not working. To work around this, log into an XOrg session first before logging into a Wayland session.
Neovim users will notice that our Neovim has been updated to 0.10.0. This is a major release with tons of changes. There are a bunch of breaking changes for plugins and configurations, so make sure your plugins are updated, and check your configs for breakages. Check out the full announcement and changelog here. Note that 3rd-party Neovim bundles like LunarVim may not have updated to Neovim 0.10 yet.
More MimeType news! The different branding packages that shipped a mimeapps.list file are now co-installable again. Additionally, these files have been added to the MATE and XFCE desktop branding packages.
In other desktop news, KDE Plasma has been updated to 6.0.5, and Qt has been updated to 6.7.1. Plasma 6.0.5 contains a bunch of bugfixes, and Qt 6.7.1 brings many new features and bugfixes to Qt. For the full release notes (the Qt ones are very long), see here and here for Qt, and here for KDE Plasma. KDE Frameworks 5 was also updated to 5.116.0, containing fixes for applications that haven't updated to Frameworks 6.
@joebonrichie made our Bash significantly faster this week! This was achieved by building Bash with Profile-guided optimizations, or PGO, which is a compiler technique that uses profiling to improve runtime performance in programs. In testing, the startup speed of running this script went from 1.409 seconds to 1.366 seconds.
for i in $(seq 1 1000); do bash -c ":" ; done
Using the Shellbench benchmarking tool, we are seeing a 60% performance increase in Bash with PGO. Talk about a speed boost!
This speedup does have a cost, however. Doing the optimization causes the binary size to increase, in this case from 9.68 MB to 9.82 MB. Enabling PGO also generally means that the software has to be compiled multiple times, making builds take longer, in some cases significantly so, like Firefox. This is the reason why PGO has not seen wide adoption by software projects.
Security updates
There are a bunch of security updates this week. In addition to this list, Opera and Vivaldi were also updated and contain updated versions of Chromium to address vulnerabilities. As always, install all the latest updates to have the latest protections.
Other updates
As usual, here is the full list of package updates this week.
That’s all for this week, folks! Check in next week for another Solus news roundup.
