Heya folks! It's Friday, and you know what that means! Update time!

KDE Gear has been updated to 24.05.1 this week. It brings new features to KDE applications, as well as lots of bugfixes. Check out their full announcement here.

OBS Studio was updated to 30.1.2. The 30.1 version series adds HDR for HEVC over RTMP support, a reworked Image Slideshow source, an option for automatic cropping to bounding box, GPU rescaling options for streaming and recording outputs, and more, including a host of bugfixes. You can read the full details here.

Clear Boot Manager (CBM) now supports multiple kernel-dependent initrd extensions. With this feature added, our NVIDIA Beta Driver supports early KMS (kernel mode setting). This allows the graphics driver to initialize earlier in the boot, which can reduce flickering. Eventually, this will be rolled out to the stable NVIDIA driver to reach feature parity with AMD and Intel systems.

Papers has been added to the repository this cycle. It is a new PDF viewer for the GNOME desktop. Forked from Evince, Papers has been ported to GTK 4 and modernized. If you use a PDF viewer on GNOME, try it out.

As a part of our plan to fully remove Python 2, the Solus Software Center will (at some point in the not too distant future) be replaced by GNOME Software and KDE Discover, since we don't have the developers to maintain the Solus SC application, let alone port it to a newer technology like GTK 3/4, or Qt.

However, in order for us to be able to first deprecate and then later remove Solus SC, AppStream metainfo files have to be added to packages so they show up in the new software centers. Right now, our focus is on doing this for graphical applications; AppStream metainfo for console applications will be added at a later time. Thanks to a script written by @sheepman4267, we know that there are 319 packages that need metainfo added before a switch can be made.

Adding metainfo is a good and simple way to get started with packaging. We have an issue up on our tracker containing the list of packages, as well as how to add the metainfo files. If you would like to help, and/or you have questions, get in touch in the Solus Packaging room on Matrix. A big thank you to our contributors who are helping with this task! Your work is very much appreciated!

Security updates

General updates

As usual, the full update list this week 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!

How did the sync go for you?

This poll has ended.

    "However, in order for us to be able to first deprecate and then later remove Solus SC, AppStream metainfo files have to be added to packages so they show up in the new software centers. Right now, our focus is on doing this for graphical applications; AppStream metainfo for console applications will be added at a later time. Thanks to a script written by @sheepman4267, we know that there are 319 packages that need metainfo added before a switch can be made"

    nice!

    Very small issue, I had to re-pin Alacritty icon to the Budgie panel after reboot because it's gone.

    EbonJaeger

    I just processed 54 updates (246.37 MiB) and nothing to report yet.

    In fact, gnome-software-center is already the application used by Ubuntu users to process their updates.

    I am a Budgie desktop user (just like our friend @brent and others), I guess this is the application we will have to use when the time comes.
    Until then, we will have to continue using Solus SC and wait for your green light to migrate? unless the migration is automatic?

        I got this at the end.

        [✗] Updating clr-boot-manager failed

        A copy of the command output follows:

        [FATAL] cbm (../src/bootman/bootman.c:L520): Cannot determine boot device

        I'ts a fresh Solus Budgie install from last week.

        edit
        System did boot.

        Minor glitch with rofi update.

        The rofi-pass script had an issue: it was showing "“Rofi is unsure what to show.” instead of the usual password selection dialogue.

        A fix was found here: Rofi error prompt

        1. Edit rofi-pass script as follows
        2. At around line 843, replace: if [[ $help_color == "" ]]; then
        3. With: if [[ $help_color == "#4872FF" ]]; then

        Apparently it doesn't like an empty help_color value.

        Noted here in case any one is using rofi-pass and comes across the same issue.

        penny-farthing I guess this is the application we will have to use when the time comes.
        Until then, we will have to continue using Solus SC and wait for your green light to migrate? unless the migration is automatic?

        I don't like gnome-software; he was floating another SC for budgie/xfce last week but doesn't appear to be now.
        My own biggest fear is having terminal/cli updates all migrated to GUI (gnome-software etc) and no more terminal. we will see. I am also curious about the migration when it is moss-time. I think, which means I'm guessing, is this is all in 'we'll cross that bridge when we get there' phase because this is new territory for everyone it seems. Certainly is exciting though

            brent My own biggest fear is having terminal/cli updates all migrated to GUI (gnome-software etc) and no more terminal. we will see.

            There are no such plans. The terminal commands for the package manager will continue working as normal for the foreseeable future (and most likely for as long as Solus exists). Nobody wants to get rid of the CLI. If anything it would be more likely that the GUI applications disappear (which they also won't, there will always be a GUI way to update for a distro that isn't exclusively targeted at hardcore nerds).

              penny-farthing Until then, we will have to continue using Solus SC and wait for your green light to migrate? unless the migration is automatic?

              Please test it. Either Gnome Software or Discover is fine. You can use it side by side with Solus-sc. You can already install, uninstall, and update packages using those software centers. It can handle flatpak and even firmware update. We hope users start using those and when the time comes solus-sc will be automatically removed from your system.

              As mentioned in the post, there are still >300 packages (that provide desktop file(s)) that needs AppStream metainfo added. This means those >300 packages ( and many if not all cli packages and libraries) will not be visible in those software centers. This will be gradual process that takes time. Untill we decided that the AppStream metainfo condition is adequate for those software centers, Solus-sc will still be available. We really need new contributor to help speed those up. So, if you have spare time and have the inclination, please join the packaging room!

                Updates downloaded through gnome-software and rebooting for offline upgrades went without a hitch.

                brent My own biggest fear is having terminal/cli updates all migrated to GUI (gnome-software etc) and no more terminal. we will see.

                I swear I've addressed this before but if I did I was clearly not my usual blunt self:

                There are no plans to do that. No team member has ever suggested doing that. There would be no value add in doing that. You do not tie a package manager to a GUI, that would be stupid.

                We are working on providing eopkg 4.0 (python3 port) as a fully self contained static binary in order to lower breakage potential for when python3 and other dependencies are updated. This increases the binary size for eopkg but makes it much more resilient to stack updates and bad user practices.

                Making it GUI only would drastically increase its complexity. Slow down our ability to update things. Requiring a fully working graphical environment for package management would essentially make some issues unrecoverable. The package manager would become extremely brittle while providing literally zero benefits to developers, package maintainers or users.

                Additionally it is much easier to give users commands to copy & paste vs steps for navigating the GUI or explaining what a hamburger menu is.

                These new software centers use packagekit which is:

                A D-BUS abstraction layer that allows the user to manage packages in a secure way using a cross-distro, cross-architecture API.

                That is how these new SC's can work on so many distributions. https://github.com/getsolus/PackageKit/tree/eopkg4/backends - I know, I too am disappointed it isn't magic.

                eopkg will be eventually replaced with moss from Serpent OS, which is a CLI tool. It will need to have its own packagekit backend to work with Discover, Gnome Software, Cosmic Store.

                Which is a lot of words to say that there will always be a CLI interface for package management. It is not up for debate.

                    Whats up with nghttp3? I got that installed when I updated my system?

                      I did the sync, all went well except for something strange.

                      After all the sync was done, i.e. after "applying udev rules ... ... ... successful", I waited for 2 minutes and typed reboot

                      CLI says

                      bash: reboot: command not found.

                      My heart skipped a beat.
                      What happened?

                      I usually do a reboot after each weekly sync, this error message never happened before in 5 years.

                      UPDATE : sudo reboot does work, but I wanna just execute a reboot, did the last few syncs changed something in my bash?

                        snowee I did the sync, all went well except for something strange.

                        I noticed this as well, only I was working as root, updating my Solus VMs. So I don't understand why sudo should have made a difference.) If I have no need for a VM after it's been updated, I simply use shutdown now when I'm finished with the update. Then the update is completed the next time I start that VM. (No need to reboot it if I'm not gonna use it.) I've done that for years with every VM, Solus or not.

                        But recently that command has resulted in an error message like the one you mentioned. And, as I remember, it happens with every current GNOME-based VM except the Xfce one. (Not with my Xfce laptop, either.) In every case, the VMs still understand the restart and shutdown commands from the menu, but not from the CLI, so it's not really a big deal - just a curiosity.

                        Just one of those things that makes me go, "Hmmm."

                            Apparently the VPN stopped working after this update (I don't know if the cause is the update at the moment,but I didn't touch the settings and on the smartphone the same VPN works), zed still doesn't work (KDE Xorg), opentabletdriver seems to be showing signs of life, but I still have to figure it out...

                              snowee
                              WetGeek

                              Check to see if you have /usr/sbin in your shell's PATH. I noticed this a little while back when I tried to run ip and it couldn't find it. I assume it was because of the merge from a couple updates ago. I would assume that using sudo made it work because /usr/sbin is in the root user's PATH.