Heya folks! It's Sync time, and that means it's time for the weekly Solus roundup!

Mesa has been updated to the latest in the 24.2 series this week. This version contains a bunch of new features and many bugfixes. The details of the initial release of 24.2.0 can be found here.

The NVIDIA driver now at major version 560. The 560 driver includes a bunch of work for better Wayland compatibility, hopefully fixing significant issues that people have been experiencing.

Our kernel packages have also been bumped this week. The current branch is now 6.10.8, and the LTS branch is now 6.6.49.

The Qt5 stack received a minor update this week to 5.15.15. This is just a bugfix release with no new features.

Thunderbird has been updated to 128.0. This release includes the integration of the Rust programming language. While this isn't a user-visible change, it does mean that Thunderbird can start to take advantage of modern language features, and a better developer process. In addition, the cards view has been redesigned, the folder pane has been enhanced, and Thunderbird will now try to match its accent color with that of your system theme. Check out the full blog post here.

We have a few new packages this week. First is crun, fast and lightweight fully featured OCI runtime and C library for running containers. Second is bpftrace, a high-level tracing language for Linux systems. Next, we have wlogout, a Wayland-based logout menu.

Our Solus Cleanup Crew™️ has been hard at work this week bringing the repository up to current standards:

Most of these tasks are beginner-friendly, and can be a great way to learn Solus packaging. We invite anyone that has the time and inclination to join us!

If you would like to join:

  1. Join Solus Packaging Room on Matrix
  2. Read and practice our packaging documentation
  3. Submit your first Pull Request. We recommend doing the homepage task
  4. Follow along the review process until your PR gets merged
  5. Continue on contributing!

Security updates

We have a handful of security updates this week. Be sure to install them for the latest protections!

General updates

The full list of updated packages 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.

    All went well. Many thanks for everyone's contribution.

    @Harvey thanks for the ufw update, --what exactly was the 'fix permissions' thing about?--tried to chase this info down before I posted but no luck. thanks.

      3 new additions to the repo missed in the sync notes, added by a new contributor @ianmjones 🎉 🍻

      • figlet - A program that creates large characters out of ordinary screen characters.
      • obs-cmd - Minimal CLI to control OBS Studio via obs-websocket.
      • watchexec - Executes commands in response to file modifications

      Harvey unlike the bug filer, when I ufw status I get a root warning like I expected. but not sure I got ble.sh installed either, whatever that is. thank god I didn't click the link to find out. that thread was weird 🙂. thanks for getting back.

          brent
          Yes the more relaxed permissions do not allow the user to use ufw without sudo, it only allows tab auto complete to function when using bash with ufw. For the record this is the same permissions set by other distributions (I checked). The more restrictive permissions were likely made in error years ago and no one noticed. Nothing to be concerned about either way.

            EbonJaeger ...and Thunderbird will now try to match its accent color with that of your system theme.

            Finally, somehow it looks like. 😁

              I recognized that there are more translations (german in my case) in Plasma

              60 updates (802,53 MiB) processed this week and nothing to report, thanks.

              For your information and to follow up on a previous post (updating Firefox for a non-English-speaking user):
              https://discuss.getsol.us/d/10761-sync-updates-for-week-28-2024/23
              I've noticed a similar phenomenon with Thunderbird.
              Indeed, when the application upgrades to version n+1, we must update the extensions, quit Thunderbird, then relaunch it to see the menus and folders appear in our native language (for example for me, in French).

              As is becoming a new normal, my Plasma laptop had Bluetooth disabled after an update and reboot. As I was able to easily re-enable it by using the thumbpad, it isn't a huge problem, but I'd sure like to see it fixed someday. It's very annoying. Alll four VMs updated without any drama.

                Where did synapse go?! Is there a replacement?
                Otherwise nothing to report.
                Thanks team!
                Edit: I guess it was removed because it's not been maintained for a while. I tried various alternatives with no luck so I guess I'll have to dim some reflexes and get used to the gnome built-in search menu.

                  WetGeek As is becoming a new normal, my Plasma laptop had Bluetooth disabled after an update and reboot.

                  you mean your bluetooth device not connected on boot? I have similar issue on another distro. Could you connect bluetooth device and after that in terminal systemctl restart bluetooth, does it reconnect automatically for you?

                      Steam will no longer open the library window for me but will only run in the background. Sometimes the library window will pop up repeatedly and show a loading symbol before disappearing again. This also will sometimes cause firefox to crash in the background, especially soon after startup

                      The typical solutions of reinstalling steam and running sudo eopkg check | grep Broken | awk '{print $4}' | xargs sudo eopkg it --reinstall have not worked.

                      Edit #1:
                      The problem has now evolved. After reinstalling steam yet again (while deleting the .steam folder again) I was able to get both steam and firefox to run at the same time, I thought this was a great success as it seemed steam was again stable. However at this point I could not open any steam games as they would fail to open due to not detecting any valid graphic devices.

                      At this point I reinstalled the nvidia drivers with doflicky and then tried to launch the games again. I thought this solved the issue as my games would now run no problem, however as I tried to launch firefox alongside them I found that firefox would not open due to graphics related issues.

                      So now my computer is in a state where it can either run a game OR run firefox, but it is not capable of doing both at the same time. This happened only after applying the most recent updates this afternoon. I have no clue how to approach this issue.

                      Edit #2:
                      After doing absolutely nothing and letting my computer sit for the past 6 hours the problem has been entirely resolved. I have no clue what has changed but I am happy to have things working as normal again.

                      Edit #3:
                      The error has again returned.

                        Solarmass you mean your bluetooth device not connected on boot?

                        My laptop is on a stand in front of my living room chair, so I usually operate it with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. I did an update, and afterwards rebooted. When I did, the keyboard and mouse were no longer connected, because Bluetooth was disabled. I enabled the Bluetooth setting, and both of those reconnected automatically. This has happened to me often. As I said, it's only a minor annoyance, because I can use the laptop's thumbpad to turn Bluetooth back on. Sound familiar?