Solus Updates for Week 47, 2024

EbonJaeger

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

SDDM, the display manager typically used with KDE Plasma, now prefers Wayland sessions over X11 sessions. This means that in the session selection menu, Wayland sessions will be sorted above X11 ones. Note: if you were purposefully using an X11 session and SDDM, make sure to re-select it before logging in! After logging in, SDDM will then remember your choice.

FFMpeg has been updated to version 7.1 this week. Introduced in the 7.x series is a native Versatile Video Coding (VVC) decoder. This decoder aims to optimize video compression without sacrificing quality. 7.x also brings support for the Interactive Media File Format (IAMF), support for more formats and codecs, and a multithreaded command line interface. The changelogs for 7.0 and 7.1 can be found here and here.

After 20 years of development, FreeCAD has released version 1.0, and it is already in the Solus repository! In this milestone version, Realthunder's Topological naming problem mitigation algorithm has been incorporated, a new Assembly workbench, which uses the brand-new Ondsel solver, has been included, a new logo was chosen by the community members from community contributed proposals, and the user interface has received huge improvements. Check out their full blog post!

OpenCollada has been deprecated this week. It used to be used by Blender, but it is no longer needed.

If you haven't seen our announcement a couple of days ago, there will be two networking outages that affect Solus services next week. If you didn't see it, head on over to the announcement thread.

Solus Cleanup Crew™️

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

Adding appstream metainfo - 195 packages (down 2) need appstream metainfo added
Adding homepage keys - 7 packages (down 2) left without homepages
Adding monitoring.yml files: 2815 (down 122)
Migrating homepages pointing to GNOME Wiki - 45 (down 17)
Fixing packages that do not build - 11 packages (down 2) do not build
Tagging packages for deprecation - 24 packages (no change) tagged

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:

Join the Solus Packaging Room on Matrix
Read and practice our packaging documentation
Submit your first Pull Request. We recommend doing the wiki gnome task or monitoring.yml task
Follow along the review process until your PR gets merged
Continue on contributing!

Security updates

We have a few security updates this week. As always, be sure to install all updates for the latest vulnerability protections.

github-cli was updated to 2.62.0-60 (@EbonJaeger). Includes security fixes for CVE-2024-52308.
libmongoc was updated to 1.29.0-13 (@davidjharder). Includes security fixes for CVE-2023-0437.
opensc was updated to 0.26.0-11 (@davidjharder). Includes security fixes for CVE-2024-45620, CVE-2024-45618, CVE-2024-8443, CVE-2024-45619, CVE-2024-1454, CVE-2024-45616, CVE-2024-45615, CVE-2024-45617, CVE-2023-5992.

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!

Known issues

NVIDIA laptop users might have the built-in display stay black when resuming from sleep / suspend. This is likely due to the NVIDIA drivers. If you have the proprietary NVIDIA drivers (nvidia-glx-driver) installed, there is a thread on their forums for feedback on the 560 driver, for those interested.

brent

EbonJaeger SDDM, the display manager typically used with KDE Plasma, now prefers Wayland sessions over X11 sessions. This means that in the session selection menu, Wayland sessions will be sorted above X11 ones. Note: if you were purposefully using an X11 session and SDDM, make sure to re-select it before logging in! After logging in, SDDM will then remember your choice.

I was just wondering if its significantly more work (for team) to maintain seperate Wayland and X11 versions of a DE? Or negligible? I was hoping Budgie would have both options, too, when the time came.

On point, rebooted and back to work and all good, thanks.

Harvey

brent

We do not develop the DEs so the burden is on testing. 99% of testing I do is on Wayland for Plasma and I doubt for most things that people test on both, that would be a PITA.

Harvey

Some additional things:

Strawberry 1.2.2 landed last minute so it is not in the "full list of updated packages".
Reilly downgraded DCN314 firmware due to issues reported by users.

andiskufi

Harvey I think with downgrading the DCN314 firmware helped me finally boot to the latest kernel. I had reported the issue in the last 2 updates and now it's working. Thank you.

brent

Harvey got it. having dual options for Budgie would be josh's decision. thanks.

ReillyBrogan

brent Not really his "decision". The Budgie team has already decided that they're going to support Wayland. It's just a matter of developing it, there's a LOT of work that goes into supporting Wayland session it's not just a simple line of code that needs to be changed.

ReillyBrogan

andiskufi Hmm interesting. I didn't think that either of the GPUs you posted use DCN314 but the way AMDGPU IP blocks are is confusing to me and I'm not sure. Does sudo dmesg | grep DCN say DCN 3.1.4 for you?

banger

Updates went well on two machines everything seems to work ok. Tried FreeCAD but couldn't get it to open some DWG files I have even with the ODA converter. Drawings just came in as white blank pages.

andiskufi

ReillyBrogan This is what I am getting:
andi  ~  sudo dmesg | grep DCN [sudo] password for andi: [ 6.521655] [drm] Display Core v3.2.291 initialized on DCN 3.0.3 [ 9.067190] [drm] Display Core v3.2.291 initialized on DCN 3.0 andi  ~ 
Don't really know how it was fixed but it was. If you need more info, happy to provide whatever you need and test whatever you want.

brent

ReillyBrogan Not really his "decision". The Budgie team has already decided that they're going to support Wayland

I know they support Wayland. I was wondering if they would be supporting an X11 budgie too, when Wayland arrives, like Plasma has?

ReillyBrogan

brent They'll most likely support it for a while at least until all of the bugs have been worked out. Like GNOME and Plasma though at some point Wayland will become the "default" session and the X11 one will get buggier as developers stop working on it.

Staudey

Actually from previous statements it sounds like there won't be a coexistence of Wayland and X11 sessions for Budgie, and once it goes Wayland, it goes Wayland-only.

While our goal in 2023 was only to start experimenting with Wayland compositors and to take the learnings from those experiments to apply to a "future Budgie WM compositor" built for Budgie 11, we made a significant shift in our development focus starting middle of last year to accelerate our Wayland plans and work towards Budgie 10 being Wayland-only (and continuing to be Wayland-only going into Budgie 11)
[...]
For Q3 and Q4, our focus is to deliver a Budgie 10 series release that is Wayland-only.[...]

https://buddiesofbudgie.org/blog/state-of-the-budgie-2023

libxfce4windowing enables us to port functionality to support Wayland without negatively impacting use under X11, facilitate early "dogfooding" when our porting work is complete, and more effortlessly "flip the switch" to support Wayland and fully drop X11.

https://buddiesofbudgie.org/blog/budgie-10-9-released

Of course some of that might have changed in the meantime (as has the timeline), or I'm misunderstanding the finer points, but it sounds like there will be no more X11 session once the Wayland session is usable (outside of early testing, which will happen in parallel).

zmaint

Greatly appreciate the heads up. Wayland still does not have native proton/wine, still has issues with nvidia, and last I tried it has significant issues with context menus (as in it don't like to draw them). I'll be sticking with X. Wayland is the way forward, but still a Ways off.

brent

zmaint
if there is no X11 option I may have to move on from the only DE I've used since 2017...40% of problem posts in any given forum seem Wayland-related and that's 39% too many for me. I ~~like~~ LOVE my goof off time but Solus is mostly productivity-used. Maybe Josh & Co. will have it dialed in by then but for now I am getting ahead of myself. Staudey quotes from the Source but I hope Reilly's gut is right.
Again...way down the road so no worries right now.

Staudey

zmaint Wayland still does not have native proton/wine, still has issues with nvidia, and last I tried it has significant issues with context menus (as in it don't like to draw them).

The latest Wine releases builds the Wayland support by default, so it should now probably get more testing and developer attention. It still prefers XWayland when available, but this can be worked around (for testing purposes) by launching wine with DISPLAY= wine to unset the display. I'm seeing some issues under Wayland though.

When it comes to NVIDIA I honestly notice no real difference between Wayland and X11 these days, except that the former feels smoother (on GNOME). Haven't experienced the context menu issue.

Oh yeah, the way notifications work is a bit annoying. Hopefully they can improve that some day.

UncleSlacky

brent Yes, I'll be moving back to MX Linux if it's Wayland or the highway.

AlphaElwedritsch

All went fine on my plasma, thanks a lot guys

Pjol

Two Plasma and one Budgie, all on baremetal upgraded without issues.
My thanks to all contributors

BruceElephant

Hmm.. fooyin does not start anymore. : (

Terminal output:
bruce@bruce-solus ~ $ fooyin fy.scanner: Scan of "Music" took "0:00.015000" Segmentation fault (core dumped)

System information:
Operating System: Solus 4.6
KDE Plasma Version: 6.2.3
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.8.0
Qt Version: 6.7.3
Kernel Version: 6.11.10-310.current (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 8 × Intel® Core™ i5-10300H CPU @ 2.50GHz
Memory: 15.4 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: Mesa Intel® UHD Graphics
Manufacturer: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.
Product Name: GF65 Thin 10SDR
System Version: REV:1.0

alfisya

BruceElephant pinging @androidnisse

WetGeek

UncleSlacky Yes, I'll be moving back to MX Linux if it's Wayland or the highway.

How long do you figure it will be before MX Linux also drops X11 for lack of support?

WetGeek

For a long time, panel at the bottom of my screen (like a "dock") for Plasma has been starting with all the contents compressed into a single small square. That's been easy to restore back to its normal size, with "Show panel configuration" in the context menu, but it was annoying. With today's sync, apparently KDE finally got it right. It now starts out with its normal size, no workarounds needed!

EDIT: Aw, fsck! The above seems to apply to my laptop only. When I updated my wife's and restarted it, the dock remained compressed into small square with its three contents squeezed to incredibly tiny icons. Since both laptops are identical DELL Latitudes, and both are running Solus Plasma, both fully updated, I'm not sure why that issue seems to be fixed on mine and not on hers. Again, easily worked around, but annoying nonetheless.

MORE EDIT: After thinking about it for a while, I believe I've found the difference. Because of all the X11 vs. Wayland discussion on the forum lately, when I restarted my laptop after updating it this morning, I was curious and first launched an X11 session. Indeed, the "dock" opened to its normal size and contents. Then I rebooted and launched my usual Wayland session, and it too opened to its normal size and contents. That's why I wrote the first message above. However, I didn't open an X11 session on my wife's laptop, but just started Wayland after a reboot, and as I noted, the dock issue was still present.

I had forgotten that I restarted the two laptops differently this time. Apparently X11's being started first made it so that Wayland also started up correctly. I hate mysteries.

TraceyC

WetGeek

For a long time, panel at the bottom of my screen (like a "dock") for Plasma has been starting with all the contents compressed into a single small square.

That's a known issue, which has has quite a few reports on the KDE tracker. Bugs like that aren't something Solus would cause or can fix.