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:

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 the Solus Packaging Room on Matrix
  2. Read and practice our packaging documentation
  3. Submit your first Pull Request. We recommend doing the wiki gnome task or monitoring.yml task
  4. Follow along the review process until your PR gets merged
  5. 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.

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.

How did the sync go for you?

This poll has ended.

    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.

        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 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.

                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 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?

                    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 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?

                            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.

                              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).

                              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.

                                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.

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

                                    • [deleted]

                                    • Post #18
                                    • Edited

                                    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

                                      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.