Heya folks! It's Friday, and that means it's time for the weekly Solus roundup!
This marks the last sync of the year! Due to the holidays next week, we have decided to give ourselves a break from worrying about doing a sync. Happy holidays, and enjoy time with your friends and family!
Xfce 4.20
Xfce users rejoice, for Xfce 4.20 has landed in the stable repository! This is a major update to the desktop environment, making many components Wayland-compatible, while also including many features, improvements, and bug fixes. Check out their 4.20 tour, found here. Note: If you installed the pre-release version for testing, make sure to remove the testing repository before updating:
sudo eopkg rr "XFCE4 Testing"
With this update, it is now possible to run Xfce under Wayland using labwc. If you wish to try it out, install the xfce4-session-wayland package, and select the Wayland session on the login screen.
Important: Wayland support on Xfce is still experimental, and should be considered alpha quality! Running Xfce under Wayland is unsupported! Not all components are Wayland-ready. These components will not run under Wayland at all:
- Xfwm4
- Xfdashboard
- xfce4-screensaver
- Xfce4-windowck-plugin
- Xfce4-xkb-plugin
If you wish to see the full changelog for 4.20, click here.
In addition, we have made some changes to the default panel settings:
- Panel size is now 40 (up from 36).
- Icon sizes are now set to 24 instead of being automatically sized.
- Show Desktop button added to far right of panel.
- Added Whiskermenu favorites for default web browser, email client, file manager, and terminal.
These settings changes will only apply to new installations or new users.
Snap deprecation
The warning that pops up whenever you run a snap has been changed to include the sentence "Snaps will stop working in early January 2025." This is part of a process we started back in July to remove Snap support from Solus; we wrote about our reasons for this in a blog post. The Help Center has a page with more details about the warning and what you can do if you have snaps installed.
Most users will not have snaps installed, as Solus has usually recommended that third-party apps be installed from the Third Party section of the Solus Software Center or as Flatpaks.
Security updates
We have some security fixes this week. As always, make sure to install your updates to get the latest vulnerability protections.
4 security-updates:
- ansible was updated to 2.18.1-56 (@silkeh). Includes security fixes for CVE-2024-11079.
- curl was updated to 8.11.1-104 (@silkeh). Includes security fixes for CVE-2024-11053.
- sox was moved to an actively maintained fork: sox_ng version 14.5.0-14 (@androidnisse, @androidnisse). Includes security fixes for CVE-2021-23210, CVE-2021-23172, CVE-2021-3643, CVE-2017-11359, CVE-2023-34432, CVE-2017-11333, CVE-2019-8357, CVE-2017-15370, CVE-2019-8354, CVE-2019-1010004, CVE-2019-8355, CVE-2021-40426, CVE-2017-15372, CVE-2017-15642, CVE-2021-23159, CVE-2017-11332, CVE-2023-32627, CVE-2021-33844, CVE-2019-8356, CVE-2023-34318, CVE-2017-18189, CVE-2017-11358, CVE-2022-31650, CVE-2023-26590, CVE-2022-31651, CVE-2019-13590, CVE-2017-15371.
- sysstat was updated to 12.7.6-22 (@davidjharder). Includes security fixes for CVE-2023-33204.
General updates
- KDE Frameworks was updated to 6.9.0 this week. It contains many new features and bug fixes. Check out their announcement here.
- Both Linux kernel flavors were updated:
linux-current to v6.12.5 and linux-lts to v6.6.66.
The full list of updated packages can be found here.
For the list of currently known issues, see the dedicated thread for it.
That’s all for this week, folks! We'll see you next time for another roundup of the news!
