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:

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!

How did the sync go for you?

This poll has ended.

Lack of snap support is likely going to throw me out of the distro, unfortunately! It's been 7 years now. This is for a single piece of software that I use daily. Morgen.

Better start looking for a suitable alternative, if I want to stay.

    Two Plasma machines updated nice and smoothly. Dont use anything Snap related so doesn't affect me. i5 machine feels nice and snappy (no pun intended) 🙂

    My Plasma laptop updated without a problem, but every VM I tried to update returned this:

    Any ideas? I DID reboot after the update, of course, but I'm guessing that I don't need to recompile my kernel.

      WetGeek

      Thanks for reporting.

      I'll have a package fix in place when my interwebs stop being stupid.

        lf-araujo I looked into it and Morgen is an electron app, which basically means you can extract the .rpm/.deb to somewhere on your desktop, run the binary and it'll just work. You can even copy the .desktop file into your ~/.local/share/applications folder, update the paths to wherever you extracted Morgen and it should just work. Hell, you could even create an eopkg recipe for it and re-pack the .deb into a .eopkg file so you can install it natively (this is basically what Discord does for example).

          Harvey You will need to reboot.

          I just did that, and tried to start a VM with the same error message as before. I'm gonna try forcing a reinstall of vivaldi, and see if that changes anything.

              WetGeek I'm gonna try forcing a reinstall of vivaldi, and see if that changes anything.

              Oh, poo. I'm probably forgetting something along the way, but simply rebooting didn't work, then I reinstalled vivaldi-stable, and that didn't work, so I rebooted again, and this time I got the notification that there were files to download. I did another eopkg up, and vivaldi-common and vivaldi-stable were installed. I'm pretty sure I did another reboot after that, but I'll do it again, just to be sure. So far no joy. (Maybe a complete shutdown and restart is needed?)

                  Hi all,
                  Update was without any issue.
                  Out of all the update this year, I think I had to point out 2 or 3 issues in total. That's just amazing.
                  And when something happenend, it was sorted out very quickly.
                  Thank you for all the team behind Solus, you guys are great.
                  Merry Christmas to all.
                  PS : I am on Budgie and I have seen 2 or 3 Budgie update on this one as well as libxfcewindowing (which I think is/will be used by Budgie). Anything special with these update or it's just a "maintenance" update ? I am just curious.

                    WetGeek Maybe a complete shutdown and restart is needed?

                    No, not even that worked. I completely powered down and restarted the machine, but the error message is still the same. Unable to start any of the VMs to update them. I can't think of anything else to try from my end.

                        Moin
                        Update went smooth on my physical Plasma system
                        Also on my virtual XFCE system

                        Thanks guys

                        One of the first stable XFCE 4.20 distro in the wild...

                        WetGeek

                        I could reproduce your issue before and it seems to be working for me and others with the fix, so lets start troubleshooting at the beginning.

                        sudo eopkg up -y

                        If any packages were updated reboot.

                        uname -r

                        Should return:

                        6.12.5-311.current

                        eopkg info virtualbox-current
                        eopkg info virtualbox-common

                        The installed release for both should be:

                        release: 342

                        cat /usr/lib/modprobe.d/virtualbox.conf

                        Should output:

                        # With kernel 6.12 kvm is enabled by default and this breaks virtualbox.
options kvm enable_virt_at_load=0

                            Harvey it seems to be working for me and others with the fi

                            Yes! I could swear that I did the equivalent, as in the message I posted, but obviously I must have left out a step. This time I was able to update virtualbox-common and virtualbox-current one more time, and I'm now able to start a VM. I'll be able to update those now.

                            Thanks for putting up with me. I really appreciate the quick response.

                            EDIT: Four Solus VMs updated with no problems. I don't have a chance right now to test Bluetooth on the Xfce edition, because my spare laptop died, and the replacement won't be here until Jan 6. I can't wait to find out if I can connect a BT keyboard to an Xfce machine now.

                                Harvey lf-araujo

                                I use the AppImage release of Warp terminal, and it works well. I also use the Gear Lever app(which is actually a flatpak) to manage my AppImage apps.

                                Gear Lever

                                      Patrice PS : I am on Budgie and I have seen 2 or 3 Budgie update on this one as well as libxfcewindowing (which I think is/will be used by Budgie). Anything special with these update or it's just a "maintenance" update ? I am just curious.

                                      Budgie Extras had an actual update. Budgie Desktop had a patch backported so it is compatible with the new libxfce4windowing.