Heya folks! It's sync day, and that means it's time for the weekly Solus roundup! We have quite a bit to cover, so let's jump right in.
GNOME has been updated to version 49.1. This is a major update for GNOME, with highlights including significant performance increases in GNOME Software, many accessibility improvements in GNOME Calendar, a new document viewer, and extended capabilities for GNOME's built-in remote desktop feature. Check out all the changes in GNOME 49 here.
Users that use the X11 session on GNOME should be aware that the X11 session is no longer well-supported upstream. You can still use it on Solus by installing the gnome-session-shell-x11 package, but be aware that it may have significant issues that will not be addressed. Furthermore, the session will be completely removed in GNOME 50. See this post for more details.
Budgie Desktop has been updated to 10.9.3. This is a compatibility update for GNOME 49. Check out the release announcement here. Important: If you use an Electron app that uses safeStorage, like Signal, there is an issue with Electron accessing anything stored there. Workarounds for this are still being explored.
In conjunction with the updates to GNOME and Budgie, we've migrated every package in the repository to use the newer libgirepository-2.0 dependency. This was necessary because of upstream changes to pygobject porting it to the new API, which we are now using. Because a process cannot use both the old version and the new version of the API, programs loading modules that use pygobject would crash. Therefore, the safest course of action was to update or patch every package using libgirepository to the new API version.
GTK desktops didn't get all the fun this cycle. KDE Plasma has been updated to 6.5.2. Plasma 6.5 is a major update to KDE Plasma, featuring automatic theme transition based on time, caret text navigation, fuzzy search in KRunner, rounded bottom corners on windows, and much more. Check out the release announcement here. But wait, there's more! KDE Gear applications have also been updated to 25.08.3. This is a bugfix release to the 25.08 version series. The changes can all be found here.
We have a much newer systemd package this cycle. Now that the Usr Merge epoch is complete, we can finally update systemd past version 254. And so we did, to version 257.10. As a part of the update, we revised the feature flags we use at compile time to configure systemd to align with the ones used by AerynOS. Most features are now only enabled for the 64-bit package, making the 32-bit package much slimmer. Notably, the HomeD and UserDB features have been enabled, as they are required for GNOME 49. The upstream changes between the old and new version can be seen here.
Also landing this cycle is a Mesa update. Mesa has been updated to 25.2.6. Check out the changelog here.
Lastly, we have a couple of new packages. resvg is an SVG image rendering library written in Rust. It also includes a C library. Also new this week is dust, an intuitive du interface. Last, but not least, solseek is now in the Solus repository. If you haven't seen the forum threads on it, solseek is a terminal interface wrapper for eopkg, created by @Original-Syn. Be sure to check them out!
Security updates
We have some security updates this week. As usual, be sure to install available updates to get the latest vulnerability fixes.
General updates
The full list of updated packages can be found here.
For the list of currently known issues, see the dedicated thread for it. If you begin experiencing a bug, please look for an issue on our issue tracker, and open a new one if one does not exist.
That’s all for this week, folks! We'll be here same time, same place next week for another roundup of the news!
