Hey, folks! It’s that time again! A few light syncs this week as we prepare for releasing Solus 4.4, performed by the wonderful Joey. Special thanks to @Girtablulu for sending in the tweaks and fixes he made to the Solus Plasma theme. We hope to see you again soon!

Changes this week include, but may not be limited to:

  • Changes and fixes to the Solus Plasma theme made by @Girtablulu
  • The Solus logo will now appear in the Budgie Control Center’s About section
  • Updates to web browsers and ffmpeg-chromium
  • Reduce the package size of yubico-authenticator by about ⅔
  • Updated the Rime Chinese input method stack
  • Other smaller package updates

Primary focus remains on getting Solus 4.4 out the door as soon as we are able.

And now, a call to action! We are looking for assistance in testing Firefox VA-API hardware acceleration! If you would like to aid in testing, please see this issue on our development tracker. Thank you!

This concludes this week’s sync post. See you for the next one!

    EbonJaeger Really professional!!!
    Something I never thought about is asking for Testers very cool idea!
    (think you may have hit a winner there for people who want to contribute!)
    I Like it alot!

      Improving communication ... Cool, cool, cool ... Super cool !

      • [deleted]

      • Post #6
      • Edited

      Thank you 🙂 I'm going to look to see what it involved. My time may be a bit stressed this month though, but if going to see if it's within my ability.

      Update: I see it's irrelevant for my currently installed system, so I'm unable to help. Either way, your post is appreciated! and maybe others here could.

      EbonJaeger I can participate in the testing. I read it all. My nvidia is deprecated and I'm on Nouveau...would I just skip the Nvidia Test section--in the writeup-- or is nvidia necessary for the acceleration tests?
      thx

        EbonJaeger In the link provided to test this new feature in Firefox, it is specified that the Budgie and MATE desktop are not concerned, because these environments do not yet support Wayland. Will it be the case in the future ? And if so (even if, in principle, you do not wish to provide ETA), can we have an approximate idea of when this might happen?

          Budgie from memory is planning on supporting Wayland with Budgie 11 and MATE seems to have stalled on their work.

          We obviously can not tell you when external projects will add support. For things under our control as you know we do not do ETAs which is what an "approximate idea of when this might happen" is.

          EDIT:
          For context I should point out for those unaware Budgie is no longer a Solus project it is completely independent and has been for over a year, although it does have some cross over in team members / contributors. I would recommend you read the Buddies of Budgie blog posts for their plans.

          For Q4 of 2023, the goals at minimum should be:

          • Finish Bluetooth (bluez) and power management (upower) implementations in new daemon.
          • RFC Budgie Configuration (TOML file-based serializing, deserializing, setting migrations, per-panel / per-applet configuration, etc.)
          • Continue our experiments with Wayland compositors and protocols, informing us on how we want to spec out the separation of concerns for Budgie WM, Budgie Daemon, and responsibilities of various graphical components.

          Source: https://blog.buddiesofbudgie.org/state-of-the-budgie-2022/

            EbonJaeger we prepare for releasing Solus 4.4

            I reported a bug on the tracker, and was following it for a while, but lately I can't find it anywhere there. Is it safe to assume that it meeans it's been fixed, and will be in a sync soon?

                EbonJaeger

                Yes, thanks. I wanted to add some information to that, but I couldn't find it.

                My VM host laptop dual boots between Solus and Sparky Linux, and I have them set up the same. In order to see whether this is a Solus bug, I logged on to a Wayland session on Sparky, created a Solus Budgie VM there, and sent it to full-screen.

                That immediately locked up both the VM and the Sparky host, in exactly the same way it locks up Solus, so it has to be a upstream bug, not Solus' problem. (Unless someone here can fix it easily.)

                I have an account on the KDE forum, so I'll check to see if it's been reported there, and if not, I'll file a bug there.

                EDIT: The VM lockup happens after the VM has gone to full-screen, so the host lockup may just be because the VM by then is covering up the host's screen, preventing the user from shutting down the VM or rebooting the host.

                    WetGeek I'll file a bug there.

                    I forgot that I did report it at KDE, 19 days ago. I left the additional information there now.

                    It's just possible that it's a VirtualBox bug, but I don't have an Oracle account there anymore. I did at one time, but I think it's probably been removed for non-use. And being retired now, I no longer have the company information they require when creating an account. (Oracle marketing, I assume.)

                    If you have any idea where I could file a bug report there, please let me know. It'd be interesting to see KDE and Oracle fight this one out, and I don't really care who wins. I just want to be able to make full use of my VMs.

                        WetGeek I dont know anything about vm but was reading
                        did you install vmguest additions?

                            Axios did you install vmguest additions?

                            Probably not. The VM seemed to be doing just fine without it -- accessing how USB ports, etc. I can try that to see if it matters. When I had the crash on the Sparky machine, the VM was Solus Budgie, fully updated.

                              WetGeek I forgot that I did report it at KDE, 19 days ago.

                              A response from the KDE forum indicates that it's not a problem there.

                              "Running Arch KDE Wayland 5.27.6 + VirtualBox 7.0.8-2 and I can not reproduce a crash.
                              Can you reproduce this every time you go into fullscreen or does it happen only sometimes?"

                              He asked me to check the logs to find out whether the host crashed, or just the VM, but since a VM being present stops the host from rebooting, I could't tell. In order to recover, I need to do a hard shutdown first. I'm not that skilled at reading Linux logs, and after scanning a few hundred lines, my eyes started getting blurry.

                              I replied that I can reproduce it 100% of the time, on two different distros.

                                Great !
                                Let's hope that the live USB will be available very soon !
                                We need that distrowatch to consider Solus as 'active' again
                                We need 'Harmony' as soon as possible

                                EbonJaeger unstickied the discussion .