Sync Updates for Week 37, 2023

EbonJaeger

Heya folks! It’s Friday, and that means the latest sync has happened! This week brings critical security updates to your web browsers. They were pulled to the Stable repository earlier in the week, so make sure your browsers are up-to-date! Also of note is the inclusion of eza, an ls replacement tool written in Rust. It replaces exa, which was recently abandoned. Eza replaces Exa, so don’t forget to update any scripts or aliases using it!

We’ve all been hard at work this week writing documentation, taking a hard look at our package tooling, and preparing the next round of major stack upgrades.

Speaking of tooling, we’ve started collaborating with the wonderful folks at Serpent OS to replace our current program for post-install/update triggers called usysconf. This tool performs various operations depending on what files on your file system have changed; for example, refreshing the icon cache if an icon theme changes. The new replacement will be written in Rust, and will serve both Solus and Serpent going forward. You can find it here.

In other news this week, @JoshStrobl recently appeared on the Fedora Podcast to talk about Budgie Desktop! Topics include “What is Budgie?”, target users, upcoming features, and contributions. It was a great conversation, so check it out!

Notable updates:

Mesalib updated to v23.1.7 with some additional packaging changes/fixes:
- Vulkan is now hardware accelerated on Intel 7th/8th gen GPUs
- Ray-tracing should be working on Intel ARC GPUs
- Mangohud hardware sensors should be more reliable
SDL2 updated to 2.28.3 bringing a bunch of controller fixes
PPSSPP updated to v1.16.1, bringing in RetroAchievements support!
RSS Guard is now in the repositories for all of those RSS aficionados amongst you

And now for the rest of this week’s updates, in non-exhaustive fashion:

brave
displaycal
eza
rednotebook
wsdd
youtube-viewer
calibre
vim
Numix icon themes
bibata-cursors
element
vscode
Thunderbird

That’s all we have for you this week! See you here next time for the weekly news roundup!

unclemez

EbonJaeger
Why no version on second section ?
Would be cool even if it doesn't pay the bill

EbonJaeger

RESERVED FOR CELTIC MAGIC

unclemez

EbonJaeger I use Solus, I'm a Druid

brent

thanks for these updates. it's Pavlovian: you post the update about the updates then I install and reboot.
After I reboot I usually open a couple apps, open a couple folders, check the taskbar widgets. So all good.
🍺

synth-ruiner

I'm getting the "blank menu" issue on my network manager applet on Budgie as reported here: https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/451

I've switched to using Openbox for the time being, so no problem there, but if there's any diagnostic info I can provide I'd be happy to help.

Harvey

Update: Thunderbird 115.2.2 has been cherrypicked.

hdansin

Hooray for Numix! The circle theme was one of the first icon themes that I thought was super cool back in the day when Korora was using it. Have installed it for the nostalgia.

Solarmass

Thanks for the quick eza and bibata-cursors updates!

penny-farthing

This morning, I processed 36 Solus updates (173.70 MiB) and I'd like to thank the entire Solus team once again for the quality of their work and the fine pedagogic effort they put into commenting each new update to the tool.

However, I would like to make 2 comments:

whether in the Onboard application or even in NetworkManager, the problem of the empty menus persists, and I've been able to reproduce it in VirtualBox; below are a few examples to illustrate this:

Onboard:

NetworkManager

The menu appears correctly before disconnecting the application.

When we want to restart the connection, the menu appears empty. But if we click on the menu line corresponding to this action, the reconnection occurs successfully.

I'm also experiencing the following problem in Nemo (also tested in a virtual machine).
The application is configured to display the folders before the files, and this is indeed the case:

But when we want, for example, to move a file, that is no longer the case:

It's a bit annoying, but it is manageable. So, I don't see what to do to resolve this anomaly.
Do you have the same problem?
Any suggestion would be welcome, thank you in advance.

EbonJaeger

There is an open Pull Request open to address the tray menu issue in Budgie Desktop, but it hasn't been merged yet. Please bear with us for just a little bit longer. 🙂

See here if you wish to follow the progress.

FAb7D

Same little issue, but I must also say that the speed with which it connects after switching on recently has improved: for a few months it seemed that the connection process waited before being started after boot.

presianbg

Vulkan is now hardware accelerated on Intel 7th/8th gen GPUs

Having i5-8250U on my main system, should I do any tweaks / configs to benefit from this change ?! 😛
How can I test if it's really hardware accelerated ?

PS: Thanks for the wonderful update and keeping the bar high!

ReillyBrogan

presianbg You're using an 8th-gen Core CPU, not an 8th-gen GPU. You already have Vulkan hardware acceleration and there's nothing for you to do. 8th-gen GPUs are more like Haswell-era iGPUs, which honestly aren't really fast enough for hardware-accelerated Vulkan to really even be useful for gaming but it can at least help make applications like Chrome a bit smoother.

presianbg

ReillyBrogan Ahhh, yes 🙁 my bad.
I just saw 8th gen and got excited, completely ignoring the GPU part 😃

Harvey

Update: Discord 0.0.30 has been cherrypicked