Heya folks! This week brings a fully updated GNOME 45 to all Solus users! @ZachBacon spent a ton of time working on this update, and we’re glad to bring it to the Stable repository. Thank you for those of you who helped us test GNOME 45! You helped us catch a couple of issues before the sync. If you haven’t seen what GNOME 45 brings to the table, check out their release post. Two new GNOME applications have been included in Solus with this update: GNOME Console and GNOME Text Editor. There may be additional syncs over the weekend if any other significant issues appear.
There have been a few changes to the GNOME edition with this update. The extension gnome-browser-connector is now installed by default, enabling users to use the GNOME extension site out of the box. The impatience extension is no longer installed by default because it does not support GNOME 45. The functionally identical speedinator extension has been added and enabled by default instead. Tray Icons Reloaded has been replaced with a new AppIndicator extension which supports Wayland, and has better compatibility. Mutter’s check-alive-timeout has been increased to 10,000ms. Lastly, two keybindings have changed:
Alt+Tab now switches individual windows and shows window previews
Super+Tab now switches between application groups
GNOME can’t have all the fun, though. Budgie Desktop released 10.8.2 last week, and it is also coming to the Stable repository this cycle! This update brings fixes for tray icons, notifications, and an improvement to Budgie Screenshot. Check out the Buddies of Budgie blog post for more information.
The system toolchain saw an update, glibc was updated to 2.38, GCC to 13.1, and binutils/elfutils were both updated to the latest. We also enabled a feature in systemd that should cause cause coredumps to have their stack traces automatically logged to the system journal. This should help us debug issues so that we can keep Solus the best it can be!
We also updated the Xorg stack! Xorg-server was updated to 21.1.9 and for Wayland users Xwayland was updated to 23.2.2. The entire Xorg stack saw a refresh, and virtually every package was either updated to the latest version or saw a rebuild (so expect to see a lot of x packages in your updated packages this week).
Graphics libraries got a bunch of updates this week. Mesa got updated to 23.2, this brings a bunch of improvements, most notably ray-tracing is now enabled for AMD users with recent enough GPU hardware! libdrm, libglvnd, egl-wayland, libva, libvdpau, glew, glfw, glslang, and vulkan all received updates as well! CoreCTRL also saw an update to 1.3.6 for those who like having application configurations for hardware profiles.
We’ve been doing some work on fonts this week. Sheepman updated our patch to fontconfig to correctly use Noto Sans and Noto Serif as our default fonts. The team has also been working with community members on adding metainfo files to font packages, so they may be found in software centers like GNOME Software and KDE Discover; more on that topic another time. A couple of new fonts have also been included: Sarasa Gothic, and a Nerd patched version of Fira Code.
The audio stack saw some updates too, Pipewire 0.3.83, Wireplumber 0.4.15, and alsa-lib 1.2.10 all landed this sync.
Hacktoberfest is almost over for this year. We’ve received over 120 contributions adding homepages to packages, and 16 contributions adding metainfo files to fonts. There have been a total of 185 merged pull requests during the month of October, though some of those will have been from team members, and that doesn’t count contributions to documentation. Massive thank you to everyone who submitted a contribution! There are still a few days left of Hacktoberfest, but we’ll gladly accept contributions any day of the year.
Other updates this week include:
- Kernels 6.5.9 and 5.15.137
- Firefox 119.0
- Thunderbird 115.4.1
- opera-stable 10.4.0.4944.33
- vivaldi-stable 6.4.3160.34
- crow-translate 2.11.0
- brave 1.59.124
- virtualbox 7.0.12
- calibre 6.29.0
- Geany 2.0
- streamlink 6.3.1
- platformio 6.1.11
- Signal-desktop 6.36.0
- Sigil 2.0.2
- Snes9x-gtk 1.62.3
- Lutris 0.5.14
- Wine 8.18
- Blender 3.6.4
- Strawberry 1.0.21
- qBittorrent 4.6.0
- VLC 3.0.19
- Virtualbox 7.0.12
That list isn't by any means comprehensive. This was such a massive sync that listing all of the changes is very unfeasable and would take up a significant amount of already limited time.
That’s it for this week, folks! See you here next time for more awesome sync news!
