Xfce, KDE Packages Flood This Week’s Tumbleweed Snapshots

A large quantity of packages from both Xfce and KDE projects flowed into openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots this week.

Hundreds of packages updated in the rolling release and KDE’s Frameworks, Applications and Plasma packages were the most prevalent of software package updated throughout the week.

KDE Frameworks 5.78.0 arrived in the latest 20210113 snapshot. Frameworks added a new compass action icon in the Breeze Icons and KConfig fixed windows being inappropriately maximized on launch. User Interface framework Kirigami fixed some visual bugs for avatar controls and KDE’s data accessing package KIO fixed a shortcut reset button and the middle-click handling with the url navigation menu. Frameworks packages weren’t the only packages to update in the snapshot; the update to the 1.12.3 version of ibus-table provides a new setup tool that allows keybindings to be configured with a GUI. Fingerprint reader package libfprint fixed issues that caused problem on non-x86 machines in its 1.90.6 version update. The last package to be included in the update was the parser library mxml 3.2, which fixed handling of elements that start with a Unicode character and fixed the handling of unquoted attribute values that start with Unicode.

The Xfce 4.16 desktop and many of its complementary packages arrived in snapshot 20210111 and people are excited about this release. There are new icons and color palettes for unifying a style and look that will make people ask what desktop environment is that. The panel received some updates with a new status tray plugin and the darkmode looks sleek. The thunar file manager can easily pause during a file transfer and the release looks topnotch. ImageMagick jumped some minor versions to 7.0.10.55 and reverted changes to the default max width/height of an image. Mozilla Firefox fixed a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure involving a COOKIE-ECHO. The compiler plugin for clang to understand Qt semantics, clazy 1.9 is now back to being 4x faster. Flatpak 1.8.4 fixed support for PowerPC. Several other packages were updated in the snapshot to include openvpn 2.4.10, mugshot 0.4.3, qpdf 10.1.0 and Xfce’s mousepad 0.5.1.

KDE’s Applications 20.12.1 arrived in snapshots 20210110 and 20210108. The update fixed a crash when a device with a capacitybar is dragged in the file manager Dolphin. KDE’s CD and DVD application K3b fixed an infinite loop when clearing a DVD Video project. Video editor Kdenlive had multiple fixes to include some regressions in the keyframe move option while editing.

Snapshot snapshots 20210110 had an update of rpm 4.16.0, which provided multiple documentation updates and added new version parsing and comparison API in C and Python. With the update of smartmontools 7.2, smartd now resolves symlinks before device names are checked for duplicates. Chinese pinyin package libpinyin updated to version 2.6.0 and the low-level crypto library libnettle 3.7 added the password-hashing function bcrypt.

Besides the 20.12.1 Applications update in snapshot 20210108, there were several more packages to land in this snapshot. The new major version of icewm 2.0.0 fixed horizontal scrolling in the icehelp. The windows manager also removed an unwanted separator in the taskbar and added support for the Imlib2 image rendering engine as an alternative for the gdk-pixbuf-xlib rendering engine. Email client mutt 2.0.4 dropped a patch. Web server content retriever wget 1.21 fixed buffer overflows in the progress bar code in some locales. Scripting language php7 updated to version 7.4.14 and fixed one CVE; it also had a fix for dtrace scripts that caused php to crash. About 20 more packages were updated in the snapshot.

Snapshot 20210107 began the week and, with the exception of three Xfce plugin packages, the snapshot was all Plasma 5.20.5. Just two days after being released upstream, plasma-desktop fixed the order of the actions of the emojier and had adjustment fixes for the panel height on the top and left. The Bluetooth devices integrator for Plasma bluedevil5 now shows only paired devices in KConfig Modules (KCM) and applet. Plasma’s network manager paused the scanning of wifi when appropriate to avoid password entry jumping to different used networks.