KDE Plasma, Gear, Frameworks Update in Tumbleweed

The past week produced two openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots and both included a lot of updates for users of KDE.

Plasma, Gear and Frameworks weren’t the only packages to update in the snapshots.

Snapshot 20211019 offered quite a bit of updated packages. Remote access package remmina 1.4.21 provided updates for the GNOME 40 runtime and made some backward compatibility with WebKit versions under 2.32.0. The refreshable braille display package brltty updated to version 6.4 and made sysusers.d a new package while also removing some old SUSE RPM constructs. The PDF rendering library poppler 21.10.0 fixed the rendering of some odd splash patterns and added support for setting custom stamp annotations. Mesa 21.2.4 had several fixes and rolled out patches for both PowerPC and LLVM i386 compiling. A package to get a major update in the snapshot was rdma-core 37.1, which focuses on userspace components for the Linux Kernel’s drivers/infiniband subsystem; this new major version fixed cmake flags to correct paths for pkg-config. KDE’s 5.87.0 Frameworks version had an enormous amount of updated packages in the snapshot. Among the updates was the removal of defunct Python and Ruby script engines with Plasma Framework. The 5.87.0 Breeze Icons package added 22px variants of the preferences icons and the same version of the UI framework package Kirigami fixed Breadcrumb Control on mobile when using layers.

The previous snapshot this week, 20211016, updated the 25th Anniversary Edition of KDE’s Plasma; the 5.23.0 version dives into a cool blue default color scheme and provides System Settings that lets users pick accent colors to make their system pop out with a personal touch. The Kickoff launcher for Plasma, which is located in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, had some large rewritten code to make it faster and easier to use. Plasma also made changes to let users drag-and-drop stuff between native Wayland and XWayland apps. KDE’s 21.08.2 version of Gear restored the ability to quickly switch between “Zoom to Fit” and “Actual Size” with a keyboard shortcut for the App Gwenview and video editing app Kdenlive made a minor timing delay for startup crash detection. The sound editing app Audacity updated to version 3.0.5 had a single bug fix and gimp 2.10.28 improved the dark theme by adding a white border on the mouse-hover. The graphics editor also set a light background for selected text in layers and removed a 3D shadow box. The updated version of git 2.33.1 fixed git pull and git rebase -r for various corner cases and bugs. LibreOffice 7.2.2.2 updated translations and the container command-line utility package skopeo updated to version 1.5.0, which introduced an --ignore option to allow sync command to continue syncing even after a particular image sync fails. Other packages to update in the snapshot were GNOME’s video player totem 3.38.2, python-kiwi 9.24.0 and several 4.2.17 versions of the widget abstraction library libyui.