Leap Heads Into Release Candidate Phase
The openSUSE Release Team says openSUSE Leap 16.1 is close to its Release Candidate (RC) stage, with general availability planned for November.
Leap Release Manager Luboš Kocman told the openSUSE project mailing list that the next build was expected to qualify as the RC. He said it should reach openQA, which is openSUSE’s automated testing system soon.
Kocman said recent changes merged into SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 16.1 had caused an additional delay.
The RC build is expect to arrive this week.
Testers can help by grabbing the latest image from get.opensuse.org/testing, picking a test from the Leap 16.1 manual test plan (high-priority and untried tests help most), and recording their result with their openSUSE username and build number; participants will receive an openSUSE Kudos badge as a thank-you.
The official roadmap had the RC build set for Sept. 16. The build is now running about a week behind that date.
The team plans to produce about one build per week during the RC phase to find and fix any remaining release blockers.
The release team says testing matters most at this stage. Users and contributors can help by:
- Running their usual workflows on the RC builds and reporting critical issues to openSUSE Bugzilla.
- Checking the non-blocking bug list for items assigned to them.
Saved bug queries and known issues are on the openSUSE Known Bugs 16.1 wiki page, and the full schedule is on the openSUSE Roadmap.
Leap 16.1 and SLES 16.1 will launch on the same day because of feedback from the Leap 16.0 release retrospective. Shipping together means Leap users won’t face a gap between the release and the first maintenance updates. Those updates arrive with the SLES 16.1 GA and flow directly to Leap.
What’s New: Notable Package Updates
Leap 16.1 brings a range of desktop, developer, and server updates compared with Leap 16.0:
| Package | Leap 16.0 | Leap 16.1 |
|---|---|---|
| KDE Plasma | 6.4.2 | 6.6.4 |
| KDE Frameworks | 6.16.0 | 6.25.0 |
| Qt | 6.9.1 | 6.11.0 |
| GNOME Shell | 48.4 | 48.8 |
| LibreOffice | 25.2.5 | 26.2.5 |
| PipeWire | 1.4.6 | 1.6.8 |
| NetworkManager | 1.52.0 | 1.54.3 |
| GRUB | 2.12 | 2.14 |
| QEMU | 10.0.13 | 11.0.3 |
| Podman | 5.4.2 | 5.8.2 |
| LLVM | 19 | 21 |
| PHP | 8.4.24 | 8.5.8 |
| MariaDB | 11.8.8 | 12.3.2 |
| Samba | 4.22.11 | 4.23.10 |
| Git | 2.51.0 | 2.53.0 |
KDE users get the biggest jump: two Plasma feature releases and nine Frameworks releases, built on a newer Qt 6.11. On the server and virtualization side, QEMU moves to a new major version, MariaDB jumps to the 12 series, and PHP moves to 8.5.
There are currently no known release blockers.
The original announcement and follow-up are in the openSUSE project mailing list thread.
Member
jimmacBuilding Flatpaks Locally, Part 2
Some of you mentioned the flatpak-builder approach is way too complicated. Indeed it is.
All you need to do with the developer sysext on GNOME OS is to:
foundry init && foundry build
Been building projects left and right today and it's rad.
Tiny Wins for Packagers: End-of-Week Update (2026-09-18)
Stolen!
Bombarded by the deception and lies of the AI industry I chose to sample boy Amodei for the ironic outrage about Chinese companies stealing their dataset. Thus the tune title.
Usually I barely manage to finish up my weekly beats track on a Sunday night. This week I've somehow had some extra time to sink into polishing an actual full track on the Dirtywave M8. Built around the bassline where I've mimicked the approach used on the Analog 4 of fading in a modulated filter and volume pulse over time using slight different tools (the M8 has 4 LFOs and ability to modulate a modulator).
Linux Saloon 220 | Early Edition
Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2026/38
Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,
This week saw the release of 6 snapshots (0910, 0911, 0912, 0914, 0915, and 0916).
The star of this week’s show was undoubtedly KDE, which delivered a stellar triple-header across consecutive releases: KDE Plasma 6.7.5 landed in snapshot 0910, KDE Frameworks 6.30 followed in 0911, and KDE Gear 26.08.1 completed the desktop suite’s major updates in 0912. Beyond the graphical interface, core system integrity was a major focus. Snapshot 0915 brought a crucial security-hardening round, delivering backported glibc CVE fixes alongside security updates for cups, alsa, and gvfs. Snapshot 0916 followed up with further CVE mitigations in freeipmi, 7zip, and xz (fixing a critical invalid memory access bug in the lzma decoders).
Under the hood, snapshot 0915 brought exciting architectural enhancements to Mesa, including enabling the ‘rocket’ Gallium driver for Rockchip NPUs on AArch64 and shipping the ‘Teflon’ TensorFlow Lite delegate in a new subpackage. OpenCV also expanded its media capabilities, enabling native support for both JPEG XL and AVIF, while the Linux Kernel progressed to version 7.2.5 in snapshot 0914.
These 6 snapshots delivered the following updates:
- 389-ds 3.3.1+8c2711bd6
- 7zip 26.03
- bash-completion 2.17.0
- container-selinux 2.251.0
- freeipmi 1.6.19
- fuse3 3.18.3
- gimp 3.2.6
- gnome-maps 50.5
- gnome-software 50.4
- gstreamer 1.28.7
- gtk4 4.22.5
- gvfs 1.60.3
- kbd 2.10.0
- KDE Frameworks 6.30
- KDE Gear 26.08.1
- KDE Plasma 6.7.5
- libgcrypt 1.12.4
- libpcap 1.10.7
- libstorage-ng 4.5.352 & 4.5.353
- Linux Kernel 7.2.5
- llvm23 23.1.1
- openblas 0.3.34
- poppler 26.09.0
- postfix 3.11.7
- python-pip 26.2.1
- selinux-policy 20260910 & 20260914
- shotwell 33.0
- simdutf 9.1.2
- timezone 2026d
- xz 5.8.4
- yast2-python-bindings 5.0.3
- yast2-samba-client 5.0.5
- zchunk 1.5.4
With these updates successfully rolled out, it is time to turn our gaze forward and see what the staging areas are cooking up for the near future:
- Swig 4.5.0: Progress is being made with compatibility updates applied to other packages, such as yast2-python-bindings, but integration issues remain tracked under boo#1275515.
- fontconfig 2.18.3: Still held up as it breaks the AppStream test suite.
- libnettle 4.0.0: Remains explicitly excluded from main staging runs while developers work on resolving test suite breakages in libzypp.
Planet News Roundup
This is a roundup of articles from the openSUSE community listed on planet.opensuse.org. This community blog feed aggregator lists the featured highlights below from Sept. 11 - 17.
This week highlights the release of Agama 24 with a two-for-one announcement covering versions 23 and 24, the beta release of Plasma 6.8 along with its first “This Week in Plasma” review, the first bug-fix update of KDE Gear 26.08 plus feature overviews of Kdenlive and Minuet, the Tumbleweed week 37 review and a September ARM update roundup, Intel’s OpenVINO 2026.4.0 release, the openSUSE Kudos report for August, the reveal of the GNOME 51 wallpapers, and a fond farewell to the Linux Hispano comic strip after 1,144 installments.
Here is a summary and links for each post:
Introducing Enhanced Distribution Support
The Open Build Service blog introduces Enhanced Distribution Support, a beta feature that gives structure to distribution information through a vendor → distribution → release hierarchy, letting maintainers record what they ship, which repositories and architectures each release is built from, and dated lifecycle milestones. It’s an early, purely descriptive first iteration, and the OBS team is asking distribution maintainers what else they need to be able to describe.
OpenVINO 2026.4.0: A New Version Announced
Alessandro’s blog reports on Intel’s OpenVINO 2026.4.0 release, which broadens model support across Intel CPUs, GPUs and NPUs while adding speculative decoding with Multi-Token Prediction. The post also covers EAGLE-3 Tree Drafting, ITT tracing extended to the NPU for VTune, an ASR pipeline for Node.js and idle-model management in the OpenVINO Model Server.
Tumbleweed ARM Updates in September
The openSUSE News blog covers September’s Tumbleweed updates for the ARM port, led by a security-heavy kernel 7.2.5, glibc 2.44 with its large AArch64 push and QEMU 11.1.1. Raspberry Pi owners get a firmware fix that clears up a Wi-Fi scan error, Rockchip and other SBCs receive MediaTek Wi-Fi kernel fixes, and GIMP 3.2.6, shotwell 33.0 and kbd 2.10.0 land AArch64-specific improvements.
GNOME 51 Wallpapers
Jakub Steiner reveals the GNOME 51 wallpaper set, calling the collection evolution rather than revolution as it sticks to its geometric roots. The default is a stylistic touch-up of the GNOME 50 hexagons, images now carry an embedded thumbnail that helps the Appearance panel, and attribution and license data are embedded directly into the files.
Download a Random Linux Hispano Comic Strip in the Terminal
Victorhck shares a pair of scripts for revisiting the 1,144 Linux Hispano comic strips that Danigm published between 2004 and 2026 after the series came to an end. A Python scraper archived every strip into a GitHub repository, while a Bash script picks a random strip and displays it with feh along with its name and publication date.
Syslog-ng repo for Amazon Linux 2023 updated to syslog-ng version 4.12
Peter Czanik reports that his syslog-ng repository for Amazon Linux 2023 has been updated to version 4.12 after a GitHub request finally prompted an update. He recounts how the repo, first created two years ago, sat untouched due to a lack of feedback despite healthy download numbers from Copr, with Java support and slog disabled as in his other repositories.
Kudos August 2026
The openSUSE News blog presents the monthly Kudos report, in which 17 users received 24 kudos and 419 badges were awarded to 251 contributors during August. Bernhard Wiedemann tops the list with five kudos, mostly for his work on Slowroll, and four contributors reached the milestone of 100 Tumbleweed Contributions.
What’s New in Minuet from KDE Gear 26.08, “Enjoy Shiny Stuff” Edition
The KDE Blog closes its KDE Gear 26.08 feature series with Minuet, the music education app that trains the ear through interval, chord, scale and rhythm exercises. Minuet debuts a new interface that works on both desktops and phones, with a reworked home page and navigation sidebar, exercises shown as cards and a search field that filters by translated names and descriptions.
Software Freedom Day 2026
The KDE Blog announces the Dia de la Llibertat del Programari (Software Freedom Day) celebration organized by Caliu on September 19 at the Espai Jove La Fontana in Barcelona, an event where the KDE community is usually well represented. The post translates the Catalan agenda, listing three talks on teaching computing with values, bootstrapping a self-managed forge with Haz-CLI and security on GNU/Linux.
Happy Programmer’s Day
Alessandro’s blog celebrates Programmer’s Day, which falls on the 256th day of the year and explains why the number 256, or 2^8, matters in computing. The post thanks developers for turning coffee into software, errors into lessons and ideas into innovation.
Innit
Jakub Steiner shares how he produced the tune “Innit” for his weeklybeats 2026 project on the Elektron Analog Four rather than his usual Dirtywave M8. After years of avoiding them, he finally learned the box’s performance macros, which bundle up to five track parameters onto a single knob and make live performance far less stressful than pre-programming a sequence.
Plasma 6.8 Beta Released – This Week in Plasma
The KDE Blog translates Nate Graham’s weekly Plasma development report covering the 6.8 beta. Kup joins Plasma as its backup system, clipboard and MIME-action settings become far clearer, the on-screen keyboard button now behaves as expected on lock and login screens, and KWin gains support for the Wayland commit_timing protocol.
Linux Saloon 219 | Butterbian and ButterKnife Distribution Exploration
Nathan Wolf posts episode 219 of the Linux Saloon podcast, covering activities around the Vintage Computer Fest Midwest. The episode gathers user experiences with the Butterknife and Butterbian distributions through polls and links out to upcoming events and participant projects.
First Update of KDE Gear 26.08
The KDE Blog presents the first update of KDE Gear 26.08, released almost a month after the feature set, bringing more stability, better translations and small improvements. It lists resolved issues across apps, libraries and widgets, including an arrow-orientation fix in KDE Connect, room-map handling in Kongress and an unexpected crash when saving documents in Okular.
Plasma 6.8 Beta Released
The KDE Blog reports that the beta of Plasma 6.8 has been released and highlights changes drawn from its changelog, from the new Hanabi wallpaper replacing Waterfall in Breeze and Nepali calendar support to GTK4 window decoration fixes, an AppStream Preview backend in Discover and a QML rewrite of DrKonqi’s coredump viewer. It encourages users to install the beta and report bugs to help polish the release.
Tumbleweed – Review of the Week 2026/37
Dominique Leuenberger and Victorhck review the four Tumbleweed snapshots (0904, 0907, 0908 and 0909) of week 2026/37, which delivered Linux kernel 7.2.3 and 7.2.4, LibreOffice 26.8.0.3, QEMU 11.1.1, zypper 1.14.101 and more.
Tiny Wins for Packagers: End-of-Week Update
The Open Build Service blog shares its end-of-week “Tiny Wins” update, which shipped a fix preventing a second click on the repository dropdown after an autocomplete selection and ensured the generated SBOM includes the SPDX V3 createdBy field. It also reports that build.opensuse.org served 22.8 million HTTP requests and produced 2.38 million package builds over the last seven days.
Agama: Releasing Version 24
The Agama blog announces Agama 24 in a two-for-one post covering versions 23 and 24 after a stabilization phase focused on testing and polish. Language, keyboard and time zone now share a single searchable form, network connections can be bound to devices through a sortable device table, and JSON search sections gained much more expressive device matching.
View more blogs or learn to publish your own on planet.opensuse.org.
Building Flatpaks Locally
I like to run my Linux as an operating system, so I usually resort to toolbox for packages and development. However flatpak-builder is distributed as a flatpak itself, so here's how you can go about building flatpaks yourself for when GNOME Nighlies are not enough.
On GNOME OS, some developer tools like git and toolbox are in the base image.
Installing flatpak-builder
flatpak-builder isn't part of base OS though. It is distributed on Flathub as org.flatpak.Builder. Install it like any other Flatpak:
flatpak install flathub org.flatpak.Builder
Building and Installing Locally
Here's how I build Shaper, an icon designer for GNOME symbolics.
flatpak run --command=flatpak-builder \
org.flatpak.Builder --user --install \
--force-clean build-dir org.gnome.design.Shaper.json
And that's it!
Developer extension
There are some extra tools for development available for GNOME OS. You get them by enabling the developer system extension:
sudo updatectl enable devel --now
So instead of installing the flatpak, you get flatpak-builder as a utility.
Fixing a UTF-8 Encoding Crash in OBS’s Workflow YAML Downloader
A few weeks ago I picked up my first real bug in the Open Build Service (OBS) codebase, part of the openSUSE project: a production crash that had been showing up on Errbit every time a GitHub workflow config with the “wrong” character in it got synced. Here’s what broke, why it broke, and how the fix closed it out.
The bug
OBS lets you wire up a GitHub repository so pushes trigger a workflow, things like package rebuilds via webhooks. When that webhook fires, Workflows::YAMLDownloader pulls down the workflow's YAML config file from GitHub and writes it to a Tempfile so OBS can parse it.
The crash looked like this in production:
"\xE2" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8
Thrown from IO#write, inside Workflows::YAMLDownloader#create_temp_file.
Why it happened
GitHub’s API returns file contents Base64-encoded. OBS decodes that with Base64.decode64, which hands back a plain Ruby string, but that string is tagged with the ASCII-8BIT encoding (Ruby's way of saying "this is just raw bytes, no assumptions about text"). That's correct and expected; Base64.decode64 has no way to know what encoding the original bytes represent.
The problem shows up one step later. Rails’ Tempfile defaults to expecting UTF-8 when you write to it. So when OBS calls .write with an ASCII-8BIT string, Ruby tries to transcode it, converting the bytes from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 on the fly. That's fine for plain ASCII content. But the moment the YAML file contains a multi-byte UTF-8 character, an em dash, a smart quote, anything outside the ASCII range, Ruby has no valid transcoding rule to apply, and it raises Encoding::UndefinedConversionError.
In short: a perfectly valid UTF-8 file was crashing because Ruby thought it was starting from ASCII-8BIT and tried to “translate” bytes that didn’t need translating at all.
The fix
The core of it comes down to one call:
decoded_content.force_encoding('UTF-8')added right before the Tempfile write. The full diff landed at three lines changed across two files: the fix itself in yaml_downloader.rb, plus a matching update to the spec covering that code path, so the regression is actually tested going forward and not just patched.
The key distinction with the fix itself is force_encoding versus a real transcode. force_encoding doesn't touch a single byte; it just relabels the string, telling Ruby "trust me, these bytes are already UTF-8." Since the bytes coming out of Base64.decode64 genuinely were valid UTF-8 all along (they just carried the wrong encoding tag), relabeling is exactly the correct fix. No transcoding attempt means no UndefinedConversionError, because there's nothing left to convert. Ruby writes the bytes exactly as they are.
What I’d tell someone hitting this themselves
If you’re decoding Base64 content in Ruby and writing it somewhere that expects text, check what encoding the decoded string is actually tagged with (str.encoding) before you assume it matches what the destination wants. Base64.decode64 will hand you ASCII-8BIT regardless of what the original content was; it's on you to correctly re-tag it if you know better, and force_encoding is the right tool for that when you're confident the bytes are already valid in the target encoding. Reach for a real transcode (.encode) only when the bytes genuinely aren't in the target encoding yet.
Getting the PR in
This was my first contribution to OBS, and I want to call out something small that made a real difference: I asked the maintainer, hennevogel, if it was okay for me to take the issue before opening a PR. His reply was simple: “no need to ask me. Just PR small things :)”, which told me a lot about how this project, and the openSUSE community around it, actually wants newcomers to engage. Low friction, just ship the fix.
The PR (#20236) was small, three lines changed across two files, reviewed, and merged. Small fix, but a good first real look at how OBS’s Rails frontend talks to external Git hosts, and that boundary, it turns out, is where interesting bugs tend to live.