There were several software package updates for openSUSE Tumbleweed during March.

Tumbleweed saw three Plasma 6.6 updates bringing progressive bugfixes to KWin, the system tray, Spectacle, and the Kicker launcher. KDE Frameworks advanced to 6.24.0 with nanosecond-precision timestamps in KIO and a new Kirigami StyleHints API. The Linux kernel moved from 6.19.5 to 6.19.9 with broad fixes across audio, display, and filesystem drivers. Both the Linux Kernel and FreeRDP fixed several Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures, and Mesa 26.0.2 resolved visual corruption on RDNA 4 hardware and a Counter-Strike 2 regression on Intel Arc.

As always, be sure to roll back using snapper if any issues arise.

For more details on the change logs for the month, visit the openSUSE Factory mailing list.

New Features and Enhancements

Plasma 6.6.1, 6.6.2 & Plasma 6.6.3: Version 6.6.3 finished the month with the third update. Application launcher Kicker receives several fixes for the sidebar, icon display, and expanded root list width calculations. The Task Manager now keeps thumbnails properly aligned in horizontal group tooltips. Spectacle resolves a crash on quick region selection and fixes a pixel-off error in the magnifier tool. The system tray sees improved popup placement on Wayland. PowerDevil restores the battery badge for 100 percent charge and syncs the manual inhibition switch with external changes. Plasma 6.6.2 has KWin resolve crashes in DRM output handling, improves mouse tracking with caret-based zoom, and fixes input region gaps in window decorations. The Kicker applet sees refinements in visual search, scrollbar behavior, and hover logic. Spectacle fixes a crash when exporting via KDE Connect, and System Settings now correctly navigates to subcategories from search results. In version 6.6.1, KWin sees the most changes with fixes for corner rounding applying to both decorations and window surfaces, zoom now works correctly on rotated outputs, and software brightness dimming on external screens on screens were enhanced. The tile editor no longer triggers on key repeat, and interactive move-resize no longer unconditionally raises windows. Clipboard and drag-and-drop teardown under XWayland is improved, and*Wine/Proton color management gains better compatibility. The Kicker application launcher for the Plasma Desktop receives multiple fixes for the icon display, layout margins, and search field behavior. The Task Manager corrects tooltip sizing. The digital clock now properly localizes digits, and the media controller fixes premature label truncation. Plasma Network Manager improves icon accuracy for Wi-Fi disabled states and now responds to external configuration changes. Discover improves Flatpak app resolution and exposes proper star count ratings. Powerdevil adds a power level check before executing critical actions that prevent premature shutdowns.

GNOME Control Center 49.5: The Display and Power panels now handle a missing UPower service instead of failing. An infinite loop when switching battery charge modes on systems with multiple batteries was fixed. Sound and Bluetooth device switching regressions are resolved through an updated libgnome-volume-control.

libxml2 2.15.2: A significant version jump that removes the built-in HTTP client and LZMA compression support, and the parser option XML_PARSE_UNZIP is now required to read compressed data. HTML serialization and character encoding handling are brought more in line with the HTML5 specification, and additional accessors for xmlParserCtxt were added for developers. Several previously patched CVEs are now resolved upstream, including fixes for attribute normalization and standalone checks. Python bindings are no longer built as they are scheduled for removal in 2.16, and Schematron support has similarly been dropped.

Xfce 4.20.2: This update covers the screensaver, session manager, and display settings. xfce4-screensaver fixes a wrong conditional in the lock plug, improves theme preview rendering, and switches from pidof to pgrep for more reliable process detection. The overlay window handling is reworked to use a single permanent window, improving device reliability. xfce4-session fixes an idle function and prevents multiple logout dialogs from being created. It also adds gnome-keyring as a Secret portal provider and improves keyboard layout detection on Wayland. xfce4-settings improves display management by checking EDID to detect output list changes, adds a missing condition for new Wayland outputs, and falls back to output name when EDID data is duplicated.

KDE Frameworks 6.24.0: This updates see KIO gain nanosecond-precision timestamps across file operations, improved paste dialogs with proper titles, and refined trash handling. KCodecs overhauls encoding with safer memory management (using unique_ptr) and Kirigami introduces a new StyleHints API to unify theme behavior. Baloo fixes database access mode issues and KTextEditor adds search history clearing and safer clipboard handling.

7-Zip 26.00: The file manager now uses the file name as a secondary sorting key for more intuitive file list ordering, and the benchmark tool supports systems with more than 64 CPU threads. A bug preventing correct extraction of TAR archives containing sparse files is fixed.

KDE Gear 25.12.3: Kdenlive addresses numerous stability and usability issues, including crashes in the curve editor, audio scrubbing with “Pause on Seek” disabled, and provides better handling of multi-stream clips and improved effect management. Itinerary and Kitinerary expand travel support with new extractors for ferry tickets. NeoChat refines room list navigation, fixes emoticon editor layout issues, prevents timeline scrolling during reactions, and resolves a crash. KMail restores proper rendering of plain-text emails and Tokodon fixes alt-text editing and account switching after login failures.

ImageMagick 7.1.2.16 - 7.1.2.18: The image editor update for version 7.1.2.18 improves the reliability of animated image handling by fixing frame delay parsing and resolves a visual artifact where the -dissolve composite operation introduced random noise. Version 7.1.2.17 focused on addressing multiple vulnerabilities and security advisories are resolved along with out-of-band data handling improvements. Version 7.1.2.16 hardens security and adds overflow checks to several image write paths including JXL, PS3, sixel, SGI, and BMP/DIB. It fixes a heap over-read in BilateralBlurImage with even-dimension kernels, a NULL pointer dereference in HEIC NCLX color profile allocation, and a double-free in SVG gradientTransform parsing.

Ruby 4.0.2: This update fixes a YJIT bug. A segfault with argument forwarding combined with splat and positional arguments is resolved, along with a GC crash in String#% and a crash on signal raise. A 20 percent performance regression in Rails related to global allocatable slots and empty pages is addressed. Several Prism parser issues were corrected including misparsing of standalone in pattern matching and the and? predicate being confused with the and keyword.

FreeRDP 3.24.1: This update sees the API comprehensively marked with [[nodiscard]] to surface unchecked function return values. Smartcard support is improved including ECC key handling in PKCS#11 enumeration, proxy support is extended to RFX and NSC graphics modes, and SDL3 multi-monitor scaling is introduced. Numerous memory leaks across connection setup, settings copying, and smartcard paths were resolved.

libavif 1.4.0: This update adds support for Sample Transform schemes from the AVIF 1.2 specification, which enables 16-bit AVIF file handling and grid-based derived image items. Data behind a document for the software handles picture files was made with avifenc, which can now read PNG or JPEG files through stdin via --stdin-format and supports converting JPEG files with Apple-style gain maps. PNG decoding now respects cICP chunks for color information as per the PNG Third Edition specification. Encoding defaults have been refined; AOM_TUNE_IQ is now used for still color samples with libaom v3.13.0+, while AOM_TUNE_PSNR is used for alpha to avoid ringing artifacts from SSIM tuning. Support for libaom versions 2.0.0 and earlier is removed.

Key Package Updates

Linux kernel 6.19.5 - 6.19.9:: The 6.19.9 update improved audio with a speaker pop fix for Star Labs StarFighter hardware and the Btrfs filesystem resolves a space info lock issue during periodic reclaim. NFS3 now correctly returns EISDIR when a create operation encounters a directory alias. The 6.19.8 kernel was dominated by a major batch of AppArmor fixes and multiple CVE-tracked fixes that were backported. The 6.19.7 release receives multiple corrections for CFS/EEVDF scheduler including fixes for zero_vruntime tracking, lag clamping, and slice protection timing. The AMD XDNA accelerator driver resolves several issues including a crash when destroying suspended hardware contexts. The 6.19.6 kernel had fixes led by extensive perf tooling corrections including reference count leaks, srcline printing with inlines, and Zen 5 vendor event definitions for AMD. Btrfs replaces a BUG() call with proper error handling for unexpected delayed ref types, adds fallback to buffered IO for data profiles with duplication, and improves user interrupt handling in btrfs_trim_fs(). The 6.19.5 releases sees Btrfs correct a block_group_tree dirty list corruption and a chunk allocation abort caused by non-consecutive gaps. GFS2 resolves quota handling and an inline data write path. The SMB client fixes a potential use-after-free and double free in smb2_open_file(). A netfilter nf_tables fix adds an abort skip removal flag for set types to address tracked security-relevant issues.

GStreamer 1.28.1: This update includes a new whisper-based speech-to-text transcription element and the speechmatics element now supports detecting audio events like applause, laughter, and music. Reverse playback and gap handling are improved across multiple components. The V4L2 subsystem gains support for AV1 stateful decoding, and CUDA/GL interop copy paths in cudaupload and cudadownload are fixed. WebRTC components gain the ability to specify custom headers for signalling servers and negotiate H.264 profile and level for encoded input. Various memory leaks, build issues, and race conditions were resolved.

curl 8.19.0: This release addresses four security vulnerabilities and provides new features like initial support for MQTTS and fractional values for --limit-rate and --max-filesize. Support for OpenSSL-QUIC was dropped. A potential NULL dereference in Curl_h1_req_parse_read() was fixed along with a potential out-of-bounds read in OpenSSL debug logging. The build now enables NTLM authentication for compatibility with certain Exchange Server endpoints.

systemd 259.3 & 259.5: The 259.5 update had a notable fix and corrected systemd-update-helper from incorrectly skipping systemctl disable during package removal. A new clean-state command is introduced and triggered automatically at the end of any transaction installing unit files. The systemd-container subpackage now requires libarchive instead of tar for archive handling. Additional systemd-update-helper fixes address do_install_units() incorrectly returning an error when no units need preset, and the clean-state command itself is corrected to remove the full state directory rather than just a subdirectory. The 259.3 was a major version upgrade. The libcap dependency was removed entirely, with its system call wrappers reimplemented directly in systemd.

GnuPG 2.5.18: This update adds support for deleting composite secret keys in gpg-agent and fixes armor parsing when no CRC is found. A recent regression in pkdecrypt with TPM RSA keys is resolved, and scdaemon adds support for D-Trust Card 6.1/6.4. The dirmngr key server search now prints all UID records for a key, which fixes a regression dating back to 2015.

Mesa 26.0.2: The release fixes visual corruption on RDNA 4 in DX11/DXVK titles like Mafia III, a GPU hang with PS epilogs and secondary command buffers, and missing L2 cache invalidation with streamout on GFX12. A Counter-Strike 2 visual glitch regression on Intel A770 is resolved. The Panfrost Bifrost compiler fixes a failure from incorrect vectorization and spill placement issues. An OpenGL VRAM memory leak when setting uniform variables is corrected. X11 shared memory attachment checks are added across drisw, EGL, GLX, and Vulkan WSI paths to prevent allocation failures.

GTK3 3.24.52: This update fixes a Firefox crash at gdk_wayland_drag_context_manage_dnd() when a toplevel Wayland surface is missing, and resolves wild strobing in multi-window mode. A refresh rate calculation overflow on 32-bit targets is corrected, and recolored icon images are no longer constantly reloaded. Accessibility events for unfocused GtkTreeView widgets are fixed, and XKB initialization failures on Wayland are now handled more gracefully.

libtpms 0.10.2: This update fixes a memory leak by freeing the KDF context and resolves incorrect IV retrieval when using OpenSSL 3.0 or later. A build fix for compatibility with newer glibc is also included. For Tumbleweed users running TPM-based virtualization with QEMU or swtpm, this is a security-relevant update.

xfsprogs 6.18.0: This update spans three releases. The mkfs.xfs tool gains several improvements including the ability to configure desired maximum atomic write sizes, AG size alignment based on atomic write capabilities, autodetection of log stripe unit for external log devices, and new default features enabled out of the box with a 2025 LTS config file. Zoned filesystem support is refined with fixes for zone capacity checks on sequential zones and improved default maximum open zones. The proto subsystem adds the ability to populate a filesystem directly from a directory. xfs_scrub removes its EXPERIMENTAL warnings and fixes a null pointer crash in scrub_render_ino_descr. Cross-architecture log CRC mismatches between i386 and other architectures are corrected, and libxfs gains support for reproducible filesystems using deterministic time and seed values. Deprecated sysctl knobs and mount options are removed. The Python dependency is also dropped from the main package since the xfs_protofile script is not essential.

Security Updates

Python 3.11.15:

• CVE-2025-11468: Fixes a header injection flaw in email header folding where long comments with unfoldable characters could allow injecting headers into email messages.

• CVE-2025-12084: Addresses quadratic complexity that could lead to denial of service when processing deeply nested documents.

• CVE-2025-6075: Resolves a performance degradation in os.path.expandvars() when user-controlled values are passed for environment variable expansion.

• CVE-2026-2297: Fixes an issue where CPython’s import hook for legacy .pyc files did not trigger sys.audit handlers and could potentially allow a security monitoring bypass.

bind 9.20.21:

• CVE-2026-1519: Fixes a flaw that could potentially lead to denial of service.

• CVE-2026-3104: Addresses a memory leak that could cause unbounded memory growth and an out-of-memory condition.

• CVE-2026-3119: Resolves an issue where an authenticated query could cause a termination unexpectedly.

• CVE-2026-3591: Fixes a use-after-return flaw that could allow an attacker to bypass ACL restrictions via crafted DNS requests.

Linux kernel 6.19.8::

• CVE-2026-23230: Fixes a vulnerability in the ksmbd kernel SMB server.

• CVE-2026-23220: Addresses an infinite loop caused by next_smb2_rc in ksmbd.

• CVE-2026-23226: Resolves a missing lock to protect ksmbd channel list.

• CVE-2026-23228: Fixes a leak of active_num_conn in the ksmbd SMB server.

• CVE-2025-71231: Addresses an out-of-bounds index in the crypto IAA driver.

• CVE-2026-23222: Fixes a memory allocation issue in the crypto OMAP driver.

• CVE-2026-23229: Resolves a missing spinlock protection in the crypto virtio driver.

• CVE-2025-71237: Fixes a potential block overflow in nilfs2 that could cause corruption.

• CVE-2025-71230: Addresses an issue where HFS superblock info was not always cleaned up properly.

• CVE-2025-71229: Resolves an alignment fault in the rtw88 WiFi driver.

• CVE-2025-71236: Fixes missing validation before freeing resources in the qla2xxx SCSI driver.

• CVE-2025-71235: Addresses a module unload race condition in the qla2xxx SCSI driver.

• CVE-2025-71232: Resolves a memory leak in an error path in the qla2xxx SCSI driver.

• CVE-2026-23225: Fixes an incorrect CID ownership assumption in the scheduler mmcid subsystem.

• CVE-2026-23221: Addresses a use-after-free in the fsl-mc bus driver override handling.

• CVE-2026-23224: Resolves a use-after-free in erofs for file-backed mounts.

• CVE-2026-23223: Fixes a use-after-free in XFS btree block owner checking.

• CVE-2026-23227: Addresses a missing lock protection in the Exynos VIDI DRM driver.

• CVE-2025-71233: Resolves an issue with asynchronous sub-group creation in PCI endpoint.

• CVE-2025-71234: Fixes a slab out-of-bounds access in the rtl8xxxu WiFi driver.

• CVE-2025-71238: Addresses a double-free in the qla2xxx SCSI driver’s bsg_done handler.

• CVE-2026-23236: Fixes improper ioctl memory copy in the smscufx framebuffer driver.

• CVE-2026-23235: Resolves an out-of-bounds access in f2fs sysfs attribute handling.

• CVE-2026-23234: Addresses a use-after-free in f2fs write end I/O handling.

libtpms 0.10.2:

• CVE-2026-21444: Fixes a flaw in libtpms that weakened encryption and decryption.

LibVNCServer:

• CVE-2026-32853: Fixes a vulnerability where a crafted message could lead to information disclosure or denial of service.

• CVE-2026-32854: Addresses an issue where crafted requests could cause a denial of service.

freeipmi 1.6.17:

• CVE-2026-33554: Resolves improper memory handling and data validation that could lead to stack buffer overflows and acceptance of malformed payloads.

nghttp2 1.68.1:

• CVE-2026-27135: Addresses a vulnerability that fixes an assertion failure from missing state validation.

inkscape 7.1.2.15:

• CVE-2026-24481: Fixes a heap information disclosure when processing malformed PSD files.

• CVE-2026-25794: Addresses a heap buffer overflow via integer overflow when writing images with large dimensions.

• CVE-2026-25796: Resolves a memory leak that could be exploited for denial of service.

• CVE-2026-25637: Fixes a memory leak in the ASHLAR image writer that could lead to denial of service.

• CVE-2026-25576: Addresses a heap buffer over-read in multiple raw image format handlers potentially disclosing sensitive information.

• CVE-2026-26983: Fixes a NULL pointer dereference in the MSL interpreter that could cause a crash.

• CVE-2026-26284: Resolves a use-after-free that could lead to denial of service or code execution.

• CVE-2026-26283: Addresses an infinite loop in the JPEG encoder that could cause denial of service.

• CVE-2026-25965: Fixes a path traversal that could allow reading arbitrary files on the system.

• CVE-2026-25967: Addresses improper encoding or escaping of output that could allow arbitrary command execution.

• CVE-2026-25989: Fixes an integer overflow in the internal SVG decoder that could cause denial of service.

• CVE-2026-25968: Resolves a memory leak in coders that write raw pixel data potentially leading to denial of service.

• CVE-2026-24485: Addresses an out-of-bounds read that could cause a crash.

• CVE-2026-25985: Fixes unbounded resource allocation in the SVG decoder that could lead to denial of service.

• CVE-2026-25987: Resolves an integer overflow in the SVG decoder potentially causing denial of service.

• CVE-2026-25966: Addresses a security policy bypass via fd: pseudo-filenames allowing stdin/stdout access.

• CVE-2026-25799: Fixes an out-of-bounds read that could disclose memory contents.

• CVE-2026-25798: Resolves an out-of-bounds read potentially leading to information disclosure or a crash.

• CVE-2026-25795: Fixes a NULL pointer dereference that could cause a denial of service.

• CVE-2026-26066: Addresses resource exhaustion when writing IPTCTEXT that could lead to denial of service.

• CVE-2026-25638: Resolves a memory leak that could be exploited for denial of service.

• CVE-2026-25797: Fixes a code injection issue that could allow arbitrary code execution.

• CVE-2026-25897: Addresses a heap buffer overflow in the sun decoder potentially causing a crash.

• CVE-2026-25970: Resolves a memory leak that could lead to denial of service via image processing.

• CVE-2026-25982: Fixes a use-after-free that could lead to denial of service or code execution.

• CVE-2026-25983: Addresses an out-of-bounds read in the PCD coder that could disclose memory contents.

• CVE-2026-25898: Resolves an out-of-bounds read that could cause a crash or information disclosure.

• CVE-2026-25971: Fixes a memory leak in the text coder that could lead to denial of service.

• CVE-2026-25988: Addresses a use-after-free in the meta coder potentially allowing code execution.

• CVE-2026-25969: Resolves a memory leak that could lead to denial of service via image processing.

• CVE-2026-25986: Fixes a vulnerability that could lead to denial of service when processing crafted images.

expat 2.7.5:

• CVE-2026-32776: Fixes a NULL pointer when handling empty external parameter entity content.

• CVE-2026-32777: Addresses an infinite loop that could lead to denial of service.

• CVE-2026-32778: Resolves a NULL pointer after an earlier out-of-memory condition.

TigerVNC:

• CVE-2026-34352: Fixes incorrect permissions that could allow other users to observe or manipulate screen contents, or cause a crash.

clamav 1.5.2:

• CVE-2026-20031: Fixes an error handling bug that could crash the program and cause a denial of service.

FreeRDP 3.24.1:

• CVE-2026-29774: Fixes a client-side heap buffer overflow.

• CVE-2026-29775: Addresses an off-by-one boundary check in the bitmap cache subsystem that could cause out-of-bounds read/write.

• CVE-2026-29776: Resolves an integer underflow that could lead to a crash.

• CVE-2026-31806: Fixes a heap buffer overflow caused by unchecked bitmap dimensions from a malicious server.

• CVE-2026-31883: Addresses a size_t underflow leading to a heap buffer overflow via the RDPSND channel.

• CVE-2026-31884: Resolves a division-by-zero in the ADPCM decoders when nBlockAlign is 0, causing a crash.

• CVE-2026-31885: Fixes an out-of-bounds read in the ADPCM decoders due to missing predictor and step_index bounds checks.

giflib:

• CVE-2026-23868: Fixes a double-free vulnerability from a shallow copy that could lead to memory corruption.

curl 8.19.0:

• CVE-2026-1965: Fixes bad reuse of HTTP Negotiate connections that could lead to authentication bypass with wrong credentials.

• CVE-2026-3783: Addresses a token leak when following redirects with netrc credentials.

• CVE-2026-3784: Resolves wrong proxy connection reuse with different credentials, potentially exposing authenticated sessions.

• CVE-2026-3805: Fixes a use-after-free in SMB connection reuse that could lead to a crash or potential code execution.

QEMU 10.2.2:

• CVE-2026-2243: Fixes an out-of-bounds read in QEMU’s VMDK image handling that could lead to information disclosure or denial of service.

• CVE-2026-3196: Addresses an integer overflow that could allow a malicious guest to cause unbounded memory allocation and denial of service on the host.

udisks2:

• CVE-2026-26104: Fixes a missing authorization check that allowed unprivileged users to back up LUKS encryption headers and potentially expose sensitive cryptographic metadata.

• CVE-2026-26103: Addresses a missing authorization check that allowed unprivileged users to restore LUKS encryption headers, which could potentially render encrypted volumes inaccessible.

GVFS 1.58.2:

• CVE-2026-28296: Fixes a CRLF injection flaw in the FTP backend that could allow a remote attacker to inject arbitrary FTP commands via crafted file paths.

python-tornado6

• CVE-2026-31958: Fixes a denial-of-service vulnerability where requests with thousands of parts could cause excessive CPU consumption.

libjxl 0.11.2:

• CVE-2026-1837: Fixes a memory corruption issue when processing crafted grayscale images with LCMS2 that could potentially lead to code execution or information disclosure.

util-linux:

• CVE-2026-3184: Addresses improper hostname canonicalization that could allow bypass of host-based PAM access control rules.

sdbootutil:

• CVE-2026-25701: Fixes an insecure temporary file vulnerability that could allow local users to access private information or manipulate boot configuration data.

ImageMagick 7.1.2.17:

• CVE-2026-32259: Fixes a stack-based buffer overflow when a memory allocation fails that could potentially allow writes past the end of a buffer.

GraphicsMagick:

• CVE-2026-25799: Provides a fix that could lead to a crash and denial of service.

• CVE-2026-28690: Fixes a stack buffer overflow vulnerability that could lead to a crash or potential code execution.

• CVE-2026-30883: Addresses a heap overflow when encoding a PNG image with an extremely large image profile.

libsoup2:

• CVE-2026-1760: Fixes improper handling of HTTP requests combining certain headers that could lead to HTTP request smuggling and potential denial of service.

• CVE-2026-1467: Addresses a lack of input sanitization that could lead to unintended or unauthorized HTTP requests.

• CVE-2026-1539: Resolves proxy authentication credentials being leaked via the Proxy-Authorization header when handling HTTP redirects.

• CVE-2026-0716: Fixes a flaw in WebSocket frame processing that could cause out-of-bounds memory reads, potentially leading to memory exposure or a crash.

freetype2 2.14.2:

• CVE-2026-23865: Fixes an integer overflow in the FreeType library that could allow an out-of-bounds read when parsing OpenType variable fonts.

exiv2 0.28.8:

• CVE-2026-25884: Fixes an out-of-bounds read in the CRW image parser when processing crafted image files.

• CVE-2026-27631: Addresses an integer overflow causing an uncaught exception that could lead to a crash and denial of service.

• CVE-2026-27596: Resolves an out-of-bounds read in preview handling that could cause a crash when processing crafted image files.

• CVE-2025-54080: Fixes an out-of-bounds read triggered when writing metadata into a crafted image file, potentially causing a crash.

• CVE-2025-55304: Addresses quadratic performance in ICC profile parsing that could lead to denial of service.

• CVE-2025-26623: Resolves a heap buffer overflow when writing metadata into a crafted image file, potentially allowing code execution.

Salt:

• CVE-2026-31958: Fixes a denial-of-service vulnerability where requests could cause excessive CPU consumption.

openexr 3.4.6:

• CVE-2026-27622: Fixes an out-of-bounds write that could potentially lead to code execution when processing crafted EXR files.

Users are advised to update to the latest versions to mitigate these vulnerabilities.

Conclusion

March 2026 was a month defined by refinement and security hardening across the openSUSE Tumbleweed stack. The three Plasma 6.6 point releases demonstrated KDE’s steady cadence of desktop polish, while the kernel’s progression from 6.19.5 to 6.19.9 kept hardware support and filesystem reliability moving forward. Security was a clear theme throughout the month, with FreeRDP, curl, libsoup2, and the kernel itself all receiving significant CVE attention alongside a broad sweep of image processing fixes across GraphicsMagick, ImageMagick, and exiv2. Under the hood, the jump to libxml2 2.15.2 marked a meaningful step forward in web standards alignment, and GStreamer 1.28.1 pushed multimedia capabilities forward with speech-to-text transcription and AV1 decoding support.

Slowroll Arrivals

Please note that these updates also apply to Slowroll and arrive between an average of 5 to 10 days after being released in Tumbleweed snapshot. This monthly approach has been consistent for many months, ensuring stability and timely enhancements for users. Updated packages for Slowroll are regularly published in emails on openSUSE Factory mailing list.

Contributing to openSUSE Tumbleweed

Stay updated with the latest snapshots by subscribing to the openSUSE Factory mailing list. For those Tumbleweed users who want to contribute or want to engage with detailed technological discussions, subscribe to the openSUSE Factory mailing list . The openSUSE team encourages users to continue participating through bug reports, feature suggestions and discussions.

Your contributions and feedback make openSUSE Tumbleweed better with every update. Whether reporting bugs, suggesting features, or participating in community discussions, your involvement is highly valued.

We have a couple of news to share with you on the package version tracking feature in OBS. We extended the feature in the API space, allow to skip version tracking for individual packages and display the version info in a couple more places. These updates are part of the Foster Collaboration beta program. You can find more information about the beta program here. Our efforts to foster collaboration started in August 2024, when we...

The series for openSUSE Leap 15 is coming to an end after nearly eight years of providing a consistent community distribution that’s upgradable to SUSE’s enterprise product. Leap 15.6 will reach End of Life (EOL) at the close of this month closing out an end of an era as it will no longer receive maintenance or security updates going forward.

The Leap 15 journey began it journey on May 25, 2018, when 15.0 was released as a fresh community build on top of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15. It brought a huge variety of new software along with a easy migration to SLE, transactional updates, server roles, scalable cloud images, and more.

What followed was an impressively long run of incremental releases from Leap 15.1 to 15.6 as each stable release aligned with its twin, which is source and binary compatible, and delivered maintenance and security updates to users over several years.

The series far exceeded promises and ultimately spanned nearly eight years of active support. With Leap 15.6 going EOL, users who wish to continue receiving maintenance and security updates should upgrade to Leap 16. Leap 16 is expected to go to 16.6 in Fall 2031 and will have 24 months of support for a point release.

Running an unsupported release means your system will no longer receive patches for vulnerabilities, which poses a real security risk over time. The upgrade path to Leap 16 is the recommended way to stay protected and supported.

You can download openSUSE Leap 16 and use the migration tool to upgrade.

Leap 15.6 itself received nearly 24 months of support, which extended the traditional support period of 18 months by about six months. With Leap 16, users can expect a full 24 months of community support per point release, which is a commitment that reflects the significant effort from maintainers to keep users protected.

Thank you to all the contributors, packagers, and users who made the Leap 15 series such a long-lasting and reliable platform. Here’s to the next chapter with Leap 16!

Almost 15 years ago, Balabit had a campaign, stating that syslog-ng could process 650k messages a second. Now I am happy to present 7 million EPS (events per second). Timing the announcement to April 1 is not a coincidence :-)

While the 650k EPS measurement was true, it was misleading. This value was measured right after syslog-ng 3.2 introduced multi-threading, in lab environment, under optimal circumstances, using synthetic log messages. However, there was no fine print explaining this, just the statement that syslog-ng could process 650k EPS. It was fixed after a while, but it took years to recover from the effects of this marketing campaign, and engineers ten years later still had a nervous breakdown when someone mentioned “650k”. Why? Because from that moment, everyone expected syslog-ng to collect logs at that message rate in a production environment with complex configurations. Which was of course not the case.

Fast-forward to today, I’m happy to share that:

syslog-ng can collect logs at 7 million EPS

• Is this measurement value valid? Yes.

• Does it apply to real world? No.

• Does it sound good? Definitely :-)

The tool: sngbench

I love playing with various non-x86 systems. I have various ARM, POWER, MIPS systems at home, and sometimes I access other architectures, like RISC-V remotely. And, of course, not just different architectures, but different operating systems: various Linux distributions, MacOS, FreeBSD, sometimes also other BSD variants. I’m a server guy, and for the past 15+ years: a syslog-ng guy. Sometimes I had access to an exotic system on the other side of the world only for less than an hour, but I almost always tested syslog-ng.

For many years I had a bunch of shell scripts and configs to benchmark syslog-ng performance. Not for real world production loads, but rather for comparing architectures and operating systems. I needed a script which could do measurements with minimal dependencies and do it quickly, in one go. This is how sngbench was born, based on my previous ugly scripts. It has quite a few advantages and shortcomings:

• Minimal dependencies: bash and syslog-ng

• No complex setup: everything runs on the same host

• network bandwidth is not a limiting factor

• loggen and syslog-ng processes are competing for resources

• Two bundled configurations: a performance tuned and the default syslog-ng.conf from openSUSE with minimal modifications to add a TCP source

• By default, very short (20 seconds) measurements, so disk I/O is not a limiting factor

• Many different test scenarios: from a single TCP connection to 4 * 128

Of course this describes just the “factory defaults”. You can easily change the test scenarios and configurations too.

How I reached 7 million EPS, and why it is not relevant

I was testing syslog-ng code which was not yet even merged to the development branch. First, I tested these patches with various settings. Along the way I remembered that Splunk guidelines mention so-rcvbuf tuning also for TCP connections. Previously I only used that for optimizing UDP performance. Now I have done it for TCP. Wonders happened :-)

But, of course, the main question is: can you achieve this performance in production? TL;DR: No.

My tests are run from localhost. Network bandwidth is not an issue. Tests are run in short bursts. This is peak performance; when it comes to writing logs to files or forwarding to a cluster of Splunk or Elasticsearch endpoints around the clock, that would be slower. Also, in my fastest test case, logs came from four different loggen instances, over 32 TCP connections each, at a constant rate. In the real world, logs come in bursts and connections are opened and closed regularly.

Test environment and tests

I used my AI mini workstation with Fedora Linux 44 Beta. First, I took a base line with stock syslog-ng 4.11.0 included in the distribution. Then I used my syslog-ng git snapshot packages for Fedora from https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/czanik/syslog-ng-githead/. Initially it also had jemalloc support compiled in. Later I disabled it and purely focused on the yet to be merged parallelize() optimizations from GitHub. I experimented with enabling and disabling parallelize(), adding various batch_size() values, and finally also so-recbuf().

This blog is part of a longer series about my adventures with my new machine and AI. You can reach me to discuss this blog on one of the contacts listed in the upper right corner. You can read the rest of the blogs under the toy tag.

I gave a proprietary tool a fair chance - and was not disappointed

The views expressed in this post are my own and do not represent the position of my employer. This post is not a commercial endorsement of QASE or any of its products.

I very seldom write about proprietary solutions and software. Not because I have any problem with them, but simply because I usually prefer open source solutions, and during my daily work and hobby projects I use almost exclusively open source software.

My AI mini workstation from HP has seen some non-AI workloads this weekend. I installed Capture One for photo editing and a couple of software synthesizers. And realized along the way that while built-in speakers are nice, high-end audio is a lot better! :-)

For months, I have been listening to music on devices that are designed for speech: a pair of Jabra headphones and the speakers of my various laptops. There were many reasons for this, including peer pressure, and some hearing loss at a way too loud concert. I was also lazy to use my high-end devices and tried to persuade myself that audio equipment designed for meetings is good enough for music too. Well…

This weekend, I installed various software synthesizers on my new computer. Not that I learned music or could play any instruments, but I still enjoy experimenting with music (well, with noise, actually :-) ). As I connected the machine to the big screen in the living room, I also connected it to my HiFi system. Suddenly, I realized how much better it sounds than my laptop or anything I’ve listened to in the past few months.

While making noise with a couple of software synths and listening to music from my TIDAL subscription, I also recharged my Focal headphones. My Focal Bathys is not as good as my HiFi, but also has a wonderful sound regardless.

So I guess that after a few months long detour, I am back to using high-end audio gear whenever it is technically possible. I love the extra detail I can hear on my Heed Enigma speakers or on my Focal headphones. Of course, nothing can replace listening to live music at concerts, but high-end gear is much better at approximating the vibe of various live events than anything below it.

This blog is part of a longer series about my adventures with my new machine and AI. You can reach me to discuss this blog on one of the contacts listed in the upper right corner. You can read the rest of the blogs under the toy tag.

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

After a high-speed run, we hit a wall this week: only two snapshots (0324 and 0326) reached the mirrors. The culprit was a combination of bad timing and a necessary course correction regarding our bootloader defaults.

It is now clear that the previous move to grub2-bls was a mistake. We are correcting that decision by switching modern systems to systemd-boot. This transition caused a “weekend blackout” because openQA changes for the new default were deployed last Friday, but the actual distribution changes didn’t land until Sunday. We spent Monday and Tuesday ironing out the resulting kinks, which cost us the weekend snapshots.

While the change to systemd-boot is a significant highlight for fresh installations, it was just one of many updates that landed this week:

• systemd-boot: Now the default for fresh installations (upgraders remain on their existing bootloader).
• AppArmor 4.1.7
• KDE Plasma 6.6.3
• ffmpeg 8.1
• FreeRDP 3.24.1
• gettext 1.0
• Linux kernel 6.19.9
• qemu 10.2.2
• SQLite 3.51.3

The package maintainers and release engineers are busy preparing the next few changes for the upcoming days. These include:

• GNOME 50: matplotlib’s test suite needs to accept deprecations in glib 2.88.0
• Autoconf 2.73
• Linux kernel 6.19.10
• Qt 6.11.0
• Mozilla Firefox 149.0
• GCC 16 as the default distro compiler
• LLVM 22
• glibc 2.43: metabug: https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1257250

This is a roundup of articles from the openSUSE community listed on planet.opensuse.org.

The community blog feed aggregator lists the featured highlights below from March 13 to March 19.

Blogs this week highlight Agama 19’s major architectural overhaul and new installation modes, the simultaneous release of Krita 5.3 and Krita 6.0, and Hyprland arriving on Tumbleweed with an official installation pattern. Blogs also cover Peter Czánik’s first steps running hardware-accelerated AI on Linux, animation smoothness improvements coming in Plasma 6.7, Mozilla’s new official RPM repository for Firefox Beta on openSUSE, the Himmelblau Workshop for Linux and Entra ID integration in Germany, an offline AI-powered child protection system for Linux using PAM, and more.

Here is a summary and links for each post:

My New Toy: OpenWebUI First Steps

Peter Czánik’s Blog continues his AI mini workstation series by documenting his first steps with Open WebUI on Fedora. He settled on running Ollama directly from the Fedora package repository after upgrading to Fedora 44 beta.

Install Firefox Beta on openSUSE

Victorhck explains how to add Mozilla’s new official RPM repository to install Firefox Beta on openSUSE alongside the stable and Nightly versions. Installing from the official Mozilla repository offers advantages including advanced compiler optimizations, faster updates, and hardened security binaries. The post provides the exact zypper commands needed to import the GPG key and install the package.

The New Features of Plasma 6.6

The KDE Blog takes a detailed look at the new features introduced in the Plasma 6.6 desktop release. The blog highlights a new global theme that automatically switches between light and dark mode by time of day, easier emoji skin tone selection via Meta+., and quick Wi-Fi connection by scanning a QR code with the device’s camera.

Trying Hyprland for the First Time on openSUSE Tumbleweed

Victorhck shares his first hands-on experience with the Hyprland tiling window manager on openSUSE Tumbleweed, which was made much easier by a new official installation pattern contributed by Lubos Kocman. The pattern bundles a minimal but functional setup including waybar, greetd, hyprpaper with an openSUSE wallpaper, and sensible keyboard defaults.

Compiling syslog-ng on an Old Mac

Peter Czánik’s Blog addresses the problem of Homebrew dropping full support for older Intel-based Macs and explains how to compile the latest syslog-ng release on these aging but still functional machines.

My New Toy: First Steps with AI on Linux

Peter Czánik’s Blog documents his first attempts at running hardware-accelerated AI workloads on his HP Z2 Mini under Linux, covering both Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora 43. While Ubuntu proved difficult due to ROCm packaging limitations, Fedora’s Heterogeneous Computing SIG wiki provided a clear path to getting AMD ROCm working, with both llama-cpp and PyTorch successfully detecting and using the GPU.

Krita 5.3 and Krita 6.0 Released

The KDE Blog announces the simultaneous stable releases of Krita 5.3 and Krita 6.0. Krita 5.3 introduces a fully rewritten text tool with direct canvas editing and advanced OpenType support. Krita 6.0 builds on all of 5.3’s additions while completing the migration to Qt6.

Animation Improvements Coming in Plasma 6.7

The KDE Blog reports on work by KWin developer Vlad Zahorodnii to smooth out animation in the upcoming Plasma 6.7. The fix addresses the “jump” effect that occurs when a brief system stall causes an animation to skip several frames to catch up. The change affects compositor-managed animations such as window open/close effects and desktop transitions.

Himmelblau Workshop – Hands-On Integration on April 21 in Germany

Just Another Tech Blog announces the first official Himmelblau Workshop taking place on April 22 in Göttingen, Germany, which is the day after sambaXP 2026. The hands-on session targets Linux system administrators and IT professionals managing hybrid environments, covering Entra ID authentication, multi-factor authentication, Intune-based device management, and policy enforcement using the current stable Himmelblau release.

Agama 19 – A New Start for the SUSE and openSUSE Installer

Victorhck provides a thorough Spanish-language overview of the Agama 19 release and its significance for SUSE and openSUSE users. The post walks through the architectural renovation, the redesigned web interface with dynamic network configuration, the rewritten user and software management subsystems, and newly added features such as LVM volume group installation and SSH key authentication.

3 Top Features of Plasma 6.6

The KDE Blog spotlights three standout features from the Plasma 6.6 release. The completely redesigned “Plasma Keyboard” on-screen keyboard offers instant appearance, automatic window repositioning, and a mobile-style layout with emoji support and cursor control via the spacebar.

3 Sports Games for Linux

The KDE Blog continues its native Linux games series with three free and open-source sports titles. Freetennis is a realistic tennis simulator featuring advanced AI and LAN/internet multiplayer; Tux Football is a fast-paced 2D arcade football game inspired by Sensible Soccer; and Foobillard++ is a 3D OpenGL billiards simulator supporting 8-ball, 9-ball, snooker, and carom modes. All three games are natively available on Linux at no cost.

VLM + CNN + Agents: Solving Digital Child Protection on Linux Without the Cloud

Alessandro’s Blog presents a technical proposal for implementing Brazil’s “Digital Statute for Children and Adolescents” (ECA Digital) on Linux using a fully offline AI pipeline. The system combines Vision-Language Models, convolutional neural networks for facial age estimation, and intelligent agents integrated directly into Linux’s PAM authentication layer to block privilege escalation by minors.

Linux Saloon 192 – Storm OS Distribution Exploration

The CubicleNate Blog recaps a Linux Saloon podcast episode focused on Storm OS, a new Arch-based Linux distribution created by contributor Ben. Participants discussed what productivity applications the distro would need to attract intermediate users and shared their own experiences testing distributions including openSUSE Tumbleweed.

Time Zone Offsets and Type-Ahead on the Desktop – This Week in Plasma

The KDE Blog translates and covers the latest “This Week in Plasma” development report. Plasma 6.7 gains time zone offset display in the Digital Clock widget, type-ahead file selection on the desktop when KRunner is disabled, and the ability to reverse the system tray item order. Performance improvements include reduced OpenGL context creation per application (saving 10–15 MB RAM each) and optimized direct scanout on fullscreen windows.

I Installed Linux on an Apple Silicon MacBook – No Going Back!

The KDE Blog highlights a video by content creator Guillem Cortés documenting his experience running Fedora Asahi Remix natively on a MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro chip. Battery life, audio, and display brightness perform comparably to macOS, though the screen is currently limited to 60 Hz instead of the original 120 Hz.

openSUSE Tumbleweed Weekly Review – Week 12 of 2026

Victorhck and dimstar report on a very active week for Tumbleweed with seven consecutive snapshots (0312 through 0318) delivered without any issues reaching users. Major updates include Mesa 26.0.2, cURL 8.19.0, Linux kernel 6.19.7 and 6.19.8, KDE Frameworks 6.24.0, GIMP 3.2.0, systemd 259.5, Ruby 4.0.2, and pipewire 1.6.2. Upcoming changes include switching the default UEFI bootloader to systemd-boot, GCC 16 as the default compiler, GNOME 50, glibc 2.43, and LLVM 22.

Agama 19 Released – A New Beginning

The Agama Installer Blog announces Agama 19. The release features a major architectural overhaul that establishes a clean, stable API as the foundation for the web UI, command-line tools, and unattended installs alike. Internal components for user and software management have been rewritten from scratch to replace aging YaST modules, and the web UI has been reorganized around a new overview page.

Passing of bear454

The openSUSE project mourns the passing of long-time community member James Mason. James, who is also known amongst the community as bear454, has a long connection with the project that stretches back to its beginnings. He was a member since 2009, an openSUSE Ambassador and dedicated much of his life’s work to open-source. He was often at LinuxFest Northwest helping several in attendance. He will be deeply missed.

James pictured at LinuxFest Northwest in 2014. left to right: Peter Linnell, Bryan Lunduke, Jon Hall (with the SUSE Chameleon), James Mason, and Michael Miller at LinuxFest Northwest 2014

View more blogs or learn to publish your own on planet.opensuse.org.

Once I got hardware-accelerated AI working under Linux on my AI mini workstation from HP, my next goal was to make it easier to use. From this blog, you can read about my initial experiments with Open WebUI on Fedora Linux.

Everything in containers

As Open WebUI is not yet available as a package in Fedora, my initial approach was to use containers. I found a Docker compose setup which was tested on Fedora Linux 43 according to its documentation: https://github.com/jesuswasrasta/ollama-rocm-webui-docker. As I (also) use Fedora 43, it sounded like a good choice.

It worked; however, I quickly realized that hardware acceleration for AI was not working. Instead of that, most CPUs were running close to 100%. It was a good test for cooling: I could hear the miniature box from the next room through closed doors :-)

As it turned out, the content of the HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION environment variable was incorrect. When I set it according to the docs, hardware acceleration still did not work. Removing the environment variable ollama found the hardware, but never answered a prompt anymore.

Ollama from the system

My next experiment was that I kept using Open WebUI from the container, but I installed ollama from the Fedora package repository directly on the system. The good news? Some smaller models ran really fast, using hardware acceleration. The bad news: most models failed to load with an error message that the given model format is unknown.

Update to Fedora 44 beta

I guessed that ollama was too old in Fedora 43. Solution? Update the whole system to Fedora 44 beta. It seems to have helped. A lot more models work now, including the largest freely available Granite models from IBM.

Why Granite?

First of all: I’m an IBM Champion, and thus using IBM technologies is for granted. But also because I learned some background stories from a friend working at IBM on LSF, which makes it also a personal choice.

What I’ve been showing here is AI inferencing on my HP AI system. But before the model can be used (for inferencing), it needs to be trained. These models are trained on large, GPU rich conpute clusters. To get an idea of the scale of such clusters, you can learn more in this research paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.05467). It duscusses the IBM Blue Vela system which supports IBMs’ GenAI mission. What’s interesting is the Blue Vela uses a more traditional HPC software stack including IBM LSF for workload management and Storage Scale (GPFS) for rapid access to large data sets.

This blog is part of a longer series about my adventures with my new machine and AI. You can reach me to discuss this blog on one of the contacts listed in the upper right corner. You can read the rest of the blogs under the toy tag.

Once I got hardware-accelerated AI working under Linux on my AI mini workstation from HP, my next goal was to make it easier to use. From this blog, you can read about my initial experiments with Open WebUI on Fedora Linux.

Everything in containers

As Open WebUI is not yet available as a package in Fedora, my initial approach was to use containers. I found a Docker compose setup which was tested on Fedora Linux 43 according to its documentation: https://github.com/jesuswasrasta/ollama-rocm-webui-docker. As I (also) use Fedora 43, it sounded like a good choice.

It worked; however, I quickly realized that hardware acceleration for AI was not working. Instead of that, most CPUs were running close to 100%. It was a good test for cooling: I could hear the miniature box from the next room through closed doors :-)

As it turned out, the content of the HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION environment variable was incorrect. When I set it according to the docs, hardware acceleration still did not work. Removing the environment variable ollama found the hardware, but never answered a prompt anymore.

Ollama from the system

My next experiment was that I kept using Open WebUI from the container, but I installed ollama from the Fedora package repository directly on the system. The good news? Some smaller models ran really fast, using hardware acceleration. The bad news: most models failed to load with an error message that the given model format is unknown.

Update to Fedora 44 beta

I guessed that ollama was too old in Fedora 43. Solution? Update the whole system to Fedora 44 beta. It seems to have helped. A lot more models work now, including the largest freely available Granite models from IBM.

Why Granite?

First of all: I’m an IBM Champion, and thus using IBM technologies is for granted. But also because I learned some background stories from a friend working at IBM on LSF, which makes it also a personal choice.

What I’ve been showing here is AI inferencing on my HP AI system. But before the model can be used (for inferencing), it needs to be trained. These models are trained on large, GPU rich conpute clusters. To get an idea of the scale of such clusters, you can learn more in this research paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.05467). It duscusses the IBM Blue Vela system which supports IBMs’ GenAI mission. What’s interesting is the Blue Vela uses a more traditional HPC software stack including IBM LSF for workload management and Storage Scale (GPFS) for rapid access to large data sets.

This blog is part of a longer series about my adventures with my new machine and AI. You can reach me to discuss this blog on one of the contacts listed in the upper right corner. You can read the rest of the blogs under the toy tag.