The content discusses recent developments in tech and Linux, including news about Discord's age verification, Mozilla Thunderbird for iOS, and Ubuntu's overhaul of its wiki. It highlights the dwindling percentage of Steam users on Linux and Reddit's removal of RSS feeds. Upcoming topics, housekeeping, and participant project links are also mentioned.

Last week Antonios Pappas told me that if I am already chasing slow tests, I should look at tests/support_server/setup.pm. It is known for wasting time. He also gave me the rule of thumb that made me take it seriously: every wasted second in the support server costs about three seconds, because the parallel nodes wait for the master to finish its setup.

That is the difference between a slow test and an expensive test. A slow single-machine test wastes one job. A slow support server wastes the whole cluster, and it does it before the real test even starts.

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This week saw the release of 5 snapshots (1001, 1002, 1003, 1005, and 1007).

It was an exceptionally productive week for rolling out long-awaited items from our outlook. Core system infrastructure moved ahead with systemd 261.3 landing in snapshot 1001, accompanied by fontconfig 2.18.3 after resolving its AppStream test suite conflict. Graphics and network stacks received major updates in snapshot 1002 with Mesa 26.2.4 and NetworkManager 1.58.1, the latter delivering key fixes for WPA3 auto-connections and IPv4 data forwarding. The expat 2.8.5 security update cleared staging together with perl-XML-Twig in snapshot 1003, and ncurses 6.6.20260926 rounded out terminal improvements in snapshot 1005.

On the desktop and productivity side, LibreOffice arrived at version 26.8.1.1, while Linux Kernel stepped up to 7.2.9 and Samba rolled out version 4.25.0 in snapshot 1007. Multimedia and gaming layers also saw nice polish with WirePlumber 0.5.18 and SDL3 3.4.18. Not everything went strictly according to plan, however: printing required a quick course correction in cups-filters2, where a previous attempt to disable universal CUPS filters stripped out essential MIME conversion rules for PDF and image printing, necessitating an immediate revert to keep everyday print jobs flowing smoothly.

These 5 snapshots delivered the following updates:

• AppStream 1.2.1
• autoyast2 5.0.11
• elfutils 0.196
• expat 2.8.5
• fontconfig 2.18.3
• ghostscript 10.08.0
• harfbuzz 14.5.1
• LibreOffice 26.8.1.1
• Linux Kernel 7.2.9
• Mesa 26.2.4
• ncurses 6.6.20260926
• NetworkManager 1.58.1
• pcre2 10.49
• Samba 4.25.0
• SDL3 3.4.18
• systemd 261.3
• timezone 2026e
• upower 1.91.4
• vim 9.2.1161
• vulkan-loader 1.4.363
• wireplumber 0.5.18
• xapian-core 1.4.32

Looking down the road at what is coming next, here is a glimpse of what the staging projects are working on:

• libnettle 4.0: Checked into Factory, awaiting next snapshot publication.
• libvirt 12.8.0
• fmt 12.2.0
• python-setuptools 84.0.0: Testing continues in staging while resolving a build failure in gobject-introspection.
• KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta 2: The second beta is currently undergoing full integration testing across the desktop workspace.
• containerd 2.3.3: Upgrading from 1.7.x is currently held back due to regressions in open-vm-tools, tracked under boo#1284086.
• kernel-source-longterm 6.18.55: Waiting on VirtualBox driver updates to adapt to kernel API changes.
• Swig 4.5.0: YaST integration issues remain under investigation, tracked under boo#1275515.

🚢 Shipped this week Fixed issues, small features, security updates, minor releases, new external contributors… Make it possible to copy/collectbuildenv special packages #20378 Fix date displayed on the Blame page - #20379 scmsync: retrigger package syncs if the info= element is missing #20376 osc: rebuild stale tardiff cache osc request list: show multibuild runs as well #2210 Allow ‘osc fork project/package’ as a single argument #2196 Honor XDG_CONFIG_HOME in git-obs configuration lookup #2214 👩‍💻 Operations...

Current openQA implementations do not offer a local user management method. This is why I use kanidm as a local identity management platform which is used for user management on my own openQA development instance. This is certainly overkill for most users and I only use it because I like kanidm and because all bits and bolts run locally on a single openQA instance.

Does syslog-ng support the latest OpenSearch version? I suspected that the answer was yes, but I gave it a try anyway. And as expected, starting to use OpenSearch 3.9 with syslog-ng is a smooth experience. My only problem? Finding a password complex enough for OpenSearch.

Read more at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/using-syslog-ng-with-opensearch-3-9

🚢 Shipped this week Fixed issues, small features, security updates, minor releases, new external contributors… Backend: generalize the dsse_as_hashedrecord feature a bit #20348 Frontend: inherit develpackage maintainers on package users page #20038 Backend: BSConSign: no longer return the signature in create_cosign_signature_ent. #20351 Frontend: BuildReasonController to require authenticated users. #20352 Backend: Support building containers with a _buildenv file. #20357 Firontend: Prepend explicit revision number to blame view links. #20346 osc: doc: document git-obs pr forward workflow...

The content discusses recent developments in tech and Linux, including news about Discord's age verification, Mozilla Thunderbird for iOS, and Ubuntu's overhaul of its wiki. It highlights the dwindling percentage of Steam users on Linux and Reddit's removal of RSS feeds. Upcoming topics, housekeeping, and participant project links are also mentioned.

ZUPT, an open source backup, compression, and data protection utility, has officially been accepted into openSUSE Factory, bringing a new security-focused backup option to the openSUSE ecosystem. The project combines backup creation, compression, integrity verification, and encryption in a single tool, allowing users to package files and directories into compact archives that are easier to store, transfer, verify, and restore.

Security is one of ZUPT’s main technical highlights. In addition to AES-256-based encryption, the tool supports a hybrid cryptographic scheme based on ML-KEM-768 + X25519. This approach combines established public-key cryptography with a post-quantum key encapsulation mechanism designed to provide stronger protection against future cryptographic threats. For users handling long-lived or sensitive backups, this adds an additional layer of protection against so-called “harvest now, decrypt later” scenarios, in which encrypted data collected today could potentially be targeted by more powerful computing systems in the future. ZUPT also includes file integrity verification features to help detect corruption, modification, or unexpected changes in archived data.

ZUPT was also designed with performance in mind. The application uses multithreaded processing to take advantage of multiple CPU cores during backup, compression, and restore operations, reducing processing time on modern systems. It includes its own compression mechanism as well as commands for testing and validating archive contents. With its acceptance into openSUSE Factory, ZUPT becomes an officially integrated solution for users looking for a combination of backup, compression, integrity verification, encryption, and post-quantum data protection within the openSUSE ecosystem.

For more information, go to ZUPT!

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This week saw the release of 3 snapshots (0924, 0929, and 0930).

Leading off with our previous outlook, both Linux Kernel 7.2.7 and 7.2.8 were successfully delivered across snapshots 0924 and 0929, keeping hardware support on the fast track. Core toolchains and the everyday terminal environment received a healthy refresh with the rollout of binutils 2.47, coreutils 9.12, bash 5.3.20, and an updated bash-completion 2.18.0. Desktop typography also stepped forward with synchronized support for Unicode 18.0 landing across character utilities and emoji fonts.

On the multimedia and desktop front, VLC 3.0.24 arrived with updated FFmpeg support, VirtualBox stepped up to version 7.2.20, and Flatpak saw two quick bugfix releases (1.18.3 & 1.18.4). Package maintainers also tightened system security defaults and delivered fixes across X11 libraries, GIMP, and Emacs, while kernel-firmware received an extensive sync with upstream.

These 3 snapshots delivered the following updates:

• bash 5.3.20
• bash-completion 2.18.0
• bind 9.20.29
• binutils 2.47
• coreutils 9.12
• flatpak 1.18.3 & 1.18.4
• freerdp 3.32.1
• fwupd 2.1.8
• gucharmap 18.0.0
• hwinfo 26.0
• Linux Kernel 7.2.7 & 7.2.8
• llvm23 23.1.2
• meson 1.12.1
• pam 1.7.3
• parted 3.8
• php8 8.5.11
• shadow 4.20.3
• tuned 2.28.0
• unbound 1.26.1
• VirtualBox 7.2.20
• vlc 3.0.24

Turning our attention to the horizon, here is a look at what is currently brewing across the staging projects:

• systemd 261.3: D-Bus security review has completed and the package is checked into Factory for the next snapshot.
• fontconfig 2.18.3: The AppStream test suite conflict has been resolved, with the package checked into Factory.
• expat 2.8.5: Progressing through staging alongside companion fixes for perl-XML-Twig.
• Mesa 26.2.4
• NetworkManager 1.58.1
• ncurses 6.6.20260926
• KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta: Testing continues in staging while resolving build failures in kwin6-x11 and libksysguard6, along with installcheck issues.
• Swig 4.5.0: YaST integration issues remain under investigation, tracked under boo#1275515.
• libnettle 4.0.0: Remains explicitly excluded from main staging runs while developers work on resolving test suite breakages in libzypp.