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

The below featured highlights listed on the community’s blog feed aggregator from August 16 to 22. Some of the most recent blogs involve updates on Tumbleweed developments, KDE and an extension of the Call for Hosts for the 2026 openSUSE.Asia Summit.

Here is a summary and links for each post:

openSUSE Welcome Receiving Makeover

The familiar opensuse-welcome-launcher is being phased out in favor of a new openSUSE-welcome greeter. Instead of relying on its own autostart, the greeter will coordinate desktop-specific greeters like gnome-tour and plasma-welcome. This approach allows welcome screens to appear not only on first boot but also after major updates and will help the project retire its legacy Qt5-based greeter.

DeepSeek V3.1: Why the Update Matters for the Market

A look at the newly announced DeepSeek V3.1 model from the Chinese AI startup. While technical details remain limited, the update promises a longer context window and incremental improvements at a fraction of the training cost of Western rivals. The release highlights the growing pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic as DeepSeek continues its fast-paced, cost-efficient development strategy.

Podcast Linux #27 – Slimbook One Special

The KDE Blog continues its archive project for Podcast Linux by revisiting the 27th episode, where Juan Febles reviews the Slimbook One desktop. Although the podcast is no longer active, its episodes remain a valuable resource for Linux enthusiasts.

KDE Gear 25.08 – Productivity Updates

This post highlights productivity-focused applications in the KDE Gear 25.08 release. Akonadi has seen major memory optimizations, KOrganizer introduces an improved date selector and search tooltips, and Kleopatra now offers independent encrypted notepad windows for better multitasking.

Accessibility with Free Technologies – Episode 6

The sixth episode of the podcast series explores accessibility topics with Eva Marco, Vicent Sanchis, and others. Discussions cover OpenStreetMap data visualization for accessibility, inclusive talent initiatives, testing adaptive hardware, and how AI is contributing to more inclusive design.

Cloud Containers: What They Are and How to Optimize Them

An overview of cloud container management, explaining how containers streamline deployment, reduce resource usage, and improve security. The article also details strategies for efficient management, from resource allocation to monitoring, and highlights OVHcloud’s solutions.

KDE Gear 25.08 – Itinerary Updates

KDE’s travel planner app, Itinerary, now allows manual input of bus and train journeys, provides live station maps, improved delay alerts, and expanded alternative connection searches to include ferries and flights. Enhanced live maps now display train infrastructure details via OpenRailwayMap.

Tumbleweed Review of the Week 33

This week brought eight new snapshots to openSUSE Tumbleweed, delivering updates such as Firefox 141.0.2, Linux kernel 6.16.0, KDE Plasma 6.4.4, KDE Frameworks 6.17.0, Postfix 3.10.3, OpenSSL 3.5.2, and more. Preparations are underway for upcoming updates including KDE Gear 25.08.0, kernel 6.16.1, and Python 3.13.7.

Lots of Polish – This Week in Plasma

Nate Graham’s weekly Plasma update, translated into Spanish, emphasizes bug fixes, performance improvements, and UI polish over new features. Highlights include accessibility improvements in notifications, refined Flatpak permissions, removal of outdated Breeze app icons, and numerous fixes across Plasma 6.4.5 and Frameworks 6.18.

Deadline Extended – Call for Host openSUSE.Asia Summit 2026

The deadline for proposals to host the 2026 openSUSE.Asia Summit has been extended to August 27, 2025. The selected host will be announced during this year’s Summit in Faridabad. Communities are encouraged to take this opportunity to showcase their region and bring openSUSE contributors together.

KDE Gear 25.08 – Dolphin Updates

The Dolphin file manager adds new search options with both indexed and simple search, tighter integration with Filelight for disk usage visualization, and improved view mode controls. These enhancements make Dolphin even more powerful for file management on KDE.

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

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Welcome back to our weekly review, where we dissect the latest snapshots to see what’s new in the openSUSE rolling release. This week has been incredibly busy, with a massive influx of updates touching nearly every part of the system, from the desktop environment and core libraries to the installer itself. Let’s get right into the details of what rolled out this week.

We published 5 snapshots (0815, 0816, 01817, 0818, and 0820) containing these changes:

• KDE Gear 25.08.0
• Linux kernel 6.16.1
• Postgresql 17.6
• SQLite 3.50.4
• Virtualbox 7.2.0
• glibc 2.42
• git 2.51.0
• hplip 3.25.6
• Introduction of opensuse-welcome-launcher: a shell script that will allow us to show different ‘welcome apps’ per desktop. The future will go towards e.g. GNOME Tour on a GNOME Desktop.

The following things are currently being tested and will reach you when things are worked out:

• Python 3.13.7
• nftables 1.1.4: earlier detected issues could be solved
• Rust 1.89
• Mesa 25.2: Xvfb crashes on 32bit systems (https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1247995)
• GNU Gettext 0.26
• Linux kernel 6.16.2
• VLC moving to ffmpeg-7 by backporting a patchset from upstream

The familiar openSUSE-welcome window that greets millions of desktops is nearing retirement and a new approach will soon take its place.

Rather than re-inventing the wheel, members of openSUSE’s release team have decided to tweak and refine existing solutions like gnome-tour for GNOME and plasma-welcome for KDE’s Plasma by making a new controller and opensuse-welcome-launcher to coordinate them and provide desktop-specific content.

This new welcome-launcher manages which greeter to run depending on the desktop environment. This gives openSUSE’s release team more control over when and how welcome screens are shown, instead of relying on each greeter’s own autostart mechanism.

The launcher isn’t limited to the first boot. It can display greeters after major system updates so users learn about new features, enhancements, and changes in a timely way.

The enrollment of this new greeter will be done in multiple phases.

1) The launcher will initially call the well known legacy openSUSE-welcome. The only difference is that it loses the checkbox show on next boot, as it’s no longer in charge of autostart.

2) The launcher triggers openSUSE branded gnome-tour and plasma-welcome while keeping openSUSE-welcome as a fallback (in case it’s installed).

3) The legacy Qt5-based greeter will eventually be decommissioned. We should have an agreed fallback on desktop sessions without dedicated greeter.

The phased approach allows integration with openQA testing and provides flexibility for future improvements.

Since opensuse-welcome-launcher is considered a legacy and is one of the last Qt5-dependent applications, the move will help phase out some remaining Qt5 components across the distribution.

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Week 33 went without major hiccups for Tumbleweed snapshot building and testing, and so it happens that we released once again 8 Snapshots in a week (0807…0814).

The changes are numerous, most interestingly:

• Mozilla Firefox 141.0.2
• KDE Plasma 6.4.4 & KDE Frameworks 6.17.0
• python cryptography 45.0.5
• Postfix 3.10.3
• openSSL 3.5.2
• gnu gettext 0.25.1
• NetworkManager 1.52.1
• GTK 3.24.50
• Linux kernel 6.16.0
• GStreamer 1.26.5
• PHP 8.4.11
• qemu 10.0.3
• Bash 5.3.3
• Readline 8.3.1
• python PIP 25.2
• python pytest 8.4.1

A few things are still in the staging areas – either submitted recently or having issues passing QA; most interestingly, we have these changes lined up:

• KDE Gear 25.08.0
• Linux kernel 6.16.1
• Rust 1.89: build fix for 389-ds pending
• glibc 2.42: yast2/text mode installation looks ‘broken’ (missing blue background)
• Mesa 25.2: Xvfb crashes on 32bit systems (https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1247995)
• Python 3.13.7: build fix for qemu pending
• nftables 1.1.4: issues detected by openQA in combination with netavark
• openSUSE-welcome: prepare infra to have different ‘welcome apps’ per desktop (e.g gnome-tour on gnome)

The openSUSE.Asia Summit Organizing Committee has extended the deadline for the Call for Host to submit proposals for the 2026 Summit. Communities now have until August 27, 2025 to apply.

The extension comes in response to requests from local communities seeking more time to prepare their proposals. This is a great opportunity to showcase your region and bring the openSUSE community together in your city.

The selected proposals will be presented during openSUSE.Asia Summit 2025 in Faridabad from August 29–30. Proposals can be presented online if on-site participation is not possible.

For more information, visit: https://news.opensuse.org/2025/06/10/osas-cfh/

The August syslog-ng newsletter is now on-line:

• Deprecating Java-based drivers from syslog-ng: Is HDFS next?

• Your first steps configuring syslog-ng

• Prometheus exporter in syslog-ng

It is available at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/the-syslog-ng-insider-2025-08-hdfs-configuration-prometheus

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Because August 1st is Switzerland’s national holiday, I took the day off last Friday — which is my excuse for skipping last week’s review. The most noteworthy technical change was mostly invisible: we switched FTP tree generation from product-builder to product-composer. This is essentially a rewrite, trimming years of accumulated features back to a more manageable set. One side effect is that product descriptions are now in YAML instead of XML — easier on the eyes.

The published FTP tree looks largely unchanged, aside from a brief bug where appstream metadata wasn’t registered, causing software centers like Discover and GNOME Software to miss it (now fixed). The main visible change affects ARM users: we merged the FTP trees for armv6, armv7, and aarch64 into a single tree under the ports/aarch64 namespace. This saves several gigabytes on our mirrors by sharing large noarch packages.

Since this results in bigger repodata containing all architectures, the new product composer supports “split repodata for merged trees” — also used in Leap 16.0. ARM users who prefer smaller metadata can append /$basearch to the end of their OSS repo URL, and zypp will then only refresh the relevant subset.

Other than that rather technical-only change, we of course also published nine snapshots (0725, 0727, 0728, 0730, 0801, 0803, 0804, 0805, and 0806) for your updating fun, containing these changes:

• Apache 2.4.65
• pipewire 1.4.7
• Mozilla Firefox 141.0
• GStreamer 1.26.4
• Linux kernel 6.15.8
• mozilla-nss 3.113
• mozjs 128.13.0 (javascript engine used by e.g GNOME)
• Virtualbox 7.1.12a
• nvme-cli 2.15 (if you have scripts using the short parameter –output, you will need to change that to –output-format)
• Mesa 25.1.7
• libvirt 11.6.0
• GCC 15.2 RC
• gnutls 3.8.10
• container-selinux 2.240.0: containers no longer have the implicit right to change SELinux labels. If you require this, you will need to enable the new boolean container_modify_selinux_labels
• gnome-shell 48.4

The next changes being prepared and tested currently are:

• Mozilla Firefox 141.0.2
• KDE Plasma 6.4.4
• Linux kernel 6.16.0
• openSSL 3.5.2
• Mesa 25.2
• python pytest 8.4.1
• glibc 2.42
• openSUSE-welcome: prepare infra to have different ‘welcome apps’ per desktop (e.g gnome-tour on gnome)
• GNU gettext 0.25.1
• nftables 1.1.4: issues detected by openQA in combination with netavark
• Bash 5.3

I’m happy to announce the release of Himmelblau 1.0, which now supports Intune MDM policy enforcement on Linux. This is a major milestone for the project—and honestly, for the broader Linux community—because it means we finally have a working, transparent, and open-source alternative to Microsoft’s half-baked Intune client for Linux.

Let’s talk about what’s new, why it matters, and how to enable it.

Intune Policy Enforcement – Now Built In

With 1.0, Himmelblau can fetch and enforce device compliance policies from Microsoft Intune. This includes things like:

• Password requirements (applied to the Linux Hello PIN, FYI)
• Disk encryption requirements
• OS version requirements
• Script policies

Policies are enforced at login time, and any non-compliant device will be reported as such during Intune check-in. This works out of the box, with no browser hacks, GUI prompts, or extra fluff. In Himmelblau, it’s all seamless to the user.

To enable policy enforcement, just add the following to your config:

# /etc/himmelblau/himmelblau.conf
apply_policy = true

Then restart the service and watch your login enforcement and compliance status just work.

Why Microsoft’s Intune Client Just Doesn’t Cut It

Let’s be blunt for a moment: Microsoft’s official Intune for Linux client is a mess.

Here’s why:

• It’s unreliable. In my testing, it usually doesn’t work. You’ll find guides online suggesting you install Edge first, or tweak your environment in weird ways just to get the thing to launch. That’s ridiculous. A tool that claims to support Linux shouldn’t require browser voodoo to function.
• It frequently crashes. Again, this is based on my own experience. The client crashes. A lot. That’s not enterprise-grade—it’s barely alpha.
• It’s hardwired to Ubuntu and RHEL. Microsoft only builds packages for those two distros. Himmelblau supports many more: Ubuntu, Debian, openSUSE, Fedora, Rocky, RHEL, SLE, Oracle, NixOS (yes seriously, even NixOS)—and I’m happy to work with the community to expand that list. Just ask, we’ll add it.
• Policy enforcement is GUI-dependent. You can’t enforce policy without logging into the desktop session. This is so broken I don’t even know where to begin. What about headless servers? SSH? Seriously?
• It’s a bizarre mix of Rust and Java. I like Rust, but what were they thinking intermingling it with Java?
• It requires Microsoft Edge. Because of course it does. Classic Microsoft move: shove their browser into every workflow, whether it belongs there or not.
• It’s bound to a local account. That’s not cloud integration, it’s cloud side-loading.
• It’s closed source. If we can’t inspect the code and see how it works, how can they expect us to trust this thing?
• They clearly don’t understand Linux. That’s the bottom line. This is not a tool made by people who know how Linux is used in the real world. It’s a checkbox product.

Himmelblau exists because we can—and should—do better.

Important: No Custom Compliance Policies Yet

Microsoft offers a feature in Intune called Linux Custom Compliance policies. These allow you to define your own compliance scripts that Intune will evaluate on managed Linux devices.

Himmelblau does not support these (yet). So please, do not assign Linux Custom Compliance policies to devices managed by Himmelblau. If you do, they’ll be marked as non-compliant, and Himmelblau will prevent users from logging in.

This feature is in progress and will land in a future version. Until then, stick to the regular Intune compliance settings—those are supported.

This Changes Everything for Linux in the Enterprise

With Himmelblau 1.0, we finally have:

• A reliable Intune-compatible agent
• Real enforcement of Microsoft’s compliance rules
• No GUI dependency
• Support for many Linux distros
• Open code, real transparency, and community-driven development

You no longer have to settle for Microsoft’s broken Linux client. You don’t have to pretend it’s “fine” just because it has the Microsoft logo on it.

Now there’s a better option—one by the community, for the community.