Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

What a week it’s been for our favorite green chameleon! With 7 snapshots (1010…1016) rolling out, we’ve had plenty of updates, improvements, and new features making their way into our systems. If you blinked, you might have missed a few—so let’s dive into the highlights from the past week and catch up on everything that’s been buzzing in the openSUSE world!

This Week’s Highlights:

• GCC 14.2.1
• Mozilla Firefox 132.0.2
• KDE Gear 24.08.2
• KDE Frameworks 6.7.0
• KDE Plasma 6.2.1
• Samba 4.21.0
• Linux kernel 6.11.3

But, hold on! The excitement doesn’t stop there—there’s more on the horizon! Let’s take a peek at what’s coming our way in the next snapshots.

What to Expect Next:

• Linux kernel 6.11.4
• Virtualbox 7.1.4
• Vagrant will be removed: does not work with Virtualbox 7.1 and has no fix in sight.
• Mozilla Firefox 132.0.3
• SWIG 4.3.0 (beta1 has been submitted for testing)
• LLVM 19: Needs Mesa 24.2.x
• Mesa 24.2.x: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/11840
• Tumbleweed Wallpaper refresh. per https://github.com/openSUSE/branding/pull/160
• Change the default LSM (opted in at installation) to SELinux. AppArmor is still an option, just not the default. This change only impacts new installations. Before going live, we threw this at openQA and it identified some bugs, see https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1230118.

The author expresses a strong preference for the 24-hour clock and the DD MMM YYYY date format, finding it more readable than US formats. Frustrated by changes in KDE Plasma's settings, they detail a workaround to restore their preferred format and emphasize the importance of customization for personal satisfaction and productivity.

I love t-shirts, especially those that you’d call logowear. But it’s not the kind of big name fashion logos that I’m referring to. Rather, it’s logowear from my favorite IT companies. I have well over a hundred of these t-shirts, and except when I’m preparing for a special event, I pull a random t-shirt from my collection. Yesterday I happened to wear a power.org t-shirt, while today I’m wearing an OpenPOWER t-shirt, two POWER t-shirts in two days :-) Both of these brought back some nice memories.

The first t-shirt is really old, I got it probably around 2008, while working for Genesi. One of my tasks was moderating the forums on the power.org website. It was a website focusing on IBM POWER server products, but it also included some generic POWER information. Besides sharing information, it also provided a meeting point for like-minded engineers, where they could discuss anything related to POWER. You can read my history with POWER-based computers in one of my opensource.com articles at https://opensource.com/article/20/10/power-architecture.

The t-shirt I had on today is a lot more recent, but still cannot be called new. It is a t-shirt by the OpenPOWER Foundation from the golden era of open source on POWER: the POWER9 years. Those years have seen the most active open source development on POWER ever since the Pegasos / PowerMac years. Many applications were ported to POWER, both for the server and the desktop. Hopefully there will be another wave of open source activity on POWER soon, fingers crossed :-)

Do you have any interesting POWER t-shirts? Share with me on your preferred social network! My accounts are listed in the top right corner of this page.

The openSUSE community is preparing for the Early Adopter Tech Summit on March 14 and 15, 2025, in Orlando, Florida.

This event will take place at Loews Sapphire Falls Resort at Universal Orlando Resort and will take place as SUSECON concludes.

Partners of SUSE, openSUSE, open-source community projects and community members are all encouraged to register for the summit and submit a talk. There are two types of talks available:

• Short Talk: 15 minutes
• Standard Talk: 30 minutes

The call for papers is open until January 15, 2025.

We welcome submissions from anyone passionate about open-source software and community development.

The summit’s schedule will be published in February 2025. Visit events.opensuse.org for more information.

The author discusses their experience with the Framework 13 laptop, initially appreciating its portability and features but ultimately needing more screen space. They experimented with dual, triple, and six-monitor setups, emphasizing the advantages and challenges of each arrangement, particularly in terms of productivity and usability, and the importance of a reliable docking solution.

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Updating two major desktops within one week is not to be taken lightly—yet, that’s exactly what Tumbleweed did this week. KDE and GNOME have received updates to the freshly released upstream versions.

In the five snapshots (1003, 1005, 1006, 1007, and 1009) released this week, you could find these changes:

• Qt 6.7.3
• Busybox 1.37.0
• FFmpeg 7.1
• libproxy 0.5.9
• Mozilla Firefox 131.0 (131.0.2 is in the Update channel, addressing CVE-2024-9680)
• KDE Plasma 6.2.0
• Linux kernel 6.11.2
• GNOME 47.0
• XWayland 24.1.3

For our KDE Users, the update frenzy is not over yet, as KDE Gear is being prepared to be updated to 24.08.2. Amongst this change, the staging Release Engineers are currently busy testing the integration of:

• GCC 14.2.1
• KDE Gear 24.08.2
• SWIG 4.3.0 (beta1 has been submitted for testing)
• LLVM 19: Needs Mesa 24.2.x
• Tumbleweed Wallpaper refresh. per https://github.com/openSUSE/branding/pull/160
• Mesa 24.2.x: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/11840
• Change the default LSM (opted in at installation) to SELinux. AppArmor is still an option, just not the default. This change only impacts new installations.

The September syslog-ng newsletter is now available:

• Improved FreeBSD and MacOS support in 4.8.0

• Setting the version number in the syslog-ng configuration

• Switching containers from Debian Testing to Stable

You can read it at: https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/the-syslog-ng-insider-2024-10-4-8-0-release-version-number-debian-stable

Version 4.8.1 of syslog-ng was released last week. It is a bugfix release, and it contains fixes for problems also reported by members of the Fedora community. The Fedora 41 release is near, so package updates now need some additional testing, and “karma” in Bodhi. You can find information on how to install syslog-ng 4.8.1 from a testing repo on Fedora 41 beta at https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2024-4e812b8a23. This is also the place where you can provide feedback and karma. Thanks for your help!

SUSE was a gold sponsor at Mindtrek 2024, a conference with a long, almost 30 years history starting as a ”multimedia competition”, always with academic conference held alongside it, and more recently held by COSS – the Finnish Centre for Open Systems and Solutions. This year Mindtrek was having a very open source focused program with two tracks, ”The Future of Open Source Business” and ”Enhancing Public Service with Open Source”.

There was a good attendance of 150+ people, a busy feeling and a lot of good talks with participants and fellow sponsors from DigiFinland, Tampere University, Seravo, Druid, HH Partners, doubleOpen(), Metatavu, Opinsys, City of Tampere, Haltu and itewiki.

The conference started with welcome words and presenting the recipient of the 2024 Open World Hero award, which this year went to eVaka project – ERP for early childhood education – which is a great success story on open source, developing based on immediate needs and starting with a minimum viable product, collaboration between big cities on common goals, and now further adoption by smaller municipilaties, which driven by open source companies which can deploy and maintain them. They also later had a talk about how they achieved their goals and continue forward, on the principles of good software development practices, early user feedback and a lot of other signs of a good project. The recipients were on the behalf of cities of Espoo and Tampere.

The keynote speaker before the tracks was Sachiko Muto from OpenForum Europe & RISE withe her presentation reflecting on how open source has both risen to the top and also still has quite some ways to go in terms of procurement, awareness, skills and so on. The presentation is quite hard to summarize but was well thought out.

Then we had SUSE’s Emiel Brok giving an energized presentation about the ”perfect storm” coming and how SUSE products can help with for example requirements of NIS-2 and had a bunch of good talks. It was nicely put together, entertaining, and positioned SUSE in a very positive light in what it has to offer.

We also had a SUSE booth which was busy througout the day, with people asking about SUSE, and distributing a lot of chameleons to happy receivers.

Throughout the rest of the day I was at the booth, and also followed at least the eVaka project presentation and another interesting presentation on NIS2 and Cyber Resilience Act from Martin von Willebrand. There was also a small evening event to continue open source discussions in a more relaxed environment.

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