Welcome to The Roundup #13, your bytes of Solus news. In this roundup, we’re talking about our new minor release of the Budgie 10.5 series, Budgie 10.5.1, the latest upgrade of our GNOME Stack, new KDE goodies, and more!
Budgie 10.5.1 is the first minor release of the Budgie 10.5 series, introducing a multitude of quality-of-life changes, bug fixes, and support for new GNOME Stacks. This Budgie 10.5 series release also brings new and updated translations thanks to our amazing community!
Bug fixes are the cornerstone of Budgie 10.5 series releases, ensuring existing Budgie user experiences are smoother than ever.
Budgie 10.5.1 introduces some bug fixes around Budgie Menu artifacting, notifications, improving window raise performance, and more. Let’s break down the big items that were addressed!
WORD_CHAR
, so we’ll be more aggressive on wrapping on words when possible, but fallback to characters for longer running strings like URLs.Budgie 10.5.1 introduces a few new goodies to make your Budgie experience, as well as those of our Budgie theme authors, even better!
Budgie 10.5.1 introduces hinting and anti-aliasing settings in our Fonts section of Budgie Desktop Settings, allowing you even more flexibility with how document, interface, monospace, and window title fonts render:
Budgie 10.5.1 provides support for several GNOME stack releases, allowing for an ever growing amount of Budgie users to get the latest updates! Budgie supports GNOME 3.30, 3.32, and now 3.34, including recent changes in GNOME Settings Daemon.
Thanks to the folks over at Ubuntu Budgie for their patches, it’s greatly appreciated!
If you have a single window open for a given IconButton in the Icon Tasklist, we will now update the tooltip when you hover over.
Budgie 10.5.1 introduces the ability to have persistent workspaces created at the launch of Budgie, with a configurable amount of default workspaces.
Under the Desktop section of Budgie Desktop Settings, you’ll find a new option called “Number of virtual desktops”, where you can go from just having one workspace up to eight! A perfect opportunity to hide away all those Electron apps you’re ashamed to be running!
If you want more workspaces dynamically, you can still use our Workspace Applet to add more as you need them.
Budgie 10.5.1 introduces a multitude of new CSS classes to ease Budgie Desktop theme development:
icon-popover
classnight-light-indicator
classmpris-widget
classraven-mpris-controls
classraven-notifications-view
classraven-header
class, as well as dedicated classes for the Do Not Disturb (do-not-disturb
) and Clear All Notifications (clear-all-notifications
) buttonsraven-notifications-group
class, with the header being raven-notifications-group-header
and the individual Notifications having notification-clone
classes.no-album-art
classWe’re happy to be bringing the GNOME 3.34 stack to our stable / shannon repo users in this coming Friday sync. This stack upgrade has been rigorously tested by a wide range of users via our unstable repository, all of whom provided valuable feedback and reports over on our development tracker. This upgrade has also fortunately been smoother compared to previous stack upgrades, with no necessary changes having needed to be made to our branding packages to account for schema changes, and we’ve been more aggressive with backporting patches for fixes to GNOME Shell and Mutter.
We do want to take this opportunity to provide some recommendations to you on the best way to upgrade your system and ensure a smoother sailing with this stack upgrade.
As always, we strongly recommend performing a full upgrade via the Software Center or eopkg (sudo eopkg up
). While for most upgrades it’s pretty important, for this upgrade it is really important, as there are schema / settings changes that we need to ensure are applied.
Furthermore, if you are using GNOME Shell, as is standard practice for upgrading to new releases we suggest disabling any extensions you’ve installed separately to those which we officially support and provide out-of-the-box. If you’ve used GNOME Tweaks to update extensions we’ve shipped, this is not advised and we’d suggest removing those extensions (dash-to-dock, impatience, topicons plus) from ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions
and reinstalling them from the repo. You can find the command below:
sudo eopkg install --reinstall gnome-shell-extension-dash-to-dock gnome-shell-extension-impatience gnome-shell-extension-topicons-plus
If you haven’t installed separate GNOME Shell extensions or updated ours via the GNOME Extensions website (or alternatively GNOME Tweaks), the above should not apply to you.
GNOME 3.34 introduces a bunch of new features and bug fixes from the GNOME community and we’d like to highlight a few below. For a more comprehensive list, check out this blog post.
GNOME Control Center / GNOME Settings has seen a redesign of two sections such as the backgrounds panel and picker, as well as moving the Night Mode in the Displays section.
For those of you that use Epiphany / GNOME Web, it’s seen some improvements in the GNOME 3.34 release. You can now pin tabs, which is handy for frequently accessed and open pages (like the Solus blog), and they’re now using the new WebKit content filters API for adblocking!
If you use Evolution for your mail, calendar, or address book, you’ll be happy to see numerous bug fixes in Evolution 3.34.0, such as fixes for:
Our KDE and Plasma integrator and maintainer, Friedrich (a.k.a Girtablulu), has upgraded Solus users to the latest KDE Applications 19.08.1 release! This release features a plethora of fixes and improvements, such as:
With this update you will receive a darker color-scheme for the Solus Dark theme. We welcome your feedback and bug reports here.
Our MATE Applications and Desktop integrator and maintainer, Pierre-Yves (a.k.a kyrios) has upgraded MATE users to the latest updates from the MATE Desktop team. These include numerous fixes and improvements, such as:
On Saturday, September 28th, Bryan and I held a Solus Hackfest featuring our latest development efforts around the rewrite of ferryd, our repository manager, as well as work on Help Center documentation in preparation for the new Help Center redesign.
If you have 5 hours to spare, feel free to watch the video embedded below!
This hackfest focused on three main areas of ferryd
: queries for generating changesets, a new API for the Repo Manager, and file-based configuration for the daemon.
While most of the repository management features of ferryd
require relatively simple queries of the database, much more compllicated queries are needed for gathering the data for operations like sync report generation, sync changesets, and cloning. In particular, this hackfest led to the development of the following reusable queries:
This work benefited greatly from the use of the excellent DB Browser for Sqlite to test queries on real data.
In previous versions of ferryd
the Repo Manager provided many operations which were either not frequently used or not used at all. Further, some of these actions were confusingly named and needed to be changed. For the new Repo Manager API we simplified these actions to a few different categories:
By focusing on organizing the operations this way, it becomes easier to see which functions can be reused and how to better compose those operations to create more complex behaviors.
At present, all configuration of the ferryd
daemon is defined by either hard-coded paths, relative directories, or command-line arguments passed when starting it. During the hackfest we focused on developing a simple JSON file format for specifying the most important pieces of configuration and added sane defaults for use in the absence of a configuration file. We will continue to develop this format as further development of the daemon continues.
With the upcoming redesign of our Help Center, we want to focus on improving the discoverability of content, breadth of content, and the ease in which we can expand our documentation in various fields such as packaging.
To accomplish this, we are splitting off various common sections of documentation, such as in Packaging, to enable it to be referenced and utilitized in more places, such as a new Beginners Guide. We’re then leveraging Hugo shortcode functionality to provide an “import” shortcode to easily import these sections during page generation.
Some examples of content we’ve already split off in our new local v2 of the documentation:
We look forward to having more routine hackfests and news on the upcoming Help Center and providing you all design previews in the future, so stay tuned!
During this hackfest, we made some minor improvements to yauto
, the tool used to automatically generate package.yml files based on a source.
.pro
file provided by the project.wscript
file provided by the project.yarn.lock
file in the project. We’ll also automatically turn on networking.solbuild, our chroot-based package build system, has seen a minor release (1.4.5.2). This release changes our default solbuild image URL away from https://packages.getsol.us
in preparation for our move to Fastly for our repository. Accompanying this is an update to the solbuild images themselves, meaning less updates for you to perform against the solbuild image during first initialization!
We’ve added Teamviewer into the Third Party section of the Software Center and have fully deprecated Android Tools from the Third Party section, as it is now maintained and available via our official repositories!
Press Center is available for members of the press to acquire resources and contact information.