Solus – Blog

More Website Improvements

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 15:00:00 +0000

If you haven’t visited our website in a while, you may notice some changes. We’ve recently made some tweaks to the website, as well as some larger improvements. All of this work is building on the website rewrite that we did over the course of 2025. In this Devlog post, we’ll be going over the recent work, and a couple of ideas we have for what we want to do with the site next.

New Building Blocks

One thing that we’ve done is add a couple of reusable components that facilitates quickly building a page with a uniform look across the entire website. The main component is called a section. It has two types: a normal mode, and an alternate mode that has a top and bottom border, and a colored background. Both forms feature a header that is followed by whatever content we want to put inside it. They have uniform sizing for a consistent look and feel, and the alternate form enables us to visually separate different sections in a single page.

We also have a special glass version for when we want to really highlight something. It uses our colors combined with Glassmorphic principles, to make the section really pop.

About Pages

The first thing we did once we made these elements was create a new section of our website. This section has pages that contains information about Solus as an organization, and the people that make up the Solus teams. All of that information was already on our Help Center, but we felt that it made more sense for that information to live on our main website. The content is a little more condensed from the old Help Center version, the goal being to make it more easily digestible.

Devlog Migration

The Devlog posts from our Help Center have been migrated to the main website. When the Devlog was first created, the idea was to have it be separate from the main blog post. On reconsideration, though, the consensus was that it made more sense for those posts to be a part of the main website blog, just with a different tag. That way, readers don’t have to follow multiple different places to see what’s happening around Solus.

Tweaks

Home Page

While the overall design of the home page hasn’t really changed, a number of tweaks have been made to make it look even better. Right away, you’ll notice a new area using our new Glassmorphic section with a list of the top Solus features, giving a very quick at-a-glance overview of what Solus is. Next, we’ve replaced the images in the informational section with screenshots of relevant programs running on Solus. This makes the home page feel more “complete”.

Downloads Page

Our downloads page is now using the new sections, along with all of the other pages on the site, and a new section has been added to list the hardware requirements to run Solus. This information is also already present in the Help Center, but we felt that it made sense to have that information directly on the downloads page. We also added links pointing to our installation documentation, and show users where they can go to receive support.

Navbar

The ordering of the navigation bar is a bit different now. All of our community links have been consolidated to their own submenu, making the navbar a bit more organized. This space savings meant that we could add a search bar, making it much easier to look for content on our website, especially in all of our old blog posts.

Mobile Sidebar

With the update to Hextra 0.12, the mobile navigation sidebar now uses the same items as the desktop navbar. With that update, we ditched our custom sidebar implementation to use the built-in one from Hextra.

What’s Next?

For myself, the next item I want to tackle is the edition cards on the downloads page. While the Hextra cards look good, I don’t think they’re intended to be used in this way. Plus, with everything that I’ve learned so far, I want to challenge myself to try to build something even better.

Malfisya has also been thinking about how we can better integrate funding information in our website. Details on that are still being worked out.

Something else that we are thinking about is a page in the About section detailing the history of Solus. We’re still unsure if we want to add such a page, or what it might look like.

That’s all for now, though! Stay tuned for the next installment.

Solus 4.8 Released

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We’re nearing the holiday season, and what better way to kick it off than by releasing new Solus ISOs? This release is called Opportunity, for all the new opportunities that are open to us. A lot has happened since we released Solus 4.7 at the beginning of this year, so let’s go over the changes.

General

Epoch jump

In October, we made the jump to a new epoch, the final chapter of our “Usr-Merge” saga. With the new epoch, we started using a new package repository, named Polaris, after the North Star. This unlocked our ability to remove “Usr-Merge” compatibility symbolic links from packages, update our systemd package, and more.

New software centers

You’ll notice that the Solus Software Center is a thing of the past. While it was a popular program among users, it had problems, the first of which being it was written in Python 2. While it could have been ported to Python 3, this would have taken considerable effort, not just in porting, but also in testing. Even with that, it sometimes had reliability issues, and it had no support for Flatpaks.

By switching to GNOME Software and KDE Discover, we are using ready-made and supported solutions to graphical package management. Users get programs that better integrate with their desktop, and we get a lot of time freed up to pursue other ways to make Solus better. While this solution isn’t perfect, either, we feel that it is better for us in the long run as we improve our packages over time to work better with these other software centers.

Removal of Python 2

The epoch also meant that we could finally remove Python 2 from Solus once and for all. This is something that we’ve wanted to do for years. Over the last two years, we’ve migrated all of our tooling to Python 3, leaving the old Solus Software Center being the only software that still required Python 2. Now that the Software Center has been sunset in favor of GNOME Software and KDE Discover, the old version of Python was removed from the Solus repositories.

New website

If you’re reading this, then you will have no doubt noticed some changes with our website. Last week, we unveiled our re-designed website ahead of the Solus 4.8 release! We spent the better part of the year on this project, and we thought it would be extra cool to deploy the new site along with the Solus 4.8 release. We are very happy with how it turned out, and it is much easier to iterate on and improve.

Plymouth

For this release, we’ve decided to install the Plymouth splash screen by default. It wasn’t a part of the default installation before because it was deemed to be too big of a performance hit, but our latest evaluation indicates that performance is no longer a problem. On a fast system, you likely wont even see it appear before your system fully boots. The big reason for adding it by default is that it provides a nice interface for installing offline updates, which GNOME Software and KDE Discover both support, even if we haven’t enabled them by default. Offline updates are where package updates are downloaded, but not installed until the next system boot, meaning you no longer have to worry about instability because of executables and libraries being moved out from underneath the running system.

girepository 2.0

All packages in the Solus repository that rely on libgirepository now use the newer 2.0 API version, with the exception of perl-glib-object-introspection. We made this change because the latest version of pygobject uses the newer GObject Introspection API, and you cannot use multiple versions of the API in the same process. This meant patching libpeas, the plugin engine for GObject-based applications, to also use the new API, eliminating the chance for a version mismatch.

General

Default applications

All our editions feature:

Firefox 145.0.1
LibreOffice 25.2.6
Thunderbird 140.5.0

Kernels and Mesa

Solus now ships with Linux kernel 6.17.8. If you need the LTS kernel, we offer 6.12.58. To pair with the kernel, this release ships with Mesa 25.2.6.

systemd

Since we are no longer blocked on updating systemd, we have updated our package to 257.10, from version 254. This is a significant version jump from where we were before. At the same time, we’ve modernized our package, and aligned it with the AerynOS package. We now build fewer of the modules for the 32-bit version, making that package quite a bit slimmer. Notably, the homed and userdb modules have been enabled.

Budgie

Solus 4.8 Budgie

Solus 4.8 Budgie Edition ships with Budgie 10.9.4. This version, along with 10.9.3, are aimed at making Budgie compatible with GNOME 49. Budgie Desktop and all applets have also been built to use libpeas-2 and girepository-2.0, retaining support for Python applets.

New defaults

Pocillo Dark GTK theme.

GNOME

Solus 4.8 GNOME

Solus 4.8 GNOME Edition ships with GNOME 49.1, an update to the GNOME 49 Brescia series. GNOME on Solus no longer ships with an X11 session by default. Users that still wish to use X11 must install the gnome-session-shell-x11 package.

With GNOME 50, scheduled for release sometime next year, GNOME will no longer support X11 at all, and will be Wayland only! Users should try the Wayland session, and file issues so that it can be improved.

Features added in GNOME 49

Accent color support.
Calendar’s interface has undergone significant accessibility enhancements for people with disabilities.
Significant performance improvements to GNOME Software.
Enhanced Remote Desktop capability and support.
Media controls on the lock screen.
HDR brightness controls.

The upstream release notes can be found here.

New defaults

MoreWaita Icon theme.
Decibel as audio player.
Papers as PDF reader.
Ptyxis as terminal.

Plasma

Solus 4.8 Plasma

Solus 4.8 Plasma Edition ships with KDE Frameworks 6.19.0, KDE Plasma 6.5.3, and KDE Gear 25.08.3. In conjunction with the GNOME Edition, we no longer ship an X11 session on Plasma by default. Users that still wish to use the X11 session must install the plasma-x11 package.

With KDE Plasma 6.8, scheduled for release in October 2026, Plasma will no longer support X11 at all, and will be Wayland only! Users should try the Wayland session, and file issues so that it can be improved.

Features added in KDE Plasma 6.5

Automatic theme transitions.
Fuzzy search in KRunner.
Rounded bottom corners for windows.
Performance improvements for Discover.

Here are the upstream release notes:

Xfce

Solus 4.8 Xfce

Solus 4.8 Xfce Edition is now out of beta! We feel that it is finally time to promote the Xfce edition as a full edition alongside Budgie, Plasma, and GNOME. It is stable and lightweight, making it a good choice for users that care about performance and stability. For 4.8, we are shipping with Xfce 4.20.

Download

Head on over to our Download page to download the edition you wish to use. Happy installing!

Thank you

We want to give a shout-out to all of our supporters on OpenCollective. We are grateful to all of our backers who fund our work, and help us bring this Linux distribution to everyone. Solus could not operate without your help. Your donations pay for our server infrastructure, services like email, and our contributors for long-term and complex package and development work. You can become a backer today for as little as $1 a month. Thank you.

A previous version of this post listed an incorrect version of LibreOffice. It has been corrected to 25.2.6.

A previous version of this post stated that Plasma 6.8 would release in early 2027. It has been corrected to say October 2026.

Unveiling Our New Website

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Heya folks, we have some exciting news to share! Today, after many months of work, Solus has a new website! A lot of work has gone into this project, and we are all very excited to finally deploy it for everyone to use.

We’ve chosen to do away with the old custom Solus theme for Hugo, and adopt the Hextra theme. It is a modern theme that supports blogs, documentation, and regular static pages. Importantly, Hextra is actively maintained, and has a good community and friendly developers.

What’s wrong with the old site?

You may be wondering why we decided to replace the old website. There are a few reasons.

First of all, the old site was created using something called “Solbit”, which aimed to be a unified look and feel for both the main website, and the Help Center. Since we moved to Docusaurus for the Help Center, Solbit was only used for the main website. Now, this all sounds good in theory, but the reality is that Solbit was not easy to work with. To compound the matter, the website used a mishmash of Solbit and its own custom Hugo theme, making it even harder to do work on the site. Most of your time would be spent trying to find in which of three different places a component or style might be located, only to find that there are versions in multiple places and you chose the wrong one.

Second, information on the old website was spread out across multiple pages. Accessing some of the pages was also difficult; links to them were not obvious as they appeared in page content and not the navigation bar or footer.

Third, the blog was kind of brittle. We were limited in the formatting we could do on posts because of missing Markdown support. For example, we could not do code blocks in posts because it wasn’t implemented.

Goals

In taking a hard look at the old website, we came up with clear goals that we wanted to achieve. One thing we wanted to do was make the content of the entire website easier to access. It should be clear how to navigate to every page on the website. Next, we wanted to try to consolidate the information on the site. Users shouldn’t have to go through three different pages to get the information they want. Third, there should be some sort of visual consistency across the website. Having a consistent look and feel makes the site look more professional and cohesive.

In with the new

Now that we know the reasons for the change, what have we actually done? Frankly, a lot; there isn’t a single page that wasn’t touched, and most received a total redesign. Too much changed to list everything, and besides, part of the fun is exploring the new site to find the differences. Still, I’ll talk about the highlights.

Home page

Right off the bat, you’ll notice that the home page is completely different. Users are greeted by a short, bold blurb about Solus, and a preview image front-and-center. The laptop image has been re-created by Malfisya, depicting a more modern laptop than the original site. Below that, prominent buttons to take you to the Help Center or download page, making them much more accessible. The rest of the page tells visitors about Solus.

Editions

The editions page is where you go to download your preferred edition of Solus. We kept the old grid layout, but redesigned it to look more modern and appealing. Of all of the pages on the website, this one probably changed the least, if you can believe it.

Technology

Our technology page has seen changes to better showcase the software and technology that Solus develops. It gives a lot more information about each project, without appearing cluttered and cramped like the old page. The page no longer lists software that we include in the repository, focusing only on software created by Solus.

Blog

The index page for our blog posts is a bit simpler than the old site. It is largely unchanged from the stock Hextra blog page. The only difference is that we’ve added a button at the top for the RSS feed. Compared to the old blog page, you’ll notice that there are no more preview images. There is an upstream issue to add that support, but it has not been done at the time of writing this post.

Blog posts now have a Table of Contents to make it easier to jump to sections in a post. They also support a broader range of Markdown, so we can more easily add images, and add real code blocks:

fn main() {
 println!("Hello, world!");
}

Posts can now have multiple authors listed, complete with avatars and links. On the old blog, only a single author could be listed, and they had to be defined elsewhere in a YAML file.

Branding & Press

The branding and press pages both saw significant reworks. The press page now has a nicer layout, with proper spacing between sections to make it more accessible and readable.

My favorite change across the entire site has to be the new branding page. It now contains a lot more information about the Solus branding. We’ve included new sections on the colors we use, and our position on merchandise. This page, while being something that most of our visitors won’t ever see, I feel best embodies what we wanted to achieve with this endeavor: making the information on our website clearer, more readable, and, I hope, visually pleasing.

Closing words

We started work on the new website on May 1, 2025. It has been quite the journey to get here. When I started this project, I had basically 0 experience with making a Hugo website. Since then, I have learned a lot, both about Hugo, and about general design. Each page took multiple iterations before we landed on the designs we have now. As with any project, it is never truly finished, but we feel this one is now in a place where we can make it the Solus website. From all of us, we hope that you enjoy the new design, and we will see you for the next blog post.

A New Epoch Begins

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Heya, folks! We have some exciting news to share with you today. Last year, we began the process of moving the remaining executable files from /bin and /sbin to directories inside of /usr, and creating compatibility symlinks from /usr/bin to /bin and /usr/sbin to /sbin. We call this “Usr-Merge”. The rollout of our Usr-Merge process was a success, and it is now time to perform the next steps. There are compatibility symlinks in some packages to make sure they work on both merged and unmerged systems, and we cannot remove those without potentially breaking systems. That is, we can’t, unless we do an “epoch bump”, and start using a new package repository. This is also an important step on the road to using AerynOS tooling.

What’s an epoch?

For Solus, an epoch refers to the binary version of the package repository. Bumping the epoch means that we are moving from one binary version to another. This means creating a new package repository from our existing one, Shannon, where we can update packages beyond what is available in the Shannon repository. That way, we know with absolute certainty that user systems are updated to the required point to install further updates without system breakages.

The current epoch began when Solus was re-launched on new infrastructure, and our package repositories were put behind a Content Delivery Network, or CDN.

A new epoch

In this epoch, we will begin using a new stable repository. We’ve chosen to name this new repository Polaris, after the North Star, keeping with our usual nautical theme. This star is often used for navigation, especially at sea, so the name can be symbolic of us being on the right path.

Once users begin using the new repository, they will be able to install updated systemd and baselayout packages which we could not safely push to the old repository. This unlocks several other upgrades that we can then do, such as improved virtual console handling. Importantly, it means we are no longer stuck on an old version of systemd.

Python 2

Something else that we’ve wanted to do for years now is finally remove Python 2. Since the old Software Center is written in Python 2, we can’t simply remove it with a normal package deprecation, because it may be the mechanism actually performing the update and removal. Removing it while it is running would be a Bad Idea. With that in mind, we decided that it would be best if we did this as a part of the epoch transition.

By the time Shannon is tomb-stoned, that is, no longer receiving package updates, Python 2 will have been fully removed from the Polaris repository. While it is still available at the time of writing, we will begin deprecations over the course of the transition period.

How do we do it?

Now we know the benefits of, and the reasons behind, starting a new epoch, how do we actually do it? The process is actually fairly simple. First, we create a new repository on our package server and clone all of the packages in Shannon into it. This step has already been done. Next, we create a script that runs during system boot that checks if the system is ready to transition, and performs the migration if it is, additionally replacing Software Center with GNOME Software or KDE Discover, depending on your desktop environment. This is exactly the same concept as the Usr-Merge script we rolled out last year. The script will be rolled out to users’ systems via a package update to the usysconf-epoch package on Shannon.

After the transition is complete on your system, install updates via a software center or eopkg, reboot, and continue using your system as normal.

When is it happening?

The update script is already in the Unstable repository for opt-in testing. After it is synced to the Shannon (Stable) repository on October 17, users can opt-in to run the script on their systems for wider feedback and testing. One week after that, assuming that no major blockers have been found, on the sync of October 24, all users on Shannon will automatically undergo the epoch transition.

Opting in

Opting in to undergo the transition is really easy. All you have to do is run this command in your favorite terminal:

echo EPOCH_ENABLE=yes | sudo tee /etc/sysconfig/epoch

Once you do that, the script will run during the next boot.

Next steps

Once the epoch bump is complete, we will be updating GNOME to 49. This release uses API only present in a newer systemd, so we can’t really update it before then. After that, we will be going into feature freeze so we can start creating and testing new ISOs for a Solus release so new users can begin using Solus straightaway without having to go through the epoch transition process. Once that is out the door, we can go back to business as usual, making this Linux distribution the best that it can be.

A previous version of this post used the incorrect name of Aeryn to refer to the organization. It has been corrected to AerynOS.

Hacktoberfest 2025

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 12:40:32 -0400

Heya folks! It’s now October, and that means Hacktoberfest! It is an annual event that “encourages people to contribute to open source throughout October”, while earning rewards. Hacktoberfest is an excellent way to start getting involved in Open Source, and many projects participate in the event. You can make contacts in different projects, get mentoring, and practice your skills. On top of that, you can get cool badges!

Our goals

We have two goals again this year. First, we have a lot of open issues on our package repository, and we would love to close some of them. There are currently three pinned issues that are a great place to start; you don’t even need to have any programming experience.

If you’re looking for something a bit more involved, we also have plenty of software that has been accepted for inclusion in the repository, but has not had anyone step up to package or maintain them. You can see them all here.

Our second goal is to slim down the number of open issues on our documentation for the Help Center. Our documentation is written in Markdown, and you really don’t need any programming knowledge to contribute. Improving our Help Center articles is a great way to help make Solus easier to use by the community.

Getting involved

Register on the Hacktoberfest website
Read up on what it is and how to participate
Check out our docs on packaging
Join our Matrix space, we use the Solus Packaging room to discuss packaging work.
Find something(s) to work on
- For development / bug triage: look in the Solus Packages repository
- We also need help with some issues in our Help Center repository
  
  Anything labeled “Hacktoberfest”, “Good First Issue”, “Package Request” or “Help Wanted” is a good candidate for new folks (but don’t feel limited to them)
Do work and create pull requests in the Solus repositories
At least four of your PRs / MRs need to be accepted and merged (across any and all projects which are participating) for you to complete Hacktoberfest

Happy hacking!

Update on Snaps

Mon, 05 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Last year we announced the removal of snaps from Solus in January of 2025. Because of recent developments, we have decided to hold off on the complete removal for the time being.

What has changed

There is progress on getting the required AppArmor support added to the Linux kernel itself. The changes have made it to linux-next, which means that they could land in the next Linux release (v6.16).

The maintenance burden of the AppArmor patches was the primary driver behind our deprecation of Snaps. With full AppArmor support in the Linux kernel, we should get full Snap support without the maintenance burden.

Current status

The current situation is the same as in our previous blog post on the topic:

Snaps will continue to show a warning when not running in strict confinement.
We recommend migrating to Flatpak: Flatpaks are integrated in both GNOME Software and KDE Discover, making it easier than ever to not only install, but also update, Flatpak software on your systems. They also have broader upstream support since Flatpak is developed by a cross-distribution community.

Next steps

There is a lot that needs to happen before Snaps can be strictly confined again:

The new AppArmor features need to actually land in the Linux kernel. When this happens is unknown, but it will be in Linux 6.16 at the earliest (expected in July, 2025).
Both AppArmor and snapd will need to be updated to support the new version of AppArmor in the Linux Kernel.
We will need to integrate the new Linux kernel, AppArmor and snapd releases.

We will continue to monitor the situation. Updates will be posted to the GitHub issue tracking deprecation.

Solus 4.7 Released

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

New Year, new ISOs! We are proud to announce our latest release: Solus 4.7 Endurance. This release focuses on updating our editions, and refreshing the default kernels. We’ve called this release Endurance to highlight our promise to users that we will continue to deliver timely updates to keep their systems stable and beautiful.

General

Default applications

All our editions feature:

Firefox 134.0.2
LibreOffice 24.8.4.2
Thunderbird 128.6.0

For audio and video multimedia playback, we offer software out-of-the-box that caters specifically to our desired experience for each edition.

Budgie and GNOME editions ship with Rhythmbox for audio playback, with the latest release of the Alternate Toolbar extension to provide a more modern user experience.
Budgie and GNOME ship with Celluloid for video playback.
Xfce ships with Parole for multimedia playback.
Plasma ships with Elisa for audio playback and Haruna for video playback.

Try a new Software Center

We encourage you to try one of the new Software Centers as a replacement for solus-sc (Solus Software Center). A new software center gets you out-of-the-box support for Flatpaks, and better app descriptions through Appstream metadata support.

Our contributors and staff have been hard at work adding and fixing the metainfo.xml files used for Appstream support. Our goal is for every packaged GUI application to have a working metainfo.xml file, so that the software centers can show users all kinds of information about an app before they decide to install it.

Curious Budgie, GNOME and Xfce users can install gnome-software, while Plasma users should install discover.

Better initial support for new NVIDIA cards

Our ISO images now include firmware support for more NVIDIA GPUs out-of-the-box. Some users with 4000 series cards were seeing black screens when trying to install Solus; this should now be fixed.

Kernels and Mesa

Solus now ships Linux kernel 6.12.9. For those who need an LTS kernel, we provide 6.6.70. We plan to move to the 6.12.x kernel series for LTS; if you are using the LTS kernel now, please try the 6.12.x kernel so we can address any issues that may arise from the switch before it becomes mandatory.

Mesa has been upgraded to 24.3.3. See the 24.3.0 notes for new features, the full release notes are here.

Budgie

Solus ships with Budgie 10.9.2, the latest release of the Budgie Desktop. The mature 10.9.x series brings some small improvements, and builds on Budgie’s reputation for stability and polish.

Upstream release notes can be found here.

GNOME

Solus GNOME Edition ships with GNOME 47.3, an update to the GNOME 47 Denver series.

Features Added in GNOME 47

Accent Colors
Enhanced Small Screen Support
Screen Capture Hardware Encoding
Faster, More Accurate GTK Rendering
New Open and Save File Dialogs

Upstream release notes can be found here.

Plasma

Solus 4.7 Plasma Edition ships with the latest Plasma Desktop, KDE Frameworks, KDE Gear, and the KDE branch for QT.

Upstream release notes:

Xfce

Our Xfce experience has been updated to version 4.20. This is a big milestone for the Xfce project: It brings very experimental support for Wayland. You can take the tour of the latest release here.

The Xfce edition includes:

Xfce version 4.20
Mousepad 0.6.3
Parole 4.18.2
Ristretto 0.13.2
Thunar 4.20.1
Whiskermenu 2.8.3

Known Issues

Plasma ISO requires creation of a kwallet key file before connecting to a network.
When running eopkg check, linux-current and linux-lts may show as broken. These are false positives, and can be disregarded.
Sometimes there is no image when booting GNOME in a VM.
GNOME sometimes boots to black screen and X cursor in VM This appears to be an upstream bug.

We will keep an up to date list of known issues for 4.7 on the forums.

Download

Go to our Download page and select direct download or torrent. Happy installing!

Thank you

This release I would like to highlight the work done by our newly-minted Solus Cleanup Crew ™. This wonderful group has been working through a series of tasks that require a particular kind of dedication. As an example, take a look at the homepage task. More than a year ago, we started a clean-up of one particular field in the files that define our packages. Now, we’re very close to finishing that task, which required editing ~2,300 packages. You can follow their work in the Contributor Round-ups we publish from time to time on our forum.

Thank you to everyone who supports our work financially through Open Collective. We are grateful to all our backers. As a reminder, OpenCollective members get access to testing ISOs between formal releases. For more information, click here.

Future plans

In keeping with our Endurance theme for this release, we are proud to have delivered another year of stable updates to all our users. We plan to mix in a few interesting changes with our next release, along with the usual updates; stay tuned.

Clean, Clean, Clean!

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Hello everyone! Alfi here, member of Solus Cleanup Crew. It’s been more than a year since I started contributing to Solus and I want to talk about it. About what I did, what we did, what we accomplished so far, and what we want to do next.

A bit of background

I started contributing in October 2023, when Solus participated in Hacktoberfest. Hacktoberfest is a month-long event that encourage people to contribute to open source project in exchange for some digital merchandise. Finally, an excuse to contribute to something I use every day. Although, as an accountant, all of this is new experience to me. It was confusing at first, but I persisted. Finally, I got the hang of it and I managed to submit around 100 pull request during the month of the event. I was very excited and motivated. During the month, a few people joined the event and contributed to Solus, but then November came and most of the contribution slowed down. I was the only one left that continued doing the beginner tasks, mostly adding homepage to packages.

At the start of January 2024, Jakob Gezelius (androidnisse) comes in and starts contributing to homepage task too. Worried that we would stepped on each other’s feet, we started a private chat to organize the tasks between ourselves. Until May, the two of us had been chipping away at the homepage task which at this point left 650 packages without a homepage. Then we had more contributors joining. I decided to make a group chat to accommodate all the people joining. It was called “Solus Homepage Team” at the time. More contributors and staff members joined the room, then it was renamed as “Solus Cleanup Crew” and moved under the official Solus matrix space.

What is it?

Solus cleanup crew is a group of community contributors as as well staff members with the goal of bringing the Solus package repository up to current standard. It is a subset of the packaging room on our matrix channel. We organize the work on all the cleanup related tasks.

Why bother?

Solus has been updating their tooling and infrastructure since its resurrection. While most of the tooling changes can be accomplished by staff members alone, there are things that they cannot do. While many consider Solus repository as small, it still contains more than 6000 packages. Some packages have never even gotten an update since Solus was first created! We want to get rid of all its cruft before we can migrate to a better tooling. That’s where the community contributor can come in and help.

For me personally, it is a chance to learn something new and fill my time with more purpose. Sometimes, I feel like a slob scrolling through things, opening the same three apps over and over or sleeping midday. Technically speaking, doing packaging is still scrolling through things, still opening the same three apps over and over, and I still get my midday nap, but now it is with purpose. I love that what I do can be enjoyed by other people. It is mostly invisible and not even noticed by people, but the chance of it helping people gives me so much joy. Why bother? Because I love it.

What we accomplished

We create a few repository wide task that can done with little reading of our packaging guide. The keen-eyed of you may have already seen these tasks. It is always attached at the end of every Sync Updates since July. These are the tasks we did:

No.	Task	Date Started	Start count	Current count
1.	Adding homepage key to package.yml	30-09-2023	2300	8
2.	Adding AppStream metainfo to all font packages	06-10-2023	38	Done 🎉
3.	Adding AppStream metainfo to all graphical applications	22-01-2024	316	198
4.	Applying new cargo macros	27-06-2024	37	Done 🎉
5.	Changing all packages with homepages pointing to wiki.gnome.org	20-10-2024	87	62
6.	Adding monitoring.yml	21-10-2024	3070	2937
7.	Tagging packages that do not build	Ongoing	N/A	13
8.	Tagging packages that should be deprecated	Ongoing	N/A	25

As you can see from the table above, we just completed two tasks and we are close to completing homepage task. Packages that do not build also are also getting solved one by one. Right now, there are 12 people in Solus Cleanup Crew Matrix room, 6 of them are new contributors. We also create a new AppStream metainfo documentation, clean up our issue templates, implement a better tagging system for organizing issues and much more. Solus Cleanup Crew is also becoming a place where we can onboard new contributors and recruit new staff. I thought we accomplished a lot and I am happy with it.

What next?

We want to focus on adding appstream metainfo for remaining 200 packages, in line with the goal of 4.7 ISO. It will not be easy nor quick, but we will try our best. We want Solus users to have the best experience possible when we finally say goodbye to solus-sc and switch to modern software center (Gnome Software and KDE Discover). We want you to be able to install all graphical application from software center and have all the relevant information (Legible screenshot, Hi-Res Icon, good description, etc).

We also want to add more monitoring.yml files to packages, so we can utilize our proof-of-concept “Package Update Monitor” created by Justin Zobel. I, myself and Joey Riches will explore the possibility of curating our own “Editor’s Choice” and “Featured Apps” in Gnome Software, made possible by gnome-app-list. I think the road ahead is very exciting for us and hopefully for you too!

Want to help?

We are always eager for people to join and spend their time contributing to Solus. There are many ways you can contribute, but for me it is packaging. For me, packaging can be relaxing, sometimes frustrating, but always gives me joy at the end. If you are interested to dip your toe on packaging and want to help us, here are the simple steps:

Join the Solus Packaging Room on Matrix
Read and practice our packaging documentation
Submit your first Pull Request. We recommend doing the wiki gnome task or monitoring task
Follow along the review process until your PR gets merged
Continue on contributing and you might get invited to Solus Cleanup Crew

Closing thoughts

I want to thank all the contributors that made all of this possible. It was such a wonderful effort from everyone and we will strive to keep that up. Let me know if you are interested in a follow-up blog about the detail of doing packaging for Solus.

Terima kasih dan sampai jumpa!

Solus 4.6 Released

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Solus team is proud to announce the release of Solus 4.6 Convergence. This refresh brings the usual collection of Desktop Environment updates, kernel enhancements, and increased hardware support.

Note that the file names of the ISOs is slightly different than they used to be. Each file now has the release channel and date that the ISO was generated in the name.

General

Default applications

All our editions feature:

Firefox 131.0.3
LibreOffice 24.2.5.2
Thunderbird 128.3.1

For audio and video multimedia playback, we offer software out-of-the-box that caters specifically to our desired experience for each edition.

Budgie and GNOME editions ship with Rhythmbox for audio playback, with the latest release of the Alternate Toolbar extension to provide a more modern user experience.
Budgie and GNOME ship with Celluloid for video playback.
XFCE ships with Parole for multimedia playback.
Plasma ships with Elisa for audio playback and Haruna for video playback.

Usr-merge

Over the summer, the Solus team has been tackling the Usr-Merge conundrum; read Evan’s excellent blog post for the full story. We have now reached the end of Stage 3 on our rollout plan: All users with an updated system now have a Usr-Merge’d system. Any users that create a fresh installation with today’s ISOs will also have a merged system. We expect stage 4 to complete Soon™️.

As a reminder, the Usr-Merge brings Solus in line with the compatibility efforts being spearheaded by Fedora and other distributions. More urgently, systemd requires the filesystem be merged for version 255. Additionally, the Usr-Merge is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for Solus to adopt Serpent tooling in the future.

Experimental Software Centers

We continue to ship solus-sc (Solus Software Center) as the default graphical package manager, but close watchers of Solus development know that we have had experimental support for GNOME Software and KDE Discover included in our repository for many months now.

These software centers let users update software distributed by the Solus repositories, as before, and install and manage Flatpaks for third-party packages. Flathub is configured as a Flatpak remote by default.

Curious Budgie, GNOME and XFCE users can install gnome-software, while Plasma users should install discover.

Kernels and Mesa

This release of Solus ships with Linux kernel 6.10.13. For those needing an LTS kernel, we provide 6.6.54.

Our linux-current kernel no longer includes AppArmor patches; see this prior blog post. Dropping the patches reduces the kernel maintenance workload. Snaps now run in partial confinement, and our preferred source of third-party applications continues to be Flatpaks. The patches are still included with our LTS kernel branch.

Mesa has been upgraded to 24.2.3. The 24.2.0 release introduced a few new features:

VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering_local_read on RADV
VK_EXT_legacy_vertex_attributes on lavapipe, ANV, Turnip and RADV
VK_MESA_image_alignment_control on RADV
VK_EXT_shader_replicated_composites on ANV, dozen, hasvk, lavapipe, nvk, RADV, and Turnip
VK_KHR_maintenance5 on v3dv
VK_KHR_maintenance7 on RADV
VK_EXT_depth_clamp_zero_one on v3dv
GL_ARB_depth_clamp on v3d
Defaulting to a new shader cache implementation, reducing filesystem overhead.

This, and newer releases, have also shipped many bug fixes.

The full upstream release notes are here.

Budgie

Solus ships with Budgie 10.9.2, the latest release of the Budgie Desktop. The mature 10.9.x series brings some small improvements, and builds on Budgie’s reputation for stability and polish.

Default applications

With this Solus release, the Budgie edition now uses some different default applications. As most GNOME apps have been ported to GTK 4 and libadwaita, the Budgie experience has had to shift to achieve a consistent look and feel. Where applicable, we are now using XApps in place of GNOME apps. XApps are generic applications for GTK-based desktop environments.

XReader has replaced Evince
XViewer has replacecd Eye of GNOME
Engrampa has replaced File Roller

Upstream release notes can be found here.

GNOME

Solus 4.6 GNOME Edition ships with GNOME 46.5.

Added Features

Global Search
Enhanced files app
Upgraded online accounts, now with OneDrive support
Remote login with RDP

Bug Fixes, cleanup & quality-of-life improvements

Settings improvements
Accessibility improvements

Upstream release notes can be found here

Plasma

Solus 4.6 Plasma Edition ships with the latest Plasma Desktop, KDE Frameworks, KDE Gear, and the KDE branch for QT. The most notable change is the introduction of Plasma 6. If you’re looking for Wayland, Plasma still has you covered.

Upstream release notes:

XFCE

We continue to call our XFCE Desktop a beta experience, though we have been shipping this desktop since the release of Solus 4.5.

The XFCE edition includes:

XFCE version 4.18
Mousepad 0.6.2
Parole 4.18.1
Ristretto 0.13.2
Thunar 4.18.11
Whiskermenu 2.8.3

Since Solus 4.5, we’ve added the following to our default XFCE experience:

Engrampa has replaced File Roller
XReader is now the default PDF reader
The keyboard layout switcher plugin is now installed by default

While not installed by default, a couple of other XFCE-related packages have been added since our last release:

xfdashboard
xfce4-battery-plugin
xfce4-clipman-plugin

Known Issues

Plasma ISO requires creation of a kwallet key file before connecting to a network
When running eopkg check, linux-current and linux-lts may show as broken. These are false positives, and can be disregarded.
Users with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers and the 6.10 kernel may experience a black screen or errors on a black screen after waking the system from sleep.
Sometimes there is no image when booting GNOME in a VM
GNOME sometimes boots to black screen and X cursor in VM

Download

Go to our Download page and select direct download or torrent. Happy installing!

Thank you

Solus infrastructure is funded solely through voluntary contributions to our Open Collective. We are grateful to everyone who has joined us there.

Our open collective backers get access to testing ISOs between formal releases. For more information, click here.

Thanks also to all of you who have helped build the Solus community; we love all your contributions! We encourage anyone who want to join the wider Solus community to check out the dedicated Getting Involved page on our Help Center.

Past and future

It has now been over a year and a half since the team relaunched Solus. 2023 saw us complete numerous migrations as we upgraded our infrastructure, while 2024 has been a year moving through much calmer waters.

Looking forward, our next goal is to make a release with the latest Linux kernel, GNOME 47, and the latest Plasma and XFCE versions. In addition, we want to begin the epoch process alluded to in the Usr-Merge blog post so that we can safely enable a Python 3 version of eopkg by default, as well as removing compatibility symbolic links that were added pre-Usr-Merge.

We are excited to see what the future has in store. Keep your eye on our forums and Mastodon for the latest Solus news. We’ll see you again soon.

Solus Hacktoberfest 2024

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 20:29:55 -0500

Hey folks! It’s spooky season, so you know what that means. It’s time for Hacktoberfest 2024! This is the annual event that “encourages people to contribute to open source throughout October”, in exchange for rewards.

This year we have two main goals. First, as always, we want to support anyone looking to get involved in open source contributions, or helping Solus specifically. We would love to add people to our packaging team.

Second, there’s been a big push recently to clean up and update our package repository, and we can use your help. Much of this work currently involves adding home pages to packages, making sure they build, fixing them if they don’t, and adding monitoring information. Related, we would like to field test and improve our “autobuild” tool.

Read on for ways to participate.

What do I get out of it?

Hacktoberfest is a great way to get started contributing to a project, or open source in general. You can make contacts in different projects, get mentoring, and practice your skills. You’ll also get cool badges.

What if I’m not a developer?

Developers aren’t the only contributors in the open source community. We also have people who write documentation, people who submit and triage bugs, and people who do communications and outreach. Your submission to a project does not have to be code.

OK so how do I get involved? And who can help me if I need it?

Register on the Hacktoberfest website
Read up on what it is and how to participate
Check out our docs on packaging
Join our Matrix space, we use the Solus Packaging room to discuss packaging work.
Find something(s) to work on
- For development / bug triage: look in the Solus Packages repository
- We also need help with some issues in our Help Center repository
  
  Anything labeled “Hacktoberfest”, “Good First Issue”, “Package Request” or “Help Wanted” is a good candidate for new folks (but don’t feel limited to them)
Do work and create pull requests in the Solus repositories
At least four of your PRs / MRs need to be accepted and merged (across any and all projects which are participating) for you to complete Hacktoberfest

Good luck, everyone and happy hacking!

Usr-Merge

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Back in May, 2024, we made our initial attempt at doing what we’re calling “Usr-Merge”. While initially hopeful, it quickly became clear that there were significant problems with our approach, and that a new one would be needed. This post will go into what happened in May, and outline what we plan to do next time.

What is Usr-Merge?

The old way of organizing the Linux filesystem split files between /bin and /usr/bin, /sbin and /usr/sbin, /lib and /usr/lib, and /lib64 and /usr/lib64. In recent years, there has been a push to unify everything by putting all the directories in the /usr file tree, e.g. /usr/bin and /usr/lib64, and adding compatibility symbolic links (symlinks) pointing to the directories in /usr. There are several reasons for this:

It improves compatibility in behavior with other Unixes and Linuxes. Scripts written for another distribution don’t need modifications for different file paths, making them more portable.
Compatibility with the GNU build systems. Porting software to Linux becomes easier, because the build system and developers don’t have to worry about a split /usr.
Improved compatibility with upstream development.
Reduced complexity of the filesystem. The separation between vendor-provided (coming from your Linux distribution, possibly read-only) resources and user resources becomes more clear.

The Freedesktop Wiki has a much more detailed article about Usr-Merge here.

Sounds like Stateless

If you’ve used Solus for any length of time, you may have heard the team talking about “stateless” packages. What does that mean? A stateless system means that, in theory, you can remove everything in /etc and be left with a still-working system using vendor-provided (e.g., Solus) defaults. We do this by putting default configuration files in /usr/share/defaults, which can be copied to /etc or $HOME/.config and modified by the user, overwriting the system defaults. While not directly related to Statelessness, the idea behind it and Usr-Merge are quite similar.

This concept is also called “Hermetic-Usr” by systemd and openSUSE.

Serpent OS and moss take the idea of Statelessness a step further. The package manager cannot install files outside of /usr, enforcing a stateless system. Since Solus will also be moving to moss and associated tooling, we will also not be able to ship files outside of /usr, including files in directories like /bin and /lib. That’s where Usr-Merge comes in; it is a prerequisite to switching to the Serpent OS tooling on Solus.

Our previous attempt

Back in May 2024, we thought we had a safe way to merge /bin and /sbin into /usr. It was discovered that we could simply turn these directories into symlinks in our baselayout package, and everything in them would end up in /usr/bin and /usr/sbin when they were updated. As it turned out, it was not that simple at all.

There were two issues with this approach.

Package updates with eopkg are non-deterministic. That means that there is no guarantee about the order that packages will be installed in. In this case, baselayout needed to be updated before any other package to create the symlinks, but there was no way to actually enforce it to be the first in the list. That created the situation where other packages were updated first, and thus their executable files didn’t end up in /usr/bin or /usr/sbin, causing people’s systems to be completely broken.
The Usr-Merge work depended on a previous update already having been installed on users’ systems. When fetching updates, eopkg goes straight from where you are to the latest package version found in the repository, skipping anything in between. Since the team’s systems are usually always up-to-date on the Unstable repository, we didn’t catch that if you weren’t already up-to-date, you would be missing the necessary work done in a previous update when you tried to install the Usr-Merge update.

The second issue is compounded by the first issue because even if the second is solved, the first makes it impossible to reliably install an update addressing it. We were stuck in the position where some users were successfully Usr-Merged, other users weren’t, and there was no way to unify those two groups, either by successfully merging everyone, or rolling back the merge.

We started calling it our Chicken and Egg problem.

Chicken and Egg

The problem goes like this: we can update eopkg to provide more deterministic updates. In fact, Ermo has already done this for both the Python 2 and Python 3 versions of eopkg. But because updates are already non-deterministic, and we can’t guarantee what point in time users are updating from, we can’t rely on the update being present on user systems if we try to do the Usr-Merge again; trying to update would lead to the same problem as before.

And that holds true for any fix that involves a package update to solve this problem. No matter what package it is, or what the update does, the issue is always the same.

Cracking the egg

We have come up with a way forward that should solve our little Chicken and Egg problem. We can’t rely on a single update in a single package to solve the issue, but what we can do is update the pieces of software involved to write and look for marker files signaling that they are compatible with Usr-Merge, and each other. In conjunction, we can ship a script to be run during the early boot process to do the actual merging, if and only if the marker files are in place. By having the process rely on these files and boot scripts instead of just happening with update installation, we can ensure that the merging process will only run when all of the pieces are in place, and not before. The package manager is taken out of the equation entirely. If you want to see what the script does for yourself, it can be found here.

The plan

The process goes like this:

eopkg is updated with Usr-Merge support. It writes a marker file to indicate that the system can safely be merged.
Our Usr-Merge script runs during early boot and detects the marker file. The script proceeds to upgrade the machine safely, checking every file along the way with each step, only continuing if everything is correct.

The checking does mean that the script takes a while to run on less powerful systems; our testing in a Virtual Machine simulating really old hardware showed that the script took about 3 minutes to complete. Recent package updates include work to speed up the migration process significantly by essentially self-migrating, but it could still take a while.

Because of the time the script could take to run, a message will be shown on screen so the user knows that something is happening. The script is robust enough to not destroy your system if a reboot occurs while it is running, but doing a hard reboot does mean that the script has to start over on the next boot.

Lastly, a marker file is written that indicates that the system is now Usr-Merged.
eopkg will use the second marker file to know that it is safe to switch to a new package repository that is incompatible with non-Usr-Merged systems.

The switch will be activated when the phased rollout is complete.

Once the migration has rolled out to everyone (more on this later), we can fork our package repository and do an Epoch bump, which is jumping from one binary repository version to another. That way, we can safely release package updates, knowing that they’ll only be going out to Usr-Merged systems. While an Epoch bump isn’t strictly necessary for the merging process itself, it is necessary to safely remove our pre-Usr-Merge compatibility symlinks from various packages. Removing the symlinks on a system that has not been merged will likely break the system, as we saw last time, because update order is non-deterministic.

Migration to a new package repository has actually been done before on Solus. Most recently, it was done when the repositories were put behind a CDN during the re-launch of our infrastructure.

Staged rollout

We’re aiming for a staged rollout, where everyone gets the necessary updates, but the script will only run on some systems, leaving everyone else operating as before. After our last attempt, we want to ensure that the process is as robust as possible, and if there is another problem that we have not foreseen, it will only affect a limited number of users, and the rollout can be stopped with minimal disruption. Assuming that no issues pop up, each weekly sync after the rollout begins will see more machines going through the Usr-Merge process, until no one is being held back.

A staged rollout can be achieved by taking the systemd machine ID of a computer, deriving a number from it between 0 and 255, and checking if the derived number is below a certain threshold. If it is, then the merging script continues to run; otherwise, the script will exit, and the system will not be Usr-Merged. The magic number can be set in a file that gets shipped with the script, enabling us to update it for each rollout stage with the weekly sync.

The entire process goes like this:

Stage 1: Allow opt-in to Usr-Merge via a configuration file.
Stage 2: Allow opt-in, and merge x amount of computers.
Stage 3..n: Each sync, more systems are allowed to go through the process.
Stage n+1: All users have been merged; do the Epoch bump. Users start getting updates from the new repository, and everyone is on a Usr-Merged system! 🎉

When is it happening?

As always, Solus does not give an ETA for anything. That said, users running on the Unstable package repository can opt-in and help us test right now! If you wish to be one of those brave people, head on over to this tracking issue for instructions, and join us on Matrix if you haven’t already. Keep an eye on our forum and Mastodon for updates on when Usr-Merge begins rolling out to users.

Dropping AppArmor Kernel Patches

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Heya folks! With the 6.9 update to our Current branch of the Linux kernel, we are dropping the AppArmor patchset from Canonical. This means that snaps will now run with partial confinement if you are using the current kernel. Our LTS kernel will still have the AppArmor patches applied.

Dropping these patches is the first step in ending support for Snap on Solus. Snaps will still be supported for the rest of 2024, they will just be running with only partial confinement. Long-term, Snap users are encouraged to explore alternative solutions, such as Flatpak.

User impact

The only immediate impact on users as a result of this decision is that snaps will now be running under partial confinement. Snaps will continue to function until their support on Solus ends at the end of 2024.

Confinement warning

Snaps are usually protected using strict confinement, ensuring that snaps can’t access more of your system than needed. The snap command provided by Solus shows a warning when strict confinement is not available. For example:

WARNING: snap is running with partial confinement. See https://help.getsol.us/docs/user/software/third-party/snap for details

We recommend migrating to Flatpak when possible. The warning can be silenced by running:

sudo snap hide-confinement-warning

Benefits to us

Maintenance

Dropping the AppArmor patchset has several benefits for us. To start with, the patchset is huge; it is upwards of 60 separate patches, making it a significant maintenance burden. Since the set is maintained and updated by Canonical, we can only update to a new kernel after they’ve updated all of those patches, which sometimes takes a long time, or even doesn’t happen at all, as with the 6.9 kernel series.

ISO generation

Not applying the patches means that we can generate ISO images on our own infrastructure. Right now, ISOs can only be generated on systems using the Solus kernel, due to our AppArmor hooks. This means that every week, someone on the team has to use their system to build all the images and then upload around 10GB of ISOs to the download server for our OpenCollective backers. The same goes for full Solus releases. By dropping the AppArmor patches, we can skip all of that and generate images on the server directly.

Next steps

Going forward, Flatpaks will be the preferred way of installing software that isn’t in our official repository. We recommend looking into migrating to Flatpak and/or looking for alternatives to any snaps you use. Snap support on Solus will end with the start of 2025. Until then, Snaps will still work and be supported on Solus, albeit without full confinement.

Flatpak

Flatpaks are integrated in both GNOME Software and KDE Discover, making it easier than ever to not only install, but also update, Flatpak software on your systems. They also have broader upstream support since Flatpak is developed by a cross-distribution community, whereas Snap is developed and managed by Canonical and currently largely targets Ubuntu. Most flatpaks are available on Flathub, which can be explored in your web browser in addition to GNOME Software and KDE Discover.

Migrating to Flatpak

We have implemented tools and documentation to assist users in migrating from snaps to flatpaks. The unsnap package has been added to the Solus repository, facilitating an easy way to switch to flatpak versions of installed snaps. Head on over to our Help Center article for more information.

State of Solus - April 2024

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

April 18, 2024 marks exactly one year since Josh published the “New Voyage” post announcing the return of Solus in its current form. A good chunk of that post was dedicated to explaining the work we wanted to do in the future, having just completed the technical task of migrating critical Solus infrastructure off the previous hosting environment. In this post, I will outline what we’ve accomplished in this busy year.

Organizational work

Expanding Solus Staff

Solus Staff now includes 19 individuals whom we have trusted with access to our packaging infrastructure. From that larger group, we have organically formed smaller groups with additional access and responsibility dedicated to:

Maintaining specific software stacks in the Solus repository
Running social media accounts and moderating Solus communities
Maintaining the infrastructure that hosts Solus services
Running the boring administrative side of the organization

As the Staff group has collaborated over the past year, we’ve found the lines between these groups are a little blurry. New members are trusted with more responsibilities as they demonstrate their abilities, leading to a large group with everyone wearing a few different hats. So far, this informal organization has worked out rather well, and we plan to continue along this trajectory.

Boring administration

There is one Staff group we have formed very deliberately: We call it “Boring Admin”. This group is trusted with billing access to all critical Solus infrastructure, and control over the Open Collective account holding money donated to Solus.

The idea here is to ensure that all critical access is shared. No single person can exert total control over the organization, or threaten it by their absence. This also allows other Staff members to focus on the technical aspects of Solus, rather than mundane administration.

In addition, we have put in place policies to ensure we have reviews of all expenses submitted for approval, and that submitters cannot approve their own expenses.

Spending donated funds

We are eternally grateful to those of you who support us financially on Open Collective. Part of the responsibility that comes with accepting donations is the implicit promise that we will spend the money. Solus is here to build and maintain an operating system, not accumulate cash. To that end, we updated the wording on the Open Collective page to explain more precisely what we will spend money on.

Our expenses fall into two categories: Fixed costs, (examples: server hosting, email), and discretionary spending (example: direct payment of contributors for work). Our fixed costs increased immediately in April 2023 when we moved infrastructure off the server co-located at Rochester Institute of Technology and onto more typical paid hosting.

We have also increased our discretionary spending, recognizing that these payments were rare in the past, and that we have a healthy reserve to draw on, even with the increase in fixed costs. In a way, we are recognizing contributor work that we would have liked to pay for in the past. All discretionary spending is put to a Staff vote before we commit to it.

As a reminder, all our paid expenses are published on the Open Collective page.

Internal documentation

Have you ever wondered what exactly is done behind the scenes to kick off the typical Friday Sync? As it turns out, we didn’t have a good answer either. Some Staff knew from experience, but not everyone. Wherever possible, we’ve worked to refresh and build up internal documentation.

Community

Published regular sync notes

Since about June 2023, we’ve been publishing weekly sync notes to the forum. These posts inform the community of notable updates and give us valuable direct feedback from users.

We’re grateful to Evan and Reilly for their weekly dedication here. Condensing a week’s worth of commits into a friendly and informative forum post is more effort than you might think. Silke also gets a mention for creating handy scripts to automate the task of formatting the changelog.

Moved from IRC to Matrix

This move was completed as part of the initial migration work in April 2023. We’re happy with the change and have donated to Matrix.org for hosting our chat over the past year.

Migrated to new Help Center

One night, Joey got sick of the old Help Center, and put in a big effort to port everything over to Docusaurus. This modern platform has made contributing to the Help Center fun and easy.

Then, Tracey completed a thorough review and re-organization of help center content in September. From that base, we have slowly expanded topics covered, with an emphasis on documenting the many small changes to packaging practices. We’ve had about 200 pull requests since the port.

Added new development log (devlog)

As an experiment, we started the devlog to host shorter developer-focused content separate from the main site. We wanted a place for more informal posts. When writing for the main Solus blog (this site), we carefully edit posts, knowing in the back of our minds that we ship browsers with the homepage set to the Solus blog.

Sent regular backer emails

Tracey has been leading the charge in ensuring that Open Collective backers get regular email updates. This required learning how to use our new mail host (Mailgun), and creating new mail templates. The process is now well documented internally, where there was little documentation previously. Silke contributed his scripting talents here too, providing a well formatted starting point for changelogs included in emails. Work continues on automating the process of gathering data for the messages and sending the emails.

Created new YouTube channel

Due to past turbulence at Solus, we no longer have full access to the existing Solus YouTube channel (note the old solus-project.com URL on the page). As a result, we’ve started a new channel here under the getsolus handle. I’m currently working on a series on packaging basics using the new infrastructure and tools.

Built new XFCE Edition

The new XFCE edition of Solus was released as part of Solus 4.5. This edition is planned to take the place of the MATE edition. We are currently working on a migration tool to assist users with this task.

Set up new translation platform

For our transition away from the MATE desktop, Joey built the Solus MATE Transition tool (MTT). I thought it would be a good idea to get the MTT interface translated into as many languages as we can find volunteers for, so we started the Solus translations team on Transifex.

Welcomed new packaging contributors

We were worried that the blackout period prior to our return in April 2023, and the subsequent jump from Phabricator to GitHub, would leave behind some of our valued volunteers. Happily, we can report that after the switch we’ve seen the return of many familiar faces, and we have also managed to attract new contributors. The experience of guiding these new contributors has informed our efforts in rewriting portions of the Help Center.

Infrastructure

Critical parts of the infrastructure migration had already been completed when we set out on A New Voyage in April 2023. This initial work was done by Algent, Ermo, Ikey, Joey, Josh, Reilly, Staudey, Tracey, and Zach, and included:

Moving package hosting to a dedicated server at a hosting provider, backed by Cloudflare CDN
Moving the package builder to more powerful dedicated server hardware at a commercial hosting provider
Ensuring proper shared access to various services among Staff

Migrated development tracker

Our next hurdle was moving Solus development off our self-hosted Phabricator instance, and onto GitHub. Phabricator had an uncertain future at the time, and GitHub was familiar to many potential contributors.

Silke and Joey wrote up a set of processes and migration tools, which included git magic to combine ~5,000 individual package repositories into a single packages repository. They also ported several hundred open issues and re-tagged them for better sorting. All in all, the migration, while initially painful, has turned out very well for the project.

Infrastructure numbers

Since April 2023 we have:

Merged ~2,000 pull requests from community contributors
Pushed ~14,000 package builds through the new build server
Served 15-20TB of package data monthly

Tooling and packaging

Solus prides itself on delivering timely and convenient updates to our users. It’s what distinguishes us as a friendly rolling Linux experience. Naturally, the processes we use to make Solus must also be friendly and continually updated. But when the tools are not updated, becoming dull or growing brittle, we accumulate technical debt. This next section is about finally paying down a portion of that debt. Some issues discussed here have lurked in the background for years.

Building a path out of the python2 rut

No single chunk of debt has loomed quite so large as our reliance on python2. The fundamental tools used to get Solus installed on user systems, as well as updating, installing, removing, and building individual packages, were all originally written for this platform. This means we’re still carrying these dependencies, even though official support of any kind stopped in 2020.

Switched to new installer

As a first step, we decided to stop investing resources into our in-house python2 based solus-installer, and instead rely on calamares, an installer used by several other distributions.

Using Calamares, we get to pool our resources with other projects, collectively building and maintaining a polished installer. We are much more comfortable relying on a larger effort like Calamares to support installing Solus under many different configurations, on a wide range of hardware. The alternative was to spend valuable contributor time porting, re-testing, and then maintaining our existing installer.

We are very grateful to Evan for his efforts and patience driving the development and integration testing for our successful switch to Calamares for the Solus 4.5 release earlier this year.

Switching to new software centers

In the early days of Solus, we pioneered the integration of repository packages and third-party applications into a single interface for users, called the Solus Software Center, or solus-sc. But it too requires python2 dependencies. Between then and now, other distributions have put their collective efforts into developing newer software centers that have features we want to bring to Solus users.

The GNOME and KDE projects offer GNOME Software and KDE Discover as native software centers for their respective desktop environments. Both include Flatpak support, which we see as a natural successor to our Third Party repository.

To include these projects in Solus, Joey and Hans, with support from Evan, Fabio and Ikey, are putting the final touches on bringing PackageKit support to eopkg. We are also trying to add support for hardware management in KDE Discover, similar to what is available in GNOME Software. If this effort goes well, we plan to contribute the work upstream to the KDE project.

Porting eopkg and ypkg to python3

Before Solus was even called Solus, Ikey forked the python2 based pisi package manager to create eopkg, which we still use today. This is yet another python2 application. So, the most fundamental tool for maintaining a Solus system is based on a platform that has been end-of-life for four years now.

Replacing eopkg is a tricky problem. We must create a new package manager that behaves exactly like the old one. Then swap new for old seamlessly on every existing Solus installation, using the package manager we are replacing! You can imagine why we’re treading carefully.

ypkg is less visible to regular users, but no less vital. It is a crucial part of the Solus packaging process, interpreting package.yml instruction files and translating them into build operations. This tool was also originally written in python2.

Here’s the the plan that Fabio, Hans, and Joey – with support from Ermo, Evan, Ikey and Silke – have been following:

Port eopkg and ypkg to python3. As part of this process, Ermo has spent some time building and documenting the release testing process for eopkg and ypkg.
As part of the porting effort, switch to a better XML library. Up until very recently, a stray emoji could corrupt the package index 😂.
Per Reilly’s suggestion, use nuitka to compile the python3 code into stand-alone executables for eopkg and ypkg. These executables are built so they only depend on the availability of the system C library, glibc, which is always available in Solus. This in turn makes these executables effectively independent of all normal python3 stack updates.
Ship those stand-alone executables as drop-in replacements for the current python2 versions (which in contrast depend on the installed python2 interpreter and a few other python2-based libraries).
Update the python3 interpreter and related dependencies without having to worry about breaking the package manager or the package build tool.

The team has already proved that the new eopkg executable is immune to system python3 interpreter changes and upgrades. This was done by using a nuitka-compiled version of the eopkg python3 port to update the system python3 interpreter version from python3.10 to python3.11.

In addition, the nuitka-compiled eopkg python3 version has also successfully demonstrated the ability to downgrade and upgrade itself between versions nuitka-compiled against python3.10 and python3.11 respectively, with no associated crashes or loss of functionality.

The team is currently in the final stages of polishing the python3 port of eopkg, having already ported and put into production the python3 port of ypkg. Early testing has also revealed a 20-25% speed-up in packaging operations.

Workflow improvements

“Workflow” is a broad term we use to cover the experience of using Solus packaging tools and infrastructure to do the day-to-day work of updating packages; and shepherding those changes through the services that handle building and shipping packages onto users’ systems. The improvements outlined here center around automating and modernizing processes and checks that were once manual.

Moved from Makefile to go-task

For a long time, our packaging tasks and commands were all captured in Makefiles. At Reilly’s suggestion, we’ve now switched to go-task, a simplified task runner written in Go. Taskfiles are easier to understand, edit, and extend. Plus, we don’t have to include a Makefile stub in every package directory.

Added automatic packaging checks

One benefit of moving to GitHub is that we can now write automatic checks that run against all pull requests. For instance: Under the old Phabricator workflow, you could easily forget to increase the release number for a package you are working on, then the reviewer could miss it in their manual review. Now, an error like that is flagged by a pre-commit hook, and then generates a warning if it is still pushed to GitHub.

Automatic checks help new packagers learn the minutiae of packaging without having to go through multiple review cycles. Meanwhile, reviewers can focus on trickier subjects and leave the simple checks to the machines.

A big thank you to Silke for having the courage and perseverance to take on this task.

Released new versions of solbuild

The Go tooling team, led by Silke and supported by the rest of the Gophers on the team, has worked with Ermo to create and document a release process for solbuild, through which a range of bug fixes and additions that makes solbuild more convenient to work with have recently been deployed.

Improved the process for updating solbuild images

The process for creating and deploying solbuild images, which are used to speed up package builds, has been updated by Ermo. It is now more straight-forward for Staff to update the images. Ermo also showed his talent for optimization; tweaking image compression to give users faster solbuild updates.

Updated build server tooling

Silke, Gavin, and Reilly have contributed useful tweaks and changes to existing build server tooling, which has allowed us to:

Create an automated PR build script, cutting down on the tedium associated with landing large stacks
List build start and end times + PR landing progress, giving better insight into the flow of builds
Follow the build log progress in real time via client-side CLI tool

Wrote better scripts for ISO generation

Our “crew” Open Collective tier gives backers access to ISOs generated weekly after every sync. You might guess that ISO generation is completely automatic, and you’re almost right: it could be; but it wasn’t! Silke and Ermo have worked together to improve that, making a weekly task less of a chore.

A big thank you to Evan and Tracey who usually handle the actual generation of the ISOs we share every week.

Wrote automated ISO boot and install testing scripts

The vast majority of the time spent on creating official ISO releases for Solus is spent on manually testing ISO images for each edition for basic functionality. To take some of the tedium out of this, Silke has taken point in authoring a test harness for our official release ISOs. This tool runs automated tests on the many boot and partition permutations our installer targets, then creates a collage of desktop screenshots showing the result for each boot + install permutation.

As a result, we can now spend more time fettling the ISO install experience, and less time setting up tests just to see if an ISO will boot.

In closing

This was a marathon post for a marathon year; thank you for reading. We’re quite pleased with the progress we’ve made over the past twelve months. Our aim was to demonstrate a certain amount of “boring” behavior. Regular syncs, solid performance, and a friendly community; all the while working behind the scenes to improve our own experience as volunteers, and laying the groundwork for another exciting year.

Intro to Optimizing Packages on Solus

Fri, 09 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We’ll explore how to build packages with advanced compiler techniques in order to squeeze more performance out of the box for packages in Solus. We’ll be using the story of how libwebp was optimized for and how it led to an unexpected side quest.

Cual es la causa

Linux distributions have a lot of control over how a source-based package gets compiled and shipped to users as part of a binary repository. Aggressive and advanced compiler optimization techniques, as well as other methods can be used to provide greater out of the box performance for end users. This can greatly benefit users running on older hardware to provide a snappier end-user experience; reducing time waiting on a heavy workload to finish; or even improved battery life; amongst other improvements.

Part of the problem is, a packager’s time is limited. So how, as a distribution, do you choose to try provide faster compatible packages for an end user. A historic approach is to simply change the default compiler flags for all packages, such as enabling LTO by default. Whilst this approach can work well, at Solus the philosophy is slightly different where a packager can trivially enable several advanced compiler optimization techniques such as PGO without too much faffing around on a targeted package.

The benefits of such an approach are:

Can target the performance of a specific package to benefit all users
A compiler optimization may improve one package, but may not apply globally to all packages.

The downsides are such:

Requires additional packager time to benchmark and experiment with different optimization strategies.
Requires the packager to choose and invest time into improving performance of a package.
Requires the packager to find an appropriate benchmark to test the package against.
Experimenting with compiler optimizations may not bear fruit: no meaningful improvement in performance, or there may be some other bottleneck.

Optimization Techniques Available

speed:
- As simple as it gets really, build a package with -O3 instead of -O2 as well as any other flags deemed worthy to be included as part of the speed flags. The main drawback of this is that -O3 is not guaranteed to produce faster results than building with -O2 and typically will produce bigger binaries. The days of -O3 outright breaking your program in weird unexpected ways is largely behind us.
LTO:
- Compared to some other distributions -flto is not yet enabled by default on Solus. LTO is almost guaranteed to provide a %1 or slightly larger performance improvement as well as a smaller binary at the cost of increased compiling times and memory usage during build. When combined with other optimization techniques such as PGO the LTO optimization can really stretch its legs and provide even greater uplift!
Clang:
- Not strictly an optimization, but, building a package with clang instead of gcc and ld.ldd to link instead of the infamous ld.bfd may provide a faster package out of the box. You’ll have to be careful of subtle ABI differences if building with clang. If in doubt, and, clang is the obvious choice, perform safety rebuilds on all reverse dependencies of the package.
PGO:
- Profile guided optimization. Build once with instrumentation in order to collect profile data when ran. Run the program using a representative workload in order to collect profiling data. Build the program again with the profiling data provided in order to build an optimized variant.
BOLT:
- Binary optimization and layout tool. You can think of this as “post-link PGO” where you instrument a binary with bolt to collect profiling data. Run that binary. Then finally reorganize the binary layout using the collected profile data. This generally works better on large statically linked binaries but smaller binaries or libraries such as found in a typical package can benefit too. This optimization is still quite new.

Regardless, that’s enough word spaghetti, let’s look at the process to actually optimize a package.

Optimizing a Package

Right, to begin with we’ll have to start on choosing an actual package to benchmark and optimize. I’ve heard the .webp file format is becoming increasingly common on the web, slowly replacing .png and .jpg file formats due to the strong backing of Google (for better or for worst). An improvement in decoding time for .webp files would benefit any user using a web browser casually browsing the web.

Let’s have a look at the package.yml build recipe for libwebp.

name : libwebp
version : 1.3.2
release : 25
source :
 - https://github.com/webmproject/libwebp/archive/refs/tags/v1.3.2.tar.gz : c2c2f521fa468e3c5949ab698c2da410f5dce1c5e99f5ad9e70e0e8446b86505
homepage : https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/
license : BSD-3-Clause
component : multimedia.codecs
summary : A new image format for the web
description: |
 WebP is a new image format that provides lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNG. WebP lossy images are 25-34% smaller in size compared to JPEG images at equivalent SSIM index. WebP supports lossless transparency (also known as alpha channel) with just 22% additional bytes. Transparency is also supported with lossy compression and typically provides 3x smaller file sizes compared to PNG when lossy compression is acceptable for the red/green/blue color channels.
emul32 : yes
patterns :
 - devel : /usr/share/man
builddeps :
 - pkgconfig32(glu)
 - pkgconfig32(glut)
 - pkgconfig32(libpng)
 - pkgconfig32(libtiff-4)
 - pkgconfig32(libturbojpeg)
 - pkgconfig32(zlib)
 - giflib-devel
setup : |
 %reconfigure --disable-static --enable-everything
build : |
 %make
install : |
 %make_install

Okay, looks to be a quite simple affair. A simple configure, make, make install as well as emul32 being enabled specifying the -32bit packages are also provided from this recipe. Next step is to look for a repeatable and easy way to benchmark it. We’ll begin by looking at the pspec_x86_64.xml file which lists all the files produced from the package.yml recipe as well as some metadata.

 <Name>libwebp</Name>
 <Summary xml:lang="en">A new image format for the web</Summary>
 <Description xml:lang="en">WebP is a new image format that provides lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNG. WebP lossy images are 25-34% smaller in size compared to JPEG images at equivalent SSIM index. WebP supports lossless transparency (also known as alpha channel) with just 22% additional bytes. Transparency is also supported with lossy compression and typically provides 3x smaller file sizes compared to PNG when lossy compression is acceptable for the red/green/blue color channels.
</Description>
 <PartOf>multimedia.codecs</PartOf>
 <Files>
 <Path fileType="executable">/usr/bin/cwebp</Path>
 <Path fileType="executable">/usr/bin/dwebp</Path>
 <Path fileType="executable">/usr/bin/gif2webp</Path>
 <Path fileType="executable">/usr/bin/img2webp</Path>
 <Path fileType="executable">/usr/bin/vwebp</Path>
 <Path fileType="executable">/usr/bin/webpinfo</Path>
 <Path fileType="executable">/usr/bin/webpmux</Path>

Perfect, we have dwebp and cwebp binaries available in the main package, which from a guess can be used to decode and encode .webp files. Let’s try it out.

$ dwebp -h
Usage: dwebp in_file [options] [-o out_file]
Decodes the WebP image file to PNG format [Default].
Note: Animated WebP files are not supported.
$ cwebp -h
Usage:
cwebp [options] -q quality input.png -o output.webp

Awesome, these binaries do exactly what we need to benchmark libwebp, but, we are also indirectly testing libpng as well for this benchmark, we’ll have to keep an eye out for that.

One extra step we have to do is ensure these binaries are actually linking against their own library, as upstream developers can have a habit of making sure their binaries don’t link against their own libraries and end up being self-contained. Run ldd to verify.

$ ldd /usr/bin/dwebp
linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffed8733000)
libwebpdemux.so.2 => /usr/lib/libwebpdemux.so.2.0.14 (0x00007f7473bb4000)
libwebp.so.7 => /usr/lib/libwebp.so.7.1.8 (0x00007f7473ae2000)
libpng16.so.16 => /usr/lib/libpng16.so.16 (0x00007f7473aa6000)
libc.so.6 => /usr/lib/glibc-hwcaps/x86-64-v3/libc.so.6 (0x00007f74738a9000)
libsharpyuv.so.0 => /usr/lib/libsharpyuv.so.0.0.1 (0x00007f747389e000)
libm.so.6 => /usr/lib/glibc-hwcaps/x86-64-v3/libm.so.6 (0x00007f74737b8000)
libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1.3.0 (0x00007f7473200000)
/usr/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f7473bea000)

Awesome in this case both dwebp and cwebp link against libwebp.so so we can be confident that any performance improvements will be applicable to all packages in the repository linking against libwebp.

Let’s grab a couple of .webp files from here to test with. We’ll just use the largest image size available in this case to reduce noise as much as possible when running benchmarks as well as allow any potential optimizations to stretch their legs a little more.

Now having done the prep work, lets actually benchmark the damn thing using hyperfine for the time being.

$ hyperfine "dwebp ~/3.webp -o /dev/null"
Benchmark 1: dwebp ~/3.webp -o /dev/null
Time (mean ± σ): 202.2 ms ± 0.3 ms [User: 198.9 ms, System: 3.0 ms]
Range (min … max): 201.8 ms … 202.7 ms 14 runs
$ hyperfine "cwebp ~/PNG_Test.png -o /dev/null"
Benchmark 1: cwebp ~/PNG_Test.png -o /dev/null
Time (mean ± σ): 1.423 s ± 0.009 s [User: 1.346 s, System: 0.076 s]
Range (min … max): 1.410 s … 1.435 s 10 runs

There, we have our a basic baseline for encode and decode performance. We mostly care about decode performance here but improved encoding performance would also not go amiss.

Let’s Start Obvious

Let’s start basic, enabling the speed optimization which basically builds with -O3 instead of -O2 as well as any other flags that are deemed to be worthy to be part of the speed group. As well as, the lto optimization which builds with link time optimization allowing for inter-procedural optimizations to take place.

optimize:
 - speed
 - lto

Moment of truth…

$ hyperfine "dwebp ~/3.webp -o /dev/null"
Benchmark 1: dwebp ~/3.webp -o /dev/null
Time (mean ± σ): 200.0 ms ± 1.5 ms [User: 197.3 ms, System: 2.5 ms]
Range (min … max): 198.1 ms … 203.2 ms 15 runs
$ hyperfine "cwebp ~/PNG_Test.png -o /dev/null"
Benchmark 1: cwebp ~/PNG_Test.png -o /dev/null
Time (mean ± σ): 1.353 s ± 0.012 s [User: 1.281 s, System: 0.071 s]
Range (min … max): 1.336 s … 1.369 s 10 runs

Well okay, we got a very minor uplift in decoding performance and a slightly higher improvement in encoding performance, but nothing too much to write home about. Luckily we have several more optimizations to explore…

PGO is great, except, when it isn’t.

Next step is to explore PGO (Profile Guided Optimization). For our libwebp package, looks like we already hit a bit of a snafu. There’s no test suite included in the tarball! That’s a bit of a disappointment as a test suite such as make check is by far and away the easiest and most comprehensive workload that can be used for profiling as part of PGO, especially for smaller libraries. However, we can still experiment with the just built dwebp and cwebp binaries as a suitable workload for PGO.

Luckily, as part of the package.yml format all you have to do is provide a profile for automatic PGO. After chrooting into the build environment and fiddling around a bit we end up with:

profile : |
 ./examples/dwebp webp_js/test_webp_js.webp -o test_png.png
 ./examples/cwebp test_png.png -o /dev/null

After specifying that, 6 builds will now be performed instead of 2:

emul32:
- Instrumented build
- Run profiling workload
- Optimized build using profiling data
x86_64:
- Instrumented build
- Run profiling workload
- Optimized build using profiling data

For this relatively small package it increases the build time from 1m1.672s to 1m42.199s

The next moment of truth…

$ hyperfine "dwebp ~/3.webp -o /dev/null"
Benchmark 1: dwebp ~/3.webp -o /dev/null
Time (mean ± σ): 204.1 ms ± 2.2 ms [User: 201.3 ms, System: 2.7 ms]
Range (min … max): 201.6 ms … 207.1 ms 14 runs
$ hyperfine "cwebp ~/PNG_Test.png -o /dev/null"
Benchmark 1: cwebp ~/PNG_Test.png -o /dev/null
Time (mean ± σ): 1.349 s ± 0.010 s [User: 1.266 s, System: 0.082 s]
Range (min … max): 1.335 s … 1.374 s 10 runs

Well… That’s interesting. We actually regress in performance for decode performance whilst gaining another small bump in encoding performance. Worse still, we get a bunch of profile count data file not found [-Wmissing-profile] warning messages during the optimized build indicating to us our profiling workload isn’t comprehensive enough and doesn’t cover enough code paths. The lack of a handy make check that could be used as a profiling workload is really hurting us here. For now, let’s put a pin in exploring PGO, it isn’t a dead end but more work needs to be done curating a more comprehensive workload to chuck at it in this particular case, whilst other, easier, optimization techniques are still available to us.

256 Vector Units go brrrrrr…

The next obvious step is to explore glibc hardware capabilities. For those unaware both clang and gnu compilers provide x86_64-v2, x86_64-v3 and x86_64-v4 micro-architecture build options on top of the baseline of x86_64. These enable the use of targeting additional CPU instruction sets during compilation for better performance. For example, -sse4.2 for x86_64-v2, -avx2 for x86_64-v3, and -avx512 for x86_64-v4.

Whilst that’s great ’n all, if a program is built with x86_64-v3 and gains an additional ~10% uplift in performance, it’s no good if a x86_64-v2 compatible cpu can’t run it. Luckily the glibc loader that’s found on almost general purpose linux installs provides a way to load higher or lower micro-architecture libraries if they’re installed and supported.

On top of all that, the package.yml format provides an incredibly simple way of providing x86_64-v3 built libraries by enabling the avx2 : yes flag.

With avx2 : yes enabled in the libwebp package three builds are performed.

emul32
x86_64-v3
x86_64

We now see these additional files in the pspec_x86_64.xml file

+ <Path fileType="library">/usr/lib64/glibc-hwcaps/x86-64-v3/libsharpyuv.so.0</Path>
+ <Path fileType="library">/usr/lib64/glibc-hwcaps/x86-64-v3/libsharpyuv.so.0.0.1</Path>
+ <Path fileType="library">/usr/lib64/glibc-hwcaps/x86-64-v3/libwebp.so.7</Path>
+ <Path fileType="library">/usr/lib64/glibc-hwcaps/x86-64-v3/libwebp.so.7.1.8</Path>
+ <Path fileType="library">/usr/lib64/glibc-hwcaps/x86-64-v3/libwebpdecoder.so.3</Path>
+ <Path fileType="library">/usr/lib64/glibc-hwcaps/x86-64-v3/libwebpdecoder.so.3.1.8</Path>
+ <Path fileType="library">/usr/lib64/glibc-hwcaps/x86-64-v3/libwebpdemux.so.2</Path>
+ <Path fileType="library">/usr/lib64/glibc-hwcaps/x86-64-v3/libwebpdemux.so.2.0.14</Path>
+ <Path fileType="library">/usr/lib64/glibc-hwcaps/x86-64-v3/libwebpmux.so.3</Path>
+ <Path fileType="library">/usr/lib64/glibc-hwcaps/x86-64-v3/libwebpmux.so.3.0.13</Path>

Let’s rerun lld on dwebp after installing the new package and…

$ ldd /usr/bin/dwebp
linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffeab5b1000)
libwebpdemux.so.2 => /usr/lib/glibc-hwcaps/x86-64-v3/libwebpdemux.so.2.0.14 (0x00007f9a351d5000)
libwebp.so.7 => /usr/lib/glibc-hwcaps/x86-64-v3/libwebp.so.7.1.8 (0x00007f9a3510b000)
libpng16.so.16 => /usr/lib/libpng16.so.16 (0x00007f9a350cf000)
libc.so.6 => /usr/lib/glibc-hwcaps/x86-64-v3/libc.so.6 (0x00007f9a34ed2000)
libsharpyuv.so.0 => /usr/lib/glibc-hwcaps/x86-64-v3/libsharpyuv.so.0.0.1 (0x00007f9a34ec1000)
libm.so.6 => /usr/lib/glibc-hwcaps/x86-64-v3/libm.so.6 (0x00007f9a34ddb000)
libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/glibc-hwcaps/x86-64-v3/libz.so.1.3 (0x00007f9a34dbb000)
/usr/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f9a3520b000)

We can crucially see that dwebp is now loading the x86-64-v3 built libwebp.so lib from /usr/lib/glibc-hwcaps/x86-64-v3/libwebp.so.7.1.8, success! Let’s what our performance looks like.

$ hyperfine "dwebp ~/3.webp -o /dev/null"
Benchmark 1: dwebp ~/3.webp -o /dev/null
Time (mean ± σ): 198.2 ms ± 1.2 ms [User: 195.4 ms, System: 2.5 ms]
Range (min … max): 197.0 ms … 200.5 ms 14 runs
$ hyperfine "cwebp ~/PNG_Test.png -o /dev/null"
Benchmark 1: cwebp ~/PNG_Test.png -o /dev/null
Time (mean ± σ): 1.313 s ± 0.009 s [User: 1.243 s, System: 0.078 s]
Range (min … max): 1.308 s … 1.341 s 10 runs

Let’s recap so far:

Optimization	Decode	Encode	Size
Baseline	202.2 ms	1.399 s	1.33 MB
Speed + LTO	200.0 ms	1.353 s	1.73 MB
Speed + LTO + PGO	204.1 ms :warning:	1.349 s	1.07 MB
Speed + LTO + x86_64-v3	198.2 ms	1.313 s	3.17 MB

Whilst we’re still getting an additional speedup it isn’t really anything to write home about. A measly ~2% improvement in decoding performance and a fairly respectable ~7% improvement in encoding performance for our test case. However, increasing the package size by an extra ~2MiB from providing a bunch of extra libs in /usr/lib/glibc-hwcaps/x86-64-v3/ just ain’t worth it. This hints that either the compiler optimizations aren’t really effective here or we’re being bottle-necked by something else.

So far, we’ve been benchmarking fairly simply using hyperfine, let’s swap that out for perf so we can get a callgraph.

Something about `perf` to the rescue

perf record -o dwebp.data -- dwebp ~/3.webp -o /dev/null

perf record -o cwebp.data -- cwebp ~/PNG_Test.png -o /dev/null

Let’s look at dwebp first with perf report -i dwebp.data.

Well god damn, literally all of our time is being spent in libz.so it’s no wonder our compiler optimizations were hardly improving performance.

Let’s also look at the cwebp report, we’ve generally been getting better results from it.

Okay, much more of our time is being spent in libwebp.so itself here which helps to explain why we were seeing a better performance uplift. Still 5.68% of our time is being spent in libz.

Choosing Wisely

You may remember early on, when I said we are also indirectly testing libpng. Well… after some more digging, that’s exactly what’s happening here. Re-running the dwebp binary it says this

Decodes the WebP image file to PNG format

Turns out, it’s more accurate to say we are directly testing libpng and by extension zlib. It isn’t libwebp that’s spending all of its time in libz.so, it’s libpng! This is exactly the reason you have to be careful about the benchmarks chosen and, ensure you understand what they’re doing.

However, the good news about this little snafu is:

dwebp can be used to translate to another image format such as .yuv that’ll more accurately remove the bottleneck from libz.so.
We now know that libpng has a huge bottleneck in libz.so and speeding up zlib should dramatically speed up libpng performance.

Adjusting the Benchmark

After reverting the libwebp package to the baseline let’s use our adjusted decoding benchmark.

We’ll now use dwebp ~/3.webp -yuv -o /dev/null for a decoding test, let’s run that with perf to ensure we’re exclusively testing libwebp.so here.

Okay that’s awesome, no libpng.so or libz.so to mess with our tests!

Let’s reapply our optimizations, keeping those which apply an uplift.

Optimization	Decode	Size
Baseline	14.7 ms	1.33 MB
Speed	14.5 ms	1.56 MB
LTO	14.6 ms	1.40 MB
PGO	18.0 ms :warning:	1.07 MB
x86-64-v3	12.7 ms	2.35 MB
Speed + LTO + x86-64-v3	12.3 ms	3.17 MB

Okay, this is great, whilst we aren’t getting much from speed or LTO, we are getting a big uplift from x86-64-v3 libraries and when combined with the other optimizations we’re getting an uplift in performance of around ~16% at the cost of close to thrice the installed package size.

Partial Profiling

Once again we see that PGO regresses performance hard, however, that smaller size is giving a good hint! We already know that the profiling workload we gave it isn’t very comprehensive due to the bunch of -Wmissing-profile warnings we get during the optimized build. By default, PGO will aggressively inline and apply additional optimizations to code that’s part of the profiling workload while everything else will be optimized for size. The idea being, hot-path code is fast and code that doesn’t matter is small. However, what happens when you can’t craft a comprehensive workload, as seems to be the case here? Luckily GCC has a flag for exactly that -fprofile-partial-training. GCC docs state that:

In some cases it is not practical to train all possible hot paths in the program. (For example, program may contain functions specific for a given hardware and training may not cover all hardware configurations program is run on.) With -fprofile-partial-training profile feedback will be ignored for all functions not executed during the train run leading them to be optimized as if they were compiled without profile feedback. This leads to better performance when train run is not representative but also leads to significantly bigger code.

Okay, let’s try it out, all we need to do is specify in our package.yml recipe.

environment: |
 if [[ -n ${PGO_USE_BUILD} ]]; then
 export CFLAGS="${CFLAGS} -fprofile-partial-training"
 export CXXFLAGS="${CXXFLAGS} -fprofile-partial-training"
 fi

And the results:

Optimization	Decode	Size
Speed + LTO + x86-64-v3	12.3 ms	3.17 MB
Speed + LTO + x86-64-v3 + Partial PGO	12.5 ms	3.13 MB

Well, it was worth a try. This highlights how useless PGO can be when you don’t or can’t provide it a good workload. Interestingly, we don’t get the size bloat that was promised, in fact, the opposite.

Final libwebp Results

Benchmark	Time Before	Time After	Size Before	Size After
“dwebp ~/3.webp -yuv -o /dev/null”	14.5 ms	12.3 ms	1.33 MB	3.17 MB
“cwebp ~/PNG_Test.png -o /dev/null”	1.399 s	1.313 s	–	–

In the end, we get a very healthy ~16% improvement in decoding from a .webp to .yuv file. As well as a respectable 6% improvement in encoding from a .png to .webp file. However, the increased package size is very unfortunate. It’s possible to tweak the x86-64-v3 build and only ship the libs that actually improve performance in order to get the installed size back to an acceptable level.

“Next-Generation” Side Quest

Now, you probably remember earlier due to our unrepresentative benchmark we found out that libpng is getting highly bottlenecked by libz.so. This now seems like a perfect opportunity to take a look at zlib and circle-back to our original benchmark that we were using.

Zlib is widely employed throughout the ecosystem and, as such you’d think it would be highly-optimized for performance. However, that isn’t really the case. Zlib is written in an old-fashioned way of C and tries to be extremely portable; supporting dozens of systems that have fallen out of common use. As such, it’s hard to apply architecture specific optimizations that wouldn’t break some old system or without introducing code spaghetti. There have been a couple of attempts to merge AArch64 and x86_64 optimizations into the canonical zlib library without success.

However, there is some light in this tunnel as various forks of zlib having been popping up, applying new optimizations on top of zlib. The most promising of these looks be to zlib-ng. When built in compatible mode, it promises to be API compatible with canonical zlib and tries to be as ABI compatible as possible.

Let’s just go for it, replacing Solus’ zlib package with zlib-ng built in compatible mode. It’s a bit scary due to how integral zlib is in a typical Linux install, but, how hard could it be?

I Zee a Purty lil’ Package

Well that was simple. Here’s what our zlib-ng package.yml recipe looks like.

name : zlib
version : 2.1.5
release : 28
source :
 - https://github.com/zlib-ng/zlib-ng/archive/refs/tags/2.1.5.tar.gz : 3f6576971397b379d4205ae5451ff5a68edf6c103b2f03c4188ed7075fbb5f04
homepage : https://github.com/zlib-ng/zlib-ng
license : ZLIB
component : system.base
summary : zlib replacement with optimizations for next generation systems.
description:
 - A zlib data compression library for the next generation systems. ABI/API compatible mode.
devel : yes
emul32 : yes
setup : |
 %cmake_ninja \
 -DZLIB_COMPAT=ON \
 -DWITH_GTEST=OFF \
 -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON \
 -DINSTALL_LIB_DIR=%libdir%
build : |
 %ninja_build
install : |
 %ninja_install
check : |
 %ninja_check

After building it, all the files seem to be in the right place and the test suite is passing. Let’s just install it overwriting our canonical zlib package and hope our system doesn’t die… I think the word is YOLO.

$ hyperfine "dwebp ~/3.webp -o /dev/null"
Benchmark 1: dwebp ~/3.webp -o /dev/null
Time (mean ± σ): 198.6 ms ± 2.3 ms [User: 194.3 ms, System: 3.6 ms]
Range (min … max): 196.3 ms … 203.3 ms 14 runs
$ sudo eopkg it zlib-2.1.5-28-1-x86_64.eopkg
...
$ $ hyperfine "dwebp ~/3.webp -o /dev/null"
Benchmark 1: dwebp ~/3.webp -o /dev/null
Time (mean ± σ): 87.6 ms ± 0.7 ms [User: 84.7 ms, System: 2.6 ms]
Range (min … max): 86.5 ms … 88.7 ms 33 runs

Well, hot diggity damn. Swapping out the zlib package for a more performant variant has instantly more than halved(!!) our decoding time.

We need to find a more contained libpng benchmark here that removes the libwebp stuff to really confirm the findings here. After some sleuthing the libpng source repository has a pngtopng.c file we can compile to use the system libpng library.

Changing the header from #include "../../png.h" to #include <png.h> then running gcc -Ofast pngtopng.c -lpng16 -o pngtopng to compile it, we have a libpng benchmark. We can reuse our test .png file from earlier. Ending up with: ./pngtopng ~/PNG_Test.png /dev/null for our benchmark.

Library	Time
zlib (canonical)	1.464 s
zlib-ng (compat)	896.6 ms

Well. This is pretty much inline with our flawed dwebp benchmark from earlier. Swapping out zlib almost halves libpng decoding time.

Squeezing more from zlib-ng

However, we’re not done yet. We still have our compiler optimizations available to us to squeeze more performance from zlib-ng.

Optimization	Decode	Size
Baseline	896.6 ms	141.00 KB
Speed	883.6 ms	182.00 KB
LTO	892.7 ms	133.00 KB
PGO	894.6 ms	141.00 KB
x86-64-v3	892.5 ms	295.00 KB
Speed + LTO	882.6 ms	170.00 KB
Speed + LTO + PGO + x86-64-v3	882.5 ms	250.00 KB

It looks like in this case the simple speed + LTO optimizations is the way to go. Speed gives the majority of the speedup but LTO helps bring back down the package size again. However, it’s only a 1.5% improvement from baseline for this benchmark. We can always re-benchmark it later, testing zlib performance more directly instead of via libpng. It shows how good a job the zlib-ng developers have done that it’s so performant right out of the gate.

Final Words

We’ve shown the process of how a package can be optimized in Solus, through the failings and wins here I hope some good tips and tricks were provided in avoiding common pitfalls. Additional benchmarking strategies such as BOLT or Polly optimizations were not discussed and it’ll be good material for a future blog post.

Some other important things such as tweaking the system for benchmarking in order to get representative and consistent results were also not discussed. This is especially important in power budget constrained systems such as laptops and worth bearing in mind.

Regardless, I hope the story of how libwebp was optimized for was entertaining and some things were learnt for anyone looking to optimize packages in Solus for the future.

Dont Call Me MATE, pal!

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Back in our 4.4 release post we announced that Solus would stop shipping a MATE ISO, mostly because MATE showed no signs of moving away from X11 and towards wayland. At the beginning of this year, we shipped our new Xfce ISO as a beta. And now we’re getting ready to ship the Solus MATE Transition Tool to move existing users off of MATE.

The problem

MATE and Xfce are similar enough that eager Solusians can, and have, installed XCFE on their MATE machines with nothing more than a couple of eopkg commands. We’re pretty sure our resident bash script enthusiast (ermo) could hammer out a working transition script in an evening. But we want a more polished experience. We know you follow Solus news; after all, you’re reading this. However, we assume there are users who dutifully update their systems, but have no interest in keeping up with our blog posts. How do we get their attention and prompt them to move away from MATE?

Introducing the Solus MATE Transition Tool

We’re pleased to show off the MATE Transition Tool, which we plan to include in normal updates to MATE systems in the coming weeks. Most of the work on this tool was done by Joey; more on his efforts in the section below. Here’s how MATE users will encounter the tool:

:::note

These screenshots are current as of the publishing of this post, we may change things as we continue testing.

:::

Users will get a notification on every start-up informing them that they need to transition away from MATE.
Clicking on that notification will launch the Solus MATE Transition Tool.
Users select either Solus Budgie or Solus Xfce. The tool installs the selected edition, removes MATE, and prompts for a reboot
The tool removes itself after a successful transition.

Simple. At least, that’s what we want users to think.

How the Mate Transition Tool is actually part of our Python2 work

The story of the MATE Transition Tool is actually tied up in our fight to drag eopkg into the current decade. As I wrote previously, we’re somewhat embarrassed by the amount of Solus tooling which still relies on Python2. One such tool is the Solus Software Center solus-sc. A while back, the team decided the sane thing to do was to ditch solus-sc in favor of KDE Discover and GNOME Software . This would have the additional benefit of promoting flatpak applications to first-class citizens. The problem is Discover and Software have no way to talk to our package manager eopkg. We need an API. Luckily, other projects have encountered the same issue, leading to packagekit.

Joey has been doing the dirty work of bolting packagekit support onto eopkg, and saw an opportunity: If eopkg could be upgraded to understand some of packagekit, then he could write a special-purpose application to move users off MATE without asking them to run scary bash scripts (sorry ermo). We’re rather pleased with this solution. MATE users get a simple transition and Solus gets closer to checking solus-sc off the list.

Eopkg Is Dead, Long Live Eopkg

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Close watchers of our packages repository may have noticed some strange looking items:

Initial inclusion of eopkg4-bin
Testing the eopkg4-bin package Warning: Minions GIF

It’s a long story.

Our package manager eopkg is written in Python2. Python2 was originally planned to hit end-of-life all the way back in 2015! So Solus contributors past and present have wrestled with three thorny issues:

Do we really want to just port eopkg to python3? Surely we could build something newer and shinier.
How exactly do we want to port eopkg to Python3? (We’ll call this ported version eopkg3 for short)
How do we make sure eopkg3 works even if something goes wrong with the Python3 libraries on someone’s machine?

Here’s the plan to solve this: Ikey and friends over at Serpent OS are actively building a new package manager moss that we are excited about. And they’re building it with Solus in mind as an eventual user. This will be our fix for the first problem. In the meantime, we’re taking a pragmatic approach to the last two issues so that (frankly) we can do more exciting things.

Sheepman, Livingsilver, and others completed a direct Python3 port, which we never expect our users to actually run directly like a traditional Python program. Instead, that port will be compiled into a binary using nuitka. We’re calling this compiled eopkg3 binary eopkg4-bin for now. Critically, this binary will have no dependencies other than libc. If we can successfully swap eopkg with eopkg4-bin on user’s machines, then we’ve solved the last issue: Python3 can be updated without worrying about also wrecking the package manager. Got it?

But what about Python2? Well, now that Evan and Joey have seen off a successful ISO release with a calamares based installer, we can cross os-installer off the list. And eopkg4-bin will let us cross off a whole bunch more. The rest of that list is a story for another day.

Welcome to the Solus Devlog

Sat, 13 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the Solus Development Log.

The Solus Development Log will be used by Solus Staff and outside contributors to highlight wins and changes in Solus. Keep an eye on this space.

The Solus DevLog has been setup to facilitate improved communication with the outside world; wins, significant changes, as well as challenges, within Solus. Solus Staff and contributors are encouraged to use this space.

The DevLog has been setup as a separate entity to the Solus Blog to encourage more short form development content that doesn’t require the same level of polish as an official blog post.

It is hoped that this will be used to help communicate what’s going on in Solus such that our short-term and medium-term progress, goals, and ambitions are less of a black box to the outside world.

Additionally, we believe it will help provide context to any of our murmurings for any users who keep an eye on the getsolus GitHub organization page and the Solus Matrix channels.

Hope to see you back at this space soon with more content!

Solus 4.5 Released

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Solus team is proud to announce the release of Solus 4.5 Resilience. This release brings updated applications and kernels, refreshed software stacks, a new installer, and a new ISO edition featuring the XFCE desktop environment.

General

Installer

With Solus 4.5 comes a new installation experience using the Calamares installer. This enables easier installation using filesystems like BTRFS, specifying your own partition layout right in the installer, and it’s a major step in migrating away from Python 2, which the old os-installer was written in. A ton of work has gone into the new installation experience, and we are glad to finally release it to everyone!

Default applications

All our editions feature:

Firefox 121.0
LibreOffice 7.6.4.1
Thunderbird 115.6.0

For audio and video multimedia playback, we offer software out-of-the-box that caters specifically to our desired experience for each edition.

Budgie and GNOME editions ship with Rhythmbox for audio playback, with the latest release of the Alternate Toolbar extension to provide a more modern user experience.
Budgie and GNOME ship with Celluloid for video playback.
XFCE ships with Parole for multimedia playback.
Plasma ships with Elisa for audio playback and Haruna for video playback.

Pipewire by default

Pipewire is now the media framework for Solus, replacing PulseAudio and JACK. Users should not see any difference in the UI. You may notice performance improvements, such as better and more reliable Bluetooth audio. For a demonstration of pipewire’s out-of-the-box capabilities, see this forum post about noise reduction for microphone inputs.

ROCm support for AMD hardware

We now package ROCm 5.5 for users with supported AMD hardware. This provides GPU acceleration for applications like Blender, and enables hardware accelerated machine learning with support for PyTorch, llama.cpp, stable diffusion, and many other AI software and tools. We have done additional work to extend the compatibility of ROCm to as much hardware as possible, including some not officially supported by AMD. ROCm 6.0 is coming Soon™ which will further improve the performance of GPU-accelerated workflows.

Hardware and kernel enablement

This release of Solus ships with Linux kernel 6.6.9. For those needing an LTS kernel we provide 5.15.145.

The 6.6.9 kernel brings wider hardware support and some interesting configuration changes. Some highlights:

Our kernel config now enables all Bluetooth drivers, sound codecs, and sound drivers
schedutil is now the default CPU governor
Kernel modules are no longer compressed during initramfs creation, reducing boot times
We have modified our kernel to use the BORE scheduler by default. This is a modification of the EEVDF scheduler optimized for interactive desktops. Under heavy CPU load the system will try to prioritize processes that it thinks are interactive, maintaining a responsive feel.

Mesa has been upgraded to 23.3.2. This introduces various improvements:

Device-select and overlay vulkan layers are now enabled
Added gallium zink driver
Added gallium VAAPI driver
Added IO support for built-in opengl overlay
Added Vulkan support for Intel 7th/8th gen GPUs (which really aren’t performant enough to make use of it but some hardware acceleration is better than nothing)
Added ray-tracing support for Intel XE GPUs
Added experimental Virtio Vulkan driver

Budgie

Solus ships with Budgie 10.8.2, the latest release of the Budgie Desktop. Since the release of Solus 4.4, our friends over at Buddies of Budgie have been steadily improving the user experience of Budgie and laying the groundwork for Wayland support.

Dark style preference support

The “Dark Theme” toggle in Budgie Settings now also sets the dark theme preference for applications. Some applications may override this with a specific color scheme; for example a photo editor may prefer a dark canvas. Even so, this standardized, vendor-neutral setting should help to create a more consistent experience for our users.

Budgie trash applet

The Budgie Trash Applet, developed by Buddies of Budgie and Solus team member Evan Maddock, is now part of the default applets available on all Budgie installations. With this applet, users can efficiently empty their trashcan and browse contents for possible restoration.

Quality-of-life improvements

System tray icons can optionally scale with panel size.
Notification system improvements, including slightly decreased memory usage.
System tray improvements around inconsistent StatusNotifierItem implementations.
Keyword support is now supported in fuzzy searching in Budgie Menu and Run Dialog: search terms like “browser” or “editor” should return better results.
The privilege escalation dialog will now show the action description and action ID when graphical privilege escalation is requested.
The battery indicator in the Status applet now enables users to chose power profile modes on supported systems.

Upstream release notes can be found here.

GNOME

Solus 4.5 GNOME Edition ships with GNOME 45.2

Defaults configuration changes

The Speedinator extension replaces Impatience to speed up animations in Gnome Shell.
The default GTK theme is now set to adw-gtk3-dark to provide a uniform look for GTK3 and GTK4 applications based on libadwaita.
New windows are centered by default.
Timeout for the “Application not responding” prompt is increased to 10s.

Bug Fixes, cleanup & quality-of-life improvements

GNOME’s file chooser now has a grid view, closing a long-standing feature request. You can now pick files based on thumbnails.
Mouse and touchpad settings are now demonstrated visually.
New accessibility settings have been added: sound over-amplification, enable accessibility features using the keyboard, permanent scrollbar visibility
GNOME Settings now includes a Security menu showing the status of SecureBoot

Upstream release notes can be found here

Plasma

Solus 4.5 Plasma Edition ships with the latest Plasma Desktop, KDE Frameworks, KDE Gear, and, the KDE branch for QT, which largely brings bugfixes and translation updates

Plenty of work has also been done for the future of the Plasma edition. We are slowly introducing Plasma 6 support, in anticipation of the first stable release from the KDE developers, expected later this year.

Defaults configuration changes

Past Solus team member Girtabulu gave us lots of little fixes to our custom theme.
Default to double click to open.
New folders opened by external applications in Dolphin now open in a new tab.

XFCE

In the Solus 4.4 release post we announced our intention to deprecate the MATE Edition in favor of a new XFCE edition. The XFCE edition aims to fill the same niche as the MATE edition: users who prefer a more lightweight desktop experience.

As this is the first release of the XFCE edition, there may be some rough edges, even with all the time taken to make the experience smooth. We are calling the 4.5 release of XFCE a beta release.

The new XFCE edition includes:

XFCE version 4.18
Mousepad 0.6.1
Parole 4.18.0
Ristretto 0.13.1
Thunar 4.18.6
Whiskermenu 2.8.0

Our XFCE edition features a traditional desktop layout with a bottom panel and Whiskermenu as the application menu. It is using the Qogir GTK theme with the Papirus icon theme for a sleek and modern look. Blueman comes installed for all of your Bluetooth needs. This edition has taken a lot of work, and we are excited to share it with you all!

Future of MATE installations

We are still working on a seamless transition path for existing users of the MATE desktop. In broad terms, we will provide a way for users to transition their MATE installations to Budgie or XFCE. MATE will continue to be supported for existing users until we are confident in our transition plan.

Download

Go to our Download page and select direct download or torrent. Happy installing!

Thank you

Big thanks to everyone backing us on OpenCollective. You have funded direct compensation of developer work, covered our modest infrastructure costs, and provided valuable ISO testing prior to the wide public release. If you are not a backer and that sounds like something you would like to be a part of, consider supporting us on Open Collective.

We have updated the perks backers get for supporting us. We’re now providing access to more ISOs over time, as well as snapshots of all desktop environments (not just Budgie). You can read more about it on our forums.

Future

2023 was certainly a busy year for Solus; we’re excited to see what 2024 brings.

Behind the scenes, we made many improvements in 2023 to our tooling and infrastructure. While end users don’t see most of this directly, it means we are able to maintain and update Solus more efficiently. What end users will see is overall improvement in packages being kept up to date. Packagers and developers will notice many quality of life improvements, which enable our plans to migrate to Serpent tooling in 5.0. One of our future blog posts will summarize these changes.

In the meantime, here’s a brief overview of the work we plan to tackle in early 2024. We are working to provide Discover in Plasma and Software Center in GNOME for software management with integrated flatpak support. We will be paying down technical debt by fixing bugs, updating system components, and completing the migration off of python2. You can follow our progress on the 4.6 milestone on GitHub. We also plan to explore how to start migrating to Serpent tooling in preparation for 5.0.

Keep an eye on this space to see how things progress, and what other things we are working on in 2024.

Solus and Hacktoberfest 2023

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 17:50:07 -0500

We are happy to announce that Solus is participating in this year’s Hacktoberfest!

We have a couple of intertwined goals with this. First, we want to encourage anyone who wants to get involved with Solus. Second, we hope to potentially get some new software packaged, fix a few bugs and improve our documentation along the way.

Is there software you wish was in the Solus repository and would be willing to maintain? Is there software needing an update, and you’d like to make it happen? Is there a bug you’d like to try to fix? This is your chance to dive in! You’ll be helping improve Solus, while doing work you can add to a resume or CV. You’ll learn stuff and might even have fun in the process.

To get started with packaging work, have a look at our issue tracker and packaging documentation. If you’re interested in improving documentation, we have an issue tracker for that as well. Check out our documentation repository to find out how to contribute.

For either tracker, we’ve labeled some issues as “Good First Issue” which we feel are good for people new to working with Solus. We also have some “Help Wanted” issues. For packages, there is also “Needs Maintainer”. You are not limited to these, we will accept other valuable pull requests.(Note: requests for adding a package to the repo must be labeled “Approved”).

Feel free to reach out on Matrix in the Packaging room if you have any questions about getting started, if you run into stumbling blocks, or have any other questions for us. Also, check out the Official Hacktoberfest Site for resources, details and rewards. We look forward to working with you. Let’s get hacking!

State of Solus - August 2023

Mon, 07 Aug 2023 00:27:44 +0300

This blog post is meant as a follow-up to A New Voyage. We want to discuss what we have accomplished, and what we have planned for the future.

New Roles and Faces

Long-time Solus users know that the project has navigated some choppy waters in the past with bus factor. Too much responsibility on too few shoulders has led to burnout, stalled work, and even an extended project blackout. For Solus to continue long into the future, we need people to enjoy working on Solus, and we need it to be a team effort.

In short, the new strategy is to spread responsibilities across a larger team, enabling individuals to fill in for each other as availability dictates. Our new processes enable us to seamlessly onboard new and offboard existing team members as necessary. Since our return in April, Solus Staff has grown to a team of 16 volunteers, and we’ve been working on internal documentation and workflows so responsibilities can be readily shared.

Case in point, to test our processes and documentation, we have been rotating the individuals that perform the package repository sync, with 11 out of our 16 staff members having already completed the process.

Solus Staff is the umbrella term for everyone who has a role on the Solus team. Note that the roles are a little different from what was laid out in the New Voyage blog post. As we have collaborated over the past few months, we found these were the roles people naturally fell into.

The roles and their responsibilities are as follows:

Boring Admin
- Be responsible for the financial side of Solus, in particular OpenCollective.
- Manage the keys for all important Solus accounts.
Comms
- Reach out with news to the Solus communities, and solicit feedback.
- Moderate Solus communities to keep them friendly and useful.
- Supervise work on Help Center documentation.
Infrastructure
- Maintain the services that are knitted together to make Solus: services hosting the homepage, Help Center, build server, the dev tracker, forum, and others.
Packaging
- Push their own packaging work, review work done by other packagers, and show new packagers the ropes.
- Coordinate weekly syncs with other Packaging Team members, Infrastructure and Comms teams.
Web
- Work with Infrastructure to develop the sites and services that deliver Solus: particularly the primary web property (getsol.us) and the Help Center.

At the end of the day, Solus is a Linux distribution, so we expect that most people will join Solus Staff as packagers, and take on other responsibilities as they wish.

Solus Staff now includes the following people:

Alex Vorobyev (aleksvor)
Algent Albrahimi (algent)
David Harder (davidjharder)
Evan Maddock (EbonJaeger)
Fabio Forni (livingsilver94)
Gavin Zhao (GZGavinZhao)
Ikey Doherty (ikey)
Joey Riches (joebonrichie)
Joshua Strobl (JoshStrobl)
Philipp Trulson (der_eismann)
Reilly Brogan (ReillyBrogan)
Rune Morling (ermo)
Silke Hofstra (silke)
Tracey Clark (TClark77)
Troy Harvey (Harvey)
Zach Bacon (ZachBacon)

Other Recent Work

New Help Center

Help Center content was moved onto a new stand-alone site at help.getsol.us. With this new Docusaurus-based site, we can quickly review and incorporate changes suggested by anyone willing to send us a Pull Request or open an issue on the accompanying GitHub repository here. Please take a look around and let us know what you think.

Launching the Solus Matrix Space

We now have four public Matrix rooms set up, migrating our old setup from IRC. All our rooms are listed in the Help Center.

All Solus IRC channels have been retired, except for #solus, which remains solely to direct people to Matrix.

Releasing Solus 4.4

The 4.4 ISOs were released at the beginning of July. Thanks to all our OpenCollective backers for testing the pre-release images. If you haven’t heard about it and would like to learn more, check out our release blog post here and catch up on all the awesome stuff that went into it!

Next Steps

Phabricator to GitHub migration

The Solus dev tracker, where all our package repositories, development tasks, and reported issues live, is currently run by software called Phabricator. We have decided to migrate these services to GitHub. There are several reasons why we decided to make this change:

GitHub provides a better team experience, especially for reviewers and admins.
GitHub has a greater mindshare among developers around the world.
GitHub provides good APIs, opening the door to more tooling improvements.
Solus will no longer need to pay for the infrastructure required to run the development tracker.
The future of Phabricator as a project is uncertain as the historical upstream is not undergoing development. The open source fork “Phorge”, while doing fantastic work associated with maintenance, is not actively focusing on new features that would positively impact the developer experience of the Solus project.

This change should be mostly transparent to users, but will be a big change for our volunteers who contribute to packaging. For our users, the place to report issues and request packages will change. Work is just beginning here, we will share more in the future.

Solus 4.5

The next milestone for Solus staff is the 4.5 ISO, which we have tentatively planned for release towards the beginning of Q4. We have a list of updates and features we want to bring to the release, which you can see here.

The Bridge to Solus V

We are still very much in the planning and experimentation phase for the eventual rebase of Solus on Serpent OS tooling. That said, real work is being done right now to move us towards our goals. Ikey and Joey have been working away on technology that encapsulates the legacy Python2-based eopkg tooling, enabling us to write a DLang-based PackageKit plugin for eopkg.

This plugin has some features we are excited about:

It’s ecosystem friendly: Enables us to use already established software centers that already have excellent flatpak integration, such as KDE Discover and GNOME Software.
It’s efficient: The design is memory efficient and prevents memory leakage.
It’s fast: Frustratingly slow Python db queries are avoided by generating a secondary database that is cached in memory and accessible from DLang, thereby significantly improving search performance.
It’s future-proof: With this plugin in-hand, we begin our efforts of adapting it to existing and upcoming Serpent DLang tooling, making the transition for our users even smoother.

Closing Thoughts

Solus continues to exist solely (heh) because a wide group of people, scattered all over the globe, are willing to contribute to the project, and build a community excited about our future. We are incredibly grateful for the continued support of all of you fine folks in the community and those of you that have financially contributed through our OpenCollective. All of this wouldn’t be possible without you. Thanks everyone! We look forward to continuing on this journey together, and we hope you’ll join us for the adventure.

Solus 4.4 Released

Sat, 08 Jul 2023 00:27:44 +0300

We are proud to announce the immediate availability of Solus 4.4, a new Solus 4 series release named Harmony. This release delivers new desktop environment updates, software stacks, and hardware enablement.

General

Default Applications

All our editions feature:

Firefox 114.0.1
LibreOffice 7.5.3.2
Thunderbird 102.12.0

For audio and video multimedia playback, we offer software out-of-the-box that caters specifically to our desired experience for each edition.

Budgie, GNOME, and MATE editions all ship with Rhythmbox for audio playback, with the latest release of the Alternate Toolbar extension to provide a more modern user experience.
Budgie and GNOME ship with Celluloid for video playback.
MATE ships with VLC for video playback.
Plasma ships with Elisa for audio playback and Haruna for video playback.

Hardware and Kernel Enablement

This release of Solus ships with Linux kernel 6.3.8, enabling us to provide support for a broader range of hardware, such as:

Secure Boot support. See our documentation for enablement.
AMD Radeon RX 7600, 7900 XT, and 7900 XTX cards.
Intel Arc cards
NVIDIA 40 series cards
Support for laptops defaulting their NVMe controllers to RAID mode
Support for laptops with ATH11K wifi
Better support for various light sensors and accelerometers

Additionally, we continue to refine our kernel configuration, and this release features changes such as:

zram enabled by default out of the box providing a better user experience for devices with low amount of memory (< 3GB)
Enable CONFIG_NFT_FIB_INET to allow Firewalld/nftables to work

Mesa has been upgraded to 23.0.3. This introduces various improvements, such as:

Nouveau 3D support for NVIDIA 30 series GPUs
Improvements to Zink driver
RADV Vulkan mesh shaders
RADV ray-tracing changes
Optimizations for Intel Arc / DG2 graphics

Budgie

Solus ships with the latest 10.7 series release of the Budgie Desktop environment, 10.7.2. This features GNOME 43 stack support alongside all the fixes and quality-of-life improvements listed below. We welcome you to check out the full release notes from Buddies of Budgie listed above.

The Budgie edition of Solus now ships with the Nemo file manager by default instead of Nautilus. We decided to make this change as, since our last release, Nautilus has been ported to GTK4 and libadwaita. Because of this, it no longer fits in with the look and feel of the rest of the desktop environment. Additionally, a few features that people relied on were removed without replacement, prompting the desire to find a familiar and feature-rich file manager alternative.

Bug Fixes and Cleanup

No longer reload the Budgie Menu during a AppIndex change when the menu is open
Fix large fonts pushing the close button out of notification popups
Notification pop-ups will no longer steal focus
Notifications should no longer cause screen flickering when in a full-screen application

Quality-of-life Improvements

New widget API for Raven
New application indexer for Budgie Menu and Run Dialog
New power dialog for session management
Dual-GPU support in Budgie Menu when launching applications
Quick XDG directory access in Budgie Menu
Buttons for settings added to Budgie Menu
New Budgie Screenshot application
Notifications will now fade in and out upon showing and closing
When a window leaves full screen mode, Budgie will now show a notification popup to alert the user that there are notifications that they didn’t see
Notification sounds are now supported
The Media Player widget now has a more compact design
You can now click on the widget header icons for sound output and input to mute the respective device
New usage monitor widget for Raven

Upstream release notes can be found here.

GNOME

Solus 4.4 GNOME Edition ships with the latest GNOME 43 series release, 43.5.

Defaults Changes

Enabled Dark Mode by default
Changed the default shell theme to Adwaita
Changed the default GTK theme to Adwaita-Dark

Bug Fixes, Cleanup & Quality-of-life Improvements

The styling of GNOME’s system UI has been updated.
A redesigned system status menu, which allows quickly changing commonly used settings. The new design also makes it easy to see the status of your settings at a glance.
A new global dark UI style preference was added.
Refreshed look and feel of the Settings app.
Redesigned screenshot experience.
The ability to install websites to the desktop, as apps.
File indexing in Tracker has been dramatically improved, with faster startup times and reduced memory usage.
Some of the animations in the Activities Overview have been optimized, so that they are smoother.
Improvements in how full-screen apps are rendered will result in reduced energy consumption for video playback and increased frame rates for games.
The Files app has received multiple improvements since its port to GTK4.
Boxes, GNOME’s virtual machine app, has a redesigned preferences view and has better support for modern UEFI operating systems.
The Calendar, Contacts and Calls apps have all been enhanced.

Upstream release notes can be found here

MATE

Solus 4.4 MATE Edition ships with the latest MATE 1.27 series release, 1.27.1.

⚠️ Planned deprecation of the MATE Edition 😱

As we implement our strategy for 4.5, including the adoption of PipeWire and Wayland where feasible, we have been evaluating the current state of the desktop landscape. In particular, we have looked at how various projects have implemented these solutions. In doing so, it has become clear that Wayland has continued to mature as more projects work to phase out X.Org support and collaborate on modern solutions for important aspects of the desktop experience. These include: Color Management, High Dynamic Range (HDR), and Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support.

After evaluating MATE, we have concluded that it does not have a credible and active Wayland strategy, with the project itself effectively being on life support. As such, we have decided to sunset the MATE Edition. Hence, Solus 4.4 will be the last release to ship a MATE edition ISO. For the time being, we will continue to support the actual MATE packages in order to ensure that our users will be able to update their existing MATE installations.

Going forward, to serve users looking for a simple, lightweight GTK-based desktop experience, we will instead ship an edition with Xfce in the near future. Xfce sees considerably more development than MATE and has a viable Wayland strategy. Work on building out the Xfce stack has already started and will begin landing in the unstable repo shortly after the 4.4 release.

The reality is that, at some point in the not-too-distant future, we will need to deprecate and remove the MATE packages from Solus. We would like to stress, however, that we are working to provide a seamless upgrade path from MATE to Xfce for those users with an existing MATE installation. You can expect to see more information on this topic soon.

Defaults Changes

Changed the default GTK theme to Qogir-Dark.

Bug Fixes and Cleanup

The MATE 1.27 series upstream changes include reliability and accessibility fixes plus small bug fixes and translation updates.
The Solus MATE edition now uses xorg-driver-input-libinput instead xorg-driver-input-evdev to make keyboard layouts other than en_US actually work in Xorg in both the greeter and the MATE desktop session.
Added qxl video driver by default to bring the MATE edition to parity with our other editions re. virtualization video driver support.

Upstream release notes can be found here

Plasma

Solus 4.4 Plasma Edition ships with the latest Plasma Desktop 5.27.5, KDE Frameworks 5.106.0, KDE Gear 23.04.2, and, the KDE branch for QT 5.15.9, which brings many new features. Some highlights:

Many new look and feel customization options to allow you to personalize your Plasma experience.
Improved gesture support for touchpads, and touchscreens.
Support for floating panels.
Overview View - Use this to manage all your desktops and applications. (Win + w)
Touch Mode - Support for touchscreen displays.
Big Screen Mode - A new mode for using Plasma with your TV.
Associate a fingerprint with a user and use it to unlock your session (but, not login).
Improved window tiling support and support for custom window tiling layouts.
System Settings will now highlight which settings have been changed.
Much improved multi-monitor support, these setups will now work much more reliably.
System widgets such as Clipboard, Network, Bluetooth and Audio have been much improved.
Many new Krunner features, such as currency conversion and showing the time in another timezone.

Upstream release notes for Plasma since Solus 4.3 can be found here:

Defaults Changes

Improvements to the SolusDark and SolusLight themes.
Replaced the default application launcher with Kickoff.
Replaced the default system monitor to System Monitor from KSysGuard.
Enabled the Wayland Session to be available out of the box.

Download

To download our latest Editions, you can go to our Download page, where direct links and torrents are available!

Thank You

A big thank-you to our backers on OpenCollective who provided us with valuable beta testing for this release. We are also thankful for the ongoing financial support. If you are interested in funding Solus, helping us cover ongoing project expenses and opening the door to direct financial compensation for developer work, consider supporting us on Open Collective

If you are interested in other ways of getting involved, we encourage you to check out our dedicated documentation on doing so!

Future

In our last blog post “A New Voyage”, we talked about the challenges Solus has faced, and the steps we took to right the ship. Our next blog post will be an update on our efforts to expand the Solus Staff to include some familiar community members, as well as a more general update on the state of Solus and the move to Wayland, PipeWire, and Xfce.

A New Voyage

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 13:00:00 +0300

As a community and a team, we have been through some choppy waters the last few months. After extensive internal discussions involving consultation with contributors past and present, we have charted a new course for long term success which will yield immediate results for users and contributors. As of today, we are deploying a new, more resilient infrastructure and a new governance structure for Solus.

What Have We Already Done

Infrastructure & Operations

Previously, our build and development infrastructure was hosted on-premises at the Rochester Institute of Technology. This infrastructure was only accessible to (and physically serviceable by) one individual. On January 17th 2023, Solus infrastructure suffered a hardware-level issue that caused a service outage. This outage resulted in almost three months of service downtime, which impacted the ability to update and deliver packages, communicate on the Solus forums, or access the website (which was rehosted on GitHub Pages on February 27th). Alongside this service downtime, there was minor data loss for a limited set of package git repositories on the server which hosted the development tracker (Phabricator).

Both prior to and during the outage, active Solus team members offered to help mitigate the infrastructure bus-factor issue and move the infrastructure to more accessible hosting providers. These efforts were not met with success. In parallel, the Solus team members stepped up to communicate with the community when there was otherwise an absence of information.

Separately, the Serpent OS project, led by Ikey Doherty (original founder and lead of Solus), reached out to offer hosting of the website to facilitate Solus’ ability to communicate with its user base and serve ISOs (which was declined). Concerned by the continuing outage and its impact on Solus users and contributors, the Serpent OS team then shared a proposal which would allow Solus to resume operations with less technical debt and mitigation of the apparent bus factor of one.

This proposal was well-received by active Solus team members and led to extensive discussions and eventual agreement regarding a sensible path towards infrastructure recovery and a viable future for Solus.

After reaching a consensus at the beginning of April regarding the new organizational structure and plans for the short, medium, and long term; the cross-project team began detailing the necessary action items for restoring operations, the continuation of the development of Solus, and earning back the trust of our community.

Our infrastructure is in the process of being redeployed on a more robust multi-cloud architecture. This infrastructure is hosted across DigitalOcean and Hetzner, mitigating the requirement for physical access, and access to the virtualized resources and service control panels are available to multiple team members, mitigating any bus-factor issues from the outset. This management is made easier with the adoption of modern DevOps tooling such as terraform. Alongside this, we now take advantage of Bitwarden Teams for consistent and secure credential sharing where it is otherwise not feasible to set up dedicated teams or invite on team members for management purposes.

This shared access to the new infrastructure also means that Solus team members are now able to independently perform package syncs to users, which is in contrast to the prior situation as package syncs were blocked on the availability of a single person.

Charting A New Course

As we embark on a new voyage, it would be wise to take inspiration from our shared experiences and perspectives. This involves addressing not only highlights and successes but also taking an honest look at what perhaps didn’t work so well or didn’t meet our expectations or that of our community.

Moving forward, our aim is to adopt a more grassroots-based leadership approach with more fluid domains of responsibility along with the increase in transparency such a move allows. Philosophically, it provides a welcome opportunity for the current team to adjust course towards the original goal, spirit, and soul of Solus.

In that respect, it is perhaps useful to outline some of the strengths displayed by Solus in its heyday.

The original Solus value proposition

Originally, the community was attracted to Solus because, as an independently developed Linux-based operating system, for a while, it was right at the vanguard of desktop Linux development, due to its ability to deliver a friendly, fast and well-curated home computing experience with an eye towards elegance and technological advancement.

Solus could deliver this because it was engineered as a seamlessly integrated collection of innovative backend engineering choices and user-facing tools, resulting in quantum leaps compared to the then competition in many areas, such as:

Having a desktop focused Linux kernel configuration that targeted increased responsiveness in the user experience under load out of the box
Delivering Haswell-optimized binaries as part of the base x86_64 packages, which would automatically be utilized on supported processors. These were offered where they showed tangible package performance benefits, during a period where there was no equivalent to the recently adopted psABI-based x86_64-v2/3/4 offerings.
Enabling PGO and LTO performance optimizations in binaries that benefited from this, before doing so was the norm across mainstream Linux distributions
A much more streamlined packaging experience, which from the outset insisted on a packaging process based around a chroot-based environment, thus ensuring reproducibility. This was made possible through innovative tooling such as ypkg and evobuild / solbuild.
A release engineering workflow which provided the stability of a long-term release model with the upside of not having to wait many months for new software versions with new features and increased performance, due to the curated rolling-release model employed by Solus.
Simple hardware enablement for many vendors such as Broadcom and NVIDIA, via our hardware enablement tool DoFlicky. This was combined with native NVidia Optimus (integrated⇔dedicated GPU switching) support at a time when this was a legitimate pain point in other Linux distributions
A great Steam experience on Linux via the in-house developed Linux Steam Integration tool, the features of which were subsequently adopted by the Steam Flatpak runtime

Leadership & Organizational Structure

Historically, the hierarchy of the Solus management did not facilitate or promote the idea of shared domain ownership or organizing into groups that could work independently to keep the Solus ship sailing smoothly. Management was organized into the “Core Team” and “Global Maintainers”, with Core Team being responsible for most of the administrative work and a considerable amount of decision-making. In contrast, Global Maintainers were mostly involved in maintaining a subset of Solus packages, such as desktop environment stacks and individual packages. The purview of Global Maintainers was typically viewed as being confined to “their” individual stacks, not allowing them much agency beyond that.

To enable the continuing evolution of Solus and the next set of quantum leaps, Solus leadership needs to evolve as well.

The new Solus organizational structure is built around the philosophy that the sum of the whole is greater than its parts. This structure, by virtue of being flatter and less strictly delineated, is deliberately designed to provide more opportunities for the community to get involved in various areas. This will allow people to showcase their amazing skills and talents in a context that encourages personal and professional growth through more areas / avenues of collaboration and learning. We intend for community members to be able to evolve in new and exciting ways, treating their experience using and contributing to Solus as an adventure where the journey is just as important as the destination.

While the organizational structure will need to be able to constantly evolve to meet the current and emerging needs of contributors and users alike, we believe that the teams listed below will provide for a good start towards our vision of a more open and inclusive Solus.

All of these teams contain more than one individual (preferably at least three), reducing bus factor within each domain, and as a result of cross-domain expertise and knowledge, it is expected that many of these groups will consist of at least a handful of people.

Technical Steering Committee

This group would be responsible for researching, guiding and influencing matters of technical development in the larger arc of evolution for Solus. The overarching goal is to ensure that Solus remains relevant in a constantly changing computing landscape. As part of its responsibility, it will carefully listen to input from the community and the various stakeholders in Solus.

At the time of publication, this group consists of: Ikey Doherty, Joshua Strobl, Joey Riches, Reilly Brogan and Rune Morling (ermo).

Infrastructure and Operations

This group would be responsible for ensuring infrastructure related to Solus is adequately maintained and managed, evolves over time as new hardware and capabilities arise, adopts modern development and infrastructure practices, essentially safeguarding the promise of install today, update forever.

At the time of publication, this group consists of: Ikey Doherty, Joshua Strobl, Joey Riches, Reilly Brogan, Rune Morling (ermo), Philipp Trulson.

Community Engagement and Communications

This group would be responsible for engaging and communicating with not only the Solus community but also the wider tech community. This includes, but is not limited to: surveys, blog posts, tech highlights, interviews, social and trade media, podcasts, and our forums.

At the time of publication, this group consists of: Joshua Strobl, Joey Riches, Reilly Brogan, Thomas Staudinger (Staudey), Tracey Clark, Algent Albrahimi.

Stack Maintainers

This is a high-level group with the goal of providing points of contact and resiliency for the maintenance of crucial or otherwise important parts of the software stack and user experiences that Solus delivers. This ranges from toolchains and kernels to your favorite applications and desktop environments.

At the time of publication, well it is basically everybody! Ikey Doherty, Joshua Strobl, Joey Riches, Reilly Brogan, Algent Albrahimi, Thomas Staudinger (Staudey), Zach Bacon.

Package Maintainers

This group would be responsible for maintaining various packages that are not part of the core software and toolchains, but are otherwise important for a fully functional desktop or server operating system.

At the time of publication (and at any point in the future): Everyone is welcome!

Web Developers

This group would be responsible for the development and maintenance of the various web properties of Solus and intersect with the Infrastructure / Operations team.

At the time of publication, this group consists of: Joshua Strobl and Ikey Doherty. This group is actively looking to onboard more contributors. Our toolset primarily consists of Node.js, React, TypeScript, Docusaurus and Next.js.

Transparency and Communications

Previously, individuals would have to coordinate with a single person before communicating via various public Solus communication channels, such as Mastodon, Twitter, posts on the Solus subreddit, and announcements on the Solus forums. In the case of Mastodon, it resulted in it no longer being taken into use at all.

Going forwards – and entirely in line with the more grassroots-oriented approach the current Solus team is adopting – more people are able (and encouraged!) to share what they are working on in the context of Solus, via our public communication channels. Our Community Engagement and Communications group is instrumental in assisting with, collating, and boosting those efforts.

As an example, this will enable stack maintainers to announce their intention to stream their work on package updates, which at the same time would allow contributors and interested users to provide feedback and see the nitty gritty details of how the distribution is actually built and kept up to date, driving more attention to the project and potentially resulting in new contributors being onboarded.

In the case of the blog, Solus team members will be actively encouraged to write dedicated posts or sections for posts, and it should be expected that the blog will return to a more regular flow of publications.

For day-to-day communication and in the spirit of evolving Solus, we have adopted Matrix and created a Matrix Space for all members of Solus. Matrix offers a superior experience over IRC, including ease of onboarding, built-in message history, video calls that could be used for community events, bots / integration, and more.

Solus 4.x release series

In the context of the above aims, the primary focus for the foreseeable future will be on delivering new ISOs with updated -lts and -current kernels, as well as new desktop environment / stack / framework releases. This will enable Solus to once again be installed on more recent hardware.

In terms of tooling and features, we are currently focusing on maintenance and quality-of-life tweaks to the developer / packager experience. Discussions are ongoing regarding the current workflows and how to improve them going into the future.

As we will be focusing on the next-generation of Solus, in the coming weeks we intend to evaluate our existing custom tooling and will come up with an individual plan for each. This includes, but is not limited to:

DoFlicky
Linux Steam Integration
OS Installer
Software Center

Solus 5 and beyond

To bring Solus back into a position where it is again at the vanguard of innovation and user experiences within the Linux ecosystem, it is perhaps useful to understand how Solus 4.x compares to the current state of the art in the Linux landscape.

Notably, innovation in the Linux ecosystem is presently centered around the use of application sandboxing, containers and the development of immutable operating systems with a well understood Software Bill of Materials. Each of these concepts allow for a degree of separation and stability when developing, testing and certifying software and products.

The current Solus tooling, as well as the resulting packaging and development experience, is somewhat ill-suited to this objective and would most likely need a wholesale re-engineering of the tools before this becomes feasible.

However, there is a more straightforward path for Solus: Rebasing onto Serpent OS.

Rebasing onto Serpent OS

Serpent OS is an independent, built-from-scratch Linux-based Operating system. It is first and foremost a project built on engineering-led, scalability-driven infrastructure and tooling, which is designed to vastly reduce the burden on project contributors via tight integration of modern devops practices.

The Serpent OS moss package manager mimics the familiarity of eopkg in daily use, marrying advanced and modern underpinnings with the celtic magic of simple yet powerful system package manager operations.

This results in Serpent OS being able to merge the world of traditional Linux distribution practices that we all cut our teeth on, with the advanced features expected from next generation tooling: offline rollbacks, atomic updates, immutability and continuous, verifiable delivery of packages.

The Serpent OS packaging format (stone.yml) is an evolution of the packaging format used in Solus (package.yml), such that existing contributors will find it very easy to learn the minor differences between the two.

How is Serpent OS developed?

In line with the aims of Solus, Serpent OS and its tooling is developed and delivered in the open, with current and former Solus contributors actively involved in the process.

How far advanced is Serpent OS?

Currently, Serpent OS is in the development stage with functioning prototype tooling, infrastructure and ISO images. Serpent OS is not yet in a state for end users to rely on as their development or daily driver system. However, even in its current prototype state, the Serpent OS tooling is already more capable and advanced than the equivalent (and originally planned future) Solus tooling, including:

ypkg3 and solbuild (build system) – replaced by boulder and the distributed avalanche middleware
sol (eopkg replacement) – replaced by moss
solhub (development hub) – replaced by summit (and GitHub)
ferryd (binary package repository manager) – replaced by vessel

How could Solus benefit from Serpent OS and vice versa?

The primary focus of the Serpent OS team is to focus on the development of a scalable, high performance set of Linux distribution development and delivery tools.

This ties neatly into the projected future needs of the Solus community and contributors, in that it enables Solus to focus on the business of the day-to-day running of a grassroots community operating system, including timely and well-tested package updates.

In return, the day-to-day needs of the Solus development process will help inform the development direction and priorities of the Serpent OS base, while offering a path to dogfooding and battle testing the Serpent OS tooling in a large-scale production environment.

Solus V – flexible, rock-solid performance

What we are proposing is that, alongside its day-to-day operations, we will begin exploring the option of re-basing our distribution onto a Serpent OS base with Serpent OS tooling and processes.

This would elegantly address several longstanding concerns in how to evolve Solus and bring it into the brave new future. Adopting the the Serpent OS tools and processes would enable Solus to:

Shed technical debt in terms of tools and development processes
Offer seamlessly integrated from-source user repositories, finally making the much asked for Solus User Repository a reality, as well enabling users to self-host personal from-source repositories
Become an atomic and immutable operating system with the benefits that this entails in terms of reliability and security
Be ported to other architectures than x86_64, such as AArch64 and RISC-V, in the future

This would be married to the traditional Solus approach of a resilient, curated rolling release with its mantra “install once, update forever”.

Conclusion

Having completed the handover process and initial testing, we’re now activating our new infrastructure and updating DNS records to make them available to the general public.

The journey ahead is incredibly exciting for users and contributors alike - the very foundations of our project, the ideas that held us together over the years, are finally coming to fruition.

We welcome you aboard as we chart new waters, melding the original, high quality experience of Solus with the forward-thinking innovation it was always known for.

The New Solus Team

Solus 4.3 Released

Sun, 11 Jul 2021 16:20:19 +0300

We are proud to announce the immediate availability of Solus 4.3, a new Solus 4 “Fortitude” series release. This release delivers new desktop environment updates, software stacks, and hardware enablement.

General

Default Applications

All our editions feature:

Firefox 89.0.2
LibreOffice 7.1.4.2
Thunderbird 78.11.0

For audio and video multimedia playback, we offer software out-of-the-box that caters specifically to our desired experience for each edition.

Budgie, GNOME, and MATE editions all ship with Rhythmbox for audio playback, with the latest release of the Alternate Toolbar extension to provide a more modern user experience.
Budgie and GNOME ship with GNOME MPV for video playback.
MATE ships with VLC for video playback.
Plasma ships with Elisa for audio playback and SMPlayer for video playback.

Hardware and Kernel Enablement

This release of Solus ships with Linux kernel 5.13.1, enabling us to provide support for a broader range of hardware, such as:

AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT, 6800, 6800 XT and 6900 XT cards.
ASoC machine driver for the Elkhart Lake platform and those with the DA7219 + MAX98373/MAX98360A I2S audio codecs.
Dell X86 Platform specific drivers, such as vendor-specific laptop extension drivers, via X86_PLATFORM_DRIVERS_DELL.
Hardware monitoring for the NZXT Kraken X42/X52/X62/X72 all-in-one CPU liquid coolers via SENSORS_NZXT_KRAKEN2.
Microsoft network devices via NET_VENDOR_MICROSOFT
Intel ASoC for Elkhart Lake, Jasper Lake, Tiger Lake
Sony PS5 controller via HID_PLAYSTATION
Supplemental Microsoft Surface support such as CHARGER_SURFACE, SURFACE_ACPI_NOTIFY (Surface ACPI Notify (SAN) driver), SURFACE_DTX and SURFACE_HOTPLUG (out-of-band hot-plug event signaling on Microsoft Surface devices with hot-pluggable PCIe cards, further details here).
SemiTek keyboards via HID_SEMITEK.

Additionally, we continue to refine our kernel configuration, and this release features changes such as:

Enabled CONFIG_NETFILTER_XT_TARGET_CHECKSUM for improved lxd support.
Enabled KVM guests to create SGX enclaves via X86_SGX_KVM
Enabled VIRTIO SND.
Disabled RT_GROUP_SCHED for improved JACK support.

Mesa has been upgraded to 21.1.3. This introduces various improvements, such as:

AMD Resizable BAR support in RADV, RDNA 2 GPUs, and Zen 3.
Improved support for various game titles such as Cyberpunk 2077, DOTA 2, DIRT 5, Elite Dangerous: Odyssey, Halo: The Master Chief Collection, Path of Exile.

Solus 4.3 ships with bluez 5.60, improving Bluetooth support and fixing the following issues:

Accepting invalid AVDTP capabilities
Fix issue with non-discoverable device and advertising monitor.
Fix issue with reading from RFKILL device node.
Fix reading from rfkill socket
GATT and handling device removal
Handling session of A2DP channels
HID report value callback registration

Multimedia Upgrades

This release ships with ffmpeg 4.4. This enables us to provide support for:

AV1 VAAPI decoders
AV1 monochrome encoding support
VDPAU accelerated HEVC 10/12bit and VP9 10/12bit decoding

The latest bug fix release of gstreamer, 1.18.4, is provided out of the box. This fixes various issues, such as:

ID3 tag reading
allow v4l2 encoder resolution changes
mpeg-2 video handling

Solus 4.3 ships with version 0.9.0 of the dav1d AV1 decoder, which should provide a large boost to high-bitdepth decoding on AVX2 supported CPUs. We also ship with Pulseaudio 14.2, which fixes a bug related to unplug event handling.

Budgie

Solus ships with the latest release of our flagship desktop environment, Budgie 10.5.3. This features GNOME 40 stack support alongside all the fixes and quality-of-life improvements listed below. We welcome you to check out the full release notes listed above.

Bug Fixes and Cleanup

Budgie 10.5.3 introduces fixes to Budgie panel applets, Raven, and various window state tracking.

Drop use of Queue and Cancellable in Raven’s NotificationView.
- Instead of using a Queue (which is not thread safe anyways), just update a reference to a NotificationWindow since we only really cared about the head of the Queue to begin with.
- Dropped Cancellable usage for async pixbuf scaling. There has not really been a scenario yet where we have not been able to scale an icon within the amount of time before a NotificationWindow is removed.
Fix application icons not scaling in Raven’s Notification Group headers.
Fix issue with VirtualBox icon not being displayed in IconTaskList applet
Fix regression in Budgie Desktop Settings icon handling.
MPRIS metadata, playback status, and CanGoPrevious / CanGoNext fetching is now performed immediately rather than being an unnecessary idle operation.
Notifications now use a high priority timeout.
Notification iconography now uses a consistent IconSize.DIALOG instead of IconSize.INVALID and only scales if the icon provided is not already the desired height.
Prevent Budgie Desktop Settings from being pinned via drag-and-drop, fixing an issue where Budgie Desktop Settings was inadvertently pinnable and unable to be unpinned.
Sound Indicator applet and Raven
- Use standard mute/unmute methods, fixing issues like muting with media keys and then trying to unmute via the applet, which would previously not work.
System Tray applet
- Fix issue with KeePass causing panel segfaults.
- Various stability improvements, such as more proactive X11 error trapping.

Quality-of-life Improvements

Here are some quality-of-life improvements shipping in Budgie 10.5.3:

Filter out audacious notifications so they do not clutter up Raven.
Hide “Default”, which is typically Adwaita / GTK’s internal theme. We continue to encourage the use of theming that officially supports Budgie, such as Materia and Plata.
Mutter and WM preference schema settings are now only applied for Budgie session.
Spacing is now configurable in the Status applet.
The application fullscreen state tracking has been slightly rewritten to use the window XIDs, only call our track window state function on specific flags in the changed or current state, and reducing instances where some unset flags would not result in the application being removed as a fullscreen application.
There is now an option in Budgie and exposed via Budgie Desktop Settings’ “Windows” section to automatically pause notifications when a window is fullscreen and unpause when there no longer is a fullscreen window. This is useful in reducing distractions when gaming or watching content!
To improve the default user experience of Budgie on some downstream operating systems such as Arch Linux, Budgie now ships with a default wallpaper, eliminating the need for downstreams to apply supplemental changes or ship a wallpaper package.
We will no longer filter device added / removed notifications. This resolves issues where ejection notifications for external media would not get stored in Raven’s Notifications section.
When xdotool is available on the operating system, the Lock Keys applet can be clicked to toggle CapsLock and NumLock!

GNOME

Solus 4.3 GNOME Edition ships with the latest GNOME 40 series release, 40.2.

Highlights

Here are the highlights of various changes introduced in GNOME 40:

GNOME Shell
- Allow tap-drag-release to select variants in OSK.
- Correct arrow navigation in alt-tab switcher in RTL locales.
- Fix PgUp / PgDown handling in overview.
- Fix repeated letters in type-to-find overview search.
- Fix screen blanking on idle.
- Handle screencast failures more gracefully
- Improved mouse gestures for switching workspaces (Super + Alt + Scroll).
- Improve workspace placeholder in overview minimap
- New horizontal-oriented layout for application grid and dash.
- Updated keyboard shortcuts for toggling the overview and switching workspaces.
Mutter
- Add support for rounded clipping when drawing background
- Add support for scroll button locking
- Disable double-buffered shadow buffering
- Ensure valid window texture size after viewport changes
- Fix X11 client resize during moves
- Fix device configuration not being picked up on X11
- Fix missed redraws of newly-mapped actors
- Fix performance drop during night light transition with Nvidia
- Fix tiling to the correct monitor
- Fix unwanted position changes on window resize
- Improve freezes when switching workspace

Defaults Changes

Solus 4.3 GNOME Edition ships with Materia-dark instead of Plata-noir as the default GTK theme. This enables us to provide support for GNOME Shell 40 and GTK4, while providing our users as similar look and feel to Plata.

Alongside this defaults change, Solus 4.3 GNOME Edition continues to ship the Impatience and Tray-Icons-Reloaded. This enables us to reduce animation timings as well as support system trays out-of-the-box!

MATE

Solus 4.3 MATE Edition ships with the latest MATE desktop environment and applications. Some highlights since the release of Solus 4.2 include:

Atril
- epub backend: Escape link text to display & in index content
Caja
- file-operations: don’t attempt to move into the source dir
- keep one .desktop suffix on desktop file renaming
Engrampa
- rar 6.00: fix listing archive content with encrypted file list
Eom
- Ensure scrollbar moves when dragged to move image
Marco
- window: do not unfocus on new window.
MATE Session Manager
- Follow freedesktop guidelines to disable autorun using Hidden key
- Look for the location of the locking screen app using user’s PATH
- capplet: memory leak
Pluma
- pluma-view: Fix incorrect interface font

Plasma

Solus 4.3 Plasma Edition ships with the latest Plasma Desktop 5.22.2, KDE Frameworks 5.83, Applications 21.04.2 and the backported patches for QT 5.15.2, which brings many new features some highlighted below:

Adaptive Transparency for Breeze.
System Settings introduces a new Speed Dial page, giving you direct access to commonly used features such as light / dark theme changing, wallpaper changing, and access to common settings.
System Tray got a rework with a redesigned Digital Clock.
If you are sharing or recording your screen the Notifications widget will automatically enter “Do not Disturb” mode.
Krunner can now be used as a mini command-line launcher.

Solus-specific Plasma integration has received various refinements, specifically:

Introducing SolusLight theme. SolusLight is a brighter theme compared to Breeze Light and compliments our SolusDark aesthetic.
Plasma-Systemmonitor replaces Ksysguard as default install for the ISO.
Reworking of the SolusDark theme to better support blur and the new Plasma adaptive Transparency functionality.
konversation now uses the Libera.chat server and uses TLS connection as default.

Download

To download our latest Editions, you can go to our Download page, where direct links and torrents are available!

Thank You

We would like to thank everyone that has supported and contributed to Solus and its endeavors. It is you, our community, that has made this release possible. Whether you have filed bugs, fixed software, contributed code, translated Budgie Desktop, validated testing ISOs, or shared Solus releases with your colleagues, friends, and family: you’ve helped shape this release and improved the project for everyone.

If you would like to financially support Solus, enabling us to continue to cover infrastructure costs as well as opening the door to future full-time work by the Solus team, you can support us via our OpenCollective. If you are interested in other ways of getting involved, we encourage you to check out our dedicated documentation on doing so!

Changelog of ISO (Budgie)

Packages added to this release:

Budgie-screensaver
fuse-common
fuse2
libgtksourceview4
libldac
libopenaptx
libopenmpt
libtirpc
rtkit
shaderc
xdotool
xorg-xwayland
youtube-dl

Packages removed from this release:

babl
fuse-exfat
gegl
gfbgraph
gnome-photos
gnome-screensaver
grilo-plugins
imlib2
libcaca
libgtksourceview
libmediaart
libmodplug
mozjs38
yt-dlc

Changes in this release:

gnome-themes-extra

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against GNOME 40 stack

Martin Reboredo: Update gd to 2.3.2

gstreamer-1.0-plugins-good

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.18.4. Changelog available here.

gdbm

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.19. Changelog available here.
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

gstreamer-1.0-plugins-base

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against tooling update
Reilly Brogan: Add 32-bit package for gstreamer-1.0-plugins-base
Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.18.4. Changelog available here.

gpgme

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against tooling update
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libsndfile

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libdvdcss

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Pierre-Yves: Update libdvdcss to 1.4.3

libimobiledevice

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joshua Strobl: Sync with git for newer iOS release support.

libgtk-2

Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.24.33
Joshua Strobl: Update ABI files

grub2

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

solus-artwork

Joshua Strobl: Update to 30.0
Joshua Strobl: Update to 29.0
Joshua Strobl: Update to 28.0

inetutils

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

unzip

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against tooling update
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

tracker-miners

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild against poppler
Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.1.2.
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against poppler
Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.1.0. Changelog available here.

mpv

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Alexander Vorobyev: mpv: backport fix for zero-copy VAAPI/Vulkan interop
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against libplacebo
Alexander Vorobyev: Update mpv to 0.33.1
Joshua Strobl: Move back to youtube-dl

os-installer

Joshua Strobl: Implement change to installer OP to improve reliability of swap setting in fstab.

npth

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

ghostscript

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

python-packaging

Joey Riches: Update to 20.9

libcairo

Joshua Strobl: Disable LTO. Evince developers complain about it.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.17 series.
Joshua Strobl: Update ABI files

fftw

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

gnome-control-center

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Rune Morling: gnome-control-center: Rebuild against samba-4.13.9
Rune Morling: gnome-control-center: Rebuild against samba
Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.0. Changelog available here.
Rune Morling: Safety rebuild for samba-4.13.7 update
Rune Morling: Safety rebuild (samba-4.13.x stack upgrade)
Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.38.4
Rune Morling: Safety rebuild for samba-4.12.11

findutils

Joey Riches: Update to 4.8.0 & rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

gnome-disk-utility

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joshua Strobl: Now held back.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.38.2

gspell

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild for GNOME 40 stack

libdvdread

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

zstd

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

dosfstools

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libinput

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Update to 1.17.1

libwebp

Joey Riches: Enable speed, lto flags and avx2 libs
Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain

libxslt

Martin Reboredo: Update libxslt to 1.1.34

libspectre

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

nano

David Harder: Update nano to 5.8
Joshua Strobl: Update to 5.7. Changelog available here.
Algent Albrahimi: Update nano to 5.6

elfutils

Martin Reboredo: Update elfutils to 0.185
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libproxy

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Algent Albrahimi: Update libproxy to 0.4.17 and switch to python3

inotify-tools

Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.20.11.0. No changelog by upstream.
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libmaxminddb

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libosinfo

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.9.0

libtimezonemap

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild for GNOME 40 stack

libcap2

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Martin Reboredo: Update libcap2 to 2.50

libqmi

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.28.2. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Add ABI files for current release

gawk

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libdazzle

Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.40.0

baobab

Joshua Strobl: Held back to 3.38 series.

bind-utils

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild against json-c
Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Safety rebuild against libuv

libcdr

Pierre-Yves: Update libcdr to 0.1.7
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libgweather

Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.0. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Update ABI files

libxfont2

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

mesalib

Joshua Strobl: Revert offending commits that cause glitchiness on Plasma for radeonsi. Resolves T9788.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 21.1.3. Release notes available here.
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Bryan T. Meyers: Updated to 21.1.2
Joey Riches: Rebuild against llvm 11

libatasmart

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

yelp-xsl

Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.2. Updated translations.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.0. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.38.3. Updated translations.

brotli

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joshua Strobl: Update ABI files

ntfs-3g

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
F. von Gellhorn: Safety rebuild

openconnect

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

qt5-base

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against toolchain
F. von Gellhorn: Sync with KDE-QT
Fabio Forni: Remove docs from qt5-base and remove qt5-docs replacement
F. von Gellhorn: Sync with KDE QT git
F. von Gellhorn: Switch to KDE QT Source for webengine update
F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against our new infrastructure tooling and add patches for: - Fix-allocated-memory-of-QByteArray - Let-QXcbConnection-getTimestamp-properly-exit-when-X

webrtc-audio-processing

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

networkmanager-openvpn

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.8.14
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild for GNOME 40 stack

perl

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

tzdata

Joshua Strobl: Update to 2021a

libgphoto2

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

xkbcomp

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Thomas Staudinger: Update xkbcomp to 1.4.5

grilo

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild for GNOME 40 stack

openssl-11

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.1.1k. Resolves CVE-2021-3449 and CVE-2021-3450.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.1.1j.

bubblewrap

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Campbell Jones: Disable priv-mode setuid in bubblewrap

libgpod

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

network-manager-applet

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild for GNOME 40 stack
Joey Riches: Backport patch to resolve T9606
Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.20.0

networkmanager-openconnect

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild for GNOME 40 stack

ffmpegthumbnailer

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

alsa-utils

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

nautilus

Joshua Strobl: Disable portal support. Fixes T9793.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.2
Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.1
Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.0. Sorta.

tar

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

sudo

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain and shadow
Pierre-Yves: Update sudo to 1.9.7p1
Pierre-Yves: Update sudo to 1.9.7

xauth

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

gsettings-desktop-schemas

Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.0.

gcc

Joey Riches: Complete bootstrap
Joey Riches: Rebootstrap
Joey Riches: Update to 10.3.0

lame

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

alsa-lib

Joey Riches: Safety rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

budgie-desktop-branding

Joshua Strobl: Sync with git for fix to Rhythmbox desktop file reference.
Joshua Strobl: Sync with git for Solus 4.3 release
Joshua Strobl: Sync with git for Budgie-specific session screensaver schema changes.
Joshua Strobl: Sync with git for update to reflect Budgie session background key change.
Joshua Strobl: Updated to support moved font settings
Joshua Strobl: Update to reflect background change.

librsvg

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.50.7
Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.50.6
Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.50.5
Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.50.4
Joshua Strobl: Add / update ABI files

gcr

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild for GNOME 40 stack

libatk

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against GNOME 40 stack

rav1e

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Alexander Vorobyev: rav1e: fix wrong prefix in pkgconfig
Alexander Vorobyev: Update rav1e to 0.4.1

amtk

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against GNOME 40 stack

gstreamer-1.0-plugins-bad

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against srt
Alexander Vorobyev: gstreamer-1.0-plugins-bad: switch from libmodplug to libopenmpt
Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.18.4. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against aom and x265
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against nettle and gnutls

aom

Alexander Vorobyev: Update aom to 3.1.1
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Alexander Vorobyev: Update aom to 3.1.0
Alexander Vorobyev: Update aom to 3.0.0
Alexander Vorobyev: Update aom to 2.0.2

zimg

Alexander Vorobyev: Update zimg to 3.0.2
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

lzip

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

adwaita-icon-theme

Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.1.1
Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.0 RC

polkit

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Reilly Brogan: polkit: Security Updates

snapd

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.51. Release notes available here.
Joshua Strobl: Linker flags fixed apparmor stuff.
Joshua Strobl: Re-introduce runuser patch for Plasma.
Joshua Strobl: Clean up various extraneous patches which should no longer be necessary due to apparmor disabling.
Joshua Strobl: Disable apparmor pending further investigation in profile issues. Ref. T9638.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.49.1. Changelog available here.

vulkan

Joshua Strobl: Bump to fix inclusion
Pierre-Yves: Update vulkan to 1.2.176.0
curtisy: Update vulkan to 1.2.170

libpsl

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joshua Strobl: Update ABI files

gnome-color-manager

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild for GNOME 40 stack

python-pysmbc

Rune Morling: python-pysmbc: Rebuild against samba-4.13.9
Rune Morling: python-pysmbc: Rebuild against samba
Rune Morling: Safety rebuild for samba-4.13.7 update
Rune Morling: Safety rebuild (samba-4.13.x stack upgrade)
Rune Morling: Safety rebuild for samba-4.12.11

xorg-driver-input-wacom

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libx11

Thomas Staudinger: Update libx11 to 1.7.2
Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Thomas Staudinger: Update libX11 to 1.7.1

at-spi2

Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.40.2
Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.40.1
Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.40.0

libao

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libgnome-desktop

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.2
Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.1
Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.0
Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.38.4. Translation updates.

libwpe

Martin Reboredo: Update libwpe to 1.10.0
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild for GNOME 40 stack

libdc1394

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

lz4

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Reilly Brogan: lz4: Add patch for CVE-2021-3520

kbd

Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.4.0. Changelog available here.
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

graphviz

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild against poppler
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against poppler
Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.47.0. Changelog available here.

mbedtls

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

gpart

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libwps

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

exfatprogs

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Silke Hofstra: Update exfatprogs to 1.1.1
Silke Hofstra: Update exfatprogs to 1.1.0

gnome-bluetooth

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.34.5
Joshua Strobl: Update ABI files

gstreamer-1.0

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against tooling update
Reilly Brogan: Add 32-bit package for gstreamer-1.0
Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.18.4. Release notes available here.

gnome-calendar

Joshua Strobl: Add various patches to support new timezone functions and fix compilation against new GWeather.
Joshua Strobl: Add HELDBACK.md file.

yaml

Eressea: Update yaml to 0.2.5

openvpn

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Reilly Brogan: openvpn: Update to 2.5.2

solus-sc

Joshua Strobl: Sync with git to resolve missing icons for Breeze.

baselayout

Joshua Strobl: Update to 4.3
Joshua Strobl: Bump for 4.2

libpaper

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

squashfs-tools

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joshua Strobl: Enable LZO for snap squashfs decompression.

libwacom

Campbell Jones: Update libwacom to v1.10.0
Campbell Jones: Update libwacom to v1.9.0
Campbell Jones: Update libwacom to v1.8.0

libp11-kit

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

pango

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.48.7
Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.48.5
Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.48.4
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild for GNOME 40 stack
Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.48.3
Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.48.2

libgtk-3

Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.24.29
Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.24.28
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild for GNOME 40 stack
Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.24.27
Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.24.25

papirus-icon-theme

Joshua Strobl: Update to 20210601. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 20210501. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Revert to 20210201. New release breaks trash icon and I don’t like the new Software Center icon.
Joshua Strobl: Revert “Update to 20210302. Changelog available here.”
Joshua Strobl: Update to 20210302. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 20210201. Changelog available here.

osinfo-db

Joshua Strobl: Update to 20210312.

dhclient

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Reilly Brogan: dhclient: Update to 4.4.2_p1 for CVE-2021-25217

system-config-printer

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against GNOME 40 stack

dbus

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

psmisc

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

pangomm

Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.46.1. Various build fixes.

wpebackend-fdo

Martin Reboredo: Update wpebackend-fdo to 1.8.4
Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.8.2

nautilus-python

Algent Albrahimi: Switch nautilus-python to python3
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild for GNOME 40 stack

bluez

F. von Gellhorn: Update bluez to 5.60
Reilly Brogan: bluez: Update to 5.59
Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Reilly Brogan: Update bluez to 5.58

nvidia-390-glx-driver

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against 5.13.1
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against 5.13
Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild against kernel
Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild against kernel
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against kernel
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against kernel
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against kernel
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against kernels
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against kernels
Thomas Staudinger: Update nvidia-390-glx-driver to 390.143 and rework descriptions
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against kernel
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against kernel
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against kernels
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against kernels
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against kernels
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against kernels

libgeocode-glib

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild for GNOME 40 stack

poppler

Joshua Strobl: Update to 21.06.1
Joshua Strobl: Update to 21.05.0
Joshua Strobl: Update to 21.03.0. Changelog available here.
Joey Riches: Update to 21.02.0

poppler-data

Joey Riches: Update to 0.4.10

gnome-screenshot

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against GNOME 40 stack

sbc

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against tooling
Martin Reboredo: Update sbc to 1.5

gutenprint

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

openal-soft

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

bash

Joey Riches: Make this guy static again i guess and test toolchain
Joey Riches: Build as shared to avoid segfault against glibc update
Troy Harvey: Update bash to 5.1.8

sdl1

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libedit

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Update to 2021021-3.1

sdl2

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

seahorse

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against tooling
Joshua Strobl: Enable LDAP support
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild for GNOME 40 stack

openssh

Joshua Strobl: Update to 8.6_p1. Changelog available here.
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

openssl

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libarchive

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

openldap

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

cryptsetup

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild against json-c
Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.3.6
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

lvm2

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

harfbuzz

Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.8.1
Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.8.0
Joey Riches: Scrap PGO
Joey Riches: Just gimme one last chance baby
Joey Riches: Enable PGO for a ~13% performance gain
Joey Riches: Actually set the version, dolt.
Joey Riches: Update to 2.7.4

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

gnome-autoar

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joshua Strobl: Update to 0.3.3
Joshua Strobl: Update to 0.3.1
Joshua Strobl: Update to 0.3.0

libjson-glib

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.6.2

libnfs

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

cups

Joey Riches: Safety rebuild
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joshua Strobl: Update ABI files

librest

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild for GNOME 40 stack

gpm

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

mariadb

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Reilly Brogan: Update mariadb to 10.5.10
Reilly Brogan: Compile out PLUGIN_AUTH_PAM completely. Update to 10.5.9
Martin Reboredo: Update mariadb to 10.5.8

libplist

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libva

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update to 2.10.0

xdg-user-dirs

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libxpm

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Thomas Staudinger: Update libxpm to 3.5.13

libpcre

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libkate

Fabio Forni: Convert libkate to package.yml format

nvidia-glx-driver

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against 5.13.1
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against 5.13
Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild against kernel
Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild against kernel
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against kernel
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against kernel
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against kernel
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against kernel
Thomas Staudinger: Update nvidia-glx-driver to 465.31
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against kernels
Thomas Staudinger: Update nvidia-glx-driver to 460.80
Thomas Staudinger: Update nvidia-glx-driver to 465.27
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against kernels
Thomas Staudinger: Update nvidia-glx-driver to 465.24.02
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against kernel
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against kernel
Thomas Staudinger: Update nvidia-glx-driver to 460.67
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against kernels
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against kernels
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against Linux 5.11
Thomas Staudinger: Update nvidia-glx-driver to 460.56
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against kernels

libunwind

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libevent

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

grep

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

ffmpeg

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against x264
Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Rune Morling: ffmpeg: Rebuild against samba-4.13.9
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against srt
Rune Morling: ffmpeg: Rebuild against samba
Alexander Vorobyev: ffmpeg: enable module files support via libopenmpt
Rune Morling: Safety rebuild for samba-4.13.7 update
Joshua Strobl: Update to 4.4. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against aom and x265
Rune Morling: Safety rebuild (samba-4.13.x stack upgrade)
Alexander Vorobyev: Update ffmpeg to 4.3.2
Rune Morling: Safety rebuild for samba-4.12.11

tree

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against tooling update
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

canon-ufriilt-common

Joshua Strobl: Update to 5.30. No changelog from upstream.
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

pipewire

Joshua Strobl: Fix build
Reilly Brogan: pipewire: Update to 0.3.31
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Reilly Brogan: Update pipewire to 0.3.28, add 32-bit package
Martin Reboredo: Update pipewire to 0.3.26
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against GNOME 40
Martin Reboredo: JACK pipewire support and version number correction
Joey Riches: Update to 0.3.25
Joey Riches: Update to 0.3.24

libepoxy

Joey Riches: Change source URL location back to original
Joey Riches: Update to 1.5.8
Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.5.7

gnupg

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joshua Strobl: Update ABI files

python-gobject

Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.40.0

python-chardet

Joey Riches: Update to 4.0.0

libgnomekbd

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild for GNOME 40 stack

man-db

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

gedit

Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.1
Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.0
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against libgtksourceview4 rename.

fluidsynth

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libblockdev

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

wavpack

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against tooling update
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

dconf

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

dbus-glib

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joshua Strobl: Update to 0.112. Mainly CI and test changes.

net-snmp

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against tooling update
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libgtkmm-3

Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.24.5

djvulibre

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libvoikko

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

which

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

wireless-tools

Martin Reboredo: Place manpages correctly in wireless-tools
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libinstpatch

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libcddb

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

cups-pk-helper

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against tooling update
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

gnome-calculator

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.0
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against libgtksourceview4 rename.

iproute2

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Silke Hofstra: Update iproute2 to 5.12.0
Silke Hofstra: Update iproute2 to 5.11.0

xrandr

Algent Albrahimi: Fix description and add homepage for xrandr
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

desktop-file-utils

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libwnck

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild for GNOME 40 stack

libmwaw

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

dav1d

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Merge branch ‘master’ of https://dev.getsol.us/source/dav1d
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc
Pierre-Yves: Update dav1d to 0.9.0
Pierre-Yves: Update dav1d to 0.8.2

thunderbird

Bryan T. Meyers: Rebuild for toolchain upgrades
Joshua Strobl: Update to 78.11.0. Release notes available here.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 78.10.2. Release notes available here.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 78.10.1
Pierre-Yves: Update thunderbird to 78.9.1
Joshua Strobl: Update to 78.9.0. Release notes available here.
F. von Gellhorn: Update thunderbird to 78.8.0
Fabio Forni: Fix thunderbird build with rust 1.50.0
Joshua Strobl: Update to 78.7.0. Release notes available here.

nettle

Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.7.2. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Revert to 3.4.x in git history and generate ABI files for that.
Joshua Strobl: Revert “Update to 3.6. Changelog available here.”
Joshua Strobl: Revert “Add / update ABI files”
Joshua Strobl: Add / update ABI files
Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.6. Changelog available here.

libusb

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc
Joey Riches: Set homepage to https

gnome-session

Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.0
Joshua Strobl: Update ABI files

libpipeline

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libsecret

Joshua Strobl: Mostly just a safety rebuild against Vala and to get our new ABI files.

libevdev

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

budgie-desktop-view

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against GNOME 40 stack
Joshua Strobl: Sync with git to enable the “Move to Trash” option for .desktop files.

gnome-system-monitor

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joshua Strobl: Fix headerbar not being applied as titlebar
Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.0

libnspr

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

popt

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.18
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

x264

Alexander Vorobyev: Update x264 to 0.163.3060
Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Alexander Vorobyev: Update x264 to 0.161.3049

x265

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Alexander Vorobyev: Update x265 to 3.5
Alexander Vorobyev: x265: update link to source tarball

gsound

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild for GNOME 40 stack

gobject-introspection

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.68.0

clr-boot-manager

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

fontconfig

Martin Reboredo: Update fontconfig to 2.13.1
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

python-asn1crypto

Joey Riches: Update to 1.4.0

xorg-driver-input-libinput

Joey Riches: Update to 1.0.0

python-magic

Jarno Turkki: Update python-magic to 0.4.22

libboost

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

iptables

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joshua Strobl: Update to a version that isn’t prehistoric.
Joshua Strobl: Update ABI files

qtstyleplugins

F. von Gellhorn: Safety rebuild

cpio

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

bash-completion

Abdulkadir Furkan Şanlı: Update bash-completion to 2.11

xorg-driver-video-intel

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

gptfdisk

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.0.8
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

onboard

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against GNOME 40 stack

db5

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

dotconf

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

tcl

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against tooling update
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

python-requests

Joey Riches: Update to 2.25.1

python-idna

Joey Riches: Update to 2.10

gnome-online-accounts

Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.38.1

flatpak

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
F. von Gellhorn: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Switch back to system bubblewrap now that setuid is disabled
Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.10.2

enchant

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.2.15. No meaningful changes.

orca

Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.0

libgnutls

Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.7.2. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.7.1. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Add / update ABI files

json-c

Joshua Strobl: Update to 0.15. Changelog available here.
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libpciaccess

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

sed

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against tooling
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

imagemagick

Joey Riches: Rebuild against libraw 0.20.2
Pierre-Yves: Update imagemagick to 7.0.11-13
Pierre-Yves: Update imagemagick to 7.0.11-11
Pierre-Yves: Update imagemagick to 7.0.11-8
Pierre-Yves: Update imagemagick to 7.0.11-6
Pierre-Yves: Update imagemagick to 7.0.11-3
Pierre-Yves: Update imagemagick to 7.0.11-2
Pierre-Yves: Update imagemagick to 7.0.11-1

mdadm

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libxaw

Thomas Staudinger: Update libxaw to 1.0.14

libxau

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

glib-networking

Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.68.0

exiv2

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Reilly Brogan: exiv2: Security Updates

v4l-utils

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against tooling update
Martin Reboredo: Update v4l-utils to 1.20.0

libetonyek

Pierre-Yves: Update libetonyek to 0.1.10
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

modem-manager

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.16.2. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Add updated ABI files

mjpegtools

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libgxps

Joshua Strobl: Update to 0.3.2

gnome-terminal

Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.40.2. Changes listed here.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.40. No changelog by upstream.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.38.3

cyrus-sasl

Joey Riches: Enable LOGIN support resolves T9005
Joey Riches: Rebuild for prosperity
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

systemd

Joshua Strobl: Pull back to 247.7 to see if that fixes sddm.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 248.3. 248 changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 247.6. No changelog by upstream.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 247.4. Release notes available here.

portaudio

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Martin Reboredo: Update portaudio to 20210406

python-cffi

Joey Riches: Update to 1.14.5

libgcrypt

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against tooling update
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libxkbcommon

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.3.0. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Update ABI files

hplip

Joey Riches: Fixup builddep and update abireport

cairomm

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against GNOME 40 stack

lash

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

lsof

Joey Riches: Use libtirpc for RPC functionality and safety rebuild against glibc
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libical

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.0.9

at-spi2-atk

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild for GNOME 40 stack

hyphen

Pierre-Yves: Split hyphenation library & english rules in different packages
Pierre-Yves: Remove component.xml

lsb-release

Joshua Strobl: Bump to 4.3
Joshua Strobl: Bump for 4.2

libmbim

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.24.6

gdk-pixbuf

Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.42.6
Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.42.4
Joshua Strobl: Add / update ABI files

network-manager

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against systemd 247.7 to fix WiFi
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.30.4
Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.30.2
Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.30
Joshua Strobl: Add ABI files

libexempi

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

cracklib

Martin Reboredo: Create the cracklib dictionary using a valid word file
Martin Reboredo: Update cracklib to 2.9.7

procps-ng

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libplacebo

Alexander Vorobyev: Update libplacebo to 3.120.3
Alexander Vorobyev: Update libplacebo to 3.120.2 & switch from glslang to shaderc

kerberos

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

graphite2

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.3.14

gstreamer-1.0-plugins-ugly

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against x264
Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.18.4. Changelog available here.

libde265

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

gnome-keyring

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.0

libnl

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libpeas

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.30.0. No meaningful changes.

libgtop

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against GNOME 40 stack

avahi

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

pixman

Joshua Strobl: Update to 0.40.0. Announcement available here.
Joshua Strobl: Cleanup package and add new ABI files

libassuan

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libxml2

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.9.12. News available here.

graphene

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.10.6

expat

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

cups-filters

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild against poppler
F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against tooling update
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against poppler
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against GNOME 40 stack
F. von Gellhorn: Update cups-filters to 1.28.7

zenity

Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.24.0. Updated translations.

rhythmbox

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joshua Strobl: Sync with git for numerous fixes. Resolves T9621.
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against GNOME 40 stack

libgudev

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joshua Strobl: Update to 236. Ported to Meson and GIR generation for multilib.

gparted

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

coreutils

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libcap-ng

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Martin Reboredo: Update libcap-ng to 0.8.2

libnice

Bryan T. Meyers: Updated to 0.1.18 and enabled gstreamer support

sqlite3

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against tooling
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

gvfs

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Rune Morling: gvfs: Rebuild against samba-4.13.9
Rune Morling: gvfs: Rebuild against samba
Joshua Strobl: Revert ProxyVolumeMonitor free of proxy object.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.48.1
Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.48.0
F. von Gellhorn: Safety rebuild
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against GNOME 40 stack
Rune Morling: Safety rebuild for samba-4.13.7 update
Rune Morling: Safety rebuild (samba-4.13.x stack upgrade)
Rune Morling: Safety rebuild for samba-4.12.11

pam

Joshua Strobl: Backport Fedora patch from their 1.3.1 that fixes check against claims of non-existent user.
Joey Riches: Make sure libtirpc is available
Joshua Strobl: Do another safety rebuild
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

liborcus

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc
Pierre-Yves: Update liborcus to 0.16.1

pinentry

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.1.1
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

fuse

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
F. von Gellhorn: Update fuse to 3.10.3

audit

Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.0.2. Changelog available here.
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

comar

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

liblcms2

Alexander Vorobyev: Update liblcms2 to 2.12

gstreamer-1.0-libav

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.18.4

breeze

F. von Gellhorn: Update breeze to Desktop 5.22.2
F. von Gellhorn: Update breeze to Desktop 5.22.1
F. von Gellhorn: Fix SplitterProxy
F. von Gellhorn: Update breeze to Desktop 5.21.5
F. von Gellhorn: Update breeze to Desktop 5.21.4
F. von Gellhorn: Update breeze to Desktop 5.21.3
F. von Gellhorn: Update breeze to Desktop 5.21.2
F. von Gellhorn: Update breeze to Desktop 5.21.1
F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against our new infrastructure tooling and some package cleanup

totem-pl-parser

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against tooling update
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild for GNOME 40 stack

alsa-plugins

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

udisks

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libuv

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Martin Reboredo: Update libuv to 1.41.0

ldb

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Rune Morling: ldb: Update to 2.2.1 (samba-4.13.7 update)
Rune Morling: ldb: Update to 2.2.0 (samba-4.13.x stack upgrade)

gnome-doc-utils

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild for GNOME 40 stack

gnome-user-docs

Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.0

less

Joshua Strobl: Update to 581.2. Changelog available here.
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libheif

Martin Reboredo: Update libheif to 1.11.0
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against aom and x265

neon

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libvpx

Fabio Forni: Update libvpx to 1.10.0
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

evince

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild against poppler
Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against poppler
Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.1
Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.38.2

firefox

Joshua Strobl: Update to 89.0.2. Changelog available here.
Joey Riches: Tweaks to improve performance
Joshua Strobl: Update to 89.0.1. Release notes available here.
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joshua Strobl: Update to 89.0. Release notes available here.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 88.0.1
Joshua Strobl: Update to 88.0. Release notes available here.
Troy Harvey: Patch Firefox to fix widevine issue
Joshua Strobl: Update to 87.0. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 86.0.1 Changelog available here.
Joey Riches: Backport patch to resolve T9605
Joshua Strobl: Update to 86.0. Release notes available here.

libglvnd

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Bryan T. Meyers: Updated to 1.3.3
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

openjpeg

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

aalib

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

samba

Joey Riches: Use libtirpc and rpcsvc-proto for RPC functionality
Rune Morling: Samba: Remove MPD from suggested rebuilds
Rune Morling: Samba: Update to 4.13.9
Rune Morling: samba: Update to 4.13.8
F. von Gellhorn: Safety rebuild
Rune Morling: Samba: Update to 4.13.7
Rune Morling: Samba: Update to 4.13.5
Rune Morling: samba: Add smplayer to list of apps that need testing
Rune Morling: samba: Tweak README.md maintainer documentation
Rune Morling: samba: Update to 4.12.11

libpcap

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

wayland

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.19.0
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

apparmor

Kaktuspalme: Remove php-fpm profile
Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.x ABI. Disabled test suite. Enabled systemd unit.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.10.6. Changelog available here.

inxi

Campbell Jones: Update inxi to v3.3.01

libreoffice

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild against poppler
Joey Riches: Ensure precompiled headers are enabled for the next rebuild
Bryan T. Meyers: Rebuild for toolchain upgrades
Pierre-Yves: Update libreoffice to 7.1.4.2
Joshua Strobl: Update to 7.1.3.2.
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against poppler
Pierre-Yves: Update libreoffice to 7.1.1.2
Joey Riches: Rebuild against poppler
Joshua Strobl: Fix patterned appdata that was moved to metainfo.
Pierre-Yves: Update libreoffice to 7.1.0.3

libusbmuxd

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

glibmm

Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.66.1
Joshua Strobl: Update ABI files

swig

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against tooling Update
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libdrm

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Bryan T. Meyers: Updated to 2.4.106
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libraw

Joey Riches: Update to 0.20.2
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libglade

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild for GNOME 40 stack

libixion

Pierre-Yves: Update libixion to 0.16.1

shadow

Joey Riches: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Rebuild against fakeroot
Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

python3

Reilly Brogan: python3: Update to 3.7.11, Update pip to 21.1.3
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Reilly Brogan: python3: Security Updates
Rune Morling: Update python3 to 3.7.10

libmtp

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

librevenge

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

hexchat

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joshua Strobl: Add patches to support Libera and default to it.
Reilly Brogan: [Hexchat] Add font rendering patch
Joshua Strobl: vala-panel-appmenu absolutely should not be a rundep. vala-panel-appmenu has no relation to Budgie or native GNOME Shell functionality.
Joshua Strobl: Revert “Add vala-panel-appmenu as a missing rundep per T9696”
Bryan T. Meyers: Add vala-panel-appmenu as a missing rundep per T9696

xorg-server

Joey Riches: Update to 1.20.12
Joey Riches: Add rundep on xorg-xwayland
Joey Riches: Don’t install Xwayland (replaced by xorg-xwayland package)
Joey Riches: Merge branch ‘master’ of https://dev.getsol.us/source/xorg-server
Joey Riches: Try moving to meson again for libtirpc support
Joey Riches: Try moving to meson again for libtirpc support
Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.20.11 and revert prior change.
Joshua Strobl: Revert “Switch xorg-server to meson and ninja”
Joey Riches: Switch xorg-server to meson and ninja
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against nettle

python-certifi

Algent Albrahimi: Update python-certifi to 2020.12.05

xdg-desktop-portal

Joshua Strobl: Add Settings implementation list patch.
Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
F. von Gellhorn: Safety rebuild
Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.8.1

gnome-settings-daemon

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.0.1
Joshua Strobl: Add / update ABI files

dnsmasq

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against nettle and gnutls
Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.84. Announcement here.
Fabio Forni: Update dnsmasq to 2.83

espeak-ng

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.50. Changelog available here.
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

shared-mime-info

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against tooling
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libcdio

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libssh

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

python-cryptography

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libicu

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libgsf

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

unrar

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc
Pierre-Yves: Update unrar to 6.0.4

glibc

Joey Riches: Update to latest commit in stable branch to resolve CVE-2021-33574.
Joey Riches: Complete bootstrap
Joey Riches: Rebootstrap against updated toolchain
Joey Riches: Update to 2.33

libice

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

tracker

Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.1.2
F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against tooling update
Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.1.1
Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.1.0. Changelog available here.

libxt

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Thomas Staudinger: Update libxt to 1.2.1

linux-firmware

Joshua Strobl: Update to 20210511

libwebkit-gtk

Bryan T. Meyers: Rebuild for toolchain upgrades
Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.32.1. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Disable GAMEPAD.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.32.0

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libgdata

Joshua Strobl: Update to 0.18.1. Translation updates.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 0.18.0

tdb

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against toolung update
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

vapoursynth

Alexander Vorobyev: Update vapoursynth to R53
Pierre-Yves: Safety rebuild vapoursynth for imagemagick 7.0.11-2

dmidecode

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

wsdd

Rune Morling: wsdd: Update to 0.6.4
Rune Morling: wsdd: Fix trailing spaces in README.md

bolt

F. von Gellhorn: Update bolt to 0.9.1
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

wget

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

evolution-data-server

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.40.2
Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.40.0. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.38.4

libjpeg-turbo

Algent Albrahimi: Update libjpeg-turbo to 2.1.0
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

intel-microcode

Joshua Strobl: Update to 20210608. Resolves T9766.
Jarno Turkki: Update intel-microcode to 20210216

libxres

Thomas Staudinger: Update libxres to 1.2.1

spice-vdagent

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against tooling
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

srt

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Alexander Vorobyev: Update srt to 1.4.3

tepl

Joshua Strobl: Update to 6.0
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against libgtksourceview4 rename.

glib2

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.68.3
Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.68.2
Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.68.1
Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.68.0
Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.66.7

stoken

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against nettle and gnutls

libass

Alexander Vorobyev: Update libass to 0.15.1

libtiff

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

wpa_supplicant

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against tooling Rebuild
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

disktype

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

ppp

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libgee

Joshua Strobl: Update to 0.24.4
Joshua Strobl: Update ABI files

libvte

Joshua Strobl: Update to 0.64.2. Doc fixes.
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joshua Strobl: Update to latest stable release
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild for GNOME 40 stack and fix source URL
Joshua Strobl: Update to 0.62.3

jack-audio-connection-kit

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

sane-backends

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

speech-dispatcher

Joshua Strobl: Update to 0.10.2. Changelog available here.
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

groff

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libxklavier

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

zip

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

gzip

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libiptcdata

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

file-roller

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.40.0
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against GNOME 40 stack
Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.38.1
Joshua Strobl: Update ABI files

mutter

Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.2.1. Fixes crashes (already were patched in Solus).
Joshua Strobl: Add patch that fixes various crashes and major issues.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.2
Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.1
Joshua Strobl: Add patch to invalidate CRTC gamma when resuming or leaving power save.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.0. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Add / update ABI files

libshout

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

taglib

Joshua Strobl: Update 1.12. Changelog available here.

ostree

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
F. von Gellhorn: Safety rebuild

yelp

Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.2. Updated translations.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.0. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.38.3. Updated translations.

libieee1284

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

xdg-dbus-proxy

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

qpdf

Algent Albrahimi: Update qpdf to 10.3.2
Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

ibus

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

file

Martin Reboredo: Update file to 5.40

curl

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Pierre-Yves: Update curl to 7.76.1 to fix multiple CVEs

bzip2

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

python-six

Joey Riches: Update to 1.15.0

libflac

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

libnma

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild for GNOME 40 stack

budgie-desktop

Joshua Strobl: Update to 10.5.3 release.
Joshua Strobl: Sync with git.
Joshua Strobl: Sync with git.
Joshua Strobl: Sync with git for budgie-screensaver rename.
Joshua Strobl: Sync with git.
Joshua Strobl: Sync with git
Joshua Strobl: Add ABI files

llvm

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Rebootstrap with gcc to avoid the issue mentioned in T9643
Joey Riches: Complete bootstrap against clang 11
Joey Riches: Update to 11.1.0
Campbell Jones: Modify LLVM update script to take version as a parameter

rubberband

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

readline

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

eog

Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.2
Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.1
Joshua Strobl: Update to 40.0
Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.38.2

noto-sans-ttf

Joey Riches: Do not force symlink creation

linux-current

Joshua Strobl: Update to 5.13.1. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 5.13.0.
Joshua Strobl: Add various DRM backports that would prevent some GPUs from entering idle state.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 5.12.13. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 5.12.11. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 5.12.10. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 5.12.9. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 5.11.22. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 5.11.21. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 5.11.16. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 5.11.12. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Add CONFIG_NETFILTER_XT_TARGET_CHECKSUM for next build.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 5.11.9. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 5.11.7. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 5.11.6. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 5.11.3. Changelog available here.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 5.10.15. Changelog available here.

pulseaudio

Reilly Brogan: pulseaudio: Add rtkit as rundep
Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against toolchain
janebuoy: Update pulseaudio to 14.2

libcdio-paranoia

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joey Riches: Update abireport for glibc

xorg-driver-video-nouveau

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain
Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.0.17

Funding Solus Development

Sat, 29 May 2021 21:58:55 +0300

After much anticipation, in this blog post we announce the availability of community funding opportunities.

Background

We have been on a multi-year endeavor to build and curate a unique and modern desktop experience for home computing platforms. Solus encompasses a multitude of initiatives, such as:

Brisk Menu: A modern menu for the MATE Desktop.
Budgie: A distribution agnostic, feature-rich desktop environment designed to keep out of the users way. This has been developed across several years and we continue to actively work on our Budgie 10 series while pursuing the next generation of our desktop environment.
Optimized Gaming Experience leveraging our custom Steam runtime environment and Linux Steam Integration project, responsible for intercepting library requests by games and serving optimized alternatives.
Package Repositories built and managed by our open-source toolchain: Packaging (ypkg, solbuild), Management (Software Center, eopkg, upcoming sol), Distribution (ferryd), Configuration (usysconf, qol-assist).

As many in our community are aware, this has been done almost exclusively on a volunteer basis, with no full-time Solus developers for close to three years now. When we did accept financial contributions, this was done through our Patreon, which we closed down after changes in leadership in late 2018 and our belief that future funding should be done through a responsible fiscal and/or project host. Since then, primary development has been done by Bryan and myself, with us being the primary financial backers for the project as well.

For some time now, Bryan and I have been considering various avenues on accepting funding as a project that enables us to not hold the burden for various tax matters, which is complicated by Bryan’s current status as well as my situation living abroad, in addition to providing transparency and equality among “shareholders” (leadership). Independently, I have launched my own Patreon to facilitate my goals to pursue full-time open source desktop application development, however not only do I want to broaden horizons to Solus in an official capacity, but both Bryan and I understand the necessity for both of us to be able to work on Solus full-time to achieve the goals we set, and in a timely manner.

We have been working to find a neutral host for Solus that satisfies our requirements for a fiscal host to relieve various tax and administrative burdens, providing a pathway towards growth and longevity for the project, and enabling us to focus more on development and taking care of the needs of our users. After considering / exploring many options ranging from various third-party hosts, establishing a 501(c)3 in the United States to a kommandiittiyhtiö (limited partnership) in Finland, some form of split model, a German GmbH, etc. we have come to the conclusion that the Open Collective platform (with Open Source Collective as the fiscal host) represents the best fit for our international team and project.

Open Collective

Solus is now proudly available on Open Collective and accepting donations. These donations will be initially used to offset virtual and physical infrastructure / hardware, ranging from datacenter co-location to providing repository mirrors and hardware upgrades for faster builds. Beyond this initial goal, we will use this funding to:

Enable part-time and eventually full-time development by one or more developers (e.g. myself and Bryan).
Subsidize or pay in full necessary hardware for the Solus team and active contributors.
Provide opportunities to finance specific approved works, such as various features, fixes, or rewrites that the Team would want to be done in a timely manner, by individuals in the our community that are well-known for high-quality contributions. These opportunities would be provided on a case-by-case basis with direct communication and engagement between all the Team and individual.

If you are interested in supporting Solus or development of one or more of our projects, we encourage you to become a financial contributor today. We are working to provide additional incentives to backers, with some of the early tier perks being detailed below (as well as on our Open Collective page).

Please keep in mind that we are actively working on the tooling to facilitate some of the perks, we will strive to provide them as quickly as possible. Details on the first weekly snapshot ISO(s) will be rolled out to Beta Testers and Crew on June 4th, 2021.

Tiers

Backers

Amount: $1+ USD

Release Testers

Amount: $3+ USD

Perks:

Early access to news / updates (timeframe will vary depending on the post)
Access to testing ISOs the week of Release

Beta Testers

Amount: $10+ USD

Perks:

Early access to news / updates (timeframe will vary depending on the post)
Access to testing ISOs the week of Release
Access to weekly “snapshot” ISO of Budgie Edition
- This ISO will be generated after our Friday syncs and use the stable repo. In situations where we are deferring sync for additional testing, they will be based on the unstable repository at a “most stable” point in time. In the event that it is the week of a release, this would overlap with the respective “testing ISOs”.

Crew

Amount: $25+ USD

Perks:

Early access to news / updates (timeframe will vary depending on the post)
Access to testing ISOs the week of Release
Access to weekly “snapshot” ISOs for all editions
- These ISOs will be generated after our Friday syncs and use the stable repo. In situations where we are deferring sync for additional testing, they will be based on the unstable repository at a “most stable” point in time. In the event that it is the week of a release, this would overlap with the respective “testing ISOs”.

Fashionable GNOME Forty | The Roundup #19

Tue, 27 Apr 2021 14:58:33 +0300

Welcome to The Roundup #19, your bytes of Solus news. In this roundup, we talk about our Budgie 10.5.3 bug fix release, GNOME 40, move to KDE’s Qt5 patch collection, and more!

Budgie 10.5.3

Budgie 10.5.3 is a minor release that introduces fixes for bugs, various quality-of-life improvements, and support for the GNOME 40 stack.

Bug Fixes and Cleanup

Budgie 10.5.3 introduces fixes to Budgie panel applets, Raven, and various window state tracking.

Drop use of Queue and Cancellable in Raven’s NotificationView.
- Instead of using a Queue (which is not thread safe anyways), just update a reference to a NotificationWindow since we only really cared about the head of the Queue to begin with.
- Dropped Cancellable usage for async pixbuf scaling. There has not really been a scenario yet where we have not been able to scale an icon within the amount of time before a NotificationWindow is removed.
Fix application icons not scaling in Raven’s Notification Group headers.
Fix issue with VirtualBox icon not being displayed in IconTaskList applet
Fix regression in Budgie Desktop Settings icon handling.
MPRIS metadata, playback status, and CanGoPrevious / CanGoNext fetching is now performed immediately rather than being an unnecessary idle operation.
Notifications now use a high priority timeout.
Notification iconography now uses a consistent IconSize.DIALOG instead of IconSize.INVALID and only scales if the icon provided is not already the desired height.
Prevent Budgie Desktop Settings from being pinned via drag-and-drop, fixing an issue where Budgie Desktop Settings was inadvertently pinnable and unable to be unpinned.
Sound Indicator applet and Raven
- Use standard mute/unmute methods, fixing issues like muting with media keys and then trying to unmute via the applet, which would previously not work.
System Tray applet
- Fix issue with KeePass causing panel segfaults.
- Various stability improvements, such as more proactive X11 error trapping.

GNOME 40 Support

Budgie 10.5.3 introduces support for the GNOME 40 stack. GNOME 40 introduced various changes in Mutter, gsettings-desktop-schemas, and gnome-shell which impacted the ability to use Budgie under a GNOME 40 stack or in conjunction with GDM (GNOME’s login manager which leverages gnome-shell).

When compiled alongside GNOME Settings Daemon 40.x, Budgie will use the migrated font anti-aliasing and hinting options, which were moved from org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings to org.gnome.desktop.interface. In GNOME Shell and GNOME Settings Daemon 40, there were changes introduced which impacted Budgie’s ability to use dedicated screensavers, such as Solus’ fork of gnome-screensaver (which we have been using since 2017). This fork has now been formally renamed to budgie-screensaver, bumped to v4, and promoted to a required component of Budgie Desktop, with changes introduced to facilitate Budgie’s continued ability to lock the session and attempt to co-exist in an installation environment alongside GNOME Shell and GDM. As always, we encourage that Budgie be used with lightdm and an optional greeter such as slick-greeter, as opposed to being installed alongside GDM and GNOME Shell.

Quality-of-life Improvements

Here are some quality-of-life improvements shipping in Budgie 10.5.3

Filter out audacious notifications so they do not clutter up Raven.
Hide “Default”, which is typically Adwaita / GTK’s internal theme. We continue to encourage the use of theming that officially supports Budgie, such as Materia and Plata.
Mutter and WM preference schema settings are now only applied for Budgie session.
Spacing is now configurable in the Status applet.
The application fullscreen state tracking has been slightly rewritten to use the window XIDs, only call our track window state function on specific flags in the changed or current state, and reducing instances where some unset flags would not result in the application being removed as a fullscreen application.
There is now an option in Budgie and exposed via Budgie Desktop Settings’ “Windows” section to automatically pause notifications when a window is fullscreen and unpause when there no longer is a fullscreen window. This is useful in reducing distractions when gaming or watching content!
To improve the default user experience of Budgie on some downstream operating systems such as Arch Linux, Budgie now ships with a default wallpaper, eliminating the need for downstreams to apply supplemental changes or ship a wallpaper package.
We will no longer filter device added / removed notifications. This resolves issues where ejection notifications for external media would not get stored in Raven’s Notifications section.
When xdotool is available on the operating system, the Lock Keys applet can be clicked to toggle CapsLock and NumLock!

Get the Release

Official distribution tarballs for Budgie 10.5.3 are available here. For Solus users, Budgie 10.5.3 will be coming this Friday, though most improvements above are already in the stable repository!

GNOME 40

With this Friday’s sync to the stable repository, we will be rolling out the GNOME 40 stack. This stack upgrade introduces the latest updates to GNOME Shell, GNOME’s desktop environment, as well as its applications, libraries, and window manager.

Highlights

Solus users can expect goodies such as:

GNOME Shell
- Improved mouse gestures for switching workspaces (Super + Alt + Scroll)
- New horizontal-oriented layout for application grid and dash.
- Updated keyboard shortcuts for toggling the overview and switching workspaces.
Boxes
- Allow users to replace install source of live images
- Improve human-readable names for OS variants
- Indicate that we can open other formats other than .iso
- Update the recommended-downloads list with latest releases
Builder
- Allow disabling show-right-margin with .editorconfig
- Debug messages from GLib/GTK are now only shown when debugging your application, not running without debugger.
- Fix highlight after pasting when multiple cursors are in use
- GNOME application templates now provide example icons
- New libide helpers for plugins to locate addins by module name
- Project tree improvements
- Support running GTK 4 applications
Calculator
- Added Ctrl+Delete shortcut for clearing the current equation
- Added Ctrl+O shortcut for degrees symbol
- Added support for frequencies conversion
- Added support for converting to and from weeks
- Added support for converting to and from centuries and decades
- Dim inapplicable bits on word size change
- Show 4 decimals in converter instead of only two
Evince
- Add support for RAR v5 archives through libarchive
- libview: Fix support for HiDPI in link preview
Files
- Add support for extracting password-protected archives
- Add support for creation date
- Do not use default location instead of root in path bar
- Don’t save window state when tiled
- Fix Batch rename dialog crashes
- Fix crashes when closing the last tab
- Fix detection and handling of remote files
- Group files depending on the opening app
- Improve tab completion in the location entry
- Preserve mtime of non-empty directories on move
GDM
- Don’t overwrite PATH set by user
- PAM integration improvements
- Support systems that boot before the graphics subsystem fully loads
Gedit
- Fix huge CPU consumption when a folder with content is deleted
- Start to use TeplBuffer and TeplFile APIs. As a result the new tabs are now named “Untitled File”, not “Untitled Document”.
GNOME Settings Daemon
- Color: Consider night-light active when disabled until tomorrow
- Fix rfkill on newer kernels
Settings
- Display: Try harder to select a good and working scale
- Mouse & Touchpad: Allow horizontal scrolling in test page
- Show hardware model and vendor in the About panel
- Sound: Update mute button icon when volume changes
- Various fixes to the language chooser
Music
- Fixed: Adding songs to favorite crashes the app
- Fix album selection checkboxes style
- Fix artist queries to retrieve art
- Fix playlist deletion

Defaults Changes

As a result of various changes to GNOME Shell, the current changes are being applied to various branding packages we ship or have shipped for Solus GNOME Edition:

Plata-noir has been swapped out for Materia-dark. Plata Theme has not seen development since the GNOME 3.38 stack release, which has meant considerable breakages under 40, alongside GTK4. Materia GTK Theme provides a very similar look and feel, so we are comfortable with applying this switch. If you changed your GTK or Shell theme to a non-default value, run the command:

gsettings reset org.gnome.desktop.interface 'gtk-theme'
Dash to Dock is temporarily deprecated from the Solus repositories and is no longer enabled by default via our desktop branding. We will reintroduce Dash-to-Dock support when the current merge request for GNOME 40 support, which introduces some instability and is “very much WIP” (exact quote), is merged in and a release is tagged around it.

The remaining extensions enabled by default, like Impatience and Tray-Icons-Reloaded, are still supported and enabled.

Upgrading

As always during a GNOME update, if you are using GNOME Shell, be sure to disable any extensions which we do not provide / have enabled out-of-the-box to ensure the best possible upgrade experience. Not doing so may result in a broken desktop experience, crashes, or worse. It is not the responsibility of Solus or GNOME to ensure those extensions are maintained and updated against newer GNOME Shell APIs. If they break, we suggest you kindly reach out to the developer. For the best possible upgrade experience, you may want to properly reset your extensions back to the stock configuration. This can be done by opening up a Terminal and running the command listed below.

gsettings reset org.gnome.shell 'enabled-extensions'

With any ecosystem as large as GNOME’s, you can expect and may encounter various issues with GNOME Shell, the window manager, or applications. We always encourage you check the respective upstream projects for issues, filing bugs with them to enable all users across the Linux ecosystem to benefit.

For GNOME Shell, we would advise checking GNOME Shell’s issue tracker.
For Mutter, GNOME’s window manager, we advise checking their issue tracker. There is currently a known issue we are tracking related to red tint with NVIDIA proprietary graphics under X.org that is the result of using a different ICC profile. If you use a dedicated color profile, the current workaround for this is to remove your color profile then add Colorspace: sRGB.
For applications, searching GNOME’s GitLab instance is the best way to find and reach the respective developers.

As with every GNOME Stack upgrade, we take this opportunity to remove packages from our repository that have either:

Implemented changes which result in the application no longer being aligned with the goals / purpose of Solus
Not received updates for several stack upgrades or an extended period of time
No longer compile / work as originally intended against newer upgrades

The majority of the packages which have been removed during this GNOME Stack upgraded are listed below, excluding old auto-generated documentation packages, and the reason for their deprecation:

epiphany: We have multiple alternative and objectively better web browsers in our repos. Epiphany has been held back for some time due to libhandy and we are more comfortable with deprecating it at this point. You can always get it from Flatpak.
gnome-clocks: Used libhandy but actual deprecation reason is that it does not support new gweather APIs.
nemiver: Has not been developed for a number of years by GNOME and they have other debugging utilities like what you can get via sysprof and Builder.

We have also held back baobab, gnome-disks, gnome-photos, and gnome-maps due to their new requirement for libhandy. This is in addition to existing applications held back. It is always worth keeping in mind that should you desire the most recent versions of this software, flatpak and snap support is available!

KDE Framework 5.81.0 and Plasma 5.21.4

KDE Frameworks has been updated to 5.81.0. This introduces fixes such as:

Baloo: Update filename terms when moving/renaming file
Breeze Icons
- Added branches with leaves to Kmymoney icon
- Add high-brightness and low-brightness icons
- Fix location of brightness icons
- Link svn-* icons to new vcs-* icons
- Make lock icon filled status consistent
KConfigWidgets: Introduce KHamburgermenu
KCoreAddons: Enable Unicode support in QRegularExpression where needed
KIO
- Fix crash in ApplicationLauncherJob(service) when service is null
- Handle errors during xattr copy in a more robust way
KNotification: Don’t close resident notifications when action is invoked
KTextEditor
- Avoid gaps in indentation line drawing
- Add option to keep spaces to the left of cursor when saving
- Don’t warn about unsaved changes when closing if blank and unsaved
- Don’t use F9 & F10 as shortcuts
- Restrict horizontal range of cursor to avoid unintentionally wrapping

Full announcement here.

Plasma 5.21.4

Plasma has been updated to 5.21.4. This introduces numerous bug fixes such as:

Bluedevil: Fix tooltip showing wrong name for connected device.
KScreen: Prefer “21:9” over “64:27” aspect ratio
KWin: Fix crash on hotplugging displays while switched to another TTY.
Plasma Audio Volume Control: Round volume to avoid increasing or decreasing by more than stepSize.
Plasma Desktop: Fix zero badges (eg when downloading small files with Firefox).
Plasma NetworkManager: Fix bug with openfortivpn that do not support 2fa.
Plasma Systemmonitor: Fix scrollbar overlapping configuration page.
Plasma Workspace
- applets/digital-clock: Fix timezone placeholder message positioning.
- Fix color scheme preview.
- Krunner: Restore history related property and methods for compatibility with third party themes.

Full changelog here.

Postgresql 13

Our Postgresql has been updated to 13.2, which features various changes noted in the Postgresql release notes. If you use postgresql for local development purposes, as with all major upgrades you will need to perform a dump / restore either prior to upgrading or by re-installing an older version of postgresql, performing the dump, then doing the restore post-upgrade.

To assist with migration, this has been formally documented on our Help Center!

Qt 5.15.3 Upgrade

KDE / Plasma Desktop maintainer Friedrich von Gellhorn (a.k.a Girtablulu) has moved our Qt5 to KDE’s Qt 5 patch collection, released as 5.13.5, including the following packages:

Package Highlights

Here is a highlight of some other package updates that have been done since our last sync. Please note this is not a comprehensive list, we were not going to go through hundreds of package updates. It also is not going to cover anything that has landed between the release of the blog post and the sync on April 30th, because time does not work that way:

Solus 4.2 Released

Wed, 03 Feb 2021 10:28:52 +0200

We are proud to announce the immediate availability of Solus 4.2, a new Solus 4 “Fortitude” series release. This release delivers new desktop environment updates, software stacks, and hardware enablement.

General

Default Applications

All of our editions feature:

Firefox 85.0
LibreOffice 7.0.4.2
Thunderbird 78.6.1

For audio and video multimedia playback, we offer software out-of-the-box that caters specifically to our desired experience for each edition.

Budgie, GNOME, and MATE editions all ship with Rhythmbox for audio playback, with the latest release of the Alternate Toolbar extension to provide a more modern user experience.
Budgie and GNOME ship with GNOME MPV for video playback.
MATE ships with VLC for video playback.
Plasma ships with Elisa for audio playback and SMPlayer for video playback.

Hardware and Kernel Enablement

This release of Solus ships with Linux kernel 5.10.12, enabling us to provide support for a range of the newer hardware, such as:

Newer AMD Ryzen 5th generation processors, such as the 5600X to 5950X.
Newer Intel Comet Lake CPUs, such as the Intel Core i9-10850K.

Mesa has been upgraded to 20.3.3. This introduces support for new GPUs, Vulkan 1.2 API support, numerous fixes for the latest gaming titles, and ACO shader compilation is now enabled by default for the RADV Vulkan driver.

Solus 4.2 introduces support for many new features and hardware capabilities through our continuous kernel enablement, such as:

AMD RAPL MSR based Energy driver
AMD Renoir Audio Co-processor support
AMD SoC SPI controller driver support
Enabled ACPI and HID ambient light sensors
Enabled CONFIG_DRM_LOAD_EDID_FIRMWARE
Enabled NVMe hardware monitoring via CONFIG_NVME_HWMON
Enabled various modules required for software such as CTParental, Mininet, and ROCm
Enabled early KMS for amdgpu, i915, qxl, radeon, and virtio-gpu
Fast charge control for iOS devices.
Improved exFAT file system support
Intel Broxton PMICs
Intel Classmate accelerometer, backlight, and input device support
Intel Haswell and Broadcom support with I2S codec present
Intel Jasper Lake PCH pinctrl and GPIO drivers
Realtek 8723DE and 8821CD PCI wireless network adapters
Several new USB cameras
Support for setup / unlock / lock Locking ranges for SED devices using the Opal protocol.
Support for Solarflare NICs
Surface 3 battery platform driver support
XFS Online Repair
We have retained XFS v4 Format support to ensure compatibility with any existing XFS filesystems

Multimedia Upgrades

This release ships with ffmpeg 4.3.1, the latest in the 4.3 series. This enables us to provide support for:

AMD AMF Vulkan-based encoding
AV1 encoding via librav1e
Intel QSV-accelerated VP8 decoding
SoX resampler support
Support for TrueHD in MP4
VDPAU VP9 hardware acceleration
Vulkan-accelerated filters

Solus 4.2 ships with the latest dav1d AV1 decoder, version 0.8.1, offering significant performance improvements and optimizations for decoding compared to its original inclusion in Solus 4.1.

Solus ships with the latest release of gstreamer, 1.18.2. This release features many improvements and fixes, such as:

Enhancements to High Dynamic Range (HDR) representation and signaling
Improvements to playback rate changes.
Renegotiation support in webrtcbin
gstreamer plugins “good”: avidemux can handle now H.265 video

You can see all the latest news on GStreamer 1.18 here.

Solus 4.2 ships with Pulseaudio 14.1, which features some key improvements such as:

Automatic switching to HDMI being disabled by default
Support for more USB gaming headets
“flat volumes” being disabled by default

Budgie

Solus ships with the latest release of our flagship desktop environment, Budgie 10.5.2.

Budgie 10.5.2 introduced budgie-desktop-view, our new desktop icons implementation. In releases dating back to the beginning of Budgie 10, we had been using Nautilus’ (now legacy) desktop icons implementation to provide such support. When Nautilus removed their desktop icons support, Solus used an older version of Nautilus to retain it, while some other downstream consumers of Budgie used alternative file managers with similar features to that version of Nautilus, such as Nemo.

We recognized that Desktop Icons was an important part of the workflow of many users, so we spent considerable time during this development cycle ensuring there was a solution for them as well as our downstream users of Budgie. Expanding on this, Solus 4.2 defaults to having desktop icons enabled to make Solus more approachable to new users.

Budgie Menu has received various refinements:

Budgie Menu introduces additional checks for an application’s DesktopAppInfo, ensuring that we consistently skip apps and exclude them from calculations when they have Hidden or NoDisplay set, as well as if the NotShowIn contains Budgie.
Budgie Menu will no longer show empty categories, a common occurrence when installing applications via WINE.
Budgie Menu will now alphabetically sort category names, which is useful when you have custom user desktop directories for applications. They are no longer forced to be below default system-wide desktop directories such as Internet / Networking, Office, Sound & Video, etc.
Applications which utilize pkexec in their desktop info will now spawn an asynchronous process, with pkexec being the command and passing the rest of the command line content as arguments.

Budgie 10.5.2 saw a complete rewrite of its System Tray implementation. Since the days of Budgie 7 in 2017, Budgie had been using an na-tray implementation also seen in desktop environments such as Cinnamon for the creation and management of system tray icons. With our new System Trays implementation leveraging the XEmbed Protocol, we’ve been able to fix numerous issues such as:

Background icons not refreshing, resulting in instances where it may appear that multiple icons are overlapping.
Tray icons not consistently hiding when a panel hides (during “Intelligent” mode).
Tray icons blinking when panel transparency is set to “Dynamic”
Tray icons getting hidden when switching icon themes.

The Sound applet has seen a redesign and now features a dedicated button for mute toggling, as well as leveraging iconography for the System Settings button rather than text.

You can now choose which side of the screen Raven, our notification and widget center, appears. Prior to Budgie 10.5.2, Raven would always appear on the left side when the main panel and trigger were on the left, and appear on the right when the main panel was anywhere else. Users will be able to choose between this behaviour, called “Automatic”, as well as left and right sides!

There was so many other improvements and fixes in this new release. Check our our dedicated blog post for more information!

GNOME

Solus 4.2 GNOME Edition ships with the latest release of the GNOME 3.38 Stack, 3.38.3. GNOME 3.38.3 introduces various fixes to the GNOME experience such as:

A brand new major release of Tracker, GNOME’s search engine and database for local and remote content.
Disks will now always show other filesystem format choices and has fixes for drive unmounting and partition creation.
GNOME Shell
- “Boot Options” support to restart dialog.
- Items can now be re-arranged in the app picker.
- Restart has been moved into a separate menu item / dialog.
- Screen recordings are now added to recent items.
Music has numerous bug fixes and a rework of art retrieval.
Mutter
- Improvements to performance thanks to optimized resource scale computation, painting of backgrounds, offscreen effect cache invalidation, and more
  - Night Light fixes after DPMS (Display Power Management Signaling).
- Support for custom keyboard layouts under $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/xkb.
- Numerous X11 fixes for button scrolling, IM handling, overview key when using multiple keyboard layouts.
- WINE copy & paste
Photos now has a new image filter called Trencin, similar to Instagram’s Clarendon filter.

Solus GNOME Edition continues to ship with our curated out-of-the-box experience leveraging a multitude of extensions, such as:

Dash to Dock for quick and easy access to favorited and running applications
Drive Menu for quick access to plugged-in devices (such as USB thumb drives)
Impatience for faster animations
Top Icons for system tray icon support out-of-the-box

MATE

Solus 4.2 MATE Edition ships with MATE 1.24, which contains numerous bug fixes and under-the-hood improvements. Some of the highlights include:

Caja can now show thumbnails in its list view.
Engrampa now has support for more formats.
MATE Control Center will now display its icons correctly on HiDPI displays.
New window decoration themes in Marco.
The alt+tab max columns is now configurable and considers window label width.
The Mouse app now supports acceleration profiles.
The Indicator applet has improved interaction with oddly-sized icons.
There is now a webp files eom-thumbnailer.
The window list applet now supports window thumbnails on hover.
Pluma plugins are now fully switched to Python 3.

Brisk Menu

Solus 4.2 also ships with Brisk Menu 0.6.2. This release features:

applet: Re-create applet menu when changing window-type
- Currently changing window types (between ‘classic’ and ‘dash’) requires restarting Brisk Menu. This leads to software like MATE Tweak to have to kill the brisk-menu process to ensure a smooth transition between panel layouts.
backend: Hide menu when rebuilding menu items
- Since we have a monitor to update the menu whenever the desktop files are updated, the list of filtered menu items can change while the user is actively navigating through it. This causes the GtkListBox filters to segfault. Hiding the menu whenever the GAppInfoMonitor fires the “changed” signal clears out the GtkListBox, and so no filtering is happening. This only happens when installing or removing applications while browsing the menu, so it should not be generally disruptive, and will prevent the menu from crashing.
frontend: Allow keyboard navigation
- Instead of disabling focus, we reuse the rollover functionality to enable listening for focus events, then we activate the corresponding category.

Plasma

Solus 4.2 Plasma Edition ships with the latest Plasma Desktop 5.20.5, KDE Frameworks 5.78, KDE Applications 20.12.1 and QT 5.15.2, which brings many new features, some highlighted below:

New System Tray layout
Switched the Task Manager default to Icons only
Night Color
Various improvements to System Settings & Info Center such as SMART support, improved layout, and highlighting of changed settings

The Solus-specific Plasma integration has received various refinements, specifically:

Fixes in SolusDark Coloring for better visibility
Solus Wallpaper in different sizes
A new Window will open where the mouse is
Change dolphin to always open in the HOME dir

Download

To download our latest Editions, you can go to our Download page, where direct links and torrents are available!

Changelog of ISO (Budgie)

Packages Added

Budgie-desktop-branding-fortitude-plus
Budgie-desktop-view
exfatprogs
graphviz
gts
iio-sensor-proxy
jbig2dec
libinstpatch
libmaxminddb
liburing
libuv
libxaw
network-manager-applet
network-manager-livecd
python-libevdev
raqm
srt
yt-dlc

Packages Removed

cmocka
exfat-utils
gnome-online-miners
gom
libgrss
libtelepathy-glib
libzapojit
vino
youtube-dl

Changes

ldb

Rune Morling: ldb: Update to 2.1.4 (samba 4.12.x stack upgrade)

gnome-doc-utils

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild

libgeocode-glib

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild

gnome-themes-extra

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild

colord

Joshua Strobl: Upgrade to latest colord. Switch to meson.

less

Pierre-Yves: Update less to 563

budgie-desktop-branding

libheif

libwpe

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.8.0

qtstyleplugins

lz4

Pierre-Yves: Update lz4 to 1.9.3

libxres

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

evince

Martin Reboredo: Rebuild gd against raqm

gstreamer-1.0-plugins-ugly

libnspr

Pierre-Yves: Update libnspr to 4.29

gstreamer-1.0-plugins-good

x264

mesalib

libxshmfence

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

gstreamer-1.0-plugins-base

libglvnd

onboard

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuilds and clean up builddeps.

gpgme

Pierre-Yves: Update gpgme to 1.15.0

vo-aacenc

gobject-introspection

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.66.1

gnome-bluetooth

Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.34.3

libxdmcp

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

hunspell-en

F. von Gellhorn: change component to office.spelling

libvisio

Joey Riches: Rebuild against libicu 68.2

gstreamer-1.0

libmediaart

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild

xset

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

sqlite3

Pierre-Yves: Update sqlite3 to 3.34.1

gstreamer-1.0-libav

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.18.1

libxscrnsaver

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

mpg123

Martin Reboredo: Update mpg123 to 1.26.3

gdk-pixbuf

Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.42.2

papirus-icon-theme

Joshua Strobl: Update to 20210101. Release notes available here.

python-magic

Jarno Turkki: Update python-magic to 0.4.18 and add python3

solus-sc

gmp

Joey Riches: Update to 6.2.1

libboost

volume_key

Pierre-Yves: Safety rebuild volume_key for gpgme 1.15.0

libmtp

Jarno Turkki: Update libmtp to 1.1.18

squashfs-tools

Pierre-Yves: Rebuild squashfs-tools for zstd 1.4.8

libcdio-paranoia

Jarno Turkki: Update libcdio-paranoia to 10.2.2.0.1

python3-cairo

Joey Riches: Update to 1.20.0

mpc

Joey Riches: Update to 1.2.1

geoclue

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild

glibmm

neon

Alexander Vorobyev: Update neon to 0.31.2

python-dbus

Joey Riches: Update to 1.2.16

tracker-miners

mpv

os-installer

Joshua Strobl: Sync with git.

libdrm

Bryan T. Meyers: Updated to 2.4.103

xorg-driver-video-intel

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

libglade

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild

harfbuzz

libnotify

grep

Pierre-Yves: Update grep to 3.6

pango

libgtk-3

atkmm

ca-certs

Joshua Strobl: Update to 20201207

ffmpeg

osinfo-db

Joshua Strobl: Update for latest OS releases.

xorg-driver-video-nouveau

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

npth

Pierre-Yves: Update npth to 1.6

ghostscript

Martin Reboredo: Update ghostscript to 9.53.3

python-packaging

Joey Riches: Update to 20.8

libcairo

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild

system-config-printer

xorg-server

dbus

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.12.20

talloc

Rune Morling: talloc: Update to 2.3.1 (samba 4.12.x stack upgrade)

gnome-screensaver

Joshua Strobl: Sync with git to fix a GNOME Desktop ABI change.

nvidia-390-glx-driver

libxcomposite

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

gnome-control-center

solus-artwork

Joshua Strobl: Update to 28.0

gnome-system-monitor

Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.38.0

gnome-online-accounts

Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.38.0

flatpak

pangomm

libsm

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

wpebackend-fdo

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.8.0

orca

gnome-disk-utility

gspell

zstd

Pierre-Yves: Update zstd to 1.4.8

xcb-util-image

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

xhost

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

nautilus-python

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.2.3

bluez

ilmbase

Martin Reboredo: Update ilmbase to 2.5.4

libgxps

libzmf

Joey Riches: Rebuild against libicu 68.2

libgtksourceview

Joshua Strobl: Update to 4.8.0

totem-pl-parser

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild

libspectre

Martin Reboredo: Update libspectre to 0.29

libxau

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

glib-networking

Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.66.0

udisks

Silke Hofstra: Patch udisks for exfatprogs

cairomm

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild

grilo-plugins

Joshua Strobl: Update to 0.3.12

xorg-driver-video-fbdev

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

xdpyinfo

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

librest

glibc

Joey Riches: Safety rebuild against toolchain

libproxy

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild

gegl

libice

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

enchant

libosinfo

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.8.0

tracker

libcdio

Jarno Turkki: Update libcdio to 2.1.0

gnome-mpv

Joshua Strobl: Drop youtube-dl rundep since it’s already a rundep of mpv-libs

linux-firmware

gnome-screenshot

Joshua Strobl: Hold back to 3.36.0.

modem-manager

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.14.6. Changelog available here.

libxext

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

libtimezonemap

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild

cups-pk-helper

Joshua Strobl: Move dbus-1 out of etc.

libwebkit-gtk

libvte

imagemagick

gnupg

gnome-terminal

libgdata

python-cparser

Joey Riches: Update to 2.20

libqmi

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.26.6. Changelog available here.

libxt

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

systemd

Joshua Strobl: Fix missing libgcrypt related rundeps, related to disabling autodep.

curl

Pierre-Yves: Update curl to 7.73.0

libxv

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

gnome-user-docs

dmidecode

Algent Albrahimi: Update dmidecode to 3.3

samba

libgnome-menus

Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.36.0

freetype2

Martin Reboredo: Update freetype2 to 2.10.4

python-pyliblzma

libxft

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

libdazzle

Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.38.0

libgcrypt

Pierre-Yves: Update libgcrypt to 1.8.7

bash

Troy Harvey: Update bash to 5.1.4

libnss

xcb-util-keysyms

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

sdl2

F. von Gellhorn: Update SDL2 to 2.0.14

seahorse

gfbgraph

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild

hplip

Campbell Jones: Update hplip to v3.20.9

baobab

Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.38.0

libass

Alexander Vorobyev: Update libass to 0.15.0

pyatspi2

Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.38.0

libarchive

libxtst

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

xmodmap

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

accountsservice

Joshua Strobl: Move configuration out of /etc

bind-utils

Martin Reboredo: Update bind-utils to 9.17.8

libcdr

Joey Riches: Rebuild against libicu 68.2

amtk

libgweather

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild

lash

Joey Riches: Remove empty directory

tepl

libxfont2

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

lsof

Martin Reboredo: Update lsof to 4.94.0

libical

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild

at-spi2-atk

Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.38.0

nano

firefox

mutter

tdb

Rune Morling: tdb: Update to 1.4.3 (samba 4.12.x stack upgrade)

libtiff

yelp-xsl

brotli

Joshua Strobl: Add patch to revert -R in pkgconfigs.

libxcursor

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

gnome-autoar

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild

plata-theme

Joshua Strobl: Update to 0.9.9

libgee

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild

libxcb

wget

libjson-glib

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.6

cups

[Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.2.13. Changelog available here].](https://dev.getsol.us/source/cups/browse/master/;82c5df1)

xorg-driver-video-qxl

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

gnome-photos

libx11

gpm

Joshua Strobl: Sync with git to ensure it can build. Remove empty etc dir that it shouldn’t own.

tevent

Rune Morling: tevent: Update to 0.10.2 (samba 4.12.x stack upgrade)

libmbim

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.24.4

qt5-base

glib2

attr

Joshua Strobl: Support a stateless path for xattr config.

gvfs

lsb-release

Joshua Strobl: Bump for 4.2

baselayout

Joshua Strobl: Bump for 4.2

networkmanager-openvpn

perl

Pierre-Yves: Update perl to 5.32.1

tzdata

Pierre-Yves: Update tzdata to 2020c

python-pycurl

libxinerama

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

libgtop

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild

libxrandr

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

libvdpau

libplacebo

libmspub

Joey Riches: Rebuild against libicu 68.2

sudo

libgphoto2

Algent Albrahimi: Update libgphoto2 to 2.5.26

nvidia-glx-driver

libxi

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

pulseaudio

file-roller

Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.38.0. Changelog available here.

babl

libqxp

Joey Riches: Rebuild against libicu 68.2

inxi

Jarno Turkki: Update inxi to 3.2.01

python3

Pierre-Yves: Update python3 to 3.7.9

libusb

xkbcomp

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

libreoffice

libde265

Martin Reboredo: Update libde265 to 1.0.7

pyparsing

Joey Riches: Update to 2.4.7

libjpeg-turbo

Jarno Turkki: Update libjpeg-turbo to 2.0.6

graphene

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild

evolution-data-server

gnome-keyring

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild

grilo

Joshua Strobl: Update to 0.3.13

openssl-11

Pierre-Yves: Update openssl-11 to 1.1.1i

bubblewrap

Pierre-Yves: Update bubblewrap to 0.4.1

python-pysmbc

faad

Pierre-Yves: Update faad to 2.10.0

dav1d

libpeas

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.28

networkmanager-openconnect

gsound

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild

pipewire

libepoxy

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.5.5

libxrender

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

upower

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild

openssh

Joshua Strobl: Apply patches to fix various shell incompatibilities for ssh-copy-id. Resolves T9315.

libxvmc

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

python-gobject

Joshua Strobl: Partial upgrade to 3.38.0

avahi

Joshua Strobl: Make stateless.

libcanberra

Joshua Strobl: Correct version number

libe-book

Joey Riches: Rebuild against libicu 68.2

alsa-utils

Jarno Turkki: Update alsa-utils to 1.2.4

libfontenc

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

nautilus

qpdf

Algent Albrahimi: Update qpdf to 10.0.3

tar

Pierre-Yves: Update tar to 1.33

intel-microcode

Jarno Turkki: Update intel-microcode to 20201118

openexr

Martin Reboredo: Update openexr to 2.5.4

libxml2

Joey Riches: Update to 2.9.10

lightdm

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild

libxmu

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

xorg-driver-video-vmware

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

cups-filters

gedit

usbutils

Pierre-Yves: Update usbutils to 013

fluidsynth

Jacalz: Add libinstpatch support to fluidsynth

zenity

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild

slick-greeter

gsettings-desktop-schemas

Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.38.0

libgudev

Joshua Strobl: Update to 234

gexiv2

Joshua Strobl: Update to 0.12.1

libdmx

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

rhythmbox

twolame

Martin Reboredo: Update twolame to 0.4.0

xorg-driver-video-vesa

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

gcc

dconf

Joshua Strobl: Update to 0.38

libgtkmm-3

linux-current

alsa-lib

libgnome-desktop

libnma

librsvg

budgie-desktop

gparted

Pierre-Yves: Update gparted to 1.2.0

network-manager

gcr

libsecret

Joshua Strobl: Update to 0.20.4

dbus-glib

Joshua Strobl: Patch to move bash completion to correct directory.

rav1e

ostree

libxdamage

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

libsoup

Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.72.0

eog

libicu

Joey Riches: Update to 68.2

gstreamer-1.0-plugins-bad

libgsf

libassuan

Pierre-Yves: Update libassuan to 2.5.4

rubberband

Alexander Vorobyev: Update rubberband to 1.9

aom

Alexander Vorobyev: Update aom to 2.0.1

pinentry

Pierre-Yves: Update pinentry to 1.1.0

gnome-calculator

adwaita-icon-theme

Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.38.0

iproute2

gnome-settings-daemon

Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.38.1

vulkan

libxfixes

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

libpsl

Joshua Strobl: Update to 0.21.1. Test fixes, improved Meson build.

libwacom

gnome-color-manager

Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.36.0

liblcms2

Alexander Vorobyev: Update liblcms2 to 2.11

gnome-calendar

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild

libxxf86dga

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

xorg-driver-input-wacom

F. von Gellhorn: Update xorg-driver-input-wacom to 0.39.0

libgnomekbd

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild

thunderbird

alsa-firmware

Jarno Turkki: Update alsa-firmware to 1.2.4

expat

Pierre-Yves: Update expat to 2.2.10

libksba

Pierre-Yves: Update libksba to 1.5.0

libxkbfile

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

vapoursynth

Pierre-Yves: Safety rebuild vapoursynth for imagemagick 7.0.10-43

breeze

libxxf86vm

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

gnome-session

Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.38.0

xdg-desktop-portal

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.8.0

alsa-plugins

Joshua Strobl: Move configuration to /usr/share/alsa/conf.d and out of /etc

yelp

at-spi2

Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.38.0

xorg-driver-video-radeon

F. von Gellhorn: Rebuild against xorgproto

mpfr

Joey Riches: Update to 4.1.0

Holiday Streaming Extravaganza | The Roundup #18

Thu, 17 Dec 2020 13:15:16 +0200

Welcome to The Roundup #18, your bytes of Solus news. In this roundup, we are talking about our upcoming two week streaming extravaganza, Linux 5.10, new KDE goodies, and more!

Holiday Streaming

While most years we would all run off to spend time with our families for the holidays, we all know 2020 has been quite a different year entirely. But that does not mean we can not stay toasty next to our computers, hang around in IRC, and engage in some banter on some live streams.

So from next Monday, December 21st to Sunday, January 3rd, we will be having daily live streams! These live streams will range in subjects and projects, such as:

A massive Haskell upgrade and rebuilds
Budgie-desktop-view
ferryd
libeopkg
usysconf
usysconf-dconf

Additionally, Bryan will be having some late night streams working on his pixel editor and we will be having a couple Friday game streams!

We have put together some fancy schedules so you will know the who, whens, and whats regarding the live streams. This schedule uses Eastern Standard Time (which is UTC -5) since Bryan will be the main streamer, but here is a link to a timezone converter so you can figure out when it it starts for you.

If you want to watch these streams, there are a few ways you can do it:

We have created a Twitch account which will host either Bryan or myself, with priority going to Bryan.
When we are both streaming at the same time, you can watch us both using multistre.am
Bryan’s Twitch channel
My Twitch channel

Be sure to follow and enable notifications to know when we go live!

KDE Applications 20.12.0, KDE Frameworks 5.77.0, Plasma 5.20.4

Global Maintainer Friedrich von Gellhorn (a.k.a Girtablulu) has landed the latest improvements to KDE’s beloved applications, frameworks, and Plasma desktop environment for Solus users to enjoy this Friday. While we encourage you to read the respective changelogs, we have highlighted some things below!

Breeze Icons
- Add icon for True Type XML font
- Add symbolic name symlink for input-* icons
- Remove useless blur from kontrast icon
Dolphin’s address bar is now in the toolbar, for example, and, in Detail View mode, you can set the size to include everything in the folder including the nested folders inside the parent one.
Elisa, a compact music player, now lets you change the color scheme of the app independent of the system wide color scheme. It also now lets you choose which view to display when the app launches.
Kate’s file browser now has an Open with menu item.
KFileMetaData: Add several subtypes for OpenDocument and OpenXML document.
KNotification: Don’t pass transient hint.
Konsole now has a configurable toolbar.
Spectacle, which is KDE’s screenshot application, now has an editor that enables you to add smilies, text, arrows, and more.
Syntax Highlighting
- C++ highlighting: update to Qt 5.15
- Zsh, Bash, Fish, Tcsh: add truncate and tsort in unixcommand keywords
kwin: Fixed Toggle Night Color global shortcut, which used i18n in object name, leading to erratic behavior e.g. when system locale or translations changed.
plasma-desktop: Use plasma theme icons in kickoff leave view.
plasma-workspace
- Fix Environment Canada weather domain.
- Re-add searching for breeze decoration.
- The cursor previews are in a layout.

Changelogs:

Linux 5.10

As some of you know, we held back linux-current from some of the newer kernel releases due to regressions introduced in 5.7 that prevented some Samsung NVMe devices and controllers from functioning correctly, which would result in failures to boot the OS. These issues were fortunately resolved in 5.10-rc1 and we have been validating every 5.10 release candidate since. With the formal release of 5.10, we are excited to deliver it to our users, with it coming to the stable repositories this Friday with Linux 5.10.1. Linux 5.10 has a ton of fantastic changes and we have highlighted some of them below:

Bluetooth suspend and resume events now get emitted.
Faster ext4 metadata heavy operations and fsyncs.
New XFS v5 format that supports widened timestamps to deal with y2038.
Prevent “ondemand” and “conservative” from being configured as the default cpufreq governor in the case when schedutil is the default choice for the default governor setting.
Support for various hardware such as new Intel sound SoCs, mute LED support on the HP Elitebook 845 G7, codec support in various cards.
Support for Thunderbolt for Intel Tiger Lake-H

Alongside these updates, we have updated:

intel-microcode to 20201118, which has fixes and security updates for Intel gen4 to gen10 processors
linux-firmware to its latest release, introducing many firmware updates for: Intel Bluetooth, amdgpu, ath10k, ath11k, i915 DMC, and rtw88.
nvidia-390-glx-driver to 390.138 and introduced patches for fixing compilation against 5.10
nvidia-beta-driver to 460.27.04
openrazer to 2.9.0
nvidia-developer-driver and nvidia-glx-driver has both received patches for fixing compilation against 5.10, as well a patch for a page allocation failure error.
virtualbox to 6.1.16

We took this opportunity to enable some kernel modules for various features, functionality, and hardware support. Here are some of our changes:

AMD Renoir Audio Coprocessor support is now enabled via CONFIG_SND_SOC_AMD_RENOIR.
Additional USB cameras have been enabled via CONFIG_USB_GSPCA_OV534 and CONFIG_USB_GSPCA_OV534_9.
CONFIG_MFD_INTEL_PMC_BXT is now enabled for Intel PMC driver support for Broxton.
CONFIG_MT7663U is now enabled for MediaTek MT7663U support
CONFIG_SENSORS_AMD_ENERGY is now enabled for AMD RAPL MSR-based energy driver support.
CONFIG_XFS_SUPPORT_V4: Ensures the continuation of XFS v4 format support. While we will eventually deprecate XFS v4 support from our kernel, it is going to be supported for several years and therefore we are not in an immediate need to do so.
Multiple Intel sound SoCs.
Multiple NFTABLES flags
schedutil is enabled via CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_SCHEDUTIL. performance is still the default.

Mesalib 20.2.3

Mesalib has been updated to 20.2.3 with an update to 20.2.4 coming down the update pipeline soon. Mesalib 20.2 series introduces many fixes and improvements. Some major changes include:

RADV now uses ACO per default as backend
Many new supported Vulkan Extensions for ANV (Intel) and RADV (AMD)

If you want to check out all the fixes and improvements, feel free to click on any of the changelogs below:

Packaging Highlights

Here’s a highlight of some packages that has been updated this week. Please note that this is not a comprehensive list:

Budgie 10.5.2 Released

Wed, 02 Dec 2020 18:30:42 +0200

Solus is proud to announce our newest iteration on our flagship desktop environment, Budgie 10.5.2, with a diverse range of new features and bug fixes!

Quality of Life

Budgie 10.5.2 introduces new goodies to make your Budgie experience even better!

Applets

Budgie Menu

Budgie Menu has received various refinements for this release:

Budgie Menu introduces additional checks for an application’s DesktopAppInfo, ensuring that we consistently skip apps and exclude them from calculations when they have Hidden or NoDisplay set, as well as if the NotShowIn contains Budgie.
Budgie Menu will no longer show empty categories, a common occurrence when installing applications via WINE.
Budgie Menu will now alphabetically sort category names, which is useful when you have custom user desktop directories for applications. They are no longer forced to be below default system-wide desktop directories such as Internet / Networking, Office, Sound & Video, etc.
Applications which utilize pkexec in their desktop info will now spawn an asynchronous process, with pkexec being the command and passing the rest of the command line content as arguments.

Icon Tasklist

The Icon Tasklist applet has seen new features and behaviour refinements in Budgie 10.5.2.

There are now two new options available, disabled by default, to launch a new instance of an application via the respective button for the application: middle click and double click. This expands on our existing option to create a new instance of an application by clicking the + button in the popover of each Icon Button.

The behavior of the Icon Tasklist has been refined in Budgie 10.5.2. We have consolidated duplicate logic in other less used classes into our dedicated application state tracking class, which is used by the Icon Tasklist and IconPopover to provide a list of running applications, their AppInfo, any group they belong to, and more. This consolidation has meant more consistent “skip pager” checks, as well as more consistent rejection of various types of windows, such as:

DOCK (like budgie-panel)
SPLASHSCREEN (temporary splash screen apps, like what you would see for GIMP or LibreOffice)
UTILITY (like controls for an emulator).

Thanks to this more consistent window type rejection, we are able to more closely discern between what is budgie-panel versus what is budgie-desktop-settings, which is part of the panel but is otherwise a NORMAL type application. This enabled us to resolve an issue where the pin and new instance buttons were being unintentionally shown, as well as an issue where you could not close Budgie Desktop Settings via the IconPopover controls (right click popover for each Icon Button in the tasklist).

After close discussions with members of the community on our forums on the expected behaviour of the Icon Tasklist, time was spent refining the behaviour of Icon Tasklist and individual Icon Buttons to be more consistent. Here are some examples:

When the “Show All Windows on Click” option is enabled, we will now more consistently show or minimize all windows on click if one of them is currently active.
If only one instance of an application is open and it is on another workspace (in this case the “Restrict to Workspace” option is not enabled), we switch to that workspace and unminimize the window (since the chances are you probably want to see the application in the first place).

We are always listening to feedback on how to improve the behaviour of Icon Tasklist while ensuring it remains simple and approachable to use. If you have an idea on how to improve it further, feel free to file an issue on Budgie’s issue tracker.

Sound

The Sound applet has seen a redesign and now features a dedicated button for mute toggling, as well as leveraging iconography for the System Settings button rather than text.

System Tray

Dating back to the days of Budgie 7 in 2014, Budgie had been using an na-tray implementation also seen in desktop environments such as Cinnamon for the creation and management of system tray icons. Thanks to the incredible work by Solus contributor Campbell Jones, the System Tray has been completely rewritten from scratch, supporting tray icons leveraging the XEmbed Protocol. This new implementation resolves numerous issues such as:

Background icons not refreshing, resulting in instances where it may appear that multiple icons are overlapping.
Tray icons not consistently hiding when a panel hides (during “Intelligent” mode).
Tray icons blinking when panel transparency is set to “Dynamic”
Tray icons getting hidden when switching icon themes.

Additionally, a configuration option has been added for the System Tray that enables the setting of spacing between individual icons, making it perfect for those that want both their applets and tray icons to be equidistant!

Budgie Desktop Settings

Budgie Desktop View has been updated to provide a clearer differentiation between removing a Panel and removing an applet from a Panel. A dedicated button for removing a panel has been added below the Panel’s applet list, with a description that makes its purpose clearer. This button will not appear when you only have one panel in your Budgie setup. Building on this, we have removed the option to disable the panel removal confirmation dialog. From user reports, the consensus was that this option was too easy to enable, would result in accidental permanent removal of panels more frequently than desired, and lacked a clear user-friendly method to re-enable the prompt.

For those which use Budgie in another language than English, the menu items presented when adding a new Autostart application or command via the Autostart section are now translatable. For any language which has the terms translated, those will be used instead.

Budgie Desktop View

Budgie 10.5.2 is the first release of Budgie to feature our new desktop icons implementation. In releases dating back to the beginning of Budgie 10, we had been using Nautilus’ (now legacy) desktop icons implementation to provide such support. When Nautilus removed their desktop icons support, Solus used an older version of Nautilus to retain it, while some other downstream consumers of Budgie used alternative file managers with similar features to that version of Nautilus, such as Nemo. During that time, other desktop environments have strayed away from providing this functionality with some going so far as to remove it entirely, requiring you to install third-party extensions to re-introduce the functionality.

We have always recognized that for many, desktop icons is an important part of their workflow, and so retaining that support in a sustainable manner was paramount for the release of Budgie 10.5.2. We wanted to enable our downstreams to ship Budgie akin to how Solus does without potentially compromising on functionality.

To facilitate this, our goal from the start for Budgie 10.5.2 was to introduce a new, separate project that could be iterated on independently from Budgie Desktop itself. This project needed to be rigorously focused and developed with an understanding of the scope and intent of the project, not trying to be a file manager but rather a method of quickly accessing the content and applications you consider most important.

Last week, we debuted the first generally public development release of Budgie Desktop View and the feedback has been fantastic, giving us numerous places where we can continue to improve this new project, in addition to what we already have planned for the upcoming releases.

Alongside Budgie 10.5.2, we have just released our first stable 1.0 release of Budgie Desktop View, which builds on the features and focus of the prior development releases with a new option to choose between using a single and double-click to launch items. This enables you to curate the launch behaviour to mimic your favorite graphical file manager, many of which have such “click policies”. By default, we default to a single-click behavior.

This release refactors many of the shared logic between the various item and view classes we have as well, reducing references or copies of values (resulting in reduced memory usage) and paving the way for easier iteration on upcoming functionality.

However 1.0 is not the final form Budgie Desktop View will take! Drag & Drop support will be added in 1.1, keyboard navigation with arrow keys will be implemented in 1.2, and once GTK4 introduces its first stable release, we will also be assessing moving Budgie Desktop View to it to take advantage of all the improvements the GNOME team has done to the latest generation of its toolkit.

Budgie has always been about striking a balance in customization and that extends to the support we provide downstreams like Ubuntu Budgie as well. That is why we worked hard on introducing a new vendor-oriented mechanism to enable downstreams to choose a desktop icons implementation that fits them and their users best. Alongside our own “native” Budgie Desktop View implementation, we are providing official support in the Budgie Desktop Settings application for the configuration of DesktopFolder and Nemo. Our OS Integration wiki page provides details on the typical method that downstreams can leverage to override default GSettings key / values, as well as providing the key should any savvy user decide to do some tinkering themselves!

Raven

Thanks to Solus contributor Evan Maddock, Budgie 10.5.2 introduces a new option to choose which side of the screen Raven should be. Prior to Budgie 10.5.2, Raven would always appear on the left side when the main panel and trigger were on the left, and appear on the right when the main panel was anywhere else.

Users will be able to choose between this behaviour, called “Automatic”, as well as left and right sides!

Translations

Thanks to our incredible community members that have stepped up to translate Budgie, Budgie is now more accessible than ever. Budgie 10.5.2 introduces support for three new languages: Afrikaans, Albanian, and Hindi. Budgie now has 40 languages which have 90% or more coverage and we have seen dedicated translators step up for a wide range of languages, many of which are now completely translated, such as:

Croatian
Finnish
Malay
Punjabi
Spanish (Argentina)
Spanish (Chile)

We are still working hard to get Budgie translated 100% into many languages. If you are interested in helping translate Budgie into your language, feel free to reach out!

Other

Here are some other aspects of Budgie that received refinements:

Animation disabling: Background transitions and workspace switching are no longer always enabled but now honor the option to disable animations in Budgie Desktop Settings
Budgie’s Application Switcher
- Typically referred to as the Alt+Tab switcher, this switcher now supports the Ctrl modifier, adding support for more custom keyboard layouts and mappings.
- We now support an option to show all windows from all workspaces in the switcher, enabling you to switch between applications and workspaces simultaneously.
Budgie Run Dialog can now check keywords, improving search and aligning its behaviour closer to that of Budgie Menu.
Budgie now provides a new meson option: xdg-appdir
- This option enables downstreams such as openSUSE to use its own stateless XDG path.
Caffeine Applet: When Caffeine Mode is enabled, the timer will now update the spin button value based on how many minutes are remaining.
Forward-specific keyboard layout switching can now be done with Alt+Shift.
Transparency is now supported in background images, falling back to the fixed color or gradient behind it.
We now provide an option via GSettings to configure the desired screenshot commands, so downstreams can use alternatives to gnome-screenshot.

Bug Fixes

In addition to all the quality of life improvements and features we have added, Budgie 10.5.2 introduces many bug fixes including for some issues dating back years to the early days of Budgie 10.

Applets
- Fix Workspace Applet allowing more than max supported workspace count. We will now return a -1 on our WM AppendNewWorkspace if we are rejecting more additions of workspaces, which informs our WorkspaceApplet to not show the + button (even if set to always show) and reject drag actions onto new workspaces.
Panel
- Added missing LEFT and RIGHT panel layouts in the manager, which prevented downstreams and users from using panel.ini files with left or right panels.
- During panel initialization, we will now appropriately set dock-mode if needed, which fixes an issue where the class would only be applied if the dock mode setting actually changed.
- Fix a crash when removing an applet with missing information.
- The Tasklist applet will no longer cause the rest of the panel contents to be thrown into the aether when you have many windows open. You will be able to scroll up / down to get all the windows and we will be working on dedicated buttons in the tasklist applet in Budgie 10.5.3. This resolves two bugs, one from 2014 and another from 2017.
- Regions which do not have any panel widgets / applets will no longer be shown, allowing applets to take up more space and eliminates weird spacing related issues.
- When changing away from dock mode on a panel, we will now correctly remove the dock-mode CSS class.
Raven
- Chromium-based browser notifications no longer display with broken icon images. This was due to the fact that these browsers would prefix the icon with file:/// and Chromium-based browsers would not pass the correct path. We will now default to the fallback mail-unread-symbolic icon for these applications.
- Notifications and Notification Groups can no longer be selected, which would result in a visual change with no obvious or easy way to deselect them. There are no functional changes, as there are no actions which make use of the selection of Notifications or Notification Groups.
- Notifications are no longer appended to Notification Groups, resulting in older Notifications being higher in a Notification Group’s list than newer ones.
- The Sound widget will no longer allow raising the volume above 100% when the option is off.
- The MPRIS player will correct the album art URLs provided by Spotify, which would otherwise be misreported by Spotify, resulting in images which could not be found.
Other
- Budgie Popovers will now properly handle window scale factors.
- Crash fixes related to the usage of Wnck have been resolved.
- Fix some custom keyboard shortcuts and media keys not correctly applying after boot or reboot.
- Night Light will now appropriately start or end if an application has the fullscreen state amongst its many states, and not just being fullscreen. This is useful if you have an application which is fullscreen and above or below other windows, is sticky (maintains position regardless of workspace), shaded, etc.

Stack Support

Budgie 10.5.2 supports the most recent GNOME 3.38 stack, as well as the GNOME 3.36 stack, enabling it to be more easily backported to older but non-EOLed operating systems. Budgie 10.5.2 has the following version requirements:

Name	Version
`accountsservice`	`>= 0.6.55`
`ibus`	`>= 1.5.10`
`gdk-x11-3.0`	`>= 3.24.0`
`glib-2.0`	`>= 2.64.0`
`gnome-bluetooth-1.0`	`>= 3.34.0`
`gnome-desktop-3.0`	`>= 3.26.0`
`graphene-gobject-1.0`	`>= 1.10`
`gsettings-desktop-schemas`	`>= 3.26.0`
`gnome-settings-daemon`	`>= 3.26.0`
`gtk+-3.0`	`>= 3.24.0`
`libgnome-menu-3.0`	`>= 3.10.3`
`libpeas-1.0`	`>= 1.26.0`
`libpulse`	`>= 2.0`
`libmutter-6` or `libmutter-7`	`>= 3.36.0`
`libnotify`	`>= 0.7`
`libwnck-3.0`	`>= 3.36.0`
`upower-glib`	`>= 0.99.0`
`vala`	`>= 0.48.0`

Huge thanks to the Ubuntu Budgie folks for their hard work introducing both libmutter-6 and libmutter-7 support into Budgie.

Get the Release

Official distribution tarballs for Budgie 10.5.2 are available here. For Solus users, we have already shipped Budgie 10.5.2 to the stable repository!

Contributors

Thank you to all the amazing contributors that have made Budgie 10.5.2 possible. Here is the full list!

Endless DE-ssert | The Roundup #17

Thu, 26 Nov 2020 17:08:12 +0200

Welcome to The Roundup #17, your bytes of Solus news. In this roundup, we’re talk about our new desktop icons implementation for Budgie, GNOME 3.38, KDE and Plasma updates, and more!

Budgie

Since the early days of Budgie, we have been using Nautilus’ (now legacy) desktop icons implementation to provide desktop icon support. While some other desktop environments have strayed away from providing this functionality over the years, some going so far as to remove it entirely and require you to jump through hoops to enable it, we have always recognized that for many it is a cornerstone of their desktop experience, and as such it has remained a priority for us to retain that aspect of the Budgie experience.

Of course, we recognized that keeping Solus on an old version of Nautilus was not going to be sustainable. Not only did we want a newer version of GNOME’s file manager with all the fancy bells and whistles that come with it, but we wanted to enable our downstreams to ship Budgie akin to how Solus does without potentially compromising on functionality.

Today we are thrilled to announce the first generally public development release of Budgie Desktop View! This release focuses on providing the essentials to a desktop icons experience:

Access to “special” folders as your home directory and trash.
Showing active drive / volume mounts (including mounted removable media).
An ordered list of Desktop directory contents, prioritizing folders before files while maintaining order of content that respects locales, as well as generating thumbnails for images to enable you to find the content you’re looking for faster.
Independently adjustable icon sizing from your file manager (Nautilus’ legacy desktop icons implementation has its sizes depend on the zoom level of Nautilus).
Right-click menu options for the background canvas to quickly access Budgie Desktop and System Settings, as well right-click menu options for opening a file using the default app, or via the Terminal.

This isn’t the final form Budgie Desktop View will take however! We’re aiming to introduce the ability to choose between single and double-click options for launching items for the big 1.0 release, and adding drag & drop support in 1.1. Once GTK4 introduces its first stable release, we’ll also be assessing moving Budgie Desktop View to it to take advantage of all the improvements the GNOME team has done to the latest major version of the toolkit.

Budgie has always been about striking a balance in customization and that extends to the support we provide downstreams like Ubuntu Budgie as well. That is why we have also been working hard on introducing a new vendor-oriented mechanism to enable downstreams to choose a desktop icons implementation that fits them and their users best. Out-of-the-gate alongside our own desktop icons implementation, we’re providing official support in Budgie Desktop’s Settings application for the configuration of alternatives as well. Depending on the choice by the downstream (or any savvy user that can look at gsettings), you will get options that align with that implementation.

Initially we will provide support for DesktopFolder, which has been validated by the Solus team, and we’ve added some preliminary functionality for Nemo, which is awaiting validation and some TLC from downstreams (as Nemo is not something Solus ships in its repo).

I want to thank all the community members that have been testing this new implementation on Solus’ unstable repository over the last couple weeks, providing feedback and identifying issues for us to fix before releasing it to the world.

We look forward to introducing it as a “stable” release next week alongside Budgie 10.5.2 (spoiler alert), which features countless improvements and bug fixes, as well as new and updated translations!

GNOME 3.38

This week we are also rolling out the GNOME 3.38 stack upgrade to the stable repository! This stack upgrade provides the latest and greatest in GNOME Shell, GNOME’s desktop environment, as well as many of their applications.

Highlights

Solus users can expect goodies such as:

A brand new major release of Tracker, GNOME’s search engine and database for local and remote content.
Disks will now always show other filesystem format choices and has fixes for drive unmounting and partition creation.
Improved screen recording functionality in GNOME Shell.
Maps has received numerous improvements.
- Allow editing negative elevations on OSM objects.
- Display population in place bubbles using localized number format.
- Fix a race-condition bug in search-as-you-type resulting in out-of-sync search results in some circumstances
Numerous improvements to the Mutter window manager.
- Improved memory usage such as optimizing background painting, offscreen effect cache invalidation, resource scale computation optimizations, and more.
- Night Light fixes after DPMS (Display Power Management Signaling).
- Support for custom keyboard layouts under $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/xkb.
- Support tap-button-map and tap-drag-lock touchpad settings.
- Various clipboard issues have been fixed.
Music has numerous bug fixes and a rework of art retrieval.
Photos now has a new image filter called Trencin, similar to Instagram’s Clarendon filter.
The video editor Pitivi now has a new major release!
- A developer console plugin allows interacting with the project in a Python console.
- Ability to favorite effects in the Effects Library.
- Ability to mute or hide an entire layer.
- A plugin system allows extending the Pitivi functionality medium-term, targeted for teams of editors.
- Composition guidelines in the Viewer.
- Easy alignment for video clips.
- The refreshed clip effects UI allows working on multiple effects at a time.
- The new Greeter perspective replaces the Welcome wizard dialog and allows a slick selection of a recently opened project.
- The Effects Library has been redesigned to allow quick access to effects.
- When being resized, the Viewer shows the percent of the actual widget size in relation to the project video size.
Totem, GNOME’s video player, has fixes for keyboard shortcuts, YouTube search, stutters when the current state is being written to disk, and support for auto-loading VTT subtitles.
Various Nautilus improvements (yes, Solus now ships with the latest release).
- Added newly created files to Recent.
- Auto-escape filenames on NTFS and exFAT mounts.
- Prevent jump to the old scrolling position after changing location.
- Show notification on completion of file transfers if the window isn’t focused.
- Trash empty speedup by preventing recursion.

Upgrading

gsettings reset org.gnome.shell 'enabled-extensions'

For GNOME Shell, we would advice checking GNOME Shell’s issue tracker.
For Mutter, we are aware of an upstream issue which may cause window flickering during window resize on some system configurations. Unfortunately, this issue has not been addressed by upstream GNOME, but we are monitoring it for any changes and will backport any fixes immediately should they occur.
For applications, searching GNOME’s GitLab instance is the best way to find and reach the respective developers.

As with every GNOME Stack upgrade, we take this opportunity to remove packages from our repository that have either:

Implemented changes which result in the application no longer being aligned with the goals / purpose of Solus
Not received updates for several stack upgrades or an extended period of time
No longer compile / work as originally intended against newer upgrades

The majority of the packages which have been removed during this GNOME Stack upgraded are listed below, excluding old auto-generated documentation packages, and the reason for their deprecation:

gnome-documents: Does not support tracker 3.0.
gnome-sound-recorder: Now requires libhandy, a mobile-focused UI library built by Purism. We do not consider applications which target or force the installation of mobile UXs or their libraries to be acceptable, considering we are solely focused on modern home computing devices (laptops and desktops).
libcloudproviders-32bit: libcloudproviders is still in the repository, however the multilib 32-bit package was not used by any software and it did not make sense to build the 32-bit package. So it has been deprecated.
noise: No longer had a maintainer and is expected to have libhandy support in the future.
vino: GNOME Control Center changed Vino support out for gnome-remote-desktop in Mutter.

We have also held back deja-dup to 40.x, gnome-boxes to 3.36.x, and gnome-screenshot to 3.36.x due to their new requirement for libhandy. This is in addition to existing applications held back. It is always worth keeping in mind that should you desire the most recent versions of this software, flatpak and snap support is available!

GStreamer 1.18.1

Gstreamer has been updated to its latest major release, 1.18.1. This includes improvements and fixes such as:

High Dynamic Range (HDR) video information representation and signalling enhancements
Instant playback rate change support
MPEG-TS muxing now also supports TV broadcast compliant muxing with constant bitrate muxing and SCTE-35 support
RTP support was enhanced with new RTP source and sink elements to easily set up RTP streaming via rtp:// URIs
Streamer Editing Services gained support for nested timelines, per-clip speed rate control and the OpenTimelineIO format.
gstreamer plugins “good”
- avidemux can handle H.265 video now
- deinterlace: new YADIF deinterlace method which should provide better quality than the existing methods and is LGPL licensed.
- pulseaudio: device provider improvements: fix discovery of newly-added devices and hide the alsa device provider if we provide alsa devices.
gstreamer plugins “bad”
- nvdec: add support for 12-bit 4:4:4/4:2:0 and 10-bit 4:2:0 decoding
gstreamer plugins “ugly”
- respect YouTube bitrate recommendation when user sets the YouTube profile preset
- separate high-10 video formats from 8-bit formats to improve depth negotiation and only advertise suitable input raw formats for the desired output depth

Pulseaudio 14

Audiophiles rejoice, we have updated our Pulseaudio to latest release, 14.0! While the improvements are truly endless, some of the highlights are:

Automatic switching to HDMI is now disabled by default.

This actually prevented Solus from upgrading to 13.x due to this issue, and we’re happy to see it was an unintended change resolved in 14.0. Here’s an excerpt from the Pulseaudio notes:

PulseAudio 13.0 started to switch output to HDMI automatically when module-switch-on-connect was loaded (upstream PulseAudio doesn’t load it by default, but some distributions do). This change was not intentional, and caused very annoying behaviour in cases where waking up the monitor from sleep appears as a plug-in event in ALSA. Now module-switch-on-connect has a configurable blacklist, which by default prevents switching to HDMI devices.

Better support for some USB gaming headsets

Pulseaudio 14 introduces custom configuration for several headsets, such as:

HyperX Cloud Orbit S
LucidSound LS31
Razer Kraken Tournament Edition
SteelSeries Arctis 5 (2019 edition)
SteelSeries Arctis Pro (2019 edition)

Pulseaudio will now also create separate stereo and mono voice sinks for these headsets

Flat volumes are now disabled by default

flat-volumes is a feature Solus has patched to be disabled for a long time now and we’re happy to no longer be required to do so. Here is Pulseaudio’s notes on the matter:

With flat volumes the stream volumes control also the sink volume. In the simple case of only one stream, the stream and the sink volume are always the same. In case of multiple streams, the sink volume is set to the maximum of the stream volumes. The purpose of this is to simplify the volume control of an application: the full volume range is always available via the application volume slider, so there’s no need to think about the sink volume. In practice, however, this has caused more harm than good (the worst problem is that some applications automatically set their stream volume to 100%, causing the audio to be played at the maximum volume that the hardware can produce), and most large distributions have patched PulseAudio to disable flat volumes by default. Now that patching won’t be needed any more.

KDE Applications 20.08.3

KDE Applications have been updated to the latest release 20.08.3. You can see KDE’s announcement here and we’ve highlighted some changes below!

gwenview received a fix for a bug that would occur when opening some images if the thumbnail bar was enabled, causing it to open a new window.
kaccounts-integration fixed an unreadable row on the account details page when using dark themes.
kdenlive
- Don’t allow removing the only keyframe in an effect (was possible from the on monitor toolbar and crashing).
- Fix crash inserting zone over grouped clips in same track.
- Fix on monitor displayed fps with high fps values.
- Project archiving: check after each file if archiving works, add option to use zip instead of tar.gz.
- Fix playlist clips have no audio regression.
- When switching project profile and there is only 1 clip in timeline, update the timeline clip duration accordingly to profile change.
kmail
- Apply data from mailto information.
- Fix missing text when removing charset encoding.
okular
- Do not disable flick if cursor has been wrapped.
- Fix fast scrolling with Shift+Scroll.
- Fix middle click on sidebar tab bar unloads the document.
- Fix scrolling with scrollbar when the slider is not clicked.
- Fix wrong memory access that may cause crash.

KDE Framework 5.76.0

KDE Frameworks are “addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms”. During our update of KDE Applications and Plasma, KDE Frameworks was also updated to its latest release: 5.76.0. While you can read the full announcement here, here’s a highlight of some of the changes:

Breeze Icons
- Add 48px dialog-warning icon
- Add some color mode icons for Okular
- Add task-complete icons
- Add network-limited icon
- Add meeting-organizer icons
- Add fingerprint icon
- Add task-recurring and appointment-recurring icons
- Change style of media-repeat-single to use number 1
- Symlink kup.svg to preferences-system-backup.svg
Extra CMake Modules
- add missing minimum version for RENAME parameter
- improve default formatting options
KCalendarCore: Add COLOR property serialization from RFC7986
KCMUtils
- Deprecate KSettings::PluginPage
- Port from QStandardPaths::DataLocation to QStandardPaths::AppDataLocation
KCoreAddons: Fix potential memory leak in KAboutData::registerPluginData
KImageFormats
- Add support for RLE-compressed, 16 bits per channel PSD files
KIO
- Avoid pointless probing for nonexisting thumbnail images
- CopyJob: Include skipped files in progress calculation when renaming
- CopyJob: fix total number of files/dirs in progress dialog (when moving)
- FileWidget: Show Selected file preview on mouse leave
- Support for xattrs on kio copy/move
KNotification
- Add comments to describe DesktopEntry field in notifyrc file
- Fix: enable legacy tray on platforms without dbus
KRunner
- Do not set the type to File/Directory if it does not exist
KTextEditor: Fix memory leak in KateMessageLayout
Plasma Framework
- Allow plasmoids to ignore the margins
- Always show ExpandableListitem buttons, not just on hover
- Fix BusyIndicator rotating even when invisible, again
- Lock the header colours of Breeze Dark and Breeze Light
- Remove unnecessary anchors in the ComboBox.contentItem
- Unify aspect ratio of 32px and 22px battery icons
Syntax Highlighting
- Decrease opacity in separator of Breeze & Dracula themes
- Feature: Add the comments.xml as an umbrella syntax for various comment kinds
- Feature: Replace Alerts w/ Special-Comments syntax and remove Modelines
- Solarized themes: improve separator
- fix php/* generation for new Comments hl

Plasma 5.20.3

If Budgie or GNOME Shell aren’t your cups of coffee (or tea), this week’s updates also include the latest Plasma 5.20.3! Here’s a highlight of some improvements and fixes:

khotkeys: Fixed import of files
kscreen: Improve consistency of the lid behaviour.
ksysguard: Stop the daemon if we have no client.
kwin
- Drm: Make sure the screens are turned on when we come from suspend.
- Effects/screenshot: fix the screenshot on GLES.
- Transform a pending repaint into a workspace repaint before destroying Deleted.
plasma-desktop: Only allow multi key shortcuts for standard shortcuts.
plasma-disks: Actually erase devices.
plasma-nm: Do not show absurdedly high speeds on first update.
plasma-workspace
- Fix edge case for tilde and ENV command.
- Fix missing “Switch User” button on lockscreen with systemd 246.
- lookandfeel: Fix switching to a different user session.
- System Tray: Fall back to tool tip title if no title is set.

Qt5 5.15.2

Our Qt5 has been updated to 5.15.2, containing 176 bug fixes. Here’s a short highlight of some of the fixes, the full changelog available here.

qt3d
- Only use surfaceSize if m_surfaceSize is not valid
- Rework Scene3D to fix potential crash on shutdown
- Update QShaderFormat matching logic to account for RHI shader snippets
qtbase
- Fixed a crash in QImage conversions still ongoing on shutdown.
- Fixed an XPM read error caused by off-by-one in overflow check.
- Network: Fixed a crash in HTTP/2 when handling Remote Disconnected.
- QCalendarWidget: The calendar widget now shows the year correctly after editing.
- QJsonObject: Fixed sorting in QJsonObject when parsing UTF-8 JSON text so that searching works afterwards.
- QMenu: We now close popups on windowWillMiniaturize notification so that context menus are not left visible when a window is minimized.
- QMimeDatabase:Fixed handling of glob-deleteall in QMimeDatabase.
- QScreen now emits geometryChanged() when the logical DPI changes so as to resize widgets and fonts after moving to a screen with different DPI.
- SVG now allows smooth curve stroking of very wide lines.
qtgraphicaleffects
- Fixed some effects turning black when source is empty..
qtmultimedia: Fixed the capture signal emission. CaptureToBuffer, and CaptureToFile will now emit imageAvailable, and imageSaved, respectively. Additionally imageCaptured will now only be emitted if there is a video frame available.
qtsvg
- Allowed loading SVG files with a doctype declaration
- Implemented a basic format check for compressed svgs so it will fail early if the file does not start with a svg or xml tag after decompressing.
- Reduced memory consumption significantly for huge files.
qtwebengine
- Fix crashes on resize
- Fix regression crash when not handling QQuickWebEngineNewViewRequest
- Fix remapped menu key being mapped back to menu key
- Handle non-ASCII names for PulseAudio

Package Highlights

Here’s a highlight of some other package updates that have been done since our last sync. Please note this is not a comprehensive list, we weren’t going to go through hundreds of package updates:

alacritty 0.6.0
antimicrox 3.1.3
atom 1.53.0
bottom 0.5.1
cargo-c 0.6.18
cozy 0.7.5
element 1.7.13
ffmpeg: enable SMB support for mpv
flatpak 1.8.3
firefox 83.0
gnuchess 6.2.7
gnupg 2.2.25
i3 4.19
initial inclusion of headset-control
initial inclusion of onefetch
iverilog 11.0
julia 1.5.3
kitty 0.19.2
kodi 18.9
lutris 0.5.8
matcha-gtk-theme
mpv 0.33.0
nano 5.3
nextcloud-client 3.0.3
nnn 3.5
nodejs 14.15.1
nvidia-beta-driver 455.45.01
nvidia-developer-driver 455.46.02
nvidia-glx-driver 455.45.01
opera-stable 72.0.3815.400
onedrive 2.4.7 – the 10000th patch submitted to our development tracker
owncloud-client 2.7.1
phoronix-test-suite 10.0.1
pipewire 0.3.16
pulseeffects 4.8.2
qpdf 10.0.3
qownnotes 20.11.9
rofi 1.6.1
samba 4.12.10
scala 2.13.3
sigil 1.4.2
signal-desktop 1.38.2
simplenote 2.1.0
spyder3 4.2.0
steam 1.0.0.67
strawberry 0.8.4
subsurface 4.9.9
tor 0.4.4.6
vivaldi-snapshot 3.5.2115.4
yt-dlc 2020.11.11-3
zim 0.73.4

Usysconf Rewrite and Major Upgrades | The Roundup #16

Wed, 01 Jul 2020 12:14:19 +0300

Welcome to The Roundup #16, your bytes of Solus news. In this roundup, we talk about our progress on the rewrite of our universal system configuration tool, usysconf, as well as multiple major upgrades which are landing or right around the corner.

Usysconf Rewrite

usysconf is our universal system configuration tool that enables us to run pre-defined triggers / actions when an aspect of your system changes. That could be anything from updating an icon cache when you install a new icon theme to ensuring your boot configuration is updated when we ship new kernels.

usysconf has been developed and used on Solus since late 2017 and while we have made improvements to it over the years, such as ensuring VirtualBox drivers are properly restarted and enabling AppArmor AoT compilation (including switching to our new aa-lsm-hook), there has been a persistent barrier-of-entry to the introduction of new triggers to enable more flexibility and keeping upgrades on Solus bulletproof: they are hard-coded in C. This makes it more difficult to rapidly iterate on new triggers as well as involve package maintainers on Solus in creating triggers for their packages by introducing the requirement that they have the technical expertise in writing C. These new triggers would then require a new usysconf release which would add another layer of work that could otherwise be avoided and prevents the associated package from being updated until the work on the trigger is completed.

To address this highlighted issue, we set out to involve the community and rewrite usysconf to address both their needs and ours. We were fortunate enough to have a talented software developer, Chris Palmer a.k.a. chrisppy, step up to port Usysconf to Go in 2019.

This rewrite introduces a new file-based configuration system that enables us to write triggers in a declarative TOML format. We opted for TOML as it balances human readability (something YAML also provides), while providing array and map data structures that can be utilized with ease, a real-world example you can see here. Moving to a file-based configuration system allows us to move those triggers into vendor-provided directories (e.g. /usr/share/defaults/usysconf.d) and into their applicable packages. Compared to the old implementation, this avoids trigger checking for packages you might not even have installed, lending to potentially faster usysconf execution.

These triggers allow us to:

Execute multiple binaries in a specific trigger, each with their own task description and arguments.
Set environment variables to run for a trigger.
Skip if we are in a live environment (ISO), in a chroot environment (solbuild), or if specific paths exist (enabling bulletproof updates by enabling migration and other actions for a package update, as an example).
Remove paths and files from the system while excluding others.

All of this can be done without writing a single line of code or shipping a new usysconf release. New configuration files are loaded whenever usysconf is run or when you list triggers, and package maintainers will be able to test out triggers on their local system if necessary by placing them in the stateless directories: /etc/usysconf.d/ or .config/usysconf.d/.

Building on this, the Go-based implementation of usysconf uses Bryan’s cli-ng library for commands, flags, and documentation generation. One benefit of this is the ability for us to introduce a translatable usysconf in the future and make it accessible via Weblate, using Weblates’s Nested JSON syntax allow for us to describe triggers and even make command-line arguments translatable. So as an example if you happened to speak Swiss German like Friedrich (Girtablulu) on the Team, you would be able to use both --hilfe and --help, making the CLI more accessible while still enabling us to provide generic command documentation on the Help Center.

Bryan has been building on Chris’ work (merged into our usysconf) in the last few Twitch streams by making live device and chroot checking more reliable, as well as starting to get into the weeds of a dependency system, which will allow us to build a dependency graph and enable triggers to depend on others (this can be useful for packages like systemd). There is still a bit of work to do, including writing some external tools to facilitate conditional dconf / gsettings key+value updating, but we are making strong headway and we are excited to be so close to a proper 1.0 major release! So keep an eye out on our social media for any new streams on it!

Libboost 1.72

Pierre (kyrios) upgraded our libboost to 1.72.0. While not the most recent stable release, we are waiting to upgrade to 1.73 after we do our major toolchain upgrades (GCC 10, LLVM 10). There are tons of fixes, improvements, and rebuilds against this release, so be sure to check out the release notes for 1.72.0 if you use this library!

OpenSSL

While Bryan was working on usysconf during the streams, I was also working on upgrading our OpenSSL to the latest in the 1.1 series. Up until now, we have been utilizing OpenSSL 1.0 and backporting any available fixes when possible. The reason we have been conservative with OpenSSL upgrades comes down to everything which relies on it and ensuring that when upgrading, we’d have a safe transition / upgrade path. In order to offer the latest updates of OpenSSL, we have had to work to ensure that the 1.0 legacy OpenSSL and 1.1 series not only are co-installable and co-exist, but software which is running during the time of upgrade continues to function as expected.

What do I mean by this? Well one of the pieces of software that relies on OpenSSL and is compiled against it is Python 2. eopkg, which is our current package manager, is written in Python 2 and has to continue to function while system upgrades occur. To facilitate this, the specific shared object files that Python 2 relies on (libcrypto.so.1.0.0 and libssl.1.0.0) cannot be removed during upgrade, otherwise Python breaks and thus the package manager itself breaks. This not only applies to the user’s system, but our build environments as well, since we wouldn’t be able to perform any rebuilds if eopkg is broken, since any package dependencies wouldn’t be able to be fetched and installed.

To ensure we can have our cake and eat it too, I implemented a new openssl-11 package for OpenSSL 1.1 series, and introduced patches to the older OpenSSL to properly version 1.0 symbols as well as move the majority of OpenSSL 1.0 libraries into its own openssl-1.0 directory. This eliminates conflicting shared objects where they may have existed, keeps the necessary OpenSSL 1.0 libs around for Python to continue to function, and thus enables us to rebuild the universe against OpenSSL 1.1 series.

Roughly 200 packages were rebuilt against OpenSSL 1.1, with only some outliers like Qt4 (planned to be deprecated down the road anyways) and some incorrect linking in packages like Atom given both OpenSSL packages are available in the build environment. We did take this opportunity to deprecate numerous old and unmaintained packages (typically by upstreams), which will ease some upgrades in the future, such as: coin, sofia-sip, trousers, megatools, pgadmin3, utopia-documents, and google-play-music-desktop-player.

To perform this upgrade during our sync this Friday (July 3rd), just make sure you select everything in the Software Center or run sudo eopkg up like normal. No other actions should be required on your part. You will see warnings from eopkg about several files being migrated between the different OpenSSL series (namely man pages and cert files), that’s nothing to worry about and you can keep on your merry way!

OpenJDK 11

Our community members have been absolutely determined to introduce OpenJDK 11 support and reduce any package’s reliance on OpenJDK 8. Thanks to the initial groundwork of livingsilver94, determination of serebit, and contributions from chax and YakoYako, OpenJDK 11 is now available to install! The introduction of OpenJDK 11 has meant we have been able to give some packages some long overdue attention and updates, such as:

gradle (4.9 to 6.5)
bisq (0.6.7 to 1.3.5)
cryptomator (1.3.5 to 1.5.0)
freeplane (1.7.10 to 1.8.5)

For those of you who make use of Java applications (we see you, Gradle users), you’ll be seeing more updates and more support for your workflow in the future. Massive thanks to our community members for making this upgrade possible!

Poppler

Thanks to the hard work of Global Maintainer Friedrich (Girtablulu), we now have the latest version of Poppler (the PDF rendering library used in a wide range of software from LibreOffice to GIMP). This upgrade introduces numerous improvements, such as:

JBIG2Stream crash fixes
ICC profile usage in PS output
Improved ICC colorspace support in images
Numerous memory leak fixes
Speed optimizations for various glib functions
Qt5-related encoding and loader fixes

Ruby

Ruby has been upgraded to the latest in the 2.7 series, 2.7.1. The 2.7 series introduces a range of features such as:

Calling a private method with a literal self as the receiver is now allowed.
Compaction GC to reduce memory usage that would be seen on some multi-threaded Ruby programs
Experimental pattern matching
Separation of positional and keyword arguments

To see the feature notes for 2.7 series, check out the 2.7.0 news post!

Package Highlights

In addition to all the stack upgrades and work done above, we have seen countless package updates and fixes. Here’s a highlight of some of them:

apparmor 2.13.4
arduino 1.8.13
bluez 5.54
brave 1.10.97
bspwn 0.9.9
composer 1.10.7
dbus 1.12.18
docker 19.03.11
egl-wayland 1.15
falkon: Enable KDE integration
fbreader: port to qt5
flatpak 1.6.4
flatpak-builder 1.0.10
ffmpeg 4.3 and enable rav1e for AV1 encoding and Vulkan filters
gnome-pomodoro 0.17.0
gpodder 3.10.16
haste-client: build with python 3
ideviceinstaller 1.1.1
i3 4.18.1
just 0.6.1
kitty 0.18.0
krita 4.3.0
leveldb 1.22
mame 0.222
matcha-gtk-theme 20200618
materia-gtk-theme 20200320
micro 2.0.6
mutt 1.14.5
network-manager-applet 1.18.0
nvidia-390-glx-driver 390.138
nvidia-beta-driver 450.51
nvidia-developer-driver 440.66.17
nvidia-glx-driver 440.100
onedrive 2.4.3
opera-stable 69.0.3686.36
picon: update to v8 and renamed from compton
ppsspp 1.10.0
podman 2.0.1
putty 0.74
python-bottleneck 1.3.2, remove python2 support
qemu 5.0
rclone 1.52.2
simplenote 1.18.0
steam: Fix udev rule modes
swaylock 1.5
sxhkd 0.6.1
systemd 245.6
unrar 5.9.4
vscode 1.46.1
warzone 3.4.0
yaru-theme 20.10.1

Upcoming

Haskell Stack Upgrade

Bryan has been the Haskell maintainer on Solus since it’s introduction in 2016. However, due to priorities in other areas of Solus development and the sheer size of the Haskell software stack (> 300 packages), it has been stuck on GHC 8.2.2. Over the last few weeks, Bryan has been working to incrementally upgrade to GHC 8.6.5 and update every package possible along the way. Work will hopefully be completed this week, with next Friday’s sync (July 10th) as a target for release. While this is only the first of several GHC upgrades, the majority of the Solus Haskell packages will be receiving an upgrade. In particular, this will mean updates for cabal-install, pandoc, stack, shellcheck, vgrep, and xmonad. Due to recent updates in Haskell’s GTK3 support, we are also optimistic that Bustle, the D-Bus visualizer / debugger will be reintroduced to the repo.

Qt5 and KDE Stack Upgrade

Friedrich has been working on upgrading our Qt5 stack to 5.14.2. This is enabled by the inclusion of OpenSSL 1.1 and allows for additional upgrades of KDE Frameworks to 5.71.0 and Plasma to 5.19.2!

We have opted to upgrade to 5.14.2 v.s. 5.15.0 to reduce patch backporting and bugs typically found in major new releases. Qt5 5.14 provides a new threading architecture in Qt 3D, support for calendars other than Gregorian in QCalendar, improved HiDPI support, network connectivity monitoring, and more.
Plasma 5.19.2 introduces various bug fixes to KRunner, KWin, Info Center, libksysguard, plasma-nm, and fixes to plasma workspace.

Barring any unexpected hiccups, this work is expected to land this Sunday and Monday (July 5th-6th) given the size of these upgrades.

Thank You

Thanks to everyone in our community that has filed update requests, bug reports, provided patches, and tested against the unstable repository. It’s all of you that help make Solus what it is.

If you’re interested in getting involved in Solus, check out our Getting Involved page!

We ❤️ Package Updates | The Roundup #15

Thu, 13 Feb 2020 07:55:05 +0200

Welcome to The Roundup #15, your bytes of Solus news. For this Valentine’s Day we’re giving you what you love the most on Linux, lots of package updates.

Python3

Thanks to the hard work spanning multiple days by Global Maintainer Joey Riches, we have brought up our Python3 to 3.7.6, the latest in the 3.7 series, as well as updating or rebuilding hundreds of packages. Users should see performance gains upwards of 30% depending on the python3-based application or package as well, as we’re now building python3 with -fno-semantic-interposition. You can see additional details on that here.

This Python3 upgrade is also a fairly significant bump from our previous 3.6 series and introduces major features for our Python 3 developers on Solus to take advantage of, such as:

Linux 5.5 Series

Our linux-current has been updated to the 5.5 series, with Solus users getting the latest release at the time of publication, 5.5.3.

The 5.5 series introduces a bunch of new features and fixes, we’d suggest heading over to Phoronix’s feature overview for a more comprehensive list. Some highlights include:

NVIDIA 340.xx Driver Deprecated

With the introduction of the 5.5 series and support for DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport (DP MST), NVIDIA has officially dropped support for the 340.xx series for kernels newer than 5.4.x. As a result of this dropped support, we’ve deprecated our nvidia-340-glx-driver package and have set xorg-driver-video-nouveau as the replacement. No user intervention should be necessary, however if you have used the NVIDIA X Server Settings tool to generate a nvidia configuration file for /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/, it is highly recommended to remove the file before updating. If you do not have this file, no intervention is needed on your part.

ALSA

ALSA and its respective packages have seen updates to their latest releases as well, introducing new UCMs (Use Case Managers) and topologies, which enables audio drivers to “load their mixers, routing, PCMs and capabilities from user space at runtime without changing any driver source code”.

This upgrade introduces improved support for various devices such as:

Broadwell Audio DSPs (including new PCM configurations)
Dell WD15 Dock USB-audio
Gigabyte Motherboards with dual HD-audio codecs
Intel Broxton SoCs such as the bxtrt298
Intel Skylake I2S
Mic recording for internal analog microphones for the Asus T100HA and Lenovo Ideapad Miix 320

For full changelogs, see: 1.2.1, 1.2.1.1, and 1.2.1.2.

Package Highlights

Here’s a highlight of some other package updates that have been done since our last sync. Please note this is not a comprehensive list, we weren’t going to go through hundreds of package updates:

Solus 4.1 Released

Sat, 25 Jan 2020 15:51:24 +0200

We are proud to announce the immediate availability of Solus 4.1, a new Solus 4 “Fortitude” series release. This release delivers a brand new desktop experience, updated software stacks, and hardware enablement.

General

Default Applications

All our editions feature:

Firefox 72.0.2
LibreOffice 6.3.4.2
Thunderbird 68.4.1

For audio and video multimedia playback, we offer software out-of-the-box that caters specifically to our desired experience for that edition.

Budgie, GNOME, and MATE editions all ship with Rhythmbox for audio playback, with the latest release of the Alternate Toolbar extension to provide a more modern user experience.
Budgie and GNOME ship with GNOME MPV for video playback.
MATE ships with VLC for video playback.
Plasma ships with Elisa for audio playback and SMPlayer for video playback.

Hardware and Kernel Enablement

This release of Solus ships with Linux kernel 5.4.12, enabling us to provide support for a wide range of new hardware from AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA, such as:

Newer AMD Radeon RX graphics cards, such as the 5700 and 5700XT.
Newer AMD Ryzen 3rd generation processors, such as the 3600 and 3900X.
Newer Intel Comet Lake and Ice Lake CPUs.
Newer NVIDIA GPUs such as RTX 2080Ti.

Mesa has been upgraded to the latest release, 19.3.2. Mesa 19.3 introduces OpenGL 4.6 support (for supported cards) and enables the new experimental ACO shader compiler, in addition to a wide variety of improvements for AMD APUs (Raven Ridge) and Intel Iris Pro Graphics.

Zstandard, Meet Solus

Solus 4.1 is the first ISO release to feature the use of Zstandard(zstd) compression for the SquashFS images. Compared to the XZ compressed ISOs from previous releases, the ztsd compressed size is a little bit larger. But as a result, the decompression times are significantly improved (3-4x), leading to a much faster installation process than ever previously achieved. In most cases, you can expect to spend more time filling out the questions in the installation wizard than it will actually take to copy everything to disk. We hope you are just as surprised as we were at just how fast this process has become.

Multimedia Upgrades

This release ships with ffmpeg 4.2.2, the latest in the 4.2 series. This release has enabled us to deliver faster AV1 decoding by making dav1d the preferred ffmpeg AV1 decoder.

Solus ships with the latest release of gstreamer, 1.16.2. This release features numerous bug fixes such as:

CineForm video support in AVI
VAAPI H265 decoder fixes
VP9 decoding fixes
Various MPEG-TS and RTSP fixes

Other libraries have seen minor updates as well, such as:

libogg has been updated to 1.3.4 and features faster slice-by-8 CRC32 implementation.
libpng now has SSE3 optimizations to increase decode performance, as much as 41% depending on image size and type.
libvdpau features VP9 decode support, HEVC 444 support, and new frame and field mode chroma types.
libwebp features lossless encode / decode performance improvements.
x265 features encoder enhancements for improving the quality of frames following dark scenes in ABR mode.

Upgraded systemd

Solus 4.1 ships with the latest release of systemd, v244. systemd v244 introduces a bunch of desired features by our users as well as paves the way for future improvements to Solus around EFI support.

Cloudflare DNS is now used as a fallback secondary to Google
Improved security on 64-bit systems to reduce PID collisions
Newer features in systemd-resolved for DNS-over-TLS

We have also taken care to ensure that software which currently only supports cgroups v1, such as Docker and podman (when leveraging runc, as opposed to crun) continue to work. So if you utilize Docker or podman in your development workflow, you’ll feel right at home under Solus with no additional effort around kernel command-line flags required!

Other Improvements

ESync Support

Gaming under Solus just got even simpler! Solus 4.1 now ships with raised file limits to enable ESync support, raising the file limits in our PAM package to Lutris’ suggested value, so you can spend less time configuring your system and more time playing games!

Improved AOT Compiler for AppArmor Profiles

Solus develops an ahead-of-timer compiler for AppArmor profiles called aa-lsm-hook, which we utilize to compile AppArmor profiles leveraged by software such as snapd and improve boot performance by loading from our generated cache. During this release cycle, aa-lsm-hook was completely rewritten in Go for simplicity and long-term maintenance, as well as enabling us to support newer versions of AppArmor which have changed cache directory locations. A benefit of this new support is the end user should no longer encounter issues where some of their snaps fail to launch after a reboot!

Updated NetworkManager and wpa_supplicant

Solus ships with NetworkManager 1.22.4. Since the release of Solus 4 and its shipped NetworkManager 1.10.10, new features and fixes such as the following have been added:

Added an ‘802-1x.optional’ property to consider the wired 802.1X authentication as optional.
Don’t disable PMF on Wi-Fi connections using SAE.
Handle ReachableTime and RetransTimer from IPv6 Router Advertisements.
Use the Network Cost Wi-Fi information element to determine metered device state.
tui: support WPA3-Personal (SAE).

wpa_supplicant has been updated to 2.9, which enables support for WPA3-SAE and OWE. WPA3-SAE is set to supersede WPA2-PSK eventually with wifi access points now starting to provide a WPA2/WPA3 mixed mode. OWE (Opportunistic Wireless Encryption) uses SAE (Simultaneous Authentication of Equals) to encrypt open wifi networks where possible.

Budgie

Solus ships with the latest release of our flagship desktop environment, Budgie 10.5.1. Released last October, this release introduced fixes and quality of life improvements such as:

Budgie Menu
- Menu artificating (such as window borders still showing in some cases) is now fixed.
- Menu items are now sorted using locale linguist rules.
IconTasklist
- 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.
- Fixed the ability to move non-favorited running applications / windows in IconTasklist across grouping and non-grouping modes. These are now allowed to intermingle with your favorited applications without concern for a panel crash. We’re doing this by more heavily leveraging our AbominationRunningApp to provide more consistent window-specific IDs.
Budgie Desktop Settings
- Hinting and anti-aliasing settings are now available in our Fonts section of Budgie Desktop Settings, allowing you even more flexibility with how document, interface, monospace, and window title fonts render. Hinting and anti-aliasing support will vary in impact based on the font chosen by the user.
Raven
- Application controls in the Sound applet will now handle Gvc ChannelMap changes. This is useful since some applications do not provide accurate GvcStream volume immediately when creating their stream, such as Firefox when starting a video. We’ll now ensure we’re updating those values and ensuring applications like Firefox more accurately reflect muted states over Gvc.
Workspaces
- You can now create 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!
Window Manager
- We now enforce an instant auto raise of windows when the focus-mode is set to mouse over / mouse focus and 250ms on click, resulting in speedy window raising.

GNOME

Solus 4.1 GNOME Edition ships with the latest release of the GNOME 3.34 Stack, 3.34.3. GNOME 3.34.3 introduces various fixes to the GNOME experience such as:

Ensuring the user is able to create application folders in GNOME Shell (by drag and dropping application icons on top of each other) when no folders existed previously.
Fixes to KMS freezing after pageflip.
Fixes to window recording on HiDPI monitors.
Seahorse contains a fix for a crash when deleting a subkey.

Solus GNOME Edition continues to ship with our curated out-of-the-box experience leveraging a multitude of extensions, such as:

Dash to Dock for quick and easy access to favorited and running applications
Drive Menu for quick access to plugged-in devices (such as USB thumb drives)
Impatience for faster animations
Top Icons for system tray icon support out-of-the-box

MATE

Solus 4.1 MATE Edition ships with the latest release of the MATE 1.22 series, which contains numerous bug fixes and under-the-hood improvements. Some of the highlights include:

MATE Applets improvements
- The Display Applet got a full revamp, allowing for better monitor control directly from the panel.
- The Timer applet now has much better mouse interaction.
The window and desktop switchers have been modernized to make them more visually appealing.
The session manager now properly terminates all processes on systemd. Additionally, apps can now be auto-started after a user-selected delay.
The Caja file manager can now optionally display desktop notifications for long-running file operations.
Eye of MATE has a reworked sidebar and better image metadata support.
Tabs in Pluma now have the ability to be switched with keyboard shortcuts and mouse scrolling.
Calculator can now support up to 15 characters of accuracy. Copy/paste support was also improved a bit.
Engrampa adds support for several new compression formats, as well as a new pause/restart functionality.
A few new key shortcuts have been added, including support for different types of media keys like Bluetooth, WiFi, touchpads, and global killswitches.

Brisk Menu

Solus MATE Edition ships with the latest release of our Brisk Menu implementation, 0.6.1. The 0.6 series features various fixes and improvements, such as:

Added a new “dash” style menu.
MATE 1.22 support.
Prioritizing Favorites.
Fixing key-binder from consuming Super+Mouse events.
Translations in over 20 languages, such as: Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, French, German, Irish, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.
Unsetting Lock key masks when closing the menu.

MATE User Manager

Solus MATE Edition now ships with a new utility for user and groups management called MATE User Manager, replacing the previous group and user management functionality in MATE Control Center.

Plasma

We’re proud to announce a new addition to the Solus family: Solus Plasma Edition. Solus Plasma Edition has been a long sought after experience by current and prospective users alike, melding our ability to create a curated out-of-the-box experience with the sophistication of the Plasma Desktop experience.

Solus 4.1 Plasma Edition features Plasma Desktop 5.17.5, the latest of 5.17 series, and is complemented by KDE Frameworks 5.66, KDE Applications 19.12.1 and QT 5.13.2.

Solus Plasma Edition refines the Plasma Desktop experience by:

Introducing Solus Dark Theme, which is a custom theme that is darker than Breeze-Dark, bringing it closer to the style of the other Solus Editions, which are using the Plata GTK theme as their default.
Changing the position of the Show Desktop widget inside the system tray.
Creating a custom layout of the Digital Clock widget.
Shortening the timeout for logout from 30 to 10 seconds.

Solus Plasma Edition ships with Solus-specific integrations for KDE Applications and Frameworks, such as:

Baloo only performs basic indexing and excludes common folders such as the snap directory.
Breeze size grip and titlebar separators are disabled by default.
Klipper will not ignore images.
Kwin will default to centering windows.
Line numbers in Kate are enabled by default.
Single-click is enabled by default.
Tap-to-click is enable by default for Synaptic touchpads.

Solus Plasma Edition ships with the following default applications (outside of the usual Solus Edition defaults such as Firefox and Thunderbird):

Elisa as default music player.
Smplayer as default video player.
Konversation as default IRC Program with setup IRC #Solus server for support.
Kdeconnect.

Thank You

We would like to thank everyone that has supported and contributed to Solus and its endeavors. It’s you, our community, that has made this release possible. Whether you’ve filed bugs, fixed software, contributed code, translated Budgie Desktop, validated testing ISOs, or shared Solus releases with your colleagues, friends, and family: you’ve helped shape this release and improved the project for everyone.

Thank you for believing in our shared vision for the project. We look forward to working alongside all of you on more releases this year.

Download

To download our latest Editions, you can go to our Download page, where direct links and torrents are available!

Changelog of ISO (Budgie)

less

Pierre-Yves: Update less to 551

lz4

Pierre-Yves: Update lz4 to 1.9.2

libvpx

libxtst

F. von Gellhorn: Safety rebuild libxtst for xorgproto

libnspr

x264

Joshua Strobl: Update to 20191013.2245

x265

gdbm

Jacob Alzén: Update gdbm to 1.18.1

gstreamer-1.0-plugins-base

libglvnd

F. von Gellhorn: Safety rebuild libglvnd for xorgproto

pango

gobject-introspection

systemd

libxdmcp

libnss

gstreamer-1.0

grub2

Pierre-Yves: Update grub2 to 2.04

inxi

gmp

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain

mpc

Joey Riches: Rebuild against toolchain

python

python-dbus

Joey Riches: Update to 1.2.12

aa-lsm-hook

bash-completion

flinux@vongellhorn.ch: Update bash-completion to 2.9

libbluray

Pierre-Yves: Update libbluray to 1.1.2

libdrm

libgtk-2

Pierre-Yves: Update libgtk-2 to 2.24.32

util-linux

ca-certs

libp11-kit

Pierre-Yves: Update libp11-kit to 0.23.18.1

libcairo

dbus

libxcomposite

findutils

Pierre-Yves: Update findutils to 4.7.0

parted

Pierre-Yves: Update parted to 3.3

json-c

Joshua Strobl: Move to system.base as cryptsetup will need it.

sed

Pierre-Yves: Update sed to 4.8

libwebp

Pierre-Yves: Update libwebp to 1.0.3

libssh

libxshmfence

F. von Gellhorn: Safety rebuild libxshmfence for xorgproto

libxau

F. von Gellhorn: Safety rebuild libxau for xorgproto

libicu

Joshua Strobl: Update to 65.1.

v4l-utils

Pierre-Yves: Update v4l-utils to 1.18.0

nano

xdpyinfo

F. von Gellhorn: Safety rebuild xdpyinfo for xorgproto

hwdata

elfutils

Joey Riches: Update to 0.177

inotify-tools

Bryan T. Meyers: Update to 3.20.1 and fix repo location

libice

F. von Gellhorn: Update libice to 1.10.0 and rebuild for xorgproto

linux-firmware

libpng

modem-manager

libxext

libcap2

Pierre-Yves: Update libcap2 to 2.27

libqmi

gawk

libxv

F. von Gellhorn: Safety rebuild libxv for xorgproto

dmidecode

Algent Albrahimi: Update dmidecode to 3.2

libxft

Bryan T. Meyers: Update to 2.3.3

libgcrypt

Pierre-Yves: Update libgcrypt to 1.8.5

bash

libedit

Joey Riches: Update to 2019-10-25.3.1

sdl2

flinux@vongellhorn.ch: Update SDL2 to 2.0.10

openssh

openssl

isl

Joey Riches: Update to 0.21

glib2

libxxf86vm

F. von Gellhorn: Safety rebuild libxxf86vm for xorgproto

cryptsetup

Joshua Strobl: Update to latest stable release.

mesalib

libtiff

wpa_supplicant

Joey Riches: Enable support for WPA3-SAE and OWE
[Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.9. Changelog available here.](https://dev.getsol.us/source/wpa_supplicant/browse/master/;ee883f3)

harfbuzz

libxcursor

Bryan T. Meyers: Switch to a trackable upstream

font-droid-ttf

flinux@vongellhorn.ch: Change url to getsol.us

libxcb

F. von Gellhorn: Safety rebuild libxcb for xorgproto

perl

curl

libssh2

Pierre-Yves: Update libssh2 to 1.9.0

openal-soft

flinux@vongellhorn.ch: Safety rebuild for SDL2 update

gdk-pixbuf

libva

Joey Riches: Update to 2.5.0

tzdata

nghttp2

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.39.2

libxinerama

F. von Gellhorn: Safety rebuild libxinerama for xorgproto

libxrandr

libvdpau

libdmx

F. von Gellhorn: Safety rebuild libdmx for xorgproto

expat

Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.2.7

ncurses

Philipp Trulson: Link static libs from ncurses

libxi

F. von Gellhorn: Safety rebuild libxi for xorgproto

kerberos

Pierre-Yves: Update kerberos to 1.17

grep

Pierre-Yves: Update grep to 3.4

ffmpeg

faad

Jacob Alzén: Update faad to 2.9.1 to fix a bunch of CVEs

linux-current

libtasn1

coreutils

flinux@vongellhorn.ch: Update coreutils to 8.31

libxrender

F. von Gellhorn: Safety rebuild libxrender for xorgproto

libjpeg-turbo

avahi

flinux@vongellhorn.ch: Rebuild for gdbm 1.18.1

alsa-utils

Pierre-Yves: Update alsa-utils to 1.1.9

man-db

sudo

file

libgudev

Joshua Strobl: Update to 233

wavpack

Joshua Strobl: Resolves multiple security issues.

gcc

lame

Jacob Alzén: Update license and update summary

libflac

Jacob Alzén: Update libflac to 1.3.3

alsa-lib

Pierre-Yves: Update alsa-lib to 1.1.9

gettext

Pierre-Yves: Update gettext to 0.20.1

network-manager

usysconf

Bryan T. Meyers: Updated to 0.5.3

libatk

sqlite3

libxdamage

pam

Joshua Strobl: Bump nofile limits to 524288. Resolves T8601.

llvm

cups

Pierre-Yves: Patch cups for CVE-2019-8696 and CVE-2019-8675

zimg

bzip2

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.0.8

xrandr

libogg

Jacob Alzén: Update libogg to 1.3.4

libxfixes

F. von Gellhorn: Safety rebuild libxfixes for xorgproto

audit

Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.8.5

libxxf86dga

iso-codes

Pierre-Yves: Update iso-codes to 4.4

libx11

F. von Gellhorn: Update libx11 to 1.6.9

usbutils

Pierre-Yves: Update ubsutils to 012

binutils

pciutils

flinux@vongellhorn.ch: Update pciutils to 3.6.2

glibc

mpfr

Joey Riches: Update to 4.0.2

New Updates For A New Decade | The Roundup #14

Fri, 17 Jan 2020 13:04:27 +0200

Welcome to The Roundup #14, your bytes of Solus news. In this roundup, we’re talking about some brand new updates to really kick off 2020!

Base System Updates

systemd

If you’ve followed our community forums for announcements at all, you may have noticed that earlier this week we deployed systemd 244 to our Solus unstable repo users for testing. systemd, which is responsible for the start-up and orchestration of most software services under Solus, always been one of those crucial components of our operating system that we’ve taken great care of managing, updating, or even holding back if deemed necessary. Up until now, we’ve held back systemd for an upgrade to OpenSSL. While it is obviously not impossible to upgrade our OpenSSL, we’ve done it in the past and plan to do it again in the coming weeks, the upgrade path is more complex than your average package.

The reason for this is pretty simple and it comes down to a bit of a catch-22: Updating OpenSSL involves also keeping the existing versioned libraries around at the same time, in the same package, and in the same upgrade. This ensures no libraries are removed that contain the necessary ABIs that software such as Python are built against. This has to be done to ensure our current package manager (eopkg) continues to function, so we can perform the necessary package transactions to get any subsequent packages to build in the first place.

Basically, updating OpenSSL involves shipping the old and new versions until rebuilds are performed, otherwise we break the package manager. Break the package manager, break package building and obviously users systems. Not fun and a royal pain to get it right. We always strive to provide as flawless an upgrade path as possible, so even having users install some separate package to get certain aspects of their system working, or modifying a file, is absolutely a no-go.

One of the major features in newer systemd releases (new comparatively speaking to what we previously used) that can utilize OpenSSL is DNS-over-TLS, which securely wraps DNS queries over TCP which would otherwise be vulnerable to spoofing or eavesdropping. systemd additionally supported GnuTLS however we actually had too new of a GnuTLS version to take advantage of the DNS-over-TLS implementation leveraging GnuTLS. In v244, that issue was fixed, but given shifting priorities and the holidays, it was only until recently I was able to re-assess it.

So now, I’ve moved our systemd to no longer require OpenSSL, but instead use GnuTLS, unblocking the deployment of the newest systemd. This upgrade introduces some much desired features / changes, such as:

Newer features for EFI-based systems (so we can eventually drop clr-boot-manager)
Newer features in the DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 servers
Improved security on 64-bit systems to reduce PID collisions
Newer features in systemd-resolved for DNS-over-TLS
Cloudflare DNS is now used as a fallback secondary to Google
Bunch of new features for sockets, units, and timers

Thanks to the incredible testing performed by some of our community members, we’ve also been able to ensure this is one of the smoothest systemd upgrades we’ve had to date, and a wider spectrum of the software available to Solus users has been tested. This testing highlighted some edge cases that needed to be addressed, primarily around software that leverage cgroups (a kernel feature typically used by containerization and virtualization software), and we’ve worked to ensure that those pieces of software continue to function after upgrading your system without any user intervention such as manually adding kernel parameters (unlike some other operating systems).

Software that would have been impacted includes (but is not limited to): Docker, podman and snapd. This impact is the result of systemd defaulting to cgroups v2 as their “default hierarchy”, which means breaking a bunch of software that does not yet support cgroups v2, as we’ve detailed here. This change is quoted below from their release notes:

systemd now defaults to the “unified” cgroup hierarchy setup during build-time, i.e. -Ddefault-hierarchy=unified is now the build-time default. Previously, -Ddefault-hierarchy=hybrid was the default. This change reflects the fact that cgroupsv2 support has matured substantially in both systemd and in the kernel, and is clearly the way forward. Downstream production distributions might want to continue to use -Ddefault-hierarchy=hybrid (or even =legacy) for their builds as unfortunately the popular container managers have not caught up with the kernel API changes.

While we understand systemd’s view that the maturity in their own project and the kernel is adequate and we’re excited to support cgroups v2 in the future as well, we simple cannot ignore the magnitude of the negative impact this change would have on software which we use and love.

So in summary, we are going to be sticking with cgroups v1 for the time being and holding back snapd to pre-2.42 (which is prior to cgroups v1 support being removed). We’re happy to see snapd already have support for cgroups v2, however at the moment there are some other software such as runc and containerd, leveraged by Docker and podman, which still need to gain support for cgroups v2 before the move to cgroups v2 can occur. We’re monitoring the respective project’s issues closely and have our own task linked above for tracking our own progress.

This all comes back to our intent with package upgrades on making them as smooth as possible for our users. However, systemd is one of those components of the software stack that is always going to be slightly more of a risk to upgrade, and while we already have mechanisms in place to attempt to re-exec systemd (effectively restarting systemd’s daemon), given the significance of this upgrade there are some notes, warnings, and advised processes we want to bring to your attention, so please read the information provided below.

Before updating and if possible, we recommend that you have a USB with any Solus edition written to it in the event your system upgrade is not complete and the team or community needs to work with you on getting your system back into tip-top shape. If you have any issues, be sure to visit our Forum or IRC channels for assistance. You can download Solus from here and we have documentation on the best methods to prepare the install medium and write the ISO if you need a refresher.

We understand that the steps below are not usual for a Solus upgrade and apologize if any of it is an inconvenience. In any case, let’s get started:

If you are upgrading via the Software Center, it cannot be stressed enough the importance to select all updates. While systemd is considered a system base package and will be selected automatically, there are other components involved that you should update as well, which might otherwise fall under “optional” updates. A future update to the Software Center will change the Updates view to eliminate these options to ensure a more complete upgrade experience, but for now just be sure to choose everything.
If you are upgrading via eopkg (our package manager) and see usysconf (our system configuration tool) fail on specific tasks like “Reloading systemd configuration” and “Re-executing systemd”, please note that this is completely normal for this upgrade cycle and can be safely ignored. If you are unsure if you’ve done a full upgrade, you can just run sudo eopkg up and sudo usysconf run -f again.
Prior to step 4, run sudo sync. This will flush all data from memory into disk and ensures everything is written to disk, which should prevent the process in step 4 from being problematic. If you’ve always waited for some time before performing a full shutdown, that may also be an appropriate solution.
Attempt to logout using the respective graphical menu options available in Budgie’s User Indicator applet, GNOME Shell, Brisk Menu, or Plasma’s application launcher (depending on the desktop environment you use). It is possible this may not be successful and it is okay to progress to step #5 if it fails.
Please perform a full shutdown using the power button on your laptop or desktop (as in, press and hold it until it shuts down). Otherwise, you will be prompted by polkit for authentication on the “reboot.target” and it will fail with access denied. It happens with these sorts of major updates and is normal, you should not see it on any future attempts after the forced shutdown.

ESync Support

For all my fellow gamers out there that have had to do the dance of raising your file limits for Esync support to play your favorite games, you’ll be happy to know that alongside the introduced support in systemd for the raised file limits, we’ve also raised our default limits in PAM to Lutris’ suggested value so you can spend less time configuring your system and more time playing games!

GNOME Updates

With the holidays well over and the team back into the full swing of things, I’ve gone through our GNOME Stack and performed a miriad of updates to bring our GNOME packages up to the latest releases, such as:

Epiphany 3.34.3.1, which re-enables on-demand hardware acceleration, fixes localization issues, and search provider crashes when there are no bookmarks.
GNOME Shell 3.34.3, which introduces some much desired fixes like: the ability to create application folders when no folders existed previously, fixes for some windows getting such on screen if closed while animating, and weather forecast fixes.
Mutter 3.34.3, which has a few minor fixes compared to what we already has from numerous patches from git.
Rhythmbox 3.4.4, which has a new Listenbrainz plugin and will use HTTPS for external requests where possible

KDE Applications and Frameworks Update

KDE Applications and Frameworks have also seen updates this week, with KDE Applications being updated to 19.12.1 and Frameworks up to 5.66.0. This update has numerous fixes, some highlights below:

breeze-icons
- Change XHTML icon to be a purple HTML icon
- Add 32px preferences-system
dolphin: Improve scroll wheel speed by basing it on label height, not icon height
kdenlive
- Ensure we don’t insert thousand separator in number conversion, and only send integer coordinates on keyframe import
- Use project name as default render name
- Fix duplicate track compositing on project opening and broken opacity with background
- Fix timeline clip duration not updated after clip reload
- Fix timeline preview not disabled on render
- Fix missing clips erased from timeline on opening project
- Adjust rendering threads for faster rendering
kio
- Adding support for mounting KIOFuse URLs for applications that don’t use KIO
- Ftp ioslave: fix 4 character time interpreted as year
- KFilePlaceEditDialog: fix crash when editing the Trash place
konsole
- Revert removal to allow Bookmark tabs as Folders to work
ktexteditor
- Avoid unwanted horizontal scrolling
okular
- Fix crash when closing print preview dialog

When Are These Updates Coming?

We typically sync our updates to the stable repository every Friday. Given some last minute refinements we’ve been validating, this week’s sync will occur on Saturday, January 18th.

That One Thing

For those of you that follow our development tracker or our social media, it’s no secret that we’re cooking up something. We’ve done the rather unusual thing of setting ourselves a timeline / countdown to when we intend on starting the process of (not necessarily when we’re releasing it, precisely) said thing. If you’re a rocket scientist, or maybe just someone with some slight curiosity, you may be able to connect the dots between the tasks we have laid out.

Like, oh I don’t know, ISO generation for hardware validation and branding package updates. Feel free to ping us on Mastodon or Twitter if you figure it out, but knowing us we’ll conveniently not be able to confirm nor deny anything.

Budgie and Its Army of GNOMES | The Roundup #13

Thu, 03 Oct 2019 16:55:23 +0300

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

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

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!

Budgie Menu
- Menu artificating (such as window borders still showing in some cases) is now fixed.
- Menu items are now sorted using locale linguist rules.
IconTasklist
- Fixed instances of window tracking in multi-window scenarios by invalidating our window on close in our AbominationRunningApp and picking another window of the same WM_CLASS.
- Fixed the ability to move non-favorited running applications / windows in IconTasklist across grouping and non-grouping modes. These are now allowed to intermingle with your favorited applications without concern for a panel crash. We’re doing this by more heavily leveraging our AbominationRunningApp to provide more consistent window-specific IDs.
Raven
- Notification body alignment is now properly justified.
- Notifications will now properly wrap using WORD_CHAR, so we’ll be more aggressive on wrapping on words when possible, but fallback to characters for longer running strings like URLs.
- Application controls in the Sound applet will now handle Gvc ChannelMap changes. This is useful since some applications do not provide accurate GvcStream volume immediately when creating their stream, such as Firefox when starting a video. We’ll now ensure we’re updating those values and ensuring applications like Firefox more accurately reflect muted states over Gvc.
Polkit: We now correctly handle user dismissing authentication dialogs
WM: We now enforce an instant auto raise of windows when the focus-mode is set to mouse over / mouse focus and 250ms on click, resulting in speedy window raising.

Quality of Life

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 Desktop Settings

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:

For font hinting, you can choose between a range of options ranging from no font hinting to full font hinting.
For antialiasing, you can choose between subpixel antialiasing, standard grayscale, and no antialiasing.

GNOME Stack Support

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!

Icon Tasklist

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.

Workspaces

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.

Styling

Budgie 10.5.1 introduces a multitude of new CSS classes to ease Budgie Desktop theme development:

Icon Popover: Now has the icon-popover class
Night Light Applet: The container for the Night Light applet popover now uses the night-light-indicator class
Raven
- MPRIS widget now has an mpris-widget class
- MPRIS widget controls now have a raven-mpris-controls class
- Notifications View now has the raven-notifications-view class
- Internal to the Notifications View, we now provide the raven-header class, as well as dedicated classes for the Do Not Disturb (do-not-disturb) and Clear All Notifications (clear-all-notifications) buttons
- Groups of Notifications (per app) now have the raven-notifications-group class, with the header being raven-notifications-group-header and the individual Notifications having notification-clone classes.
- When no album art is provided for the MPRIS widget, we set the no-album-art class

GNOME 3.34

We’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.

Smoother Sailing

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.

Latest Goodies

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.

Settings Improvements

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.

Epiphany / GNOME Web

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!

Evolution

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:

Calendar: Force 24-hour format early after start
Enhance URL end recognition regarding closing bracket
Notify clients when backend is refreshing its content
Remove shortcut for “Copy all contacts to…” in Contacts view
ToDo bar: Multiday events shown incorrectly
Use GtkPopover for an emoticon tool button
Use special icon for “Assigned Task” in the menu

KDE Applications & Plasma Updates

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:

Akonadi: Fix short names of favorite folder resulting in improperly shown number of unread messages.
Ark: Fall back to numerical owner and group if no text representation exists.
Dolphin
- Bug fixes in new folders in tabs feature.
- Fix places text when the URL has a trailing slash.
- Reset progress bar text when directory loading starts.
- Fixing bug where split view opens with no URLs.
Kate
- Fix stop button of search and replace plugin.
Kdenlive
- Fix disabling clip only disable audio part of an AV clip.
- Fix regression breaking timeline resize.
- Fix disabling autoscroll.
- Convert old custom effects to new customAudio/Video naming.
- Ctrl resize in monitor effects keeps center position.
- Fix custom effects not recognized as audio.
Kmail
- Fix missing “Save Attachments…” from Multiple Emails
Konsole
- Fix the fallback code used when restoring session fails.
- Add scrollbuttons for tabs when tabbar is full.
- Restore “Show ’new tab’ button” option in Konsole Settings.

With this update you will receive a darker color-scheme for the Solus Dark theme. We welcome your feedback and bug reports here.

MATE Desktop Updates

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:

Pluma
- smart-converter: Fix memory leaks.
mate-menu
- The buttons will now have a relief on hover.
- The viewport is now coloured consistently with the other plugins.
mate-panel
- When determining whether the pos is in the applet, use ad->cells to calc.
- panel-toplevel: fix applets placement on expanded vertical panel
mate-screensaver
- Ensure lock on suspend and unlock on resume
mate-settings-daemon
- Hide MATE Settings Daemon from Startup Applications capplet.
mate-session-manager
- Fix mate-session-properties vertical scaling.
mate-tweak
- Add support for setting window manager button layouts with and without the menu.
- Remove clear shadow. This seems to affect how some shadows are positioned, leading to a clear space between the window and its shadow.
mate-utils
- mate-disk-usage-analyzer: Remove blank space before right parenthesis.
mozo
- Change DragAction to MOVE
- Fix item drag & drop creating copies, fix undo, redo and a crash when refreshing.

Tooling Improvements

Hackfest

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!

ferryd

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.

SQL Query Design

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:

Fetch all of the Package Releases for a given Repo
Fetch all of the Package Releases shared by two repos
Fetch all of the Package Releases within one repo, but not another.

This work benefited greatly from the use of the excellent DB Browser for Sqlite to test queries on real data.

Repo Manager API

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 tags:

Repo Manager Only Operations
Single Repo Operations
Multiple Repo Operations
Package-Specific Operations

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.

File-based Configuration

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.

Help Center Documentation

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:

Build and Runtime Dependencies: Documentation regarding build and runtime dependencies is useful to be referenced and utilitized across multiple Packaging articles. With the current Help Center, this is only utilized in our Packaging Practices documentation, however going forward we would like to have a Beginner’s Guide that covers this information as well, so these are going to be a new importable sections!
Setting Up Arcanist, Common, Packager files, etc: At the moment, setting up arcanist, common, packager files, and other crucial parts of the packaging process (from building to submitting patches) is split across multiple packages (Building Packages and Submitting the Package). Going forward, all of these are importable sections that we can utilize in our Beginners Guide and other Packaging docs.

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!

Package.yml Generation Improvements

During this hackfest, we made some minor improvements to yauto, the tool used to automatically generate package.yml files based on a source.

This tool will now prioritize Meson support and use Meson actionable macros instead of CMake, when a project provides both CMake and Meson support.
QMake is now detected and we’ll use qmake, make, and make_install macros when we detect a .pro file provided by the project.
WAF is now detected and we’ll use our waf_configure, waf_build, and waf_install macros when we detect a wscript file provided by the project.
Yarn support for node projects is now detected and we’ll add a yarn install during the setup step if we detect a yarn.lock file in the project. We’ll also automatically turn on networking.

solbuild

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!

Other Minor Updates

Software Center

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!

GNOME Of Thrones | The Roundup #12

Thu, 25 Apr 2019 16:14:28 +0300

Welcome to The Roundup #12, your bytes of Solus news. In this roundup, we’re talking about our latest GNOME Stack upgrade and the new KDE Applications 19.04 updates!

GNOME Stack Upgrade

We are thrilled to announce that we have just landed the latest GNOME 3.32 Stack into Solus unstable repository for testing. This stack upgrade brings new features and improvements to GNOME Shell as well as GNOME applications. On the GNOME applications front, Solus users can expect the latest goodies such as:

Many GNOME applications have seen a consolidation of their menus into a singular application menu rather that being split in two. This can be noticed with applications like Calendar, Evince, and GNOME System Monitor.
Numerous improvements to GNOME Control Center.
- GNOME Control Center now has a new Applications panel that lists application-specific permissions (such as notifications) and storage usage.
- Night Light color temperature can now be adjusted.
- Sound settings has been re-designed to be more intuitive.
GNOME Music now works better with dark themes.
GNOME Terminal no longer uses traditional window decorations but has now adopted the use of GTK3 Headerbar, with faster access to search, new tab creation, and more.
GNOME Weather will now show tomorrow’s forecasts at the end of the day.

During our testing of both Budgie and GNOME Shell under the latest GNOME Stack, we have seen varying performance improvements, as well as CPU and memory usage reductions.

Budgie saw a significant reduction in memory usage in Budgie WM at cold start-up, largely thanks to improvements made to Mutter, which it is currently built on. On a laptop with an AMD Ryzen 2500U, we saw memory usage reductions of about 50%, going from 58MiB to 27.2MiB. On a desktop with an AMD Ryzen 1700 and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070Ti (running NVIDIA Beta Driver 418.43) we saw a memory usage reduction of roughly 30%, going from 122MiB to 84MiB.

On GNOME Shell, we saw a slight reduction in memory usage at cold start-up and a CPU usage reduction of about 10-15% on our laptop with the AMD Ryzen APU, especially during animations and interaction with GNOME Shell’s Applications dashboard / view, so those with lower-end systems that opt to use GNOME Shell should expect it to be less taxing on their system!

Alongside all these updates, we have also updated Network Manager to 1.16 series, upgraded Enchant to 2.x (while still maintaining backwards compatibility with an enchant16 library), and finally deprecated a legacy version of WebKit.

For our Budgie users, we are now using Budgie git builds with GNOME 3.32 support. This support was graciously provided by the Ubuntu Budgie developers and we’re grateful for their contribution to the Budgie Desktop. We have performed a few changes on top of this new support to ensure we continue to use Budgie WM schemas (to make any transitions between stack upgrades and newer Budgie releases occur more smoothly), as well as fixed instances where we would not be performing a redraw on closing the Budgie Menu, resulting in artifacts.

Additionally, Budgie has now gained support for setting font hinting and antialiasing in Budgie Desktop Settings.

As with every GNOME Stack upgrade, we take this opportunity to remove packages from our repository that have either:

Implemented changes which result in the application no longer being aligned with the goals / purpose of Solus
Not received updates for several stack upgrades or an extended period of time
No longer compile / work as originally intended against newer upgrades

The majority of the packages which have been removed during this GNOME Stack upgraded are listed below (and the reason for their deprecation):

dleyna-renderer: Not under active development and does not build against gupnp 1.2
empathy and multitude of telepathy libraries: Not under active development, with usage of the telepathy libraries being deprecated across the GNOME Stack
galculator: Hasn’t seen a release since 2015
gnome-code-assistance: Hasn’t seen a release since 2016 and was only used by GNOME Builder
gnome-contacts and gnome-games: Now requires libhandy, a mobile-focused UI library built by Purism and currently considered unstable. Not only do we largely not accept the usage of unstable libraries in the repository, but having applications which target or force the installation of mobile UXs or their libraries is not acceptable, considering we are solely focused on modern home computing devices (laptops and desktops).
- As a result of the deprecation of gnome-games, retro-gtk has been removed.
gnome-todo: No longer compiles against latest Evolution Data Server. Should it receive a new stable release (we have been on git builds since late in GNOME 3.28 cycle) that compiles against it, we are open to including it in the repository again.
libwebkit3-gtk: This is an old release of WebKit GTK that was only used by uzbl. To reduce the complexities of maintaining and rapidly updating our stack against changes to libsoup, cairo, glib2, etc. we have decided to deprecate libwebkit3-gtk and uzbl from the repository.

Amongst these changes, we also performed an upgrade of deja-dup which has resulted in the removal of Google Drive support. This is the result of deja-dup now requiring the use of pydrive, a python Google Drive API wrapper library that hasn’t seen a release in several years and doesn’t use a maintained OAuth2 library. If you are a using Deja-Dup and its previous Drive support, we encourage you to reach out to the developer to implement an alternative solution.

We all know you are incredibly excited to try out the latest goodies from GNOME! With Solus being a curated rolling release, you know you can get the latest packages at a pace which doesn’t compromise the usability of your system. With the GNOME Stack upgrade being as comprehensive and wide-reaching as it is, we have decided to defer our sync to the stable repositories until Friday, May 3rd, which provides an additional work week of testing for all of our unstable repo users.

If you are on the unstable repository, feel free to upgrade and start testing. We have created a task on our development tracker detailing what has been tested, and we’d love for you to contribute in the comments of the task with your own experience! If you run into any issues, please file an issue on our development tracker so we can investigate and address the matter. This testing doesn’t just apply to Budgie and GNOME Shell, but to MATE as well.

If you are currently using the stable repository but wish to help test these latest changes, you are welcome to reach out to us in our IRC channel

KDE Applications 19.04.0

It’s not just Budgie and GNOME users that are getting a bunch of goodies this week though! Friedrich (Girtablulu) has been hard at work before his vacation to provide the latest KDE Applications for our Solus Plasma users on the unstable repo.

KDE Applications 19.04 comes with a bunch of improvements, such as:

Dolphin can now display previews for EPub, Microsoft Office, and Blender files.
KMail can now correct your grammar in messages. It will also detect phone numbers in emails, which can be dialed directly via KDE Connect.
Kdenlive has been refactored and comes with massive improvements to its timeline.
- The timeline now uses QML.
- Audio and video now always go to separate tracks when you add a clip to the timeline.
- Copy / pasting now works between project windows
Okular now has added scaling options to their Print Dialog.
You can now verify digital signatures in PDF files via Okular.

We encourage you to read KDE’s announcement for all the news about these updates!

Solus 4 Fortitude Released

Sun, 17 Mar 2019 23:06:48 +0200

We are proud to announce the immediate availability of Solus 4 Fortitude, a new major release of the Solus operating system. This release delivers a brand new Budgie experience, updated sets of default applications and theming, and hardware enablement.

General

Default Applications

All our editions feature:

Firefox 65.0.1
LibreOffice 6.2.1.2
Rhythmbox 3.4.3 with the latest release of the Alternate Toolbar extension
Thunderbird 60.5.2

Our Budgie and GNOME Editions ship with GNOME MPV 0.16 and our MATE Edition ships with VLC 3.0.6

Hardware and Kernel Enablement

This release of Solus ships with Linux kernel 4.20.16, enabling us to provide support for AMD Picasso and Raven2 APUs, AMD Vega20 and broader Vega10 enablement, as well as improved support for Intel Coffee Lake and Ice Lake CPUs.

Furthermore, Linux kernel 4.20 expands our support for other hardware devices, such as touchpad support for the Lenovo IdeaPad 130-15IKB and 330-15ARR.

Mesa has been upgraded to the latest release, 19.0.0, enabling us to provide OpenGL 4.5 API support (for supported cards) as well as support for newer AMD Polaris, Vega10, Vega20, and VegaM cards.

Multimedia Upgrades

This release ships with ffmpeg 4.1.1, the latest of the 4.x series. This release has enabled us to deliver improved VAAPI MPEG and VP8 decoding as well as support for AOM AV1 encoding, decoding, and parsing.

We’ve also enabled support in VLC for dav1d, an open source AV1 decoder.

Software Center

The Software Center has seen some minor refinements and fixes ahead of our planned rewrite. Specifically, we have fixed instances where search results may not show the package summary or description when an ampersand is used in it.

Additionally WPS Office has been removed from Third Party due to the introduction of an unenforceable EULA by the developers.

Budgie

Solus ships with our brand new release of the Budgie 10.x series, Budgie 10.5, as well as complimenting this release by shipping Solus 4 out-of-the-box with the Plata (Noir) GTK Theme.

Applets

Budgie Menu

This Budgie release introduces a few refinements to Budgie Menu. We no longer show applications multiple times in non-compact mode when headers are turned off. We will also attempt to eliminate the “Sundry” category by automatically moving them to an “Other” category if the category is available.

Caffeine Mode

Budgie 10.5 introduces a new applet called Caffeine Mode. Caffeine Mode is designed to ensure your system does not automatically suspend, lock, or dim when you’re hard at work.

Caffeine Mode supports:

Notifications when it is turned on or off
Setting a timer to automatically turn off Caffeine Mode
Turning up your display brightness to max or a designated brightness level

We’d like to thank yursan9 for their amazing work on this applet!

Icon Tasklist

Budgie 10.5 provides a massive upgrade to the IconTasklist applet. Our new IconTasklist applet has improved application detection to more consistently group applications and introduces a brand new IconTasklist popover experience.

This new popover design enables you to:

Close all instances of the selected application
Easily access per-window controls for marking it always on top, maximizing / unmaximizing, minimizing, and moving it to various workspaces.
Quickly favorite / unfavorite apps
Quickly launch a new instance of the selected application
Scroll up or down on an IconTasklist button when a single window is open to activate and bring it into focus, or minimize it, based on the scroll direction.
Toggle to minimize and unminimize various application windows

Additionally, this new popover design enables you to take advantage of custom application actions by supported apps, such as launching a private window in Firefox, composing a new message in Geary, and more!

Raven

Raven, our widget and notification center, has seen improvements in Budgie 10.5.

Calendar

You can now enable week numbers for the Calendar widget in Raven. This can be done easily by going to the Raven section of Budgie Desktop Settings and toggling on “Enable display of week numbers in Calendar”.

Notifications

Budgie 10.5 introduces improved notification management. With this release, notification management is no longer a “clear all or nothing” scenario. Notifications are grouped on a per-app basis and you’re in control of whether or not you want to:

Clear all notifications
Clear all notifications for a specific app
Clear a specific notification for an app

Building on this, notification summaries and descriptions are now properly summarized in their Notification popups. We will also no longer store notifications for:

Power, such as automatic suspend and wake-from-suspend notifications
Printer notifications, such as those for network printers

Sound

Our Sound widgets have been completely rewritten and redesigned! We’ve broken up the widgets into Sound Output and Sound Input, fixed some long-standing bugs, and introduced long sought after features.

For Sound Output, you can now enable the “Allow raising volume above 100%” option to crank up your volume to 150%! Great for parties or movie watching.

Controlling your volume on a per-application basis has never been easier. With our new Sound Output widget, you can now control each application as well as mute them right from Raven! No longer do you need need to dive into the Sound settings in GNOME Control Center or install a third-party tool like pavucontrol. Applications which utilize ALSA for sound playback will also have less verbose names, so you can expect to see applications like mocp (music-on-console player) showing up as “mocp” rather than “ALSA plug-in [mocp]”

With both the Sound Output and Input widgets, you can easily switch between devices, and the functionality for device switching has been rewritten to be more reliable in cases of plugging in a new device or removing an existing one.

Last but not least, in the event you have no output or input devices, we’ll automatically hide the respective widget in Raven! Plug in a device and they’ll automatically show up!

Personalization

We strongly believe that Budgie should provide a balanced, curated desktop experience for our users, enabling a reasonable level of personalization out-of-the-box and empower our users (and downstreams such as Ubuntu Budgie) to open up a world of possibilities with Budgie applets.

Budgie 10.5 introduces a wider array of personalization options via our Budgie Desktop Settings application. Let’s go over the various sections which have been refinements!

Style

Budgie 10.5 builds on our existing support for selecting various cursor, icon, and widget (GTK) themes by ensuring that the options we present to users for icons and widgets are more likely to work well with Budgie.

To do this, we have implemented a blacklist of Icon and GTK themes which are known to not provide our users the most optimal experience. For GTK Themes, we blacklist themes such as Adwaita, Clearlooks, Industrial, etc. which are provided by GNOME and are largely aimed at supporting GNOME Shell. For Icon Themes, we blacklist Breeze and the Solus SC Icon Theme (largely leverages Papirus). Should you desire, you can still switch to these themes through a third-party tool such as GNOME Tweaks.

Thanks to the hard work of EbonJaeger, you can choose the position in which Notification pop-ups are displayed. By default, Notifications will display in the top right of your screen, however that can now be changed to any corner of your screen!

For vendors, we now provide the gschema key to hide the “Built-in theme” option. For Solus 4, we leverage this option to hide such built-in “internal” theme and prioritize our work on surfacing third-party GTK themes such as Plata.

Raven

Budgie 10.5 introduces a new section to Budgie Desktop Settings for personalizing Raven. This is where you would go to allow raising volume above 100% as well as toggle various widgets. We provide options for:

Allowing the raising the volume above 100%
Enabling the display of week numbers in the Calendar widget
Toggling Raven widgets
- Calendar
- Sound Output
- Microphone / Sound Input
- Media Playback Controls (MPRIS)
- Power Strip (Quick Access to Budgie Desktop Settings, Lock, and Logout)

Windows

The Windows section of Budgie Desktop Settings introduces options for:

Center new windows on screen (when possible).
Disabling Night Light mode when a window becomes full-screen. This option will automatically re-enable Night Light mode when leaving fullscreen. This is great for late night gaming or movie watching.
Enabling window focus change on mouse enter and leave instead of based on clicking on a window.

Other

Some other changes / fixes of note:

Added dedicated CSS classes for Sound widgets (apps-list, devices-list, sound-devices) as well as various popovers to make it easier for theme developers.
We now prevent the dragging of desktop icons into the IconTasklist, given its purpose is to show favorited and/or active windows.

GNOME

Our GNOME experience has seen some refinements to our out-of-the-box default experience.

Gedit will now default to using the Oblivion theme
We now default to the Plata (Noir) GTK Theme.

MATE

Our MATE experience has seen some refinements to our out-of-the-box default experience.

We now default to Plata GTK Theme for improved system theming
We’ve resolved an issue with password setting in the About Me of MATE Control Center
Due to various issues with broken user management, we have decided to temporarily remove the packages responsible for providing this functionality, which are gnome-system-tools , system-tools-backend, and liboobs. We are actively working with the developer of an alternative tool to resolve various issues (such as avatar and language setting) and we are optimistic we’ll have a solution to deliver to our users. When this tooling is considered ready for production, we will deploy it automatically to our MATE users.

Our MATE ISO ships with latest of the MATE 1.20 series, which has numerous improvements and fixes such as:

Applet fixes in Cpufreq and Eyes
Numerous fixes in MATE Tweak
Numerous fixes in MATE Panel such as for the Clock and na-tray
Support for background fallback on HiDPI in mate-desktop
You now double-click instead of single-click to edit keyboard shortcuts in MATE Control Center

Plasma

Thanks to the hard work by Friedrich von Gellhorn (Girtablulu) and the groundwork laid by Peter O’Connor (sunnyflunk), we’re happy to introduce the availability of a new Plasma Testing ISO. This new Plasma Testing ISO features the latest of the Plasma Desktop 5.15 series, 5.15.2, and is complemented by KDE Frameworks 5.56, KDE Applications 18.12.2, and Qt 5.12.1.

This Plasma Testing ISO features various performance improvements, as well as reduced QML Engine Memory usage thanks to Qt 5.12 by upwards of 30%. It also features improvements from the latest Plasma Desktop and KDE Applications such as:

Crash fixes for Dolphin
Full support for emoji characters, including color emojis.
KDE Plasma 5.15 is starting up now faster.
Some new / improved icons.

We have also refined our default experience so windows now open in the center of the desktop, as well as the addition of a new default keyboard shortcut for showing your desktop (Meta+D).

You can download the new Plasma Testing ISO here

Thank You

We would like to thank everyone that has supported and contributed to Solus and its endeavors, including Budgie Desktop. It’s you, our community, that has made this release possible. Whether you’ve filed bugs, fixed software, contributed code, translated Budgie Desktop, or shared Solus releases with your colleagues, friends, and family, you’ve helped shape this release and improved the project for everyone.

Thank you for believing in our shared vision for the project. We look forward to working alongside all of you on many more releases in the future.

Download

To download our latest Editions, you can go to our Download page, where direct links and torrents are available!

Changelog of ISO (Budgie)

Packages added to this release:

aom
ldns
libpcap
nvidia-390-glx-driver-modaliases
ppp
solus-sc-icons
wireless-regdb
zstd

Packages removed from this release:

font-indic-ttf
font-lateef-ttf
nvidia-304-glx-driver-modaliases

Changes in this release:

libao

Bryan T. Meyers: Update to 1.2.2 and switch to github source

ldb

Rune Morling: Update ldb to 1.3.6 as part of the Samba 4.8.x stack update.

libmbim

Pierre-Yves: Update libmbim to 1.18.0

libwpg

Pierre-Yves: Update libwpg to 0.3.3

libwpd

qtstyleplugins

lz4

libxres

xmlsec1

Bryan T. Meyers: Update to 1.2.27, temporarily disable tests since a few are failing (minor)

libxtst

Peter O’Connor: Rebuild for xorgproto merge

gstreamer-1.0-plugins-ugly

libnspr

Pierre-Yves: Update libnspr to 4.20

gstreamer-1.0-plugins-good

x265

libxshmfence

gstreamer-1.0-plugins-base

libglvnd

tevent

Rune Morling: Update tevent to 0.9.37 as part of the Samba 4.8.x stack update.

gmime

Bryan T. Meyers: Update to 3.2.3

gpgme

Pierre-Yves: Update gpgme to 1.12.0

libsndfile

Joshua Strobl: Resolves the following CVEs:

libxdmcp

xorg-driver-video-amdgpu

libvisio

Joey Riches: Rebuild against libicu

gstreamer-1.0

xset

gstreamer-1.0-libav

libgxps

Pierre-Yves: Update libgxps to 0.3.1

wayland

Bryan T. Meyers: Switch to gitlab source
[Joshua Strobl: Update Wayland to 1.16.0. Release announcement available here.](https://dev.getsol.us/source/wayland/browse/master/;79272d5)

python-asn1crypto

Pierre-Yves: Update python-asn1crypto to 0.24.0

papirus-icon-theme

xorg-driver-input-libinput

solus-artwork

solus-sc

nghttp2

lm_sensors

Pierre-Yves: Update lm-sensors to 3.5.0

libheif

libboost

Joey Riches: Rebuild against libicu

baselayout

volume_key

Bryan T. Meyers: Switch to github source

libmtp

Pierre-Yves: Update libmtp to 1.1.16

python-setuptools

Pierre-Yves: Update python-setuptools to 40.5.0

unzip

libxv

youtube-dl

geoclue

python

python-dbus

Pierre-Yves: devel: add python3-dbus as dependency

tracker-miners

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild because I want a working system.

aa-lsm-hook

cpio

Bryan T. Meyers: Switch to GNU mirror source

bash-completion

mpv

xorg-driver-input-wacom

libdrm

xorg-driver-video-intel

harfbuzz

shadow

xdpyinfo

libixion

gnutls

onboard

Pierre-Yves: Rebuild onboard for libhunspell 1.7.0

util-linux

libdaemon

Bryan T. Meyers: Switch to git source

libxscrnsaver

ca-certs

ffmpeg

osinfo-db

libcaca

Bryan T. Meyers: Switch to github source

ghostscript

Peter O’Connor: Update to 9.25 to address CVE-2018-16802

libp11-kit

Pierre-Yves: Update libp11-kit to 0.23.15

luajit

Bryan T. Meyers: Switch to github source

hexchat

Pierre-Yves: Rebuild hexchat for perl 5.28.0

libcairo

Pierre-Yves: Update libcairo to 1.16.0

system-config-printer

xorg-server

dbus

Joey Riches: Update to 1.12.10

comar-api

talloc

Rune Morling: Update talloc to 2.1.14 as part of the Samba 4.8.x stack update.

python-requests

python-certifi

Pierre-Yves: Update python-certifi to 2018.10.15

python-idna

Pierre-Yves: Update python-idna to 2.8

libxcomposite

gnome-control-center

dejavu-fonts-ttf

Bryan T. Meyers: Switch to github source

libsm

findutils

Bryan T. Meyers: Switch findutils to a GNU mirror source

zlib

Bryan T. Meyers: Switch to github source

libzmf

Joey Riches: Rebuild against libicu

xcb-util-image

xhost

xdg-user-dirs-gtk

Bryan T. Meyers: Switch to better mirror

attr

Pierre-Yves: Update attr to 2.4.48

sed

libinput

libwebp

libxslt

Bryan T. Meyers: Switch to github

libglu

freeglut

Bryan T. Meyers: Switch to github source

pyparsing

python-cryptography

Joey Riches: Update to 2.3.1

libxau

libaio

Bryan T. Meyers: Rebuild for ABI and component.xml

exiv2

v4l-utils

pisi

Peter O’Connor: Remove 3rd party fallback and sort common symbols by alignment

xorg-driver-video-fbdev

psmisc

hwdata

Philipp Trulson: Update hwdata to 0.320

elfutils

libproxy

Pierre-Yves: Rebuild libproxy for perl 5.28.0

libetonyek

Pierre-Yves: Update libetonyek to 0.1.9

libevdev

Pierre-Yves: Update libevdev to 1.6.0

libgpg-error

poppler

libice

enchant

Pierre-Yves: Rebuild enchant for libhunspell 1.7.0

libosinfo

Bryan T. Meyers: Switch to gitlab source

tracker

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild against libicu so I can actually have a working system again.

libxt

Peter O’Connor: Rebuild for xorgproto merge

gnome-mpv

linux-firmware

tdb

Rune Morling: Update tdb to 1.3.16 as part of the Samba 4.8.x stack update.

libpng

Pierre-Yves: Update libpng to 1.6.36

modem-manager

Philipp Trulson: Update modem-manager to 1.10.0

libxext

perl-xml-twig

Pierre-Yves: Rebuild perl-xml-twig for perl 5.28.0

libxdamage

libwebkit-gtk

imagemagick

gnupg

perl-x11-protocol

Pierre-Yves: Rebuild perl-x11-protocol for perl 5.28.0

dotconf

Bryan T. Meyers: Refresh

libcap2

Pierre-Yves: Update libcap2 to 2.26

python-cparser

Pierre-Yves: Update python-cparser to 2.19

libqmi

Pierre-Yves: Update libqmi to 1.22.0

cyrus-sasl

systemd

curl

python-urllib3

sbc

samba

gutenprint

Justin Berthault: Update to 5.3.1

clr-boot-manager

openal-soft

Bryan T. Meyers: Switch to github source

python-cffi

Pierre-Yves: Update python-cffi to 1.11.5 & use macros

libgcrypt

Pierre-Yves: Update libgcrypt to 1.8.4

libnss

libcmis

Pierre-Yves: Update libcmis to 0.5.2

postgresql

Pierre-Yves: Update postgresql to 10.6 to address CVE-2018-16850

doflicky

libedit

Pierre-Yves: Update libedit to 20181209.3.1

exfat-utils

Pierre-Yves: Update extfat-utils to 1.3.0

vapoursynth

openssh

hplip

openssl

pyatspi2

Pierre-Yves: Update pyatspi2 to 2.30.0 & fix a rundep

libarchive

jansson

Bryan T. Meyers: Switch to github source

accountsservice

Bryan T. Meyers: Update to 0.6.54 and fixup patches

bind-utils

libcdr

libxinerama

libxfont2

python3

libxxf86vm

snapd

firefox

python-openssl

inxi

libatasmart

Bryan T. Meyers: Switch to git source

libtiff

brotli

Bryan T. Meyers: Update to 1.0.7

libxcursor

linux-current

breeze-cursor-theme

flinux@vongellhorn.ch: Update to 5.15.2

xkeyboard-config

Pierre-Yves: Update xkeyboard-config to 2.25

libndp

sane-backends

Bryan T. Meyers: Switch to gitlab source

libxcb

wget

libxxf86dga

libnfs

Pierre-Yves: Update libnfs to 3.0.0

cups

xorg-driver-video-qxl

python3-cairo

Pierre-Yves: Update python3-cairo to 1.18.0

openconnect

libssh2

Bryan T. Meyers: Switch to github source

libxft

Peter O’Connor: Rebuild for xorgproto merge

tar

qt5-base

opus

Pierre-Yves: Update opus to 1.3

gnome-screensaver

Bryan T. Meyers: Make PAM config stateless

font-tlwg-ttf

Bryan T. Meyers: Update to 0.7.1

unrar

adapta-gtk-theme

networkmanager-openvpn

Philipp Trulson: Update networkmanager-openvpn to 1.8.8

perl

tzdata

python-pycurl

libva

speech-dispatcher

libxml2

groff

Bryan T. Meyers: Update to 1.22.4

libxrandr

Peter O’Connor: Rebuild for xorgproto merge

pycups

Pierre-Yves: Update pycups to 1.9.74 & drop python 2 bindings

libvdpau

audit

Bryan T. Meyers: Update to 2.8.4

libmspub

Joey Riches: Rebuild against libicu

sudo

libgphoto2

nvidia-glx-driver

openjpeg

libusbmuxd

libxi

kerberos

Bryan T. Meyers: Update to 1.16.2 and switch to github source

mesalib

Alexander Vereeken: Update mesalib to 19.0.0
Bryan T. Meyers: Update mesa to 18.3.3
Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild against libdrm 2.4.97
Bryan T. Meyers: Update mesa to 18.3.2
Bryan T. Meyers: Update mesa to 18.3.1
Live User: Update Mesa to 18.2.6
Bryan T. Meyers: Update mesa to 18.2.5, resolves T7209
Bryan T. Meyers: Update mesa to 18.2.4, resolves T7177
Bryan T. Meyers: Rebuild for libdrm
Peter O’Connor: Rebuild for LLVM 7
Bryan T. Meyers: Rebuild for xorgproto
Joshua Strobl: Update to 18.2.3
Peter O’Connor: Rebuild for xorgproto update
[Bryan T. Meyers: Update to 18.2.2. Release notes available here. Resolves T7026.](https://dev.getsol.us/source/mesalib/browse/master/;05eff08)
[Joshua Strobl: Update to 18.2.1. Release notes available here. Resolves T7002.](https://dev.getsol.us/source/mesalib/browse/master/;1b9a14c)

graphite2

Pierre-Yves: Update graphite2 to 1.3.13

libqxp

python-magic

Bryan T. Meyers: Update to 0.4.15, remove component.xml

libunwind

xkbcomp

Peter O’Connor: Rebuild for xorgproto merge

libreoffice

grep

Pierre-Yves: Update grep to 3.3

wavpack

Bryan T. Meyers: Switch to github source

iproute2

Philipp Trulson: Update iproute2 to 4.20.0

evolution-data-server

Joshua Strobl: Rebuild because I want a working system.

gvfs

pcre2

Pierre-Yves: Update pcre2 to 10.32

bubblewrap

nvidia-340-glx-driver

faad

Bryan T. Meyers: Update to 2.8.8

libnl

sdl2

tree

python-appdirs

Pierre-Yves: Enable python3

network-manager-applet

Peter O’Connor: Update to 1.8.18, revert prior patch to resolve T6937

coreutils

Philipp Trulson: Update coreutils to 8.30

python-asn1

Pierre-Yves: Update python-asn1 to 0.4.4

libxrender

Peter O’Connor: Rebuild for xorgproto merge

xcb-util-renderutil

Bryan T. Meyers: Refresh

libjpeg-turbo

Justin Berthault: Update libjpeg-turbo to 2.0.1

libxvmc

noto-sans-ttf

avahi

Joshua Strobl: Ensure shairplay can start by not splitting SO files. Resolves T6198.

fdk-aac

libe-book

Joey Riches: Rebuild against libicu

gnome-terminal

[Joshua Strobl: GNOME Terminal’s --new-tab is seemingly buggy, as seen here. Reverted change.](https://dev.getsol.us/source/gnome-terminal/browse/master/;72929b0)
Joshua Strobl: Revert “Add supported desktop actions.”
Joshua Strobl: Add supported desktop actions.

libxkbcommon

python-chardet

Pierre-Yves: Enable unit tests and use SPDX 3.x license code

python-packaging

libfontenc

xcb-util-keysyms

Peter O’Connor: Rebuild for xorgproto update

eog

Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.28.4

qpdf

xcb-util-wm

Bryan T. Meyers: Refresh

openexr

Bryan T. Meyers: Switch to github source

man-db

Pierre-Yves: Update man-db to 2.8.5

lightdm

libxmu

Peter O’Connor: Rebuild for xorgproto merge

xorg-driver-video-vmware

cups-filters

pulseaudio

libffi

Bryan T. Meyers: Switch to github source

foomatic-db-engine

Pierre-Yves: Rebuild foomatic-db-engine for perl 5.28.0

file

Philipp Trulson: Update file to 5.36

python-six

Pierre-Yves: Update python-six to 1.12.0

slick-greeter

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.2.4 (updated locales and Vala compat). Updated default background. Resolves T7390.

gsettings-desktop-schemas

Bryan T. Meyers: Update to 3.28.1

libgudev

Bryan T. Meyers: Fix GNOME source

gexiv2

Bryan T. Meyers: Update to 0.10.9

libdmx

rhythmbox

nettle

Pierre-Yves: Update nettle to 3.4.1

bzip2

Peter O’Connor: Actually use shared bzip2 and symlink duplicate files

libssh

libgtkmm-2

Bryan T. Meyers: Switch to GNOME source

xmodmap

libflac

Bryan T. Meyers: Switch to github source

mdadm

libtheora

gettext

budgie-desktop

gparted

network-manager

libvoikko

Pierre-Yves: Update libvoikko to 4.2

gnome-settings-daemon

Joshua Strobl: Backport patch for notification desktop-entry setting from 3.30 series.

lsb-release

sqlite3

xorg-driver-video-vesa

rhythmbox-alternative-toolbar

pam

libicu

gstreamer-1.0-plugins-bad

llvm

wireless-tools

liborcus

libassuan

font-roboto-ttf

Bryan T. Meyers: Update to 2.138

unixodbc

Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.3.7

zimg

Pierre-Yves: Update zimg to 2.8

lzip

gcab

polkit

net-snmp

Pierre-Yves: Rebuild net-snmp for perl 5.28.0

fuse

Pierre-Yves: Update fuse to 2.9.9

libogg

Bryan T. Meyers: Switch to github

perl-net-dbus

Pierre-Yves: Rebuild perl-net-dbus for perl 5.28.0

libhunspell

mtdev

Bryan T. Meyers: Switch to github source

mariadb

libxfixes

Peter O’Connor: Rebuild for xorgproto merge

libwnck

perl-xmlparser

Pierre-Yves: Rebuild perl-xmlparser for perl 5.28.0

libwacom

Joey Riches: Update to 0.32

glib2

liblcms2

nano

python-pysmbc

libbluray

Pierre-Yves: Update libbluray to 1.1.0

libx11

thunderbird

libimobiledevice

e2fsprogs

xorg-driver-video-radeon

libxkbfile

xorg-driver-video-nouveau

libraw

Bryan T. Meyers: Switch to github source

binutils

Joshua Strobl: Safety rebuild against glibc 2.29.

totem-pl-parser

Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.26.1

gzip

Pierre-Yves: Update gzip to 1.10

gptfdisk

James Lee: Update gptfdisk to 1.0.4

udisks

Peter O’Connor: Patch to address CVE-2018-17336

glibc

vulkan

python-cairo

Pierre-Yves: Update python-cairo to 1.18.0

Introducing Our New Community Forums

Fri, 01 Mar 2019 16:59:25 +0200

We are really excited to be introducing our new community forums. With the introduction of our Flarum-based community forums, we will have a new centerpiece to community engagement that provides us with the user experience and flexibility we’ve long desired.

With Flarum, we’ve been able to:

Introduce a better support medium with functionality like Best Answers to highlight the best answer from the Team or the Community.
Enable a more personalized user experience by having custom social media badges on your profiles and user-enabled dark mode.
Enable multiple login methods so you don’t need yet another account. Our support login methods include our Development Tracker, GitHub, and traditional username / email + password.
Enable two-factor authentication, which supports any authentication application that supports TOTP.

Flarum also provides us some fancy things like:

More flexibility in how we organize our discussions, with support for primary and secondary tags.
Availability of user-created extensions for media embedding, custom reactions, discussion necrobump warnings, and more.

Flarum enables us to follow through with our commitment to improving community engagement and providing a new avenue for people to:

Provide feedback on documentation, our website, and more.
Report issues ranging from packaging to hardware issues, that can be further escalated to Phabricator if necessary.
Engage with other community members, showcase their artworks / wallpapers, etc.
Engage with the Team on announcements, whether that’s coming from our cross-posted blog posts or future Activity Hub-based.

So check it out and start engaging at https://discuss.getsol.us. We would love to hear your feedback here.

2019: To Venture Ahead

Mon, 14 Jan 2019 11:56:14 +0200

Solus is a project which does not shy away from continuously improving and rethinking entire aspects of our architecture and experiences on our quest for technical excellence, whether that is introducing new tooling and experiences or changing existing ones. 2019 is going to be a transformative year for Solus.

To make it easier to discover what we’re going to be working throughout the year and the time-frames for when development of those items will occur, we are going to be breaking up these sections into quarters, and within each quarter the projects themselves.

As with all things Solus, our roadmap is subject to change over time and may not be the full breadth of our plans. We’ll be keeping our new Roadmap page up-to-date throughout development and you can always follow along with development by reading our blog and checking various development resources (our Development Tracker, GitHub, etc.).

Q1 (January - March)

Budgie

Budgie 10.5 is effectively complete aside from translation updates. To enable us to translate a wide variety of Solus projects going into the future, as well as address the immediate issue of Budgie translations and unblock the release of Budgie 10.5, we announced last year that we would be deploying Weblate on our infrastructure. I’m happy to announce that our Weblate instance is now available for use.

If you wish to translate Budgie into your language, click here! Thank you in advance for your contributions and pardon any early hiccups. Weblate is pretty new to us and we’re still working out its usage, resolving some performance issues, and finishing up the GitHub OAuth support. I’ll be working with Bryan on addressing load times when we upgrade the server as well.

I’m hoping that Budgie 10.5 will be ready for release in the next few weeks, which also means Solus 4 will also be released, finally moving us away from the Solus 3.x release and subsequent ISO refresh and opening the door to our previously announced change in our In Full Sail blog post to how we release new versions of Solus.

February will be spent on enabling GNOME 3.30 support in a manner which should maintain compatibility with the GNOME 3.28 stack (such as libmutter-2). With such upgrade, we’ll also be tagging a Budgie 10.5.1 release and release Solus 4.1 alongside it.

Depending on the release schedule and changes for GNOME 3.32, we may see a Budgie 10.5.2 release in March as well.

To be perfectly clear, it should not be expected that any major new releases of Budgie 10 series will occur beyond 10.5. I know it has been said a few times before but you’ll understand why in the Q2 section. That doesn’t mean new goodies shouldn’t be expected to land in the minor patch releases for Budgie 10.5 series though.

Cuppa

Comprehensive Upstream Provider Polling Assistant (or Cuppa, for short) enables us to easily track and report the current state of our package repository and individual packages within it, across a wide variety of sources such as (but not limited to):

CPAN
GitHub
GNOME
Hackage
KDE
PyPi

For January, the goal is to get a new release tagged. This release will introduce a wide variety of improvements that have happened since the last release, such as initial GNU source and Sourceforge support as well as improved development release filtering. We look forward to having a blog post out for it when it is ready!

Linux Hardware Qualifier

Linux Hardware Qualifier, our tool for checking hardware compatibility supported by the kernel and enabled in its config, should see a beta or stable release in January. It is seen continuous improvements and is nearing feature completion for an initial release. Just in our last hackfest alone, Bryan implemented USB sysfs support, so we can now check for support for various USB devices.

Web Infrastructure

As mentioned in our Budgie section, our Weblate instance is now available for use, which will enable translations of Budgie and in the future other projects such as the Software Center.

Our web infrastructure is always evolving to meeting the needs of us and our users. During our last hackfest, I implemented the new API endpoints for Closest Mirror, Location, and Search. Effectively, this re-introduced the search in the Help Center as well as the “Closest” mirror download functionality on the Download page.

In February, I will be working on deploying Flarum to effectively replace our forums and the Google+ Community (which has an accelerated “sunsetting” of April). This was touched on in our Improving Community Engagement blog post. In conjunction with this, I’ll be working on the OAuth tie-in with Phabricator, so all Solus users engaging on Flarum will be known to also have an account on our Development Tracker, which should make it easier for them to file issues!

In March, I will be deploying a redesigned Help Center with updated and restructured documentation.

YPKG

ypkg, our declarative build format and packaging tool, will see official development starting in February. It is not understating it to say that ypkg 3 will be the most significant change to our tooling since its inception, and will help shape Solus development for years to come. ypkg 3 will see:

A massive consolidation and enforced consistency in our package tooling, folding in a lot of currently used functionality such as package bumping and package.yml generation.
The introduction of much desired functionality for package.yml formatting and linting, so we can do things like:
- Check licensing against SPDX and provide a warning if it is non-compliant
- Check for valid package names, release numbers, and version numbers
- Check for mandatory and empty keys
The introduction of a new ypkg specification

In February, Bryan’s primary focus will be the porting of common and the variety of tools we use into a single binary, as well as the parsing / generation of package.yml.

In March, his focus will be on the ypkg 3 build process and incorporating eopkg-deps and ypkg-update-checker like functionality.

Q2 (April - June)

Budgie

Budgie 11 development will officially (re-?)start in April. This development will occur internally on our Development Tracker until it is in a more ready state, in which case it will be available under our GetSolus GitHub organization. This will enable us to iterate on Budgie 11 at a pace which won’t compromise our other higher priority and more time sensitive development efforts, as well as allow us to evolve and experiment with various Budgie 11 components.

April will be focused on starting the development of these components, starting with budgie-daemon and budgie-desktop-shell.

For Budgie Daemon, the early development efforts will center around initial settings, power, and notification state handling. Effectively it will be feature parity with current Budgie Daemon and introduce a Budgie 10 compatibility layer for supported features.

For Budgie Desktop Shell, the early development efforts will center around the various classes and foundation for supporting Budgie Panel, Budgie Menu and Raven.

May and June development efforts are still in a “TBD” stage at this point and are expected to be until various Budgie 11 components are built out. I’ll be writing up a dedicated blog post soon on my ambitions for Budgie 11 and beyond.

Software Center

The Software Center will see development efforts start in late April and will be developed in parallel with Bryan’s work on Sol, our future package manager. This Software Center will be:

Completely rewritten in C and GTK3 (with proper desktop handling to not use a Headerbar on Plasma)
Introduce support for Flatpak and Snaps via our planned plugin architecture
Introduce a new user experience (which you may be familiar with from the work last year done on the Python-based “XNG” Software Center)

The current aim is for Software Center is to be released in early June but like all things, it shall be released when it is ready.

Sol

In April, Bryan will begin developing our next generation package manager, sol. The first development item for sol 1.0 will be the release of sold (sol daemon) as a Go JSON-RPC service that will call out to eopkg. This will be done until the rest of sol’s functionality is completed, for the purposes of enabling the Software Center to perform native package transactions.

sol daemon will also have a Third Party backend to facilitate installation of Third Party repo items using ypkg, which would not otherwise be supported by Flatpak or Snaps (such as Google Chrome).

In May and June, Bryan will be working on introducing feature parity (and feature improvements) v.s. eopkg, such as (but not limited to):

Package Management
Repository Management
Search

sol development is expected to continue into Q3, where we’ll then turn to sol 1.5.

Web Infrastructure

In April I will begin work on replacing the blog with a new Activity Hub, which will consolidate all relevant Solus activity from the team (blogs, social media posts, development tracker activity) in a single place.

In May, I’ll be working on various tooling for social media cross-posting, which will be able to be leveraged by the Team to post across:

Activity Hub
Facebook
Flarum
Mastodon
Reddit
Twitter

In June, Activity Hub and its respective components should be complete and ready for deployment.

YPKG

In April, we will be releasing the first stable release of ypkg 3.

Q3 (July - September)

Budgie 11

My primary focus in Q3 will be Budgie 11 development. I am aiming for public alpha builds (on top of a Solus ISO) to happen around August and formal development to transition to GitHub at that time as well.

Sol

Development efforts for sol will continue in Q3, with the planned release of sol 1.5. Some items that will be introduced in 1.5 are:

A new binary index format
A new metadata + files format
Enforced index signing

usysconf

usysconf, our system configuration interface that formally replaced the legacy COMAR system in Solus, will see a rewrite sometime in Q3. This rewrite will move usysconf to being almost entirely configuration based and eliminating the need to learn and write C just for new usysconf handlers.

Q4 (October - December)

Budgie 11

My primary focus in Q4 will be Budgie 11 development. I am aiming for public beta builds (on top of a Solus ISO) to happen around October.

Sol

Development efforts for sol will continue in Q4, with the planned release of sol 2.0. Some items that will be introduced in 2.0 are:

The conversion of sol daemon to C
Improved deltas
Improved index and package repair functionality

As you can see, we have a lot in store for 2019. Alongside the above mentioned items and timeframes, I also want to mention other efforts of ours which will see attention throughout 2019, though at no specific or committed time:

Installer
- The Installer will see some love in 2019, whether that’s in the form of improvements to the current implementation or the re-write of the Installer entirely. Some notable improvements we’re looking for is OEM installer mode and better UEFI handling.
Linux Steam Integration
- We’ll be working to hopefully update LSI with better support for newer gaming titles, improving LSI libintercept, and releasing an updated Snap.
ferryd: Our binary repository manager
- While we are quite happy with ferryd, there is some improvements we’d like to make to it such as improving delta generation and various behaviors around obsoleting and trimming packages.

This Year in Solus: 2018 Edition

Mon, 31 Dec 2018 18:25:10 +0200

2018 has been an amazing year for Solus. It brought us new and improved tooling that will pave the way for development for years to come, and fresh experiences in Budgie. 2018 also brought to the community new faces with fresh ideas, as well as the departure of a veteran in the Solus world.

In January, we introduced Linux Driver Management, or ldm for short. Linux Driver Management has enabled us to improve the detection of the supported hardware in your system, such as graphics cards and wireless devices, as well as broaden our support later in the year for numerous new variants of proprietary graphics drivers.

Linux Driver Management is designed with the intent to incorporate it into a future release of the Solus Software Center, folding in the functionality of DoFlicky (our driver installation software) to provide users recommended software for various hardware such as:

NVIDIA graphics cards
Logitech devices (prompting installation of Piper for DPI and LED configuration)
Printers
Various Yubikey devices (prompting installation of software like the Yubikey NEO Manager or Yubikey Personalization GUI)

January also brought to our Patrons the first sneak peek at Peter O’Connor’s (a.k.a sunnyflunk) efforts at providing a first-class KDE+Plasma desktop experience, complementing our current editions (flagship “Solus” with Budgie, Solus GNOME, and Solus MATE).

Efforts expanded in February to improve Solus MATE Edition, as well as rapidly iterate on Plasma. These efforts included various stack upgrades (such as to MATE), as well as usability refinements by Peter in Plasma.

In March, we began early development efforts on a new design for the Software Center. These efforts will provide inspiration for upcoming efforts in 2019, such as:

A plugin-based architecture that will enable us to more easily integrate various software delivery mechanisms such as Flatpak and Snap. This same architecture will also enable us to swap out the eopkg package manager for our next-generation package management system.
Improved search with filtering for already installed software.
A priority-based queue system that would allow stacking up install / remove operations and have them execute in the background.
A notion of “soft links” between various packages, that will allow us to automatically group related software based on the system configuration or AppStream recommendations. For example, driver providers for the active kernel would be prioritized within the Hardware view, 32-bit libraries are automatically recommended for proprietary graphics drivers, etc.

Concurrent to these development efforts, I began work on various improvements and cleanup to Budgie, such as:

Deprecating support for versions of GTK below 3.22, shifting a significant part of the codebase to using modern GTK APIs such as changing the usage of Gdk.X11Display to Gdk.X11.Display.
Introducing a more global Do-Not-Disturb mode and support for disabling notifications via GNOME Control Center.
Complete overhaul of the Sound widgets in Raven to support per-app volume control.

In August, Bryan began working extensively on new tools, with the focal points being:

Enabling a more rapid iteration of upgrades in Solus by reducing the manual work of tracking upstream projects across multitude providers and surfacing the most likely candidate if a package is in need of an upgrade.
Simplifying and improving the reliability of upgrading various software stacks in Solus, e.g Haskell, Perl, Python, Ruby.

Traditionally, the tracking of upstream projects has involved following a bunch of RSS feeds, subscribing to mailing lists, following social media accounts, and more. In some cases, none of the above would ever be provided, so we would be resigned to routinely checking websites or FTP servers manually. Every moment spent tracking upstreams in this manner means one less moment spent performing upgrades or working on other aspects of Solus, so providing an distro-agnostic solution was absolutely crucial to us as we aim for a more rapid iteration of development.

To accomplish the task of reducing manual work of tracking upstreams, Bryan began work on the first stable release of Cuppa (or Comprehensive Upstream Provider Polling Assistant), which was shipped in early August with support for a truly massive set of providers:

CPAN (for Perl)
GitHub
GNOME (tracking of releases based on download.gnome.org)
Hackage (for Haskell)
Jetbrains
Launchpad
PyPi (for Python)
RubyGems (for Ruby)

Cuppa has already significantly simplified tracking upstreams in Solus and more recent efforts have expanded our coverage as well.

But it is one thing to be able to track an upstream and upgrade software, it is another to improve the reliability of upgrades and the minimize fallout from them. There are multiple aspects of stack upgrades which were in need of simplifying. One aspect is painting a clearer picture of the reverse dependencies of a package and another is enabling a reliable and most optimal path to a full stack upgrade without missing or skipping packages.

To address this, Bryan worked on eopkg-deps for dependency tracking with eopkg. We are now able to fetch a list of forward and reverse dependencies of a package, as well as be provided a ToDo list of packages which need to be rebuild and in what order.

We immediately put eopkg-deps to the test with an upgrade to KDE Frameworks 5, Mesalib, dbus, evolution-data-server, gstreamer, and more all in August.

Bryan worked on improving the resilience of upgrades with eopkg / pisi in August as well, resolving some edge cases that were discovered during the upgrade of a package.

Lastly in August, I worked on more improvements for Budgie 10.5. I have always believed that Budgie should provide a balanced desktop experience for our users, enabling a reasonable level of curation / personalization out-of-the-box while still empowering our users (and downstreams such as Ubuntu Budgie) to open up a world of possibilities with Budgie applets.

One of my first actionable items in August was to expand on its personalization via Budgie Desktop Settings. I introduced a few goodies such as:

The ability to show / hide individual Raven widgets
The ability to raise your volume above 100% via Raven’s Sound Output widget
The ability to turn on mouse enter / leave focus for window switching.

Contributor feddamis introduced a new Text Scaling option in the Fonts section of Budgie Desktop setting as well.

I also introduced a long-desired feature for Raven, Notification Grouping and the ability to dismiss individual notifications. Notifications also no longer would fill up your screen thanks to a contribution by EbonJaeger.

As if our Budgie wasn’t hyped up enough, yursan9 ported his Caffeine applet (prevents screen dimming and lock screen triggering) over to Vala and provided a stellar patch for its inclusion in Budgie “core”.

In September, as a result of a multitude of factors such as the expiration of various OVH contracts, lack of access to the solus-project.com domain, and the move of the project founder, Ikey, Bryan and I spent a considerable amount of time migrating the project over to new infrastructure as well as a new domain name. Bryan provisioned hardware graciously provided by the Rochester Institute of Technology and I began work to bring back online various services such as our website, development tracker, and forums.

By the end of September, all services were back online, we shipped an ISO refresh with updated repository URLs, and we were back to performing various stack upgrades.

In October, Peter released a public Plasma testing ISO and we performed a multitude of stack upgrades, such as:

GEGL
KDE Frameworks 5
libicu
libinput
libssh

Bryan and I sat down in late October to provide a comprehensive update on the state of Solus, development, and our plans for the future of the project via the In Full Sail blog post. In this blog post, we delved into detail on our infrastructure migration, communication attempts with various parties, explaining the shared vision for Solus, reducing bus factor, and intent to pursue membership with the Software Freedom Conservancy.

We also laid out our plans in two different blog posts for improving communication, community engagement, and making it easier to contribute to Solus. These were laid out in Improving Community Engagement and Shiny Delights | The Roundup #11.

Various projects were consolidated to Phabricator, our Development Tracker, such as our branding packages. Additionally, we established a new GitHub organization to maximize our development capabilities and avoid various issues with lack of access to (and ownership of) certain repositories in the old solus-project organization.

In October, Bryan and I sat down for our You Don’t Know JACK Hackfest. The primary focus of this stream was Bryan’s improving of the state of JACK under Solus. For the longest time, jackd or the JACK Audio Connection Kit hasn’t been properly integrated into Solus. Many audio processing workflows are built entirely around JACK, so this wasn’t a small problem for us. The necessary Kernel flags had been enabled and everything should have been in place to make this happen, but it still needed fixing. During this Hackfest, Bryan found a few issues that needed to be resolved:

Real-time priority was not being granted to the user by pam_limits
Solus’ PAM configurations had largely gone untouched since they were originally created.

Once those problems had been taken care of, we finally had ourselves a jackd that was working correctly, out-of-the box.

In early November, we released a blog post detailing available Patreon funds, being fully transparent on current access to various financial assets. Early November also saw the departure of the founder of Solus, Ikey Doherty, for various family reasons detailed in his Open Letter.

Back in full gear with wind behind our sails, November was an incredibly busy month for Solus development with several Hackfests. Starting with Just GTK Things, I implemented a new application tracking mechanism for Budgie, which was to be used by the IconTasklist to drastically simplify state tracking and pave the way for new improvements that were to be made to the IconTasklist.

Peter released ypkg v29. For those unfamiliar with ypkg, simply put it is our declarative build format and packaging tool, effectively converting our format into a set of instructions for configuring, building, and generating a binary package (eopkg). ypkg v29 introduced a multitude of changes and improvements, such as:

Added an environment key which exports content to all ypkg build steps
New python test macros
No longer installing 32-bit clang as it is deprecated
Removed setting locale as it is set already via solbuild
Used flag for AVX2 builds that supports clang and gcc
Used llvm-objcopy to strip ar archives with clang
Used SSE2 for 32-bit builds resulting in a significant performance boost in some tests

Bryan unveiled and began his work on a new project, Linux Hardware Qualifier, in the Cornucopia of Compatibility Hackfest. One of the biggest problems we have when it comes to hardware is knowing exactly what our users need us to support. Up until now, we had relied entirely on bug reports and social media messages to let us know when there’s something we need to enable in the kernel or if there is some out-of-tree driver that we should be providing. It became perfectly clear that a new piece of software was needed to help us do this automatically, in an efficient and timely manner.

So Bryan set out to accomplish the following goals with Linux Hardware Qualifier:

Identify hardware attached to a user’s system
Identify the Kernel flags necessary to enable that hardware
Determine what flags are missing from the Solus Kernel configs

Linux Hardware Qualifier (LHQ) seeks to perform all three of these tasks automatically with the help of the fantastic resources provided by the Linux Kernel Driver DataBase (LKDDB).

During the Cornucopia of Compatibility Hackfest, Bryan laid the foundation for the codebase. This included finally learning how to to use the Meson build system to manage C projects, setting up the initial project architecture, and implementing the parsing for the main lkddb.list format.

At the start of this month, Bryan and I had our I Choose You, Budgie! Hackfest. In that Hackfest, I worked on the brand new IconTasklist popovers (which I ended up having to completely rewrite due to disk corruption). Bryan continued his work on Linux Hardware Qualifier. He had made significant progress in Linux Hardware Qualifier since the last Hackfest, now being able to read in all of the LKDDB listings, so he spent the majority of the stream implementing LKDDB search functionality. By the end of the stream, he was able to search for any USB device in the LKDDB.

On December 7th, I deployed the latest Budgie development build to Solus and rapidly iterated in preparation for our upcoming Budgie 10.5 release. This brought Solus users the latest stable development build of Budgie, featuring a huge amount of changes and improvements, such as (but not limited to):

Caffeine-applet in Budgie core
Completely new Sound widgets in Raven with per-app volume control, sound output “overdrive” feature, and more.
Disabled powerstrip in Raven by default. Still can be enabled in Budgie Desktop Settings.
Expanded Budgie Desktop Settings options.
New IconTasklist and IconTasklist popovers.
Notification Grouping and individual dismissable notifications.

I resolved various issues discovered by our users across the unstable and stable repositories, such as fixes for grouping, icon removals, pinning, and more. This happened over the course of 9 subsequent package updates / deployments between the initial release on the 7th and our last hackfest.

On December 15th, Bryan and I had our last Hackfest of this year. In this Hackfest, Rock, Meet Sysfs, Bryan turned his attention to hardware detection, making use of the sysfs virtual file-system to query the Kernel for existing hardware. A significant portion of the stream was spent working out the organization of sysfs and culminated in being able to identify all of the ACPI devices attached to Bryan’s workstation. In a neat coincidence, this was the first time that LHQ had identified a piece of hardware that was not currently enabled in the Solus kernels.

During this hackfest, I worked on the Help Center document indexer. This indexer will enable me to introduce a new search API and functionality to the Help Center in 2019.

On the 21st of December, I shipped further refinements to Budgie, such as:

Changing a previously-made design decision for Budgie Menu. We used to show applications multiple times in non-compact mode when headers were turned off. Going forward, in non-compact mode, we will not duplicate items under “All” unless you have Show Headers enabled.
- Disable menu headers by default now.
Changed the behavior of the mute button to essentially act as a temporary toggle for the user to mute the volume while still interacting with the volume slider. This could be useful if at launch, the volume of an application is too loud, and the user wishes to quickly mute it, lower the volume, then unmute at a safer volume.
- Additionally, if the volume is set to 0 on the closing of an application, we define this as being “pre-muted” and allow for the immediate raising of the volume without needing to unmute first.
Consolidating Translations in preparation for use by Weblate.
Ensured we perform a lookup of the Icon key/val, if it exists, of an application which has a respective DesktopAppInfo during our on_notification_closed func. This resolves an issue where an application (GNOME Pomodoro) uses the standard file naming convention set forth in the Desktop Entry specification, however does not do the same for their icon.
Making versioning clearer and more accurate

Bryan worked on improving our upstream tracking coverage for Cuppa by reviewing and updating over 300 packages in the span of the last week, bringing our current coverage to over 75% of our entire source repository (git repositories containing package.yml files). Additionally:

We added a new member to the Global Maintainer team, Friedrich von Gellhorn (a.k.a Girtablulu). Friedrich has been responsible for the support of Brother printer drivers, Rust and cargo, and more!
Friedrich upgraded our Ruby stack to the latest in the 2.6 series.
Pierre-Yves (a.k.a. kyrios) landed AV1 support in gstreamer and ffmpeg, as well as various MATE desktop updates.

Last night I finished the last remaining items for Budgie 10.5, excluding translations (which I’ll cover in our upcoming blog post) and any sneaky goodies I might land before the final release. These changes, now in the Solus unstable repository, include:

Ensure action labels in IconPopover do not get cut off by calculating the longest label length (with a minimum of 20) based on available actions (if any).
Ensure power and printer notifications don’t get stored in Raven.
- Power notifications such as automatic suspend and wake-from-suspend should no longer get stored in Raven. To enable this, I needed to backport various desktop-entry hint setting in gnome-settings-daemon for the Solus package and add gnome-power-panel as a spam “app” in the gschema.
- Additionally added printer notifications since those can get quite spammy for network printers (apparently).
Ensured we set button layout in org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences whenever we set our budgie-wm button layout.
Implemented a mechanism for hiding Sound widgets when there are no devices, dynamically showing / hiding the Sound Output and Input widgets based on the devices which are plugged in, while still respecting the setting defined in Budgie Desktop Settings
Made it possible to pin Chrome Apps (and keep them separated from Chrome itself) as well as resolving issues with tracking LibreOffice windows. For a comprehensive explanation on all the engineering behind this, I’d suggest reading this commit.
DIALOG and SPLASHSCREEN window types are now rightfully ignored.

It is no understatement to say this has been a truly amazing year for Solus. Throughout the year, our community has grown alongside the number of contributions to the project itself. Despite a few setbacks, we have gained new team members, bolstered our infrastructure, and made strides in various areas like tooling and our flagship desktop environment. Our focus on Budgie, Software Center, and tooling in 2018 has been pivotal in getting the Solus ship into tip-top shape and preparing us for future adventures in 2019. We look forward to giving you a sneak peek into some of our plans in our upcoming blog post, bringing you on our journey and enabling you to help shape Solus for years to come. There is always more work for us to do and more improvements to be made as we continue to strive for technical excellence.

So thank you for all of your contributions, your kind words, and your support. Most of all, thank you for believing in the shared vision of Solus. We couldn’t do this without all of you.

Signing off,

The Solus Core Team

Update on Patreon

Fri, 02 Nov 2018 00:25:25 +0200

In this blog post, we provide an update on our Patreon account, current available funds, and insights on previous finances.

Summary

This section is a summary of all information our Details section is comprised of. I welcome you to read the full details below, however if you’re under time constraints (or you’re covering this in a podcast, coughs) this should provide a clear picture of the current financial situation:

Patreon is now in the hands of the active Core Team.
Our Patreon campaign will remain frozen until further notice and discussions internally.
Current Patreon holdings: 73.90 USD
In our In Full Sail blog post, we reported the PayPal account attached to Patreon as being “Ikey’s personal account”. After further investigation and validation in Patreon, it appears this was not in fact the case, rather it was under a solus-project.com account. The payouts from Patreon to this PayPal account for the last several months, in addition to the majority of payouts from 2017, are believed to have occurred automatically. We believe this to be the case as the number of processed pledges, minus fees, accurately reflects the payout, as well as such payouts occurring precisely on 1st of each month consistently, which is in line with Patreon’s documentation. However, we will not know for certain until we obtain access to the PayPal account which was used for withdrawals. We are working towards recovering this account. There is no guarantee that this will occur, but we will actively work towards doing so and are cautiously optimistic that it will occur. In such event, we will have further follow-ups.

Details

In our In Full Sail blog post, I detailed the situation around our Patreon account and our unfortunate lack of access to it. That statement was built around over a month of discussions with the Patreon Support team that did not culminate in the transfer of ownership of the account.

After the publication of our In Full Sail blog post, I continued to follow up with Patreon, whom were undoubtedly in a difficult and fairly unique situation. During these further discussions, I continued to encourage our community to both cease their donations to our Patreon campaign as well as reach out to Patreon as to their reason for cancelling.

Yesterday, on October 31st at 21:27 UTC, the Patreon Support team updated the designated email address of the Solus Patreon account to Bryan’s getsol.us email address, officially placing the Patreon account into the hands of the active Core Team of Solus. I want to thank Patreon for their understanding in this difficult situation and especially thank all of you in our community for making your voice heard. There is absolutely no doubt in our minds that this couldn’t have been done without your help.

Immediately, Bryan and I put measures in place to ensure the Patreon account would be able accessible (and recoverable) by the Core Team. Additionally, I purchased the Google Vault GSuite service and enabled designated email functionality on our Google Apps for Business / GSuite accounts so all account administrators of the GetSolus organization will be able to access emails (and therefore accounts registered to them) of other Core Team members should the need arise.

During this time, Bryan began doing an assessment on the current holdings of the account, previous payments, payouts, and more. I froze our Patreon Campaign to reduce the likelihood of additional charges to our Patrons and put out a notice via the Patreon account to all individuals which were active Patrons. In the event you get charged further (specifically, you may get charged for November due to the timing of the campaign freezing), I welcome you to request a refund from the Solus Patreon account if you desire. This can be done by messaging the Patreon account, at which point I can follow up.

In the interest of full transparency, I want to provide information on our current account holdings as well as details on all processed pledges and payouts dating back to the creation of our Patreon account / campaign. Please note that the processed pledges do not account for Patreon’s fee, nor do payouts represented in our table account for VAT (Value-Added Tax, which appears to have been at Ireland’s “standard rate” of 13.5%) or fees from PayPal. It is also important to note that these payouts may not be representative of the total donations at the time, as some of these payouts were performed manually.

Current account holdings: 73.90 USD

Past payouts:

Month	Processed Pledges (Does Not Include Fees)	Payout (in USD)
2018-10-01	3194.73	2799.59
2018-09-01	3519.32	3323.65
2018-08-01	3472.52	3081.88
2018-07-01	3531.28	8134.44
2018-06-01	3648.79	0
2018-05-01	3804.23	10000
2018-04-01	3704.23	0
2018-03-01	3738.03	10000
2018-02-01	3678.43	0
2018-01-01	3421.53	0
2017-12-01	3366.95	0
2017-11-01	3224.78	0
2017-10-01	3090.92	2564.5
2017-09-01	3083.97	0
2017-08-01	3058.97	0
2017-07-01	2844.07	0
2017-06-01	2481.96	1658.85
2017-05-01	1806.4	1613.29
2017-04-01	1479.89	1219.24
2017-03-01	1344.89	1298.17
2017-02-01	1258.74	1026.18
2017-01-01	985.24	930.06
2016-12-01	916.24	774.45
2016-11-01	806.13	3327.88
2016-10-01	665.13	0
2016-09-01	528.13	0
2016-08-01	333.63	0
2016-07-01	333.13	0
2016-06-01	358	0
2016-05-01	290	0
2016-04-01	378	463.79
2016-03-01	507	259.84
2016-02-01	279	187.54
2016-01-01	209	53.37
2015-12-01	60	48.97
2015-11-01	55	52.59
2015-10-01	58	48.03
2015-09-01	53	172.78
2015-08-01	185	160.65
2015-07-01	165	0
2015-06-01	7	0
2015-05-01	0	0

For the four months prior to the March payout, no withdrawals were made, which explains the atypical amount that was withdrawn. For May, this can be accounted for by the lack of a withdrawal in April, as well as multi-month contracts (e.g. OVH), various service bills (e.g. GSuite and SendGrid) and certificates (e.g. SSL) which needed to be paid for, in addition to Ikey’s wages.

The transfers from Patreon to PayPal for the last several months appears to have occurred automatically. Additionally the majority of payouts in 2017 were as well. We believe this to be the case as the number of processed pledges, minus fees, accurately reflects the payout, as well as such payouts occurring precisely on 1st of each month consistently, which is in line with Patreon’s documentation. However, we will not know for certain until we obtain access to the PayPal account which was used for withdrawals.

This brings me to PayPal. In our In Full Sail blog post, we reported the PayPal account as being “Ikey’s personal account”. After further investigation (I checked over a years worth of weechat IRC logs) and validation in Patreon, it appears this was not in fact the case. The PayPal account is in fact under a solus-project.com account. As such, we are actively working towards recovering this account. There is no guarantee that this will occur, but we will actively work towards doing so and are cautiously optimistic that it will occur. In such event, we will have further follow-ups.

Until such time, all money which was withdrawn to PayPal, whether manually or automatically, is not accessible to the Core Team, nor are we fully aware of how much money may be held in that account.

We hope this information has provided insight into our current and past finances. Going forward, we will continue to not accept any monetary donations until decided otherwise, or we have a legal entity such as the Software Freedom Conservancy handling legal and financial matters for Solus. I want to thank everyone that has continued to offer their support for Solus, whether that be financial or otherwise. We look forward to providing more means of donating to the project in the future once we’ve returned to more normal development operations and have a legal entity working on behalf of the project. Until then, there are plenty of other ways to contribute to the project, whether that’s filing bugs, contributing patches, or simply sharing Solus with your friends!

Signing off,

The Solus Core Team

In Full Sail

Sat, 27 Oct 2018 03:00:00 +0300

In Full Sail is our update on the state of Solus, our project founder, services which we use, as well as our plans for the project and future Solus releases.

Audio

Embedded below is the audio recording of Bryan’s and my discussion, which we call “In Full Sail”. This audio recording is available in both MP3 and OGG formats.

MP3

Direct link: https://getsol.us/podcastmedia/in-full-sail.mp3

OGG

Direct link: https://getsol.us/podcastmedia/in-full-sail.ogg

Transcript

If you wish to have the full discussion in text form, it is provided below.

Joshua: Hello everyone. My name is Joshua Strobl, Bryan: and I’m Bryan Meyers, Joshua: We are both Core Team members of the Solus project, and we are here to talk about Solus. And there’s no real easy way of beginning this conversation, so let’s just go ahead and jump right in.

Bryan: To start off, we want to provide a timeline of events leading up until today. We will start on June 13th of last year, 2017, when Ikey departed from his job at Intel to work full-time on Solus. In his words, he felt that, and I quote:

“this is a move I can now make myself. In doing so this will allow me to commit full time to Solus and all of it’s projects, bringing them up to the standards I want, with the features and experience that you deserve. Whilst we have achieved a great deal so far, this has been through spare time. With this move I’m now able to dedicate all of my work hours to Solus, which in itself will result in a massive explosion in growth and development cadence for our project.

For clarification, I’m leaving my current job at Intel as a personal choice, and not a professional one. The four years I’ve spent as a software engineer and distribution engineer at Intel have helped mould me into the engineer that I am today. I’ll always be grateful for the experience, knowledge and relationships I have as a result of that time, and will of course miss those that I’ve worked with. This transition is about me following my heart: Solus is my passion. This move has been enabled by you, supporters of Solus. Together, as a community, we’re going to take Solus to new heights. I want to extend my personal thanks to all supporters and users of Solus, for placing your faith in me. Now, it is time to deliver on that faith.”

Joshua: And for reference, that is coming from our We are Growing blog post, published on June 13th 2017. Alongside this announcement, we brought on a new team member, Stefan Ric (also known as cybre), whom you may know from his work on Budgie. By working full-time on Solus, Ikey was able to enforce more strict work hours while being able to dedicate time for himself.

Bryan: Solus 3 represents the first major development effort after this transition. We worked on out-of-the-box support for snap packages and a new Budgie release, Budgie 10.4. For Budgie this was a monumental release, featuring a dock-mode for the panel, dedicated Budgie Settings app, Night Light applet, and many other improvements.

Joshua: Solus 3 introduced further refinements to our GNOME and MATE Editions. This was also the last release until our Solus 3 ISO refresh from last month. After this point, we began focusing on various aspects of Budgie 11, which was Ikey’s first completely new project after his transition. Development began on August 26th of 2017 and was later featured in the “Eleventh Budgie” hackfest on September 16th of 2017.

Bryan: It was around this time that I finished a major porting effort for the Haskell development stack. With several hundred new packages, Haskell placed a huge strain on our existing repo manager, binman, which had otherwise been unchanged since the EvolveOS days. Creating new repo indexes took so long, that normal day to day operations were grinding to a halt. With that, Ikey and I went into deep technical discussions on how to fix the problem in a future proof way, and ferryd was born. Ikey carried out the majority of the development effort, but I was also largely responsible for the design and implementation of ferryd’s first task scheduler.

Joshua: With the release of ferryd, we were enabled to more aggressively perform stack upgrades, which we did for the next several months, such as GNOME 3.26.1, LLVM 5, and more in October of 2017. We also rounded out the year with our Welcome to the Grid Gamefest, which put our then brand new snap-based LSI and Steam support to the test. This was also the last livestream Ikey took part in. It was around this time when, at least in my personal opinion, it grew more evident that there was various changes to his behavior and personality that gave me the impression that he was about to make various changes to his personal life.

Bryan: I can’t really say that I noticed anything at the time, but then again, I have only known Ikey for a little over 2 years. Even then, I think seeing him move on to new projects like Linux Driver Management, in January, and the Software Center rewrite, in February of 2018, we would have put those concerns behind us. On a personal level, Ikey and I spent the better part of Feb and March competing in our quest to lose weight. We were both eating a lot healthier and getting generous doses of exercise. What I can say, is that I’m not surprised that at the end of March, Ikey decided to quit Late Night Linux. It was clear to me that having to spend a non-trivial amount of time every two weeks to put a show together was more than he had bargained for. Additionally, at the time, Linux was experiencing an unusually politically charged atmosphere, with the toxicity of global politics starting to rear its ugly head in our typically less heated circles. This escalated to such a degree that we were forced to strictly disallow certain politics from being discussed in our own off-topic and development channels. For Ikey, this was a period of time where he was basically being paraded around from podcast to podcast because of his strong opinions, and frankly, ability to draw a crowd. It’s hard for me not to see this as people exploiting Ikey’s status for their own gain. The entire Core Team agreed wholeheartedly with his decision to walk away from all of that.

Joshua: Outside of Late Night Linux, Ikey had decided to no longer take part in various social media platforms, specifically Reddit and Twitter, and double down on his journey of self-improvement. He began to more publicly talk about various aspects of his personal life, such as working towards getting his driver’s license and engaging in a more healthy life, which culminated in the Core Team discussing with him privately about us taking on more responsibility and more clearly defined roles. We understood that he was carrying a large burden on his shoulders as the sole full-time developer.

Joshua: On July 3rd 2018, Ikey informed us that certain personal events in his life were going to result in him moving back to England. He began making preparations and on July 11th, Bryan, Ikey, and myself sat down to talk about eliminating various bus factor issues. This initially was ensuring we had full access to the OVH servers, namely the builder, ring0 (our package server) and the web server (which I already had SSH access to). The intent was to follow-up the next day on the domain (handled by Dediserve), Google Apps for Business (for email and documents), Fastly, and more. Unfortunately, due to various conflicting schedules, such as my family visiting from the United States, Bryan being occupied with work, and Ikey preparing to move, these discussions were never picked up again.

Bryan: On July 13th 2018, I had my first ever Friday sync. A day or so before, Ikey and I agreed that this would be a trial run for others taking over that particular duty. Everything went smoothly, serving as proof that we had access to everything we needed to make major changes to Solus on a weekly basis, without relying on Ikey to pull the final switch. At this point, I had also completed my second week of performing Kernel updates. With Josh and I both busy with life, the next week passed rather quickly. On the 19th of July, Ikey officially departed for England. He posted a few photos and messages on G+ about his journey and the rest of us on the Core Team decided to give Ikey all the time he needed to get settled into his new surroundings.

Joshua: From personal experience, as someone that moved to Finland from the United States in January of 2014, I absolutely understand how stressful and chaotic the first few weeks to a month can be to get settled in. We wanted to remain cognisant of the fact this could be a very stressful time for Ikey. On July 30th, Ikey reached out via IRC in our public off-topic channel as well as remarked on Google+ about his awful mobile Internet.

Bryan: That brings us up to August of this year. Josh and I decided that a Hackfest was long overdue and Summertime Solus was born. During the course of that stream we hit a significant number of milestones, and personally, I was able to finally release several pieces of software that I had spent over a year developing for Solus. These included Cuppa (upstream release tracking) and eopkg-deps (rebuild orders), both of which saw substantial upgrades that day. Josh also worked on several huge quality of life improvements for Budgie, making this the first-ever Hackfest where we both contributed significant code for Solus. It was hard to ignore the absence of Ikey that day, with many people asking if we knew how things were going with him and when he would finally be getting real Internet access. We knew that he hadn’t been feeling well since moving to England, likely with some sort of flu he picked up from the local fauna. Naturally, we decided to give him time to rest and didn’t press the issue of getting better internet. Looking back, it was that same week that Ikey quietly deleted his Instagram and checked into IRC while none of us were around.

Joshua: I reached out to Ikey on August 16th, only after which he posted to Mastodon that he was effectively leaving the platform. At this stage, he had either not posted to his social media accounts or deleted them entirely.

Joshua: Fast-forward to August 27th and Solus incurred one of its first major outages of various services, such as the website, Phabricator, and forums. Unfortunately, access had not been provided to the OVH global control panel, nor was I made the technical contact for the account. As a result, OVH remained rather restrained on providing any details on the issues related to the server. After multiple calls, they finally stated it was the result of network maintenance.

After roughly 5 hours of downtime, Ikey reached out and informed that it was an OVH issue due to hard freezes. There was no further contact from him until after the second outage.

The second outage occurred on September 5th. Once again without adequate access, I was unable to immediately come to a determination on what the issue was. We immediately went into action, I set up a temporary mirror on a domain I had previously purchased for direct downloads, getsol.us, and informed our community to follow social media and that website for more information. At around 2am on September 6th, I was able to get in touch with an individual at OVH and was informed that server payments had not been made. After explaining our situation and the lack of contact with Ikey, they permitted to bring the server back online for 5 more days. It was at this point when Bryan and I began implementing various migration plans and contingencies.

Bryan: I reached out to my co-workers at the Rochester Institute of Technology for help getting us back up and running. We had previously been in talks about hosting hardware at RIT for Solus and that made it easier for me to request retired hardware to rebootstrap the Solus Infrastructure. In fact, I had already begun setting up a second build server for Peter to use in light of his (terrible) laptop and large stack upgrades (such as KF5). My coworkers provided me with yet another server, this one with much more memory, if a bit older. I set this up as quickly as possible to serve as a virtual-hosting environment for Solus services, namely: the Build Server, Package Server, and Web Server. Once this system was up and running, I turned my attention to pulling data from the OVH servers and bringing back up the Build environment.

Joshua: While Bryan was working hard on bootstrapping the various environments, such as the build environment, I began bringing up services such as the forums and website, configuring some aspects of nginx, as well as pulling down the Phabricator git repositories. We also spent a considerable amount of time focusing on informing our community by virtue of writing the Supercharging Solus Infrastructure blog post and remaining in constant contact with our community by means of our social media accounts.

Bryan: In the middle of all this, Ikey reached out to us on September 7th and informing us that he was still not feeling well, but that he had paid the server up for another 30 days so that we wouldn’t need to rush to finish the migration:

“and i am very very sick atm. all will be paid up for the next 30 days and gives me time to get back out and transfer to you. ill speak with you tomorrow afternoon/evening”

To date, that was the last communication we or anyone in contact with us have received from Ikey.

Joshua: By September 9th, our development tracker was online. With Bryan’s attention focused on bringing up the builder, I focused on implementing changes to eopkg / pisi to gracefully move our users over to the RIT Solus package repository (hosted on mirrors.rit.edu). On September 10th, the builder was officially up, receiving builds and passing them to our new repository. I finalized the eopkg update and subsequently released it on September 11th to the old stable repository and announced via the “Package Repo Migration Now Available” blog post.

Joshua: It was also around this time where, unbeknownst to me, I was contacted by various individuals for comment on an upcoming podcast. With a lack of concrete information about Ikey, an understanding of his personal situation, as well as being preoccupied with ensuring a seamless upgrade experience for our users, we simply did not have the full opportunity to comment until after the podcast took place. As a result of our (unintended) lack of response prior to the podcast, several individuals grossly mischaracterized the situation both for the project and Ikey, which lead to a more official response from me on Reddit about the situation at that time, with respect for Ikey’s privacy. Looking back, it is easy to see why people were frustrated by our lack of a definitive response. However, we believed (and still believe) that the best course of action was not to respond until either receiving more information about the situation or until such a time as we could no longer justify waiting.

Joshua: The infrastructure migration officially was completed with the release of the Solus 3 ISO Refresh (also referred to as Solus 3.9999). After this point, our focus moved to improving community engagement, first-party services, and delivering users exciting new features and stack upgrades (such as the new Plasma Testing ISO as of our Shiny Delights roundup). To put this all into context, in the span of only 6 days we had entirely re-bootstrapped the Solus infrastructure, including a new Solus release.

Bryan: Now that you have a better idea of the series of events leading up to today, I would like to take this opportunity to share with you our reasoning behind the decisions we have made in the past several weeks. I do this both in the interest of transparency and because I personally believe that you have a right to hear it directly from us and not through the words of other groups or individuals.

There are two main reasons that we have kept an effective “Radio Silence” when it comes to Ikey and the status of certain aspects of the project. Firstly, it is important to recognize that while the members of the Core Team do not place Ikey on a pedestal, we do have a significant amount of respect for him both as a person and as an excellent technical mind. It is this respect which we have exercised these many weeks by giving him time to take care of himself both physically and mentally. This has meant that we have opted to wait patiently for him to provide his own answers, rather than resorting to, or encouraging, speculation. Many of you likely see the resulting silence as poor judgment, avoiding confrontation, or just plain being “cagey”. I would like to again reiterate that our silence has been out of our mutual respect for Ikey as a human being, for his vision for Solus, and for the many thousands of hours he has given to us and the project.

Bryan: Our second reason for remaining silent is much more pragmatic. In the wake of the last OVH outage, we spent nearly every spare moment bringing our infrastructure back online and doing everything we can to return to our previous pace as a project. This meant focusing entirely on the migration, restoring service for our users, and finally being able to resume day-to-day development. As a result of the migration we are now 100% back online, but it has taken us most of the last month to make up for lost time. Almost ironically, I can now say that we are actually in a better state now than we were before the OVH outages. We now have our own hardware for the infrastructure, are presently not required to pay any hosting fees, and are in full control of Solus, from stem to stern. In the past 30 days we have closed over 300 Tasks on the bug tracker and Triaged just as many Tasks into their appropriate priorities and projects. We have also carried out 5 successful Friday syncs, featuring: the Xorg 1.20 stack upgrade, the introduction of the latest Nvidia 410 series graphics drivers for the Turing RTX cards, and an upgraded Plasma Desktop Environment now available as Public Beta ISO.

Joshua: During this time, I have been in contact with a multitude of providers of services which were handled either via Ikey’s personal accounts or the administrative Solus account which Core Team lacks access to. I want to provide a clear list of services which were and/or still are not accessible to the Core Team:

Dediserve is what was used for the previous Solus domain name and DNS. Without access to this, we are unable to update the various DNS settings to point to our new servers and as a result were forced to migrate to getsol.us, likely permanently.
Fastly is what was used prior to our migration for our repository CDN, enabling users around the world to access packages at a server geographically closer than the OVH package repository.
Google Apps for Business is what was used for our email as well as document collaboration.
OVH is what was used for hosting our previous build, repo, and web servers. As explained earlier, we did not have full access (via the control panel) to make any necessary changes or pay for OVH services. Fortunately, we did have partial access in the form of SSH.
Patreon is what was used for monthly financial contributions to the Solus project. This funding was used to pay Ikey to work full-time on the project as well as provide additional funding for hardware purchases, covering service costs, and more.
Paypal is what was used for withdrawing money from Patreon. This was to Ikey’s personal account.
SendGrid is what was used for mail delivery for Phabricator and the Forums.

I have reached out to all the above mentioned parties, which has resulted in the following:

In the case of Dediserve, they have refused to provide any access to the account.
In the case of Fastly, their support has been absolutely incredible and they immediately provided me the necessary access to the Fastly CDN. We have the fullest intent on moving our users to a CDN-backed package repository and I’d like to thank Fastly again for their fast response and understanding.
In the case of Google and Google Apps for Business, they have not responded to my inquiries as a result of me not being in control of the administrative account.
In the case of OVH, they had been unwilling to provide us the adequate access, however they were willing at the time to leave the servers on for an additional 5 days during our migration. At this stage, they are no longer needed.
In the case of PayPal, this is Ikey’s personal account and as such, it is not feasible for me to obtain access to it.
In the case of SendGrid, they have not responded to my inquiries. I have however created a new SendGrid account for mail delivery, so this is a non-issue.

Joshua: Which brings me to Patreon, arguably the most difficult for me to talk about. After multiple support tickets, they have repeatedly refused to provide access to the Solus account. At this moment, we have no way of accessing the funds many of you have graciously donated, nor are we fully aware of what funds are available via Patreon. I absolutely understand if you are frustrated with having financially contributed to the Patreon, with no way for us to utilize these funds for hardware purchases and paying for services, it’s frustrating for us too. Unfortunately, with Patreon’s refusal to assist us, our only option is to kindly request that you immediately cease your donations to it. My personal advice would be to additionally contact Patreon for refunds and express your frustration to them for their unwillingness to assist us. We can only hope that they decide to grant us access to the funds or account.

I deeply apologize that we did not take the necessary measures earlier to ensure this account was accessible to the entire team. Moving forward, we will not be accepting any monetary donations until we have measures in place to ensure it can be accessed by the entire team at any point in time.

Bryan: Ikey’s vision for Solus is one that all of us on the Core Team share. Solus is a selfish, pragmatic obsession with building a technically excellent linux distribution. This vision is what attracted us all to the project in the first place. We each bring our own unique experiences and expertise to the table, with Ikey’s phenomenal mentoring over the years giving us an incredible foundation to build on.

Admittedly, what first brought me to Solus was actually the Budgie Desktop environment. At the time, Solus was still EvolveOS and, I’m ashamed to admit, I was an avid user of XFCE on Ubuntu Studio. With XFCE development ground to a halt, I was looking around for a new desktop environment and Budgie showed remarkable promise. Digging further, I was surprised to find that “that Ikey guy” had been at it for years and was also running his own from-scratch Linux distribution. I had to find out more. For the next year, I kept an eye on EvolveOS and Budgie development, avidly reading the blog posts for any new details, even as EvolveOS became Solus. It was in the Spring of 2016 that I finally broke down and dusted off my IRC client and started hanging around the Solus channels on Freenode. During the Solus 1.2 Hack-fest in June, I finally felt comfortable engaging in conversation with Solus users and the Core Team. Ironically, one of my earliest memories of these conversations was an exceedingly nerdy argument between me and Josh about how Asynchronous Compute Shaders in the Radeon GPUs work. I won.

At work, I was spending my volunteer hours helping to support researchers by building and maintaining some of the software they used. So the leap between that and my learning how to package (especially seeing how easy it was ypkg), wasn’t that far. So, I pulled an ancient machine off the shelf, fired up by first Solus install and found myself taking on ludicrous things like printer drivers and the massive TeXLive LaTeX publishing distribution. After contributing several packages through the then Bugzilla Bug Tracker, I decided that it was time to carve out a corner of Solus that I would work on: Games. I felt that Solus utterly lacked open-source games, so I made it my personal vendetta to fix that and the Solus Game-Fests were born! During these early YouTube streams, I was only a community member, but I was spending anywhere from 5-17 hours a weekend packaging new Games for the Solus repos. By that time I was already in fairly constant communication with the Core Team and we had started “hanging out” on our mumble server. After several livestreams together, Ikey and Josh finally broke down on October 26th, 2016 and invited both me and Peter to join the Core Team, remarking that they really should have done this sooner. All of a sudden, things had changed for me forever. Fast forward to today, and I just celebrated my second anniversary as a member of the Core Team. Looking back, I am incredibly proud of all that we have accomplished in such a short time and thankful for all of the support that I have received from both the Core Team and the Solus Community. Thank You!

Joshua: I first got started with the project shortly after the release of EvolveOS Beta 1. I was originally attracted to the project for several reasons, some I’ll admit are more superficial than others. Budgie 8 looking similar to Chrome OS, which was a design I was fairly attracted to at the time. Some more technical reasons like its focus on a single architecture (at the time with no support for emul32 packages even, so no Steam or WINE) and being built from scratch with home computing devices in mind. It was also (and still is) the only operating system my old laptop was able to properly suspend with, which was remarkable on its own. Of course, that didn’t make up for its hilariously few packages at that time. It had no Atom, so I didn’t really have a comfortable IDE to edit with. It had no mono, which meant no Keepass so I couldn’t even open up my password database. But it had Ikey, his vision, and his willingness to dedicate countless hours to teaching me ypkg and the brand new package.yml packaging format, so I could email him patches so that he could include them in our then single monolithic git repository. EvolveOS (and later Solus) was the first real Linux project where I felt truly empowered to make a difference and help serve others. I was there when we formalized the first proper team for EvolveOS (Ikey, Justin, and myself). I remember the conversations with Ikey where I was absolutely adamant that we have some form of notification and widget center for the new Budgie release. I was the one that announced the first release (and release candidate) of Solus and stepped into the shoes of communications manager. I remember sitting there, reviewing and landing Bryan’s packages in his game-fests before he became a Core Team member. I remember having the discussion with Ikey on bringing Bryan, Peter, Stefan into Core Team. I’ve been there, I’ve had those discussions, and we pushed forward together because what we have as a diverse team is a shared vision and common goals.

Joshua: The shared vision of what Solus fundamentally is has remained unchanged throughout the years and has acted as our true north, our north star to guide us. What Solus can be has been our catalyst for change as our community, our needs, and our team have evolved.

Solus is selfish.

We are focused solely on home computing devices.
We are focused on supporting the dominant hardware architectures for devices we use.
We are focused on building an operating system we want and are proud to use.

Solus is pragmatic.

We don’t constrain ourselves to any single philosophy.
We curate the contents of our repository to ensure users install software which is well integrated into the operating system, as well as ensure maintainability and sustainability.
We provide closed-source software because that provides an optimal experience for our users, even though we prefer open-source wherever possible.

Solus is an obsession.

We are obsessed with providing sane out-of-the-box experiences and defaults, some which may run counter to their upstream counterparts (like GNOME).
We are obsessed with providing a responsive, performant, and accessible platform for all users regardless of experience or skill level.
We are obsessed with providing a safe, friendly community and working environment for our users.

Solus is technically excellent.

We do not shy away from rethinking entire aspects of our architecture to continuously provide ourselves and our users a better experience, whether that’s driver management, Steam support, or software delivery.
We develop the tools that Solus needs because nothing else is good enough to meet those demands.

Solus is a Linux-based operating system.

We are proud to use the Linux kernel as the basis for our operating system. Using Linux enables us to maximize hardware compatibility, rapidly support new devices and features, and when necessary, engage with the Linux project for the benefit of our users.

Bryan: Moving forward, we want to spell out our clearly defined roles and responsibilities. We will also be working on a dedicated Team page on our website so you can learn a bit more about us, get information on our roles in the project, as well as means of contacting us.

The various roles for the project are currently spread across the three active members of the Solus Core Team: Joshua, Peter, and myself.

Going forward, I will be in taking on the title of Technical Lead. This role involves (but is not limited to) the following:

Development, enablement, and support of drivers and the kernel
Development, enablement, and support of key sub-systems such as dbus and systemd
Development of various tools related to packaging and devops.

Peter will be taking on the title of Performance Lead. This role involves (but is not limited to) the following:

Development, enablement, and support of our various supported compiler toolchains
Development of various build-time optimizations
Development of various tools related to benchmarking.

Joshua: I will be taking on the title of Experience Lead. This role involves (but is not limited to) the following:

Development, enablement, and support of Budgie and GNOME desktop environments.
Development and support of various platforms and tools related to community engagement, internationalization and accessibility.
Continued role of community engagement across the blog and social media accounts.

Bryan: I would like to take this opportunity to directly speak to Ikey, since I have no other way to do so at present and out of respect for his many years of service feel that I owe him that much and so much more.

Ikey. You are the reason that Solus exists today. There isn’t a single one of us that can stake that claim or who isn’t grateful to you for everything you have accomplished and for letting us be a part of this journey. It is our sincere intention to carry on with Solus in a way the fits with your vision for the project and that reflects the thousands of conversations we have had over the years on what Solus is and what it needs to be. This is in no way some form of hostile-takeover or coup. If at any point in time you wish to return to the project, we will be happy to welcome you back. We will also respect your decision not to if that is what you truly desire. In the meantime, Solus has a life of its own now and we are all thoroughly invested in continuing its development and, pardon the pun, evolution.

On a personal note, I am immensely grateful for all of our time working together on Solus. You have taught me a great many things these past two years and I will carry those memories for the rest of my life. It is an honor for me to be able to call you friend. For you, I wish the highest of successes in whatever you choose to do next in life and that it brings you the happiness that you so rightfully deserve. Thank you and good luck!

Joshua: These last few weeks have emphasized the need to fully eliminate all aspects of bus factor from the Solus project, immediately when we bring up or start using new services. This ranges from domain administration to access to funds. Already, we have done the following:

I have enabled administrative capabilities for the GetSolus domain for Bryan, so any DNS changes necessary can be made by him.
For our GetSolus GitHub organization, every member of Core Team has owner rights.
Bryan, Peter, and myself all have SSH access to the relevant self-hosted servers and virtual machines used by Solus.
Bryan has administrative access for the GetSolus SendGrid account via their Teammates feature.
As was previously the case with Phabricator, our Development Tracker, Bryan, Peter, and myself all have administrative capabilities as well as the ability to perform modifications to Phabricator via its CLI over SSH.

Bryan: One of the single largest challenges for any open-source project is dealing with the legal side of the house, especially when the developers span multiple different countries and jurisdictions. In the past, we dealt with this by having Ikey be financially responsible for the project and having the whole Core Team share the legal burdens of things like enforcing our licenses and complying with the license terms of the software we provide. However, with the project growing, it has been clear to us for well over a year now that we would eventually need to move to either treating Solus as a business or relying on another organization to become our “clearing house” for legal matters.

At present, none of the Core Team members are in a position to take on the individual responsibility of establishing Solus as a legal entity, so we are planning on pursuing membership with a non-profit legal entity. We will be preparing to submit a formal application to have Solus join the Software Freedom Conservancy. The Conservancy is a non-profit organization which exists for the sole purpose of serving as a parent organization for FOSS projects. In this role, they are able to:

Receive tax-deductible charitable donations that may be directed to the Solus Project
Provide us with the ability to hire full-time developers as contract workers
Provide us with legal representation for both licensing (copyright) and branding (trademark) enforcement
Assist in the organization and operation of Solus Community Events (e.g. conferences and meetups)

For those of you with reservations about us joining forces with another organization, I would like to put your minds at ease by pointing out that the Conservancy provides legal representation for:

Coreboot
Debian Copyright Aggregation Project
Git
Godot
Inkscape
Mercurial
QEMU
Samba
Wine

Joshua: Solus has long been defined as a curated rolling release operating system. This model enables us to rapidly deliver new updates to our projects or relevant software stack in a manner that does not sacrifice the overall stability of the user experience.

In the past, we have alternated between major releases and ISO snapshots. Going forward, we will have a model that enables us to release new versions of Solus every month while still providing adequate amounts of time for larger projects to mature before shipping them.

This model will have both major and minor releases. Starting with Solus 4, which is our upcoming major release, we will be implementing this new model. For Solus 4, our primary focus at this moment in time is the finalizing of Budgie 10.5 and deferring the Software Center to a later 4.x release. Our decision to do this is also in recognition that we have had a multitude of stack upgrades since even our Solus 3 ISO Refresh, such as X.Org 1.20.x, and these are changes we want to get delivered in a new ISO.

For Solus 4.1, the focus will be on Budgie 10.5.1 and upgrading our GNOME stack to 3.30.x. During this time, we will be analyzing the “xng” or “next generation” Software Center code and begin work on its completion. We have no set date or release for it, simply “when it’s ready”.

Beyond our releases, we also want to take the time to focus on improving our first-party services and improving communication with our community. This was something we detailed in our Improving Community Engagement blog post, as well as our following roundup, “Shiny Delights”. We want to provide room for more voices in our community, regardless of their language, and provide better tools to serve them.

Additionally, Bryan will be focusing on improving our build tooling, including continued improvements and updates to cuppa and eopkg-deps. He is also in the planning stages of the next major version of ypkg.

This is just the start and a look at the near-term. There are countless other aspects of Solus we want to improve or re-architecture, whether that is sol, a new Installer, a power management replacement for TLP, and yes even a GTK4-based Budgie 11.

We absolutely understand that everything we’ve just discussed is a lot to take in. We hope that all of it has provided a comprehensive explanation on our perspective. As always we want to be upfront with you, our community, about the current events and situation of Solus, while still respecting the privacy of others. If you have any questions, we will answer to the best of our ability.

Signing off,

The Solus Core Team

Shiny Delights | The Roundup #11

Wed, 24 Oct 2018 01:36:29 +0300

Welcome to The Roundup #11, your bytes of Solus news. In this roundup, we’re talking about all the availability of our public Plasma testing ISO, latest stack upgrades we’ve performed, and an update on feedback for improving community engagement!

Plasma Testing ISO

A testing ISO for the Plasma Edition is now available. It includes Plasma desktop 5.14 and is complemented with the KDE Frameworks 5.51, KDE Applications 18.08.2 and Qt 5.11.2 releases. Solus users can now perform a clean install of the Plasma desktop with the latest updates.

Over the last couple of weeks a majority of the packages have been updated and rebuilt. This provides a stateless implementation of the Plasma desktop on top of Solus.

Known Issues:

Some icons are missing in the Software Center, this will be addressed in the rewrite.

ISO: Solus-Plasma-Testing-v1.iso

SHA256SUM: 8baf1ee5d68fa1153d9f650cad51b7610557c59ca0b1ad181e0a41572eb99743

Bugs can be filed here with the Plasma tag if it is specific to the Plasma edition.

Stack Upgrades

It’s been all hands on deck this last week as we perform stack upgrades. Let’s start on October 17th where it was kicked off with the upgrade of KDE Plasma to the 5.14.1 bugfix release. This was delivered in last Friday’s sync and Peter has continued improving the KDE + Plasma experience on Solus by backporting multiple fixes from git to our packages. Let’s highlight some of the fixes featured in Plasma 5.14.1, you can read the announcement and see the full changelog here:

KWin
- There’s been a fix to a logic error in the user menu blocking activity updates.
- Visual artifacts caused by the maximize effect for wobblywindows have been resolved.
Plasma Desktop
- Keyboard navigation on the desktop is now fixed thanks to focus fixes.
Plasma Workspace
- The menu layout option should now no longer always be disabled in Global Menu Applet.
- The popup indicating the device can now be safely removed in Device Notifier will now auto-hide.
- Slideshow Wallpaper “Open” and “Next” context menu actions should now use the translated string.

Peter has backported a few fixes to various KDE packages, such as:

kiconthemes: Back ported a patch to fix a crash in the icon dialog.
solid: Backported a patch to allow removable disks to spin down when using the “safely remove” context menu option.

Libssh was upgraded to 0.8.4 to resolve CVE-2018-10933 and all packages which relied on libssh have been rebuilt. Beyond the security fix, libssh 0.8.4 also introduces the following (among other changes):

Added support for rsa-sha2
Added support to parse private keys in openssh container format (other than ed25519)
Added support for diffie-hellman-group18-sha512 and diffie-hellman-group16-sha512
Added sha256 fingerprints for pubkeys
Improved performance and reduced memory footprint for sftp
Various fixes around reading a closed channel, ecdsa publickey auth, memory leaks, and more

GEGL, the graph-based image processing framework, has been upgraded. This framework is used in GMic, MyPaint, GNOME Photos, and GIMP to support non-destructive image processing capabilities. This upgrade reduces memory clearing overhead, introduces new APIs and operations around buffers and GIFs, and more.

libinput has been updated to the latest bug fix release for the 1.12 series. This upgrade introduces various fixes and handling of touchpad quirks, such as:

Fix product ID for MS Nano Transceiver
Restore and extend fixes for ELAN touchpad quirks
Added a quirk around the Kesington Orbit’s scroll wheel.
Disable pressure on the Asus UX302LA touchpad
Fix the trackpoint multiplier for the Dell E7470

Our NVIDIA graphics drivers have seen numerous changes this week, which users will get to experience on this Friday’s sync. For starters, we have introduced a new NVIDIA 390 graphics driver, as it is now a long-term branch. This can be installed via nvidia-390-glx-driver.

Additionally, we’ve upgraded both nvidia-glx-driver and nvidia-beta-driver to 410.66, as that’s been promoted to the latest of that long-lived branch. This follows on our deprecation of the NVIDIA 304 driver when we upgraded to X.Org 1.20 series, as this is now solely handled by the X.Org Nouveau driver. We are currently investigating supporting the 396.xx driver for DXVK testing purposes as well and will have a solution before Friday’s sync. Do note that 396 supports a more limited subset of cards, which you can see here.

libicu, which is a library responsible for software internationalization, has been upgrade to the latest release, 63.1. This release has numerous fixes and improvements, such as:

Added Venezuela’s Bolívar Soberano (VES) as a currency
New Japanese calendar era from 2019
New API for number and currency range formatting
The following languages have been added to ICU: Sindhi, Maori, Turkmen, Javanese, Interlingua, Kurdish (ku), Xhosa

Updates on Community Engagement

First off, I’d like to thank everyone that has reached out with their ideas on how to improve community engagement, as well as suggestions for new social networks and messaging platform options.

I’d like to go over some of the common suggestions we’ve gotten since the posting of our blog.

Messaging

Riot + Matrix

Riot.IM (and the accompanying Matrix network) is one of the two most suggested options to adopt and I understand why. For the most part, it satisfies our requirements, such as:

It supports buffering messages.
It’s open source (as is Matrix).
It supports multiple channels in the forms of “rooms”.
It is mobile friendly, with clients for Android and iOS.
Users are able to engage without needing an account.

However, there are issues with supporting Riot (and with Matrix) that should or need to be addressed before we’d adopt it.

Riot does not support voice channels. This is a known issue that I am subscribed to, so I will keep informed about any resolution to it. Additionally it doesn’t support push-to-talk in conferences. The latter is not a requirement however, just something I noticed in my research.

In my opinion, the decentralized nature of Matrix enables it to be more easily abused by spammers and otherwise toxic individuals. These individuals can easily jump on other public Matrix servers, which in general makes it more difficult to maintain a moderated set of rooms / channels. Compared to IRC, most users are associated with either an I.P. address or are directly registered with the centralized IRC server, which makes it substantially easier to implement blacklists / bans.

However, unlike IRC, you can delete messages via clients like Riot, which means any new servers or users will not receive the message (existing servers and users will still see it unfortunately). There are still various issues around message deletion and roles that should ideally be resolved though, such as sending server ACLs and support for redacting multiple messages. Beyond that, I’ve had discussions with Matrix developers in their channel during my testing and they’re absolutely aware that there are improvements that can be made to moderation tooling.

Overall, Riot and Matrix do show promise. I’ll be keeping an eye on the related issues going forward and I remain hopeful that Riot (and Matrix as a whole) will provide a good option for our community in the future.

Rocket Chat

Rocket Chat is the second most recommended chat solution and is a really compelling one for users wanting a feature-rich chat implementation. It supports multiple rooms, direct messages, private and public channels, and a load of fancy features like custom emojis and media embedding.

However, it does not meet the following requirements:

It does not support audio channel or similar voice channels like Discord.
It does not appear to support engaging via anonymous or guest accounts for support purposes, at least during my testing when attempting to join https://open.rocket.chat
It lacks user moderation around I.P. banning.

I am subscribed to the above mentioned issues to keep an eye on the progress of Rocket Chat going forward.

Mattermost

Mattermost does not meet our requirements, specifically:

It does not support voice channels
Various moderation features appear to be under review for Mattermost Enterprise Edition, as opposed to being placed under the Community edition.

Mattermost generally appears to be less feature rich and less likely to suit our needs.

Social Media

I appreciate all the suggestions from our community on various new social media / engagement platforms for Solus to join. Generally speaking, we are not opposed to joining them (namely Diaspora and MeWe, which have been the two most suggested options), however we want to improve our first-party services first before we expand. Keep the suggestions coming, I’ll keep them bookmarked and assess them all when we’re ready!

Other Suggestions

We’ve received a few other suggestions that I’d likely to go over for improving community engagement and making it easier to access Solus news.

Feed Reader

Implementing a feed reader / RSS reader into Raven with “Solus news” enabled by default. - This is something we’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on and it was something I suggested in our News section after we implement a new news hub. Certainly something we need to address in Budgie 11.

Improving support for non-English speaking users.

The need to improve support for non-English speaking users is something we’re absolutely aware of. As a native English speaker living in a country that has neither its primary or secondary language as English, having support networks for your language is a real enabler for the community (or society) around it.

Once we deploy a Transifex alternative, I will be making it our #1 priority to get the website and Help Center in the position to support multiple languages. There are some technical hurdles I need to overcome with Hugo to make it possible, but nothing that isn’t impossible. Furthermore, I will be investigating the viability to making language-specific sections of Flarum when I deploy that and updating our support / community involvement pages to reference non-English resources.

What Has Been Done Already

As part of our new GitHub org, I’ve actively worked to ensure new teams are set up to reduce barriers (such as awaiting us to approve PRs) and maximize our own capabilities. With the new Third Party repository, there are now two new active contributors that have direct push access, which should mean updates to Third Party occur in a much more expedited fashion. Other repositories, such as budgie-site, are now part of the GitHub org so I may resume improvements and updates to the Budgie website. Beyond that, all of the Core Team have been set as owners of the organization, so they have full access to make any changes (repo creation, adding new members, permission changes, etc.).

I’ve also begun the process of migrating various projects to Phabricator, starting with our branding packages. The following branding packages are now available via Phabricator:

Budgie Desktop Branding
GNOME Desktop Branding
MATE Desktop Branding
Plasma Desktop Branding

The above mentioned projects were considered the most likely initial candidates for migration as they’re not intended to be distro agnostic (they’re branding packages for our ISOs). I’ll be working on getting tooling set up for tarball publishing and project pages soon.

Upcoming Hackfest

We will be doing a hackfest this coming Saturday (October 27th, 2018) at 1400 UTC (10am Eastern Time, 5pm Helsinki). During this hackfest, Bryan will be working on improving the state of JACK support on Solus and I’ll be working on the new indexer / tooling for the Help Center.

Improving Community Engagement | The Roundup #10

Thu, 11 Oct 2018 01:50:12 +0300

Welcome to The Roundup #10, your bytes of Solus news. In this roundup we are focusing on improving community engagement, reducing barriers to entry, and improving the delivery of Solus news.

We believe good communication is the cornerstone of a healthy community. We always strive to actively communicate with our community and understand that it’s never a matter of just talking at our community, but listening and having a conversation. We can’t implement feedback or make changes unless we listen, engage, and sometimes debate.

Sharing the happenings of Solus to our community occurs across a variety of platforms and services. As we’ve grown as a project and as a community, we’ve been increasing our presence on various platforms. Doing so enables our community to check for Solus news on the platform that fits them best, or the best middleground between what those of us on the Core Team want to use and what is most comfortable for our community members.

Back in the EvolveOS days, this was Google+, our old Wordpress site, Forums, and IRC. Since the EvolveOS days, we’ve expanded to other platforms like:

Facebook
Mastodon
Reddit
Twitter

To this day Google+ still remains one of the most engaged platforms, one which all of the Core Team is available on, and the Google+ Communities feature is one which is used almost daily by our community members and us. In fact, Google+ Communities is one of our favorite systems to interact with. With the unfortunate announcement by Google of their sunsetting of Google+ over the next 10 months, we wanted to take this opportunity to improve communication and engagement across the board.

The Problems To Solve

To do this, we need to address multiple aspects of communication and engagement.

1. Avoiding echo chambers.

We want to provide avenues of communication and engagement that both the team and our community want to use. If the team isn’t interested in using a platform or service (self-hosted or third-party), that just ends up creating an echo chamber where only the voices of our community reside, where they may not feel like we are responsive to their feedback. That isn’t something we want. On the other hand, we need to use a platform or service that our community wants to use, otherwise it’s just an echo chamber of the voices of the team, with little to no engagement from our community. That isn’t something we want either. For example, the Core Team rarely uses the Solus Forums, rather we gravitate towards more social platforms with real time or near real time engagement (such as Google+, Mastodon, Reddit, Twitter).

So ensuring we choose platforms and services that all parties want to use is absolutely crucial.

2. Making it easier to talk about Solus.

There is always Solus news for us to share, whether it’s something major like a release announcement, or something less significant like a new feature or package update. However, these updates would sometimes be posted in a manner which wouldn’t necessarily result in the entirety of our community being made aware of them. Trying to ensure news gets out to all of our community can sometimes be difficult, just as getting news about Solus can be. We want to make the entire process easier.

3. Reducing barriers to engagement.

To make it easier to engage, we need to reduce the steps to actually doing so, on the platforms we intend on using. Let’s lay out some examples where you may need a new or dedicated account:

Development Tracker: To engage on our development tracker, you either need a dedicated account or a GitHub account.
Forums: To engage on our forums, you need a dedicated account.
GitHub: To engage on issues regarding some of our projects, you’ll need a dedicated GitHub account.
IRC: To engage on IRC and access registered-only Solus channels (#Solus-Chat, #Solus-Dev, #Solus-Livestream, #budgie-desktop-dev) you will need a freenode account.
Translations: To translate some Solus software, you will need a Transifex account.

We want to reduce this as much as we possibly can, as well as be cognisant that some may not wish to have a million accounts, or accounts of platforms such as GitHub, to engage.

Addressing The Problems

Engagement

With the sunsetting of Google+ and thusly Google+ Communities, we want to provide a more modern alternative to our forums that not only our community would like to use, but we’d like to as well.

At this moment in time, Flarum is looking like the most appealing option, from both a UX and technical perspective. The Flarum UX is more appealing to us as a result of it delivering a more tag-oriented layout as opposed to topic-based layout, which will make it easier for us to organize content. Additionally, they have plans on introducing a hybrid approach to pagination, which is more appealing to some members of the Core Team.

After assessing the Flarum API, I’m of the opinion that it will overall be easier for us to build open source tools and login methods against it.

The APIs follow JSON-API 1.0 specification with a simple token-based authentication implementation, which should reduce the complexity around authentication.
Their discussion and post API endpoints should it easier to fetch or publish content from/to the platform.
Their login APIs indicate that it may be simpler to build a login method implementation that can leverage the OAuth Server functionality of our Phabricator. As a result, we’ll have one less login to use on the platform. Essentially every user posting on our new forum would also be capable of creating new tasks / reports on our development tracker.

For real-time communication, IRC is still in our opinions a mature and reliable standard. However, we are open to additional services in the future, but would do so under the expectation that they meet the following requirements:

It needs to support buffering messages so users can read them when they come back online. If we’re going to support alternatives, it may as well be to something which natively supports buffering messages as opposed to requiring the use of an IRC bouncer.
It needs to be open source (which rules out Discord).
It needs to be allow multiple channels, so that we can separate support, off-topic, and development discussions. (This rules out Telegram).
It should support voice channels (with push-to-talk). We understand that this isn’t something IRC supports, but we’re talking about supporting alternatives that enables us to engage better with our community. Voice channels have been previously facilitated by temporary Discord services for specific events like our Gamefests and Hackfests.
It needs to be mobile friendly.
Users need to be able to engage with anonymous or guest accounts for support purposes.
It needs to have good role management and user moderation.

We have yet to find a solution that does all of the things listed above. We’re opposed to introducing non-compliant options for real-time communication (like Discord, Mumble, Telegram, etc.) as it unnecessarily fragments our community, as well as makes providing support harder and more time consuming.

News

The team should be enabled to share news about Solus with the entire community, as easily as possible. Fewer accounts, clicks, copy / pasting, and time spent. To do this, the intent is to create an open source broadcast system which we can tie into various frontends, whether that’s web-based or even on IRC (like with a plugin for the IRC bot I’m developing). It should be able to post to as many platforms as possible, such as:

Facebook
Flarum
Mastodon
Reddit
Twitter

Additionally it should be able to automatically generate Hugo content pieces (a mix of TOML and Markdown), so we can implement a centralized Solus news “hub” so you can see all our short and long form posts in a single place. Naturally, it would support the ability to get the latest posts, so in theory we could figure out a way to integrate that into an RSS feed that people can follow, a Raven widget, Software Center, or elsewhere. Really we’d have limitless options. For our needs, a custom solution is a better option over the likes of Buffer or Circular, since we’re able to more closely curate the services we support. For example, Buffer doesn’t support Mastodon, which means we’d have to manually post updates there.

For the blog, I’m currently working on a redesign that will enable us to feature multiple pieces of content and hopefully make content consumption easier. This will later be integrated into the News hub so all relevant activity from the team (posts, blogs, etc.) can be discovered in a single place.

Other Areas

In addition to the above mentioned areas, there is also the opportunity to improve and simplify engagement across two other areas of Solus development:

GitHub-hosted projects
Translations

For projects currently hosted on GitHub, we should determine which ones are candidates for migrating to our development tracker (Phabricator), develop processes for tagging new releases and surfacing them on our planned development hub (Solhub) or generated project pages. Some of these projects may include our Software Center, Installer, ypkg, etc. In general, Peter and I have some ideas on using Phabricator’s tag system to make it easier to tag specific pieces of software (as an example, qt-creator) and ideally that should extend to software developed on Phabricator.

For translations, we should ideally migrate from Transifex to something which is:

Open source
Is able to be self-hosted
Can integrate into CI (so we can do fancy things like automatic updating of translations on the platform).
Can scale to dozens or more projects.
Enables us to leverage OAuth to provide a singular login experience leveraging Phabricator

Currently I’m assessing Pootle and Weblate. If you have any ideas on other platforms we can use, we’d love to hear from you. I want something that makes it not just easy for developers, but translators too!

Going Into The Future

Some of the items I’ve mentioned in this blog post are ones which will take time to build, test, and improve upon. So over the course of the next several months, the plan is to tackle the following items:

Deployment of a Transifex alternative. This should ideally be chosen, deployed, and used for Budgie 10.5 and new Software Center.
Deployment of Flarum and sunsetting of our forums. This will require some time for us to build and test an OAuth implementation, so more news on that in the future.
Deployment of the new blog redesign.
Implementation of the content posting backend (as well as a frontend) to enable team postings.
Implementation of the News hub.
Migration of some projects away from GitHub to Phabricator, introduce new project pages (and as a result, overhaul our “technologies” page).

Suggestions

There are always other ways of improving community engagement and reducing barriers to entry. If you have any suggestions, you’re always welcome to reach out via to us via the Forums, IRC or social media.

Solus 3 ISO Refresh Released

Thu, 20 Sep 2018 08:20:39 +0300

We are proud to announce the availability of Solus 3.9999, our ISO refresh of Solus 3. This refresh enables support for a variety of new hardware released since Solus 3, introduces an updated set of default applications and theming, as well as enables users to immediately take advantage of new Solus infrastructure.

General

Default Applications and Theming

All of our editions feature:

Firefox 62
LibreOffice 6.1.0.3
Rhythmbox 3.4.2
Thunderbird 60

Our Budgie and GNOME Editions ship with GNOME MPV 0.14 and our MATE Edition ships with VLC 3.0.3.

Solus ships with theming that enables a consistent look and feel across the entire system, regardless of which edition is chosen. All editions feature the Adapta GTK Theme for applications and Papirus Icon Theme for icons.

Hardware and Kernel Enablement

This ISO refresh of Solus ships with Linux kernel 4.18.5, enabling us to provide out-of-the-box support for the latest CPUs from AMD and Intel, including support for high core count CPUs like AMD Threadripper 2.

Additionally, we’ve introduced Intel GVT-g support for improved GPU virtualization via the enablement of KVMGT, MDEV, and VFIO_MDEV modules, as well as improved Realtek wireless card and dongle support with enablement of the RTL8XXX/RTL8XXXU modules.

Infrastructure Support

As previously announced, we have been making changes to our infrastructure, repositories, and more. To ensure users are able to immediately take advantage of our new infrastructure, this refresh changes our default repository URLs so no modification or further updates are necessary.

As such, we have also updated various system packages, such as our baselayout, to point to more relevant support documentation.

Defaults

GNOME

Our ISO refresh of Solus GNOME Edition introduces some changes to our default branding, such as:

GNOME
- Removable Drive applet / extension is now enabled by default. This should make it much easier to perform unmounts without having to open Nautilus, the default file manager
Nautilus
- Default to single clicks for opening files and folders. We are confident that this change will prove to be more efficient for users, especially those which typically interact with their system via a touchpad. This is always changeable via Nautilus’ Behavior section of its Preferences.
- Enabled show-image-thumbnails for all devices, so that will include network shares (Samba).
- Set recursive-search to local-only so it’s not trying to search across every possible device you have and causing it to choke on lower-end systems

Additionally, Solus GNOME Edition now ships with GNOME Photos out of the box, enabling easier photo management and editing!

MATE

Our ISO refresh of Solus MATE Edition introduces some changes to our default branding, such as:

panel
- Add a separator after the clock, improving readability.

Changelog of ISO

Packages added to this release:

aa-lsm-hook
aalib
audit
brotli
bubblewrap
Budgie-screenshot-applet
dnsmasq
freeglut
gexiv2
gptfdisk
ilmbase
imagemagick
jasper
ldb
libblockdev
libbytesize
libcue
libdazzle
libde265
libglu
libglvnd
libgrss
libgsf
libgudev
libheif
libhogweed
libiptcdata
libnfs
libnice
libnumbertext
libosinfo
libqxp
libraw
libreoffice-all
libreoffice-base
libreoffice-common-dictionaries
libreoffice-math
libseccomp
libsoxr
libvoikko
libxfont2
libxvmc
libzmf
linux-driver-management-lightdm-integration
lm_sensors
lua51
luajit
mdadm
mesa-demos
mjpegtools-libs
mozjs38
mpg123
nautilus-python
nss-mdns
openexr
openjpeg
osinfo-db
perl-net-dbus
perl-x11-protocol
perl-xml-twig
perl-xmlparser
poppler-data
poppler-utils
postgresql
pyparsing
python-appdirs
python-asn1
python-asn1crypto
python-certifi
python-cffi
python-chardet
python-cparser
python-cryptography
python-enum34
python-idna
python-ipaddress
python-openssl
python-packaging
python-pysmbc
python-pysocks
python-setuptools
python-six
python-urllib3
qol-assist
sdl1
sndio
spice-vdagent
tevent
tracker
tracker-miners
unicode-character-database
usb-modeswitch
usysconf
volume_key
vulkan
webrtc-audio-processing
woff2
xhost
xmlsec1
xorg-driver-video-intel
xset

Packages removed from this release:

dracut
fftw
goofiboot
libmad
libxfont
linux-tools-cpupower
mesalib-demos
spidermonkey

Changes in this release:

appstream-glib

Pierre-Yves: Update appstream-glib to 0.6.13

gstreamer-1.0-plugins-good

gdbm

gstreamer-1.0-plugins-base

gpgme

libsndfile

Joshua Strobl: Resolve CVE-2017-14634

libdvdcss

Pierre-Yves: Update libdvdcss to 1.4.1

libvisio

grub2

solus-artwork

inetutils

unzip

mpc

youtube-dl

mpv

os-installer

gnutls

libxscrnsaver

ghostscript

libp11-kit

libcairo

transmission

libabw

Pierre-Yves: Update libabw to 0.1.2

libxcomposite

gnome-control-center

findutils

Peter O’Connor: Safety rebuild for glibc

parted

gnome-disk-utility

gspell

libdvdread

dosfstools

libinput

libwebp

libxslt

libspectre

Bryan T. Meyers: Rebuild for ghostscript

libunistring

elfutils

Peter O’Connor: Safety rebuild for glibc

libproxy

libevdev

libgpg-error

libxext

Ikey Doherty: Rebuild for hygiene

libtimezonemap

libqmi

foomatic-db

font-clear-sans-ttf

Joshua Strobl: Convert to ypkg.

clr-boot-manager

libnss

doflicky

Ikey Doherty: Fix incorrect detection of masked NVIDIA drivers

exfat-utils

baobab

mutagen

jansson

Ikey Doherty: Enable emul32 build for NetworkManager update

bind-utils

libcdr

libgweather

firefox

gnome-themes-standard

libatasmart

yelp-xsl

Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.28.0

libxcb

attr

xorg-driver-video-qxl

libxft

qt5-base

giflib

python3-gobject

Joshua Strobl: Upgrade to latest in 3.28 series. Updated license.
Peter O’Connor: Rebuild for ldflags
Pierre-Yves: Rebuild for python 3.6
Pierre-Yves: Update python3-gobject to 3.26.1
[Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.26.0. Changelog available here.](https://dev.getsol.us/source/python3-gobject/browse/master/;afa0282)

networkmanager-openvpn

perl

tzdata

libxrandr

Ikey Doherty: Rebuild for hygiene

libvdpau

Joey Riches: Sync with git to fix a segfault with DRI_PRIME enabled

expat

libgphoto2

xkbcomp

xcb-util

Ikey Doherty: Enable emul32

evolution-data-server

grilo

nvidia-340-glx-driver

libtasn1

Pierre-Yves: Update libtasn1 to 4.13

network-manager-applet

networkmanager-openconnect

upower

Ikey Doherty: Update upower to 0.99.7

libe-book

alsa-utils

nautilus

tar

lightdm

sudo

gsettings-desktop-schemas

libarchive

gcc

libtelepathy-glib

lame

alsa-lib

Pierre-Yves: Update alsa-lib to 1.1.5

budgie-desktop-branding

librsvg

gcr

libatk

rhythmbox-alternative-toolbar

gstreamer-1.0-plugins-bad

unixodbc

zimg

lzip

adwaita-icon-theme

polkit

libxshmfence

snapd

libhunspell

mariadb

libxfixes

Ikey Doherty: Rebuild for hygiene

libquvi

Joshua Strobl: Build against lua 5.3

gnome-color-manager

xorg-driver-input-wacom

fribidi

openldap

Philipp Trulson: Update openldap to 2.4.46

libx11

libxkbfile

pciutils

at-spi2

libao

Joshua Strobl: Resolve CVE-2017-11548.

libgnome-desktop

libwpd

qtstyleplugins

lz4

libwps

gnome-bluetooth

libxdmcp

xorg-driver-video-amdgpu

gstreamer-1.0

Pierre-Yves: Update gstreamer-1.0 to 1.14.2
[Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.14.1. Release notes available here.](https://dev.getsol.us/source/gstreamer-1.0/browse/master/;89478ad)
[Joshua Strobl: Upgrade to 1.14.0. Release notes available here.](https://dev.getsol.us/source/gstreamer-1.0/browse/master/;2c202b5)
Joey Riches: Update gstreamer-1.0 to 1.12.4
Bryan T. Meyers: Make tests -j1 for builder
Pierre-Yves: Update to gstreamer-1.0 to 1.12.3

gnome-calendar

atkmm

gdk-pixbuf

openvpn

solus-sc

baselayout

python

xvidcore

libwacom

libbluray

Pierre-Yves: Update libbluray to 1.0.2

pango

reiserfsprogs

gvfs

ca-certs

font-hack-ttf

dhclient

system-config-printer

dbus

libmpeg2

pangomm

libsm

bluez

xorg-driver-video-fbdev

libgeocode-glib

poppler

gnome-mpv

gnome-screenshot

sharutils

gutenprint

Pierre-Yves: Rebuild gutenprint for cups 2.2.8

openal-soft

Pierre-Yves: Update openal to 1.18.2

bash

libedit

sdl2

seahorse

openssh

openssl

pyatspi2

Pierre-Yves: Update to 2.26.0 and rebuild for python 3.6

python3-cairo

Peter O’Connor: Rebuild for ldflags
Peter O’Connor: Rebuild for python 3.6
[Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.14.1. Changelog available here.](https://dev.getsol.us/source/python3-cairo/browse/master/;959c4b3)
Peter O’Connor: Update abireport

accountsservice

Ikey Doherty: Update AccountsService to 0.6.45

libfreehand

Pierre-Yves: Update libfreehand to 0.1.2

isl

Peter O’Connor: Update to 0.20

linux-driver-management

cryptsetup

Ikey Doherty: Drop 20k in weight

lvm2

harfbuzz

gnome-autoar

libjson-glib

python-parted

cups

librest

Joshua Strobl: Update to 0.8.1.

docbook-xml

libva

xdg-user-dirs

libxpm

Ikey Doherty: Rebuild for hygiene

libpcre

libkate

libxinerama

nvidia-glx-driver

libusb

Ikey Doherty: Update libusb to 1.0.22

libevent

grep

Peter O’Connor: Safety rebuild for glibc

freetype2

canon-ufriilt-common

libepoxy

gnupg

python-gobject

Joshua Strobl: Upgrade to latest in 3.28 series. Updated license.
Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.26.1
[Joshua Strobl: Update to 3.26.0. Changelog available here.](https://dev.getsol.us/source/python-gobject/browse/master/;5e0a8b7)

libcanberra

hicolor-icon-theme

libgnomekbd

man-db

libspeex

gedit

gnome-backgrounds

wavpack

dconf

dbus-glib

net-snmp

libgtkmm-3

libdvdnav

db5

exiv2

cups-pk-helper

Pierre-Yves: Rebuild cups-pk-helper for cups 2.2.8

gnome-calculator

iproute2

libdv

desktop-file-utils

libwnck

libexttextcat

Pierre-Yves: Update libexttextcat to 3.4.5

nano

libxxf86dga

thunderbird

nettle

libunwind

gnome-session

xinit

Bryan T. Meyers: Updated to 1.4.0

liboauth

colord

Joshua Strobl: Update to 1.3.5

libpipeline

gnome-system-monitor

libnspr

x264

x265

Joey Riches: Update x265 to 2.8
Joey Riches: Update x265 to 2.7 & reenable assembly instructions
Joshua Strobl: Disable assembly to see if the build server just dislikes it.
[Joshua Strobl: Update to 2.6. Release notes available here.](https://dev.getsol.us/source/x265/browse/master/;00d91e2)
Bryan T. Meyers: Update to 2.5

gobject-introspection

hunspell-en

libpwquality

Pierre-Yves: Update libpwquality to 1.4.0

fontconfig

xorg-driver-input-libinput

os-prober

libboost

iptables

geoclue

python-dbus

bash-completion

onboard

util-linux

libdaemon

ffmpeg

talloc

python-requests

Pierre-Yves: Update python-requests to 2.18.4 & add new/missing deps

gnome-online-accounts

libvorbis

enchant

orca

Pierre-Yves: Update orca to 3.26.0 and rebuild for python 3.6

vino

libodfgen

Pierre-Yves: Update libodfgen to 0.1.7

libpciaccess

Pierre-Yves: Update libpciaccess to 0.14

sed

libgtksourceview

djvulibre

libxau

glib-networking

kmod

v4l-utils

pisi

hwdata

libetonyek

lua

Joshua Strobl: Upgrade lua to 5.3.4

libpng

modem-manager

appstream-data

libgxps

gnome-terminal

xdg-utils

systemd

libpagemaker

Pierre-Yves: Update libpagemaker to 0.0.4

gawk

libgcrypt

libxkbcommon

hplip

foomatic-db-engine

Peter O’Connor: Rebuild for perl 5.26.1

cairomm

lsof

libical

Pierre-Yves: Update libical to 3.0.3

at-spi2-atk

xkeyboard-config

lsb-release

fuse-exfat

mtdev

font-symbola-ttf

Pierre-Yves: Update font-symbola-ttf 10.03

libmbim

font-tlwg-ttf

Bryan T. Meyers: Updated to 0.6.5

network-manager

libexempi

procps-ng

Peter O’Connor: Update to 3.3.15 to resolve the following CVEs:

libmspub

ncurses

kerberos

graphite2

Peter O’Connor: Update to 1.3.11 and address CVE-2018-7999

imlib2

gstreamer-1.0-plugins-ugly

gnome-keyring

zlib

libpeas

libgtop

avahi

libassuan

libxml2

gmime

libxmu

xorg-driver-video-vmware

cups-filters

clutter-gtk

clutter

zenity

slick-greeter

rhythmbox

gparted

coreutils

sqlite3

xorg-driver-video-vesa

libxdamage

libsoup

pam

liborcus

fuse

libstartup-notification

Ikey Doherty: Enable emul32 startup-notification support

pycups

gstreamer-1.0-libav

iso-codes

Pierre-Yves: Update iso-codes to 3.78

libxxf86vm

totem-pl-parser

alsa-plugins

udisks

gnome-doc-utils

gnome-user-docs

less

a52dec

libvpx

evince

libxtst

Ikey Doherty: Rebuild for hygiene

mesalib

libdmx

samba

dconf-editor

wayland

Peter O’Connor: Update to 1.14.0

adapta-gtk-theme

snappy

Pierre-Yves: Update snappy to 1.1.7

papirus-icon-theme

apparmor

inxi

libreoffice

gmp

glibmm

libdrm

libglade

libixion

shadow

pcre2

python3

libmtp

libcaca

Pierre-Yves: Safety rebuild for imlib2 1.5.1

librevenge

Pierre-Yves: Disable-werror for gcc7 & enable unit tests

hexchat

xorg-server

breeze-cursor-theme

Peter O’Connor: Update to 5.11.0 for 32px cursors

binutils

gnome-settings-daemon

espeak-ng

Bryan T. Meyers: Updated to 1.49.2

shared-mime-info

Peter O’Connor: Update to 1.9, no longer build mimedb

libcdio

solus-hardware-config

libfontenc

Ikey Doherty: Rebuild for hygiene

libicu

unrar

libxi

glibc

libice

libxt

linux-firmware

nvidia-304-glx-driver

libwebkit-gtk

libgdata

tdb

vapoursynth

libxv

Ikey Doherty: Rebuild for hygiene

dmidecode

Alexander Nordahl: Update to 3.1

wget

libcmis

xcb-util-keysyms

Pierre-Yves: xcb-util-keysyms enable emul32

libjpeg-turbo

acl

libexif

libxres

libgusb

glib2

libass

libtiff

wpa_supplicant

libxcursor

libvte

sane-backends

nghttp2

Peter O’Connor: Update to 1.32.0 to address CVE-2018-1000168

speech-dispatcher

Peter O’Connor: Rebuild for python 3.6

libxklavier

Ikey Doherty: Rebuild for hygiene

zip

gzip

file-roller

mutter

taglib

yelp

libxrender

Ikey Doherty: Rebuild for hygiene

qpdf

ibus

pulseaudio

file

curl

bzip2

Ikey Doherty: Rebuild for toolchain, switch to unroll-loops list arg

libssh

Bryan T. Meyers: Update to 0.8.1

libflac

gettext

budgie-desktop

llvm

kernel-glue

libogg

Pierre-Yves: Update libogg to 1.3.3

libffi

readline

eog

gnome-screensaver

noto-sans-ttf

linux-current

usbutils

e2fsprogs

libcdio-paranoia

xorg-driver-video-nouveau

time

xorg-driver-video-radeon

mpfr