Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,
From May 26 to 28, many contributors and users found their way to Nuremberg in order to attend the openSUSE Conference. Many would have believed that this is a period when Tumbleweed is less likely to roll – and we have proven them wrong. Actually while most contributors were together at the conference, we took the opportunity to clean out final issues and switched the distribution to use the GNU C Compiler 7, in combination with Position Independent Executables/Address Space Layout Randomization (PIE/ASLR).
Despite this already very big change (which resulted in a full rebuild of all packages, giving you a large download), the 5 snapshots delivered (0521, 0522, 0524, 0529 and 0601) in the last two weeks also contained these gifts from the community to the community:
- Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird 52.1.1
- GNOME 3.24.2
- git 2.13.0
- Linux Kernel 4.11.1 & 4.11.2
- KDE Applications 17.04.1
- Perl 5.24.1
- KDE Plasma 5.10.0
- KDE Frameworks 5.34.0
Despite all the fun people had at the conference, a lot of future updates are already being prepared for you:
- Qt 5.9
- openSSL 1.1.x as default implementation (a lot of help needed!)
- GStreamer 1.12 – with MP3 support enabled out of the box
- go 1.8
- LibreOffice 5.4
With the switch to GCC 7, some non-ring packages have not been fixed in time. There are currently about 200 packages failing (out of ~ 12000) that still need your attention and love. Packages that remain unbuildable for a long time are considered unmaintained and risk to be removed – so even if you do not yet maintain any package, this might be the perfect moment to step up and helpf fix the ones you care for. If you need help getting started, feel free to reachout to to the community, best on the opensuse-factory@opensuse.org mailing list.
I wished openSUSE would spend its resources into LibreSSL instead of OpenSSL 1.1
libreSSL is available as an alternative implementation in the repositories – I doubt this will happen to be the default anytime soon, considering that openSUSE is upstream to SLE – and there FIPS is even a topic: anybody tried this on libreSSL?
Hi Dominique, thank you very much for your updates on openSUSE Tumbleweed! They are very helpful to me.
I am running different Linux distributions on my systems and Tumbleweed has become a favorite, despite some issues (e.g. not able to reboot, having to recompile my NVIDIA kernel modules after a kernel update).
I like being up-to-date with software and Tumbleweed allows me that. Sometimes it is hard to keep up with the development pace. I like the way software for the distribution is tested and integrated by the openSUSE team.
Keep up the good work!