Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

The year started with a big bang. Be it that since the last review, there have actually been 7 snapshots released (20171228, 1229, 1230, 1231, 20180101, 0102 and 0103) or that the news is full with reports about security issues.  Let’s hope we can keep up the rate of snapshot releases (we won’t be able to keep it for the whole year; 7 in a week means I get no weekends) – but for the 2nd part, let’s hope we won’t have to cope with such things too often this year.

The 7 snapshots contained those interesting bits and pieces:

  • Evolution 3.26.3
  • Linux kernel 4.14.9
  • AppArmor 2.12
  • KDE Plasma 5.11.5

Some snapshots were a bit smaller than others, but holiday season brings this as a consequence. But the stagings are full of things happening:

  • Linux Kernel 4.14.11 (incl fixes for Meltdown, in snapshot 0104)
  • RPM 4.14
  • LibreOffice 6.0; this reached RC quality, which the maintainer declared ‘fit for use’ (KDE users will get the KDE4-based UI back)
  • KDE Frameworks 5.41
  • CMake logic change: newer python versions will be favored (meaning, python3)
  • The YaST Team’s libstorage-ng reimplementation

This all promises to be some interesting time ahead of us