openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2022/04

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

The week has passed without any major hiccups, which also shows in the number of Tumbleweed snapshots released during this week. Not the highest count ever achieved, but we are at a solid 6 snapshots (0121.0126), with the next one already in QA.

The major changes in those 6 snapshots were:

• systemd 249.9
• Lots of YaST changes (mostly under the hood, some UI changes in the installer)
• Mozilla Firefox 96.0.2
• Samba 4.15.3 & 4.15.4, including a rather large reorganisation of the library packages (i.e. multiple libs combinaed into samba-client-libs
• Virtualbox 6.1.32
• Bash 5.1.16
• Linux kernel 5.16.2
• Switch the default Network interface manager from wicked to NetworkManager: so far this was only done for graphical installations, but newly NetworkManager is also the default on server/console-only installs. With nmtui it is rather comfortable to configure it. Upgraders do not (yet) get migrated to NetworkManager, but stay on their working wicked config. Of course wicked is still available in the repos

Thins being worked on to reach you in the future include:

• Linux kernel 5.16.3
• Polkit with fix for pwnkit (Snapshot 0127(: the fix is also already in the Tumbleweed update channel. Make sure to get this update soon
• Ruby 3.1, incl switch of default Ruby version to 3.1
• Removal of Ruby 2.7 and Ruby 3.0 (together with the switch to Ruby 3.1)
• KDE Plasma 5.24 (currently beta is staged and being tested)
• Python 3.6 interpreter will be removed (We have roughly 100 python36-FOO packages left)
• Python 3.10 as the distro default interpreter (a bit down the line)
• GCC 12 introduction has started to be as ready as possible for when the upstream release happens.