14 DAY TRIAL // openSUSE's Douglas DeMaio is back with news for users of the openSUSE Tumbleweed operating system series, informing them about the latest technologies and updated applications that landed in the repositories.
The developer starts his weekly report by reminding us that OpenSuSE Tumbleweed was the first GNU/Linux distribution to ship the latest GNOME 3.24 desktop environment to its users. A total of eighteen snapshots appear to have been released for Tumbleweed users, bringing all the newest apps, including the Mozilla Firefox 52.0.1 web browser and KDE Plasma 5.9.4 desktop environment.
"GNOME 3.24 received most of the hype in snapshot 20170322, but that release also included Mozilla Firefox’s newest 52.0.1 version, which added support for WebAssembly, an emerging standard that brings near-native performance to Web-based games, apps, and software libraries without the use of plugins," said Douglas DeMaio.
openSUSE Tumbleweed could switch to Linux kernel 4.11 by the end of April
Among other technologies and apps that have been adopted by openSUSE Tumbleweed, we can mention the latest Flatpak 0.9 series of the Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework previously known as XDG-App, as well as the KDE Frameworks 5.32.0 collection of over 70 add-on libraries for Qt 5, which brings support for Flatpak portals to the KNotifications component.
The Git 2.12.2, Python 3.6.1, cpupower 4.10, ImageMagick 6.9.8.2, and Ruby 2.2 updates have landed as well in the stable repositories of openSUSE Tumbleweed, along with multiple new versions for YaST2's -bootloader, -installation, -storage, and -network components, among many others. It also looks like the OS is now powered by the latest Linux 4.10.8 kernel.
Tumbleweed snapshot 20170403 brought Linux kernel 4.10.8, upgrading the kernel from version 4.10.5, which was used until yesterday, April 5, 2017, when the respective snapshot was announced. Now that the development cycle of the upcoming Linux 4.11 kernel is nearing its end, the openSUSE developers are confident that Tumbleweed will be the first, again, to be powered by Linux kernel 4.11.