GIMP 2.8.20 and Vim 8.0.311 have landed as well

Feb 16, 2017 11:32 GMT  ·  By

openSUSE's Douglas DeMaio reports today, February 16, about the latest software updates and technologies that landed in the stable repositories during last week and the beginning of this one via a total of six snapshots.

First of all, it would appear that OpenSuSE Tumbleweed is now keeping up with the latest Linux kernel releases. Following a rolling release model, the operating system migrates to the latest Linux kernel branches as soon as they're out, and it's powered by Linux 4.9 for a long time now.

However, as the Linux 4.9 point releases are coming out so fast, it's pretty hard for OS vendors to keep up with them, but it looks like the openSUSE Tumbleweed team has more under its sleeves, as they managed to update the distro to both Linux 4.9.8 and 4.9.9 kernel releases last week.

"Two Linux kernels per week in openSUSE Tumbleweed is becoming the norm as the rolling release is providing daily snapshots of new software that are closely aligned with upstream development," says DeMaio. "Kernel 4.9.8 and 4.9.9 were released in the 20170208 and 20170212 snapshots respectively and the later brought a fix for a Btrfs system call."

Tumbleweed users can now play the latest games with Mesa 13.0.4

Another cool new feature that landed in the openSUSE Tumbleweed repositories last week was the recently released Mesa 13.0.4 3D Graphics Library, which lets openSUSE Tumbleweed users play the latest games with their AMD Radeon graphics cards. Besides that, users received the new GIMP 2.8.20 open-source image viewer.

If you're using Tumbleweed with the KDE Plasma desktop, you should know that KDE Plasma 5.9.1 and KDE Applications 16.12.2 have landed. Among other updates that arrived in the openSUSE Tumbleweed repositories, we can mention Vim 8.0.311, FVWM 2.6.7, AppArmor 2.11.0, python3-kiwi 9.0.2, libosinfo 1.0.0, libssh 0.7.4, and GCC 6.3.1.

Last but not least, it looks like the GRUB2 bootloader was bumped to the Release Candidate (RC) milestone in the latest snapshot pushed to Tumbleweed's repos. Therefore, all users are advised to update their systems now to receive all these goodies, and please keep in mind to reboot your PCs after installing the new kernel.