Numerous updates landed in the main repositories in January

Jan 27, 2019 01:27 GMT  ·  By

January was a fruitful month for the openSUSE Tumbleweed developers, which managed to cram quite a bunch of updates in a handful of snapshots released through the main archives of the rolling operating system.

The biggest news, is, of course, the addition of the latest kernel series, Linux 4.20, which adds lots of goodies to OpenSuSE Tumbleweed, including support for the upcoming AMD Radeon Picasso and Raven 2 GPUs, stable support for AMD Radeon Pro Vega 20 GPUs, a new C-SKY CPU architecture, and support for Hygon Dhyana x86 CPUs.

Linux kernel 4.20 also adds stronger mitigations for the Spectre Variant 4 vulnerability on ARM64 (AArch64) CPUs, better Spectre Variant 2 userspace-userspace protection, a new "Early Departure Time" model for TCP, improvements to virtualized graphics, as well as numerous updated and new drivers for better hardware support.

Apart from the Linux 4.20 kernel, openSUSE Tumbleweed received all the latest KDE apps that are distributed as part of the recently released KDE Applications 18.12.1 and Frameworks 5.54.0 software suites, along with a minor update to GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 8  system compiler to include a backport of asm inline.

All Tumbleweed users are urged to update their computers

Other noteworthy updates include VLC 3.0.6, Mozilla Thunderbird 60.4.0, Wireshark 2.6.6, Evolution 3.30.4, Geany 1.34.1, Meld 3.20.0, Gucharmap 11.0.3, Mercurial 4.8.2, MariaDB 10.2.21, SQLite 3.26.0, Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) 1.1.8, Samba 4.9.4, OpenJDK 12.0.0.0~26, python-pyOpenSSL 18.0.0, purple-facebook 0.9.6, grep 3.3, mutt 1.11.2, and libvirt-glib 2.0.0.

All users of the openSUSE Tumbleweed operating system are urged to update their computers to receive all the latest software releases enumerated above, and, of course, the most advanced Linux kernel branch. openSUSE Tumbleweed follows a rolling release model where you install once and receive updates forever, so there's no need to download a new ISO image to stay up-to-date.