Tumbleweed Development and Laptop Experience

Users of the openSUSE Tumbleweed operating system are getting a lot of the latest GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source software applications lately as a total of seven snapshots were released this week.

openSUSE Project's Douglas DeMaio is back to report that openSUSE Tumbleweed is now powered by the latest Linux 4.11.6 kernel, and the GStreamer multimedia framework was updated to the major 1.12 series, adding out-of-the-box MP3 decoding support in the distribution.

A total of seven openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots featuring new software were released this week along with an upgrade to GStreamer that allows for mp3 decoding to work out-of-the box.

The newest stable Linux Kernel 4.11.6 is also available in the latest Tumbleweed snapshot 20170620.

Updates in the repositories from the 20170620 snapshot brought both the 52.2 versions of Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, which fixed some critical vulnerabilities. Systemd 233 provided a package for a new systemd-umount binary and, with the update of dracut 044.1, supports the new compatibility rule. Fontconfig’s 2.12.3 version fixed the build issues with gperf 3.1 and on GNU Hurd. The Beta 2 version of LibreOffice 5.4 cleaned up the license string and got rid of the Oxygen theme. A removal of support for old, non-systemd distros was made available in the snapshot with libvirt 3.4.0.

I am not quick to buy new things, though I did replace my Dell Latitude D630 about three months ago with a newer Dell latitude E6440. My plan was to deprecate the machine and put it on a "reserve only" status. In my process of setting up the E6440, I found that I used my D630 still but quite differently, it became my home station machine and my E6440 would be my mobile machine that would return back to "base" where I would have it connect as a client to the D630 for keyboard and mouse. It was a rather nice arrangement.

Unfortunately, the hard drive died on the D630 and I needed to install openSUSE once again on it in order to continue to use my workspace as I have been. What is $50 on a new hard drive to restore my SuperCubicle, right?

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I run KDE Plasma for my desktop. I've tried others but the customization options in KDE Plasma just fits my personal tastes best. I have also been real happy with the speed improvements of KDE Plasma in the last couple years and especially those of KDE Plasma 5.10 on Tumbleweed as of late.