- Edited
Over the weekend you received some major updates to the KDE packages. Frameworks 5.77.0 was released and the major updated to the Release Services/KDE Apps moved to all users after being in the kde-next repo during the RC testing of 20.12.
Quite a few changes this time with 20.12.0. You will now get monthly updates to partitionmanager, ktorrent and konversation, since they are newly added to the Release Services.
Complete new is Itinerary, an app that provides you with all the information you need while on the road.
Dolphin changed a lot of layout options, some well received, some not so successful...Dolphin’s address bar is now in the toolbar, for example, and, in Detail View mode, you can set the size to include everything in the folder including the nested folders inside the parent one. This one has caused some issues, but in the final version this option can be disabled again.
Spectacle has an annotation tool added:
But bigger news for those working on KaOS (probably and hopefully not visible at all to regular users) is the migration to a new, dedicated server. This is a real hardware server, running KaOS, so no longer using a VPS. It has been worked on the last few weeks, and today after thorough testing, all was deemed ready to activate the KaOS website, Package Viewer and Forum from this server. Advantage is direct access to the hardware, much more powerful specs, see the hardware setup:
inxi -MCPmS
System: Host: nuc Kernel: 5.8.18-1 x86_64 bits: 64 Console: tty 0 Distro: KaOS 2020
Machine: Type: Mini-pc System: Intel Client Systems product: NUC8i5BEH v: J72747-307 serial: <superuser/root required>
Mobo: Intel model: NUC8BEB v: J72692-309 serial: <superuser/root required> UEFI: Intel
v: BECFL357.86A.0077.2019.1127.1452 date: 11/27/2019
Memory: RAM: total: 7.65 GiB used: 3.79 GiB (49.6%)
RAM Report: permissions: Unable to run dmidecode. Root privileges required.
CPU: Info: Quad Core model: Intel Core i5-8259U bits: 64 type: MT MCP L2 cache: 6144 KiB
Speed: 1300 MHz min/max: 400/3800 MHz Core speeds (MHz): 1: 1301 2: 1301 3: 1301 4: 1301 5: 1302 6: 1286 7: 1301
8: 1296
Partition: ID-1: / size: 214.37 GiB used: 26.05 GiB (12.2%) fs: xfs dev: /dev/nvme0n1p2
ID-2: /boot size: 299.4 MiB used: 69.0 MiB (23.1%) fs: vfat dev: /dev/nvme0n1p1
ID-3: swap-1 size: 8.80 GiB used: 412.6 MiB (4.6%) fs: swap dev: /dev/nvme0n1p3
Since the November ISO, a lot of base packages received major updates (which required large rebuilds), this included ICU 68.1, Boost 1.75.0, Protobuf 3.14.0, hdf5 1.12.0 and Poppler 20.12.1.
Qt 6 is now available to all users, the first stable release was last week. Very few packages can use Qt 6 so far, but you can try Notepad and Strawberry in their Qt 6 builds.
And lastly for this December update, the new forum install made a few more spam detection options available. They are set quite strict now, so any IP, email or username that has ever been part of a spam database will automatically be rejected. We'll see if this is causing issues as being to restrictive.