openSUSE Tumbleweed had some significant changes this past week with KDE Applications updating to version 15.12.3, which includes Long Term Support version of KDE Development Platform 4.14.18, and zypper updating to 1.13, but what is likely the biggest news is GNOME 3.20 is on the verge of being released.

Tumbleweed users might be using the latest GNOME release that has been thoroughly tested by openQA by this evening.

Arriving in GNOME 3.20 is a new cross-distro framework for building and distributing desktop applications with Builder and XDG-Apps. Wayland is available with 3.20, but not as the default. To try it out, select GNOME on Wayland from the gear menu on the login screen. The release of 3.20 is also a big release for GTK+, which provides more flexibility and power to theme authors.

Tumbleweed’s 20160326 snapshot provided a some new feature outside of GNOME 3.20’s new features as well.

The network manager has a new feature to determine if you are online. The network manager communicates with conncheck.opensuse.org to determine if a TW user has connectivity. To disable the feature, Tumbleweed users will need the NetworkManager-branding-upstream package.

Other News

openSUSE has been steadily transitioning its translations to Weblate, which just deployed version 2.5. If anyone would like to contribute to the openSUSE Project by translating release notes and other information about openSUSE and the project’s efforts, Weblate is translations made easy with a simple dashboard and progress bar to let people easily know where they can help with the project. There are even some additional tools being developed for Weblate by the openSUSE community.

The openSUSE is looking for a maintainer to help support 32-bit architecture for Tumbleweed. If anyone in the community is interested, email opensuse-factory@opensuse.org or join #opensuse-factory on IRC.