Hello stargazers,
We are attempting to publish a small update every now and then and this is our first issue!
General Updates
Summer is here, which means things usually get more chill (chillops, as Jorge tends to call it). After Fedora 42 released and all Aurora images moved to a F42 base, we have been mostly in maintenance mode. But we have also been quietly working on new features which we will discuss below.
We welcomed a new maintainer to the team: everyone please welcome renner! He has been a busy bee working on our copr packages, centralizing our branding/theming packages, and generally helping out. For anyone else looking to contribute, it’s as simple as taking a look at our GitHub issues and PRs (or following the discussion on Discord) and jumping in!
Feature Updates
Bazaar Beta
As mentioned previously, we have added the new Flathub-first app store Bazaar to our beta stream. This is a good time to let it mature a bit before including it into the official release streams of Aurora. Additionally, we have worked on better integration of Bazaar within the KDE ecosystem by creating a KRunner plugin that allows Bazaar search results to appear in KDE’s various menus.
Bazaar provides curation features that allow customisation of the different categories and apps that appear front and center. We have our configurations mostly complete and we are waiting to get our custom artwork completed.
Our custom artwork (stay tuned, it’s gonna be awesome!) is created by our wonderful @Chandeleer.
Once we are ready to push Bazaar to our main images, we will make an announcement here.
EDIT: Discover will be left on the image
Homebrew Utilities
We have added some nifty Homebrew packages to the aurora-cli experience. One new addition is the wonderful Bold Brew package, which provides a nice terminal UI (TUI) for homebrew to search and manage all your brew packages.
Behind the Scenes
Integration testing for images
We have started work (ublue-os/aurora#617) on more robust testing for our images during build time to catch issues booting or crashes to Plasma/SDDM when loading.
It is still in the work-in-progress stage, but it will be incorporated into our build workflow once completed to provide better reliability to our images.
Switcheroo Improvements
For those with both a discrete and integrated GPU, we were maintaining a patch for KDE’s core IO libraries to allow for games and other graphics-heavy applications to automatically use the discrete GPU instead of the integrated one. See the blog article The state of multi-GPU support in Linux distros for more context.
Thankfully, KDE merged this patch and it is now in the latest version of KDE Frameworks. Big thanks to the KDE team and Jan for driving Linux Gaming forward for the whole ecosystem.
What’s Next
After the summer, it’ll be time to start preparing for the new Fedora release. Fedora 43 is scheduled for release at the end of October, with a beta in the middle of September. Shortly after, we will start building Aurora 43 betas and will announce those once we are ready to roll them out.
Currently, there aren’t any major breaking changes in Fedora 43 that will affect Aurora, but we will know more in the coming months.
Deprecation of Asus and surface hwe images
Just a reminder that our hwe images will be depracated with Aurora 43.
Feedback
This was our first issue of these kind of update posts and we would be happy to hear your thoughts. Do you want these kind of updates in the future?
We can’t promise any definitive timelines for these but atleast we could do them once in a while if there is something bigger to announce or do “recaps” what has been happening on Aurora.
We wish all of you a nice rest of the summer! Enjoy your (hopefully) good weather (it’s not been that great here in the Northern Hemisphere :P).
Thanks