The Solus Project is proud to announce the release of the first version of its operating system, Solus, on 27th of December, 2015. Solus 1.0 is codenamed Shannon after the longest river in Ireland.
Solus 1.0 is the result of over eight months of work, coalesced from over a dozen contributors, over 2000 package builds, a rewrite of the premier desktop environment Budgie, and more.
Solus is a Linux-based operating system built from scratch for the modern desktop and targeting the x86_64 architecture.
The Solus Project develops a GTK-based desktop environment referred to as Budgie. Budgie ships with a multitude of features, such as the ones below.
Budgie has been tested and refined to ensure High Contrast theming works out-of-the-box and enabling usage by individuals with visual impairments.
This menu enables quick access to your installed programs and offers category and compact views.
Budgie ships with an applet, notification and customization center referred to as Raven. Raven enables you to:
Solus uses a package manager called eopkg. eopkg supports standard functionality, such as:
The package management system also separates out packages into components, which are categories and sub-categories that describe what the application or library may provide. For instance, firefox is within the network.web.browser component.
Solus 1.0 ships out-of-the-box with numerous applications to enhance the desktop experience. Below are some highlights of applications Solus 1.0 ships:
We enhance the out-of-the-box desktop and Firefox experiences by defaulting to the Arc GTK Theme as well as Arc Firefox Theme, and utilize the Moca Icon Theme to spruce up application iconography.
Solus 1.0 ships with gstreamer media libraries, a multitude of system utilized fonts such as Droid Sans, Symbola, and Dejavu and leverages the most updated GTK 3.18 stack.
Solus 1.0 is UEFI enabled via goofiboot, a distribution-agnostic fork of gummiboot, to ensure a wider variety of modern hardware is capable of using Solus, and further hardware enablement with the shipping of Linux kernel 4.3.3.
Solus 1.0 ISOs can be downloaded across official and community-supported mirrors internationally, as well as via BitTorrent, here. Follow the Installation Guide and ensure you’re using the correct tools to write the downloaded ISO to your DVD or USB.
Below is a list of known issues associated with Solus 1.0:
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