Solus 1.1 Shannon Released

Joshua Strobl (Comms & DevOps)

March 2, 2016

Overview

We are proud to announce the release of Solus 1.1, the first point release in the Shannon series of releases. Solus 1.1 builds upon the groundwork of 1.0 with subtle refinements and improvements to Budgie, large core and graphics stack improvements, and furthers us on our journey to create something that you can just use, something that just works.

Solus

Solus is a Linux-based operating system built from scratch for the modern desktop and targeting the x86_64 architecture.

Budgie

Budgie is our flagship desktop environment, developed and designed for the desktop, with inch of it catering to a desktop workflow. We have continued to improve Budgie, with v10.2.4 shipping in Solus 1.1. This release features a multitude of bugfixes, the following highlighted improvements, alongside updated translations:

We have resolved issues with the some icons, such as network, occasionally rendering inconsistently (sizing, colors).
We have resolved issues with the volume icon size.
System locking has been restored in Solus 1.1, as we are now leveraging LightDM. As a result of dropping GDM for LightDM, we are also seeing significant performance improvements with a reduced CPU overhead.
We have a new logo. Admit it, it’s cute.

For more details on Budgie, see our dedicated Budgie page.

Core and Graphics Improvements

It isn’t tradition for Linux distributions to ship fundamental changes in point releases. But given our tradition of breaking traditions, we’ve shipped a plethora of optimizations to the core of our operating system and further optimization to the core libraries used throughout our display / graphic stack.

We now provide preliminary OpenGL 4.1 support.
Mesa has been updated to 11.1.2
Xorg has been updated to 1.17.4
We’ve synchronized our Intel X11 driver with the last development version in git for improved performance and extended hardware support, including Broadwell, Skylake and preliminary support for future SKUs.
Nouveau support is at the latest release.

General Improvements

Let’s be honest, printing isn’t sexy. Printing isn’t even what the cool kids do anymore. Nowadays they send their ol’ vintage filtered pictures on the Snapchats and sign documents on their fancy iPotatos. But that doesn’t matter. Solus 1.1 ships with printing support out of the box. Now when those cool kids grow up and get jobs, their need for printing on old fashion paper will work. Got an HP printer? Install the hplip package!

We’ve refined our selection of beautiful wallpapers, generously provided by Twisted Pixels.

We also improved mail support in Solus 1.1 by resolving issues relating to Thunderbird and mime association.

Initial Installation Experience

Solus 1.1 builds on our aim to provide a seamless, effortless Linux desktop experience. This experience extends to the installation of Solus, and we have taken the time to evaluate and implement improvements to be made to the installer.

We’ve improved timezone configuration.
We’ve ensured that Windows 8 and above are properly detected.
We’ve continued to improve detection of EFI System Partitions.

We also have resolved issues with USB and UEFI booting!

Shipped Applications and Packages

Applications

Solus 1.1 ships out-of-the-box with numerous applications to enhance the desktop experience. Below are some highlights of applications Solus 1.1 ships:

firefox 44.0.2
nautilus 3.18.5
rhythmbox 3.3
thunderbird 38.6.0
vlc 2.2.2

Firefox, GTK, and Icon Themes

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 Moka Icon Theme to spruce up application iconography.

System

Solus 1.1 ships with gstreamer media libraries, a multitude of system utilized fonts such as Clear Sans, Symbola, and Dejavu and leverages the most updated GTK 3.18 stack.

Solus 1.1 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 4.4.3.