20170101 Featured

Solus Releases ISO Snapshot 2017.01.01.0

January 1, 2017

We’re happy to be kicking off the new year with the release of our first ISO snapshot, 2017.01.01.0, across our Budgie and MATE editions.

General

Improvements To The Out-Of-The-Box Experience

The out-of-the-box experience for shipped applications in Solus has improved, as we’ve worked towards enabling a larger set of features for them.

  • A larger set of devices are now supported for MTP mounting, thanks to an upgraded libmtp.
  • Evince can now handle PS and XPS files.
  • Our package manager, eopkg, has received performance improvements as well as a fix to statelessness that’d cause the Software Center to hang.
  • Instances where a corrupted cursor would appear while using Firefox have been resolved.
  • VLC can now play content from SMB shares and SFTP locations. We’ve also done work on enabling subtitles for certain content played via MKV files.

Alongside those targeted improvements, Solus ships with Firefox 50.1.0 and Thunderbird 45.6.0. Firefox 50.1.0 brings security fixes on top of the various improvements to the Firefox 50 series, such as built-in emojis (those are all the rage these days, right? 🎉) and Thunderbird 45.6.0 delivers various bug and security fixes.

Graphics and Kernel

Solus 2017.01.01.0 ships with the latest stable branch of the Linux Kernel, 4.8.15, as well as 13.0.2 of the OpenGL compatible 3D graphics library, Mesa. Via DoFlicky, our Hardware Drivers utility, we provide the latest of the NVIDIA proprietary drivers:

  • nvidia-glx-driver - 375.26
  • nvidia-340-glx-driver (340.xx series) - 340.101
  • nvidia-304-glx-driver (304.xx series) - 304.134

Installer

Due to a subtle bug in the Installer, swap partitions were ignored when using custom mount points. This issue has since been resolved.

Software Center

This release of Solus ships with the latest version of our Software Center, v15, which features numerous improvements and bug fixes.

Expanded Categories

Solus Sc V15 New Categories

We have expanded our list of dedicated software categories to include:

  • Office:
    • Note-taking applications.
    • E-book and PDF viewing applications.
  • Programming:
    • Haskell libraries
    • General programming libraries.

Third Party

Solus Sc V15 Third Party

We also have an expanded list of 3rd-Party applications that can be installed via the Software Center, such as:

  • Bitwig Studio
  • Enpass
  • Flash Player (NPAPI)
  • Flash Player (PPAPI)
  • Google Earth
  • Insync
  • Mendeley Desktop
  • Moneydance

Software Viewing

Solus Sc V15 Software View

When looking at software information, we now show software licenses.

Translations

This release also features a huge set of translations by our community. Our Software Center is now fully translated into:

  • Basque
  • Catalan and Catalan (Spain)
  • Chinese (Taiwan)
  • Croatian
  • Czech and Czech (Czech Republic)
  • Danish
  • Dutch
  • Finnish
  • French (France)
  • German and German (Switzerland)
  • Hungarian
  • Indonesian
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Nepali
  • Polish
  • Portuguese and Portuguese (Brazil)
  • Romanian
  • Russian
  • Serbian and Serbian (Latin)
  • Slovak
  • Slovenian
  • Spanish, Spanish (Argentina), and Spanish (Mexico)
  • Swedish
  • Turkish
  • Ukrainian

We also have an almost completely translated Software Center in Arabic and partial translations for Greek and Spanish (Latin America). A huge thank you to all translators, we’re always amazed by your hard work and dedication towards making Solus accessible around the world ❤️

Budgie

20170101 Budgie

Solus 2017.01.01.0 ships with the latest of our Budgie releases, 10.2.9. This release features a large set of bug fixes and improvements before our focus on Budgie 11 development, such as:

  • In the Icon Tasklist, an issue with the spinning wheel that would persist for 30 seconds during the launching of an application has been resolved.
  • Resolved an issue in the Keyboard Layout widget where we didn’t manage to retrieve a language name from libgnome-desktop for the zh_CN locale. This resulted in rendering an odd label for the libpinyin IBUS engine, i.e. “(null) (libpinyin)”. Now, when we fail to get a language based on the language code, we fall back to locale detection.
  • Arabic is now a supported language.
  • Chinese is now a supported language, both in Chinese (Traditional) as well as Chinese (Taiwan).
  • Multiple languages have received translation improvements.
Budgie Replace Small

Prior to Budgie 10.2.9, it was easy to accidentally remove a panel. Now, we show a confirmation popover when clicking the removal button, to ensure accidentally panel removal doesn’t occur.

For more information, consult our Budgie 10.2.9 release blog.

MATE

20170101 Mate

Solus 2017.01.01.0 MATE Edition is a continuation of the goal we established with Solus 1.2.1, to deliver a Solus edition that has more traditional desktop experience and optimized for older hardware.

This release ships with the MATE 1.16 series and is the first operating system to ship with the Brisk Menu, our distribution agnostic implementation of a clean, efficient, and modern menu for the MATE Desktop. Brisk Menu enables quick access to installed applications, the Control Center, Software Center, as well as session controls for logging out, locking your system, etc.

20170101 Mate Brisk Open Closeup

We have also renamed our MATE Notification theme from Solus to Slate to reflect our mission of distro agnostic software and such name is used in the Solus MATE Edition. Alongside being available in the Solus repositories, v4 of Slate is also available via its GitHub Page.

Full Changelog (Budgie)

Packages added to this release:

  • jansson
  • libdc1394
  • libebml
  • libgxps
  • libmatroska
  • libraw1394
  • libsamplerate
  • libspectre
  • libssh2
  • nghttp2
  • qt5-base
  • qt5-x11extras
  • sdl1-image
  • xorg-driver-video-qxl

Packages removed from this release:

  • aalib
  • enca
  • mlocate
  • qt5

Changes in this release:

libao

evince

gd

libnspr

gstreamer-1.0-plugins-good

firefox

gpgme

libsndfile

libdvdcss

lightdm-gtk-greeter

libnss

fontconfig

gdk-pixbuf

python3

xorg-driver-input-libinput

openvpn

solus-sc

baselayout

moka-icon-theme

libxfont

vlc

gtk2

gtk3

os-installer

libdrm

xorg-driver-video-intel

gvfs

ca-certs

nvidia-340-glx-driver

libmtp

ghostscript

hexchat

transmission

xorg-server

python-requests

gnome-control-center

gnome-online-accounts

findutils

kernel

gspell

popt

libpciaccess

bluez

libinput

libwebp

solus-hardware-config

djvulibre

libxau

pisi

nano

libxi

glibc

poppler

arc-firefox-theme

tdb

nvidia-304-glx-driver

gnome-terminal

gnome-screenshot

systemd

xorg-driver-video-amdgpu

bash

openssh

xmodmap

libass

mesalib

libtiff

xkeyboard-config

libxcb

lsb-release

tzdata

libxpm

libpcre

dracut

expat

nvidia-glx-driver

graphite2

taglib

freetype2

ffmpeg

nautilus

tar

sudo

xorg-driver-video-vmware

cups-filters

gedit

rhythmbox

curl

gcc

libfontenc

budgie-desktop-branding

xorg-driver-video-nouveau

budgie-desktop

gparted

sqlite3

xorg-driver-video-vesa

rhythmbox-alternative-toolbar

llvm

bash-completion

desktop-file-utils

gnome-color-manager

liblcms2

xorg-driver-video-fbdev

xorg-driver-input-wacom

libx11

thunderbird

arc-gtk-theme

xorg-driver-video-radeon

Full Changelog (MATE)

Packages added to this release:

  • brisk-menu
  • jansson
  • libdc1394
  • libebml
  • libmatroska
  • libraw1394
  • libsamplerate
  • libssh2
  • mate-notification-theme-slate
  • nghttp2
  • qt5-base
  • qt5-x11extras
  • sdl1-image

Packages removed from this release:

  • aalib
  • enca
  • mate-notification-theme-solus
  • mlocate
  • qt5

Changes in this release:

libao

xorg-driver-input-synaptics

gd

libnspr

gstreamer-1.0-plugins-good

firefox

gpgme

libsndfile

libdvdcss

lightdm-gtk-greeter

libnss

fontconfig

gdk-pixbuf

python3

xorg-driver-input-libinput

openvpn

solus-sc

lm_sensors

baselayout

moka-icon-theme

libxfont

vlc

gtk2

gtk3

os-installer

libdrm

xorg-driver-video-intel

ca-certs

nvidia-340-glx-driver

libmtp

ghostscript

hexchat

transmission

xorg-server

mate-desktop

mate-desktop-branding

python-requests

findutils

kernel

popt

libpciaccess

mate-themes

libinput

libwebp

solus-hardware-config

djvulibre

libxau

pisi

nano

libxi

glibc

poppler

arc-firefox-theme

caja

nvidia-304-glx-driver

tdb

systemd

xorg-driver-video-amdgpu

bash

libmateweather

openssh

libass

mesalib

libtiff

atril

xkeyboard-config

libxcb

lsb-release

tzdata

libxpm

libpcre

dracut

expat

nvidia-glx-driver

graphite2

taglib

mate-notification-daemon

freetype2

ffmpeg

xorg-driver-input-evdev

tar

sudo

xorg-driver-video-vmware

cups-filters

rhythmbox

curl

gcc

libfontenc

xorg-driver-video-nouveau

gparted

sqlite3

xorg-driver-video-vesa

gvfs

llvm

bash-completion

desktop-file-utils

liblcms2

xorg-driver-video-fbdev

xorg-driver-input-wacom

libx11

thunderbird

arc-gtk-theme

xorg-driver-video-radeon