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Solus Releases ISO Snapshot 2017.04.18.0

April 18, 2017

We’re proud to announce our second ISO snapshot, 2017.04.18.0, across our Budgie and MATE editions, as well as our new GNOME edition!

This snapshot is the culmination of months of work across nearly every aspect of our operating system, ranging from multiple under the hood upgrades and changes to improvements to our desktop experiences.

Core Improvements

This snapshot features a multitude of new improvements and upgrades to almost every package that ships on any of our ISO snapshots.

Bulletproof Boot Management

This snapshot is the first to deliver bulletproof boot management out-of-the-box, leveraging clr-boot-manager to enable the maintenance and garbage collection of kernels, as well as configuration of the bootloader (across GRUB2 for Legacy Boot and goofiboot for UEFI boot).

Furthermore, clr-boot-manager enables the retention of known-working kernels, so you can always rollback to a prior kernel if a kernel upgrade results in the inability to boot. This gives users even more confidence in upgrading their system, and ensures that their running systems will just keep working as expected.

clr-boot-manager also provides a pathway to supporting multiple kernels. By default, we provide the LTS kernel to our users, however we now have the flexibility to provide multiple kernels without “branch jumping” existing users onto a mainline kernel, something we plan on adding in the future.

GNOME Stack

Our GNOME Stack has been upgraded to the 3.24 series. We have also done further refinements by:

  • Adding back the Enter Location menu option for Nautilus
  • Enabling EGLDevice for EGLStreams in Mutter, as well as disabling NET_WM_PING dialogs, which could break many SDL games or some applications. Such applications are just slower to start, such as Thunderbird, or GL-locked (SDL), and as a result displaying a “not responsive” window unnecessarily would break focus, input, etc. when the application is in fact working.
  • Including a patch to resolve items not appearing via gnome-menus
  • Updating libgnomekbd to resolve schemas from a prior release.

Graphics Stack and Kernel Enablement

Many improvements have been made to our graphics stack and enablement of the Linux kernel for this snapshot, as well as shipping the latest Mesa, 17.0.4.

Linux Driver Management

This snapshot features Linux Driver Management, which is a modern, open source solution developed by us to enable NVIDIA Optimus support and paves the way towards supporting dynamic, switchable graphics across all hardware vendors in the future.

Kernel Enablement

This snapshot features Linux kernel 4.9.22, the latest of the longterm branch at the time of release. Alongside the wide variety of improvements brought by using the latest kernel, we have enabled a substantial set of hardware / devices, such as:

  • NVME Enablement and Improvements
    • Backporting support for Macbook Pro 2016 SSD (NVME, really)
    • NVME SCSI emulation to resolve some minor NVME bugs
    • We now use NVME patches, backported from 4.11, provided by linux-nvme
  • Webcam Enablement
    • GSCPA ZC3XX class webcams (Creative, etc.)
    • GSPCA STV06XX class webcams (Logitech QuickCam, etc.)
  • Other
    • Baytrail sound card support (SoC)
    • Dell All In one WMI (hotkeys, etc)
    • Enabling /proc/config.gz
    • Enabling Macbook gmux for Macbook backlight support.
    • Mayflash (ACRUX) game controller support (gamecube, etc)
    • Ricoh NAND and SDX/MMC
    • Samsung Q10 platform support

With the latest changes to solus-hardware-config and our linux-lts package, we’ll now dynamically select the appropriate power saving CPU frequency governor after the system is booted. During boot we default to the performance setting, to ensure a rapid startup, however we’ll now switch to the appropriate scaling setting to conserve battery life (powersave for intel_pstate and ondemand for cpufreq).

Multimedia Upgrades

This snapshot delivers upgraded multimedia libraries and a new Pulseaudio. We are now shipping with ffmpeg 3.2.4, including patches to VLC for ffmpeg 3 support. ffmpeg 3 features a large set of improvements, such as:

  • New filters
  • VP9 hardware acceleration
  • Support for SDL2

Our gstreamer-1.0 packages have been updated to 1.10.4, which is the latest in their 1.10 stable series.

Pulseaudio has been upgrade to 10.0, enabling improvements to Bluetooth A2DP and HSP profiles and hotplugging support for USB sound cards.

Default Applications

All Editions

All of our editions feature:

  • Firefox 52.0.2
  • Rhythmbox 3.4.1
  • Thunderbird 52.0.1

We also now ship with a default office suite across all editions, LibreOffice 5.3.2.2!

Default Video Player

Our Budgie and GNOME editions ship with GNOME MPV as the new default video player. GNOME MPV was chosen to be our new default for these two editions as it:

  • Fits into the general aesthetic of both Budgie and GNOME
  • In our opinion provides a simpler experience for watching video content

Our MATE edition will maintain the use of VLC, preserving a more traditional user experience.

Budgie

Budgie

This snapshot features the brand new Budgie 10.3.1 release. Budgie 10.3 is the last incarnation of the 10.x series, with only minor updates to the 10.3 releases being planned, and opening the door for development of the Qt 5-based Budgie 11.

Alt+Tab

Budgie Alt Tab

Budgie 10.3 features our new Alt+Tab implementation, eliminating previous issues with our alt+tab and enabling a faster, prettier, and more reliable window switching experience. This implementation is thanks to a significant community contribution, done during our first implementation competition that provided a monetary award of 500 EUR, and further improvements done to the user interface of it.

Customization

Budgie Clock Applet

Clock Applet received customization options in this release, enabling the ability to show the date, seconds, as well as the option for 24 hour time.

Budgie Button Layout

We have also added the ability to choose between left and right window button layouts via Budgie Settings.

Fixes for GTK 3.22

Budgie 10.3 features numerous fixes for GTK 3.22. For starters, Budgie Menu and other popovers will no longer appear to move from the top to the bottom of your screen when the Budgie panel is located on the bottom. We have also resolved an animation issue from GTK 3.22 where popovers would animate twice.

Budgie Run Dialog

Lastly, the Run Dialog will no longer appear “stumpy” on GTK 3.22.

MPRIS Artwork

Budgie Spotify

In Budgie 10.3, we now support the downloading of artwork for our MprisClient and adding code to prevent such artwork from being loaded twice. This can be noticed the most when playing content via Spotify!

Other Fixes and Improvements

On the Budgie applets front, we have:

  • Resolved the inability to pin GNOME Twitch via the Icon Tasklist
  • Resolved incorrect vertical alignment of the Clock Applet
  • Now ensure tray icons are evenly spaced, as a result of syncing our natray with upstream gnome-panel.
  • Improvements have been made to the Places applet
    • Support for encrypted volumes and remote (S/FTP, SMB) shares.
    • Clicking on S/FTP bookmarks now open them in the default file manager.

For Raven, we fixed the notification spam that’d occur during start up notifying the user they’re connected to the network. No more red notification bell on startup!

For budgie-wm, a crash has been fixed that would occur when the current locale was deleted.

GNOME

Gnome

We’re proud to formally announce the release of our Solus GNOME edition. This edition fulfills our desire to make GNOME a first class experience, instead of a hybrid Budgie / GNOME setup, and introduces a near-stock GNOME experience with sane defaults and some shipped extensions.

Our GNOME edition ships with GNOME 3.24 and features the GNOME theme provided by Arc, providing a cleaner and more modern look to GNOME. Furthermore, we ship and have enabled several sensible extensions so you can spend less time tweaking and more time just using the system.

  • Dash To Dock is installed to enable faster access to your applications. We provide subtle styling changes as well as set defaults such as:
    • Setting the Applications icon on the top of the dock
    • Setting the default click action of running applications to minimize
    • Reducing the hide delay
    • Changing the maximum icon size to better utilize screen real estate.
  • Impatience enables faster animations for GNOME Shell. In our edition, you can expect animations to take only half the time!
  • TopIcons is shipped by default to merge the locations of application tray icons into a single place, as opposed to it being separated by the “Legacy Tray” and the top tray icons.
  • We provide the chrome-gnome-shell package out-of-the-box so installation of extensions via Chrome are painless, and installation via Firefox is simpler, by only requiring the installation of Firefox support provided via the GNOME Extensions website.

MATE

Mate

Solus MATE edition delivers the latest 1.18 release from the MATE project as well as shipping with a new Brisk menu.

Brisk Menu 0.3.5 offers:

  • Standardized CSS usage and fixes broken assets
  • Enables a rollover behavior via gsettings
  • Adds a context menu for editing menus

Ongoing support of development of Brisk Menu has been provided by Martin Wimpress and the Ubuntu MATE project and they have our thanks for helping to enable a modern, efficient menu for the MATE Desktop Environment.

Several issues relating to keyboard layouts have now been resolved, ensuring layouts are “sticky” and switch dynamically. The control center is now able to display the system layouts, as well as the MATE 1.18 stack update introducing support for libinput.

Full Changelog (Primary Image)

Packages added to this release:

  • breeze-cursor-theme
  • clr-boot-manager
  • coinmp
  • dbus-launch
  • fdk-aac
  • fftw
  • glew
  • gnome-autoar
  • gnome-backgrounds
  • gnome-mpv
  • gnome-tweak-tool
  • gnome-user-docs
  • hwdata
  • isl
  • kernel-glue
  • libabw
  • libboost
  • libcdr
  • libcmis
  • libe-book
  • libetonyek
  • libexttextcat
  • libfreehand
  • libixion
  • liblangtag
  • libmspub
  • libmwaw
  • libodfgen
  • liborcus
  • libpagemaker
  • libreoffice-calc
  • libreoffice-common
  • libreoffice-draw
  • libreoffice-impress
  • libreoffice-writer
  • librevenge
  • libunistring
  • libvisio
  • libwpd
  • libwpg
  • libwps
  • libxscrnsaver
  • linux-driver-management
  • linux-lts
  • linux-tools-cpupower
  • mpv-libs
  • mythes
  • nautilus-extension
  • neon
  • npth
  • pcre2
  • stoken
  • uchardet
  • vapoursynth
  • youtube-dl
  • zimg

Packages removed from this release:

  • breeze-snow-cursor-theme
  • faac
  • gl-driver-switch
  • groff
  • json-c
  • kernel
  • kernel-modules
  • libdc1394
  • libdvbpsi
  • libebml
  • libidn
  • libmatroska
  • libmodplug
  • libpth
  • libraw1394
  • libsamplerate
  • libssh2
  • libupnp
  • libwebkit3-gtk
  • libxvmc
  • qt5-base
  • qt5-x11extras
  • rfkill
  • sdl1
  • sdl1-image
  • thermald
  • tlp
  • vlc
  • xorg-driver-video-intel

Changes in this release:

libao

appstream-glib

colord

less

budgie-desktop-branding

totem-pl-parser

xinit

evince

gd

libnspr

gstreamer-1.0-plugins-good

x264

x265

gdbm

gstreamer-1.0-plugins-base

gpgme

gobject-introspection

libsndfile

samba

xorg-driver-video-amdgpu

libpwquality

glibmm

gstreamer-1.0

gnome-calendar

gdk-pixbuf

xorg-driver-input-libinput

openvpn

solus-artwork

solus-sc

gmp

baselayout

inetutils

lsb-release

unzip

mpc

mesalib

geoclue

python

python-dbus

cpio

bash-completion

gtk3

libwacom

xorg-driver-input-wacom

libdrm

libnotify

gnutls

pango

util-linux

alsa-plugins

atkmm

ca-certs

font-hack-ttf

libmtp

ghostscript

libp11-kit

comar

hexchat

libcairo

xorg-server

dbus

dconf-editor

xdpyinfo

gnome-control-center

gnome-system-monitor

gnome-online-accounts

dejavu-fonts-ttf

espeak-ng

libvorbis

pangomm

orca

shared-mime-info

gnome-disk-utility

gspell

vino

iso-codes

popt

attr

libpciaccess

bluez

setxkbmap

libinput

libwebp

libxslt

libgtksourceview

udisks

glib-networking

pulseaudio

v4l-utils

pisi

xorg-driver-video-fbdev

iptables

librest

elfutils

libproxy

inotify-tools

libgpg-error

arc-firefox-theme

linux-firmware

libpng

nvidia-304-glx-driver

libwebkit-gtk

gnupg

gnome-terminal

libcap2

gnome-screenshot

sharutils

coreutils

gnome-bluetooth

gawk

libsigc++

libbluray

lightdm-gtk-greeter

orc

bash

libnss

doflicky

pcaudiolib

libxkbcommon

seahorse

openssh

baobab

openssl

foomatic-db-engine

libarchive

mutagen

cairomm

accountsservice

openldap

libgweather

libgusb

glib2

lua

at-spi2-atk

libplist

firefox

libgnome-menus

gnome-themes-standard

lvm2

libtiff

harfbuzz

xz

ntfs-3g

xkeyboard-config

font-droid-ttf

libvpx

wget

libjson-glib

cups

xorg-driver-video-qxl

libvte

font-symbola-ttf

openconnect

zenity

wayland

python3-gobject

networkmanager-openvpn

perl

tzdata

opus

libva

libpeas

speech-dispatcher

libexempi

libpcre

dracut

libvdpau

procps-ng

libxklavier

nvidia-glx-driver

kerberos

file-roller

mutter

ibus

libevdev

libusb

xkbcomp

gstreamer-1.0-plugins-ugly

eog

libksba

evolution-data-server

grilo

grep

nvidia-340-glx-driver

zlib

libtasn1

network-manager-applet

networkmanager-openconnect

sed

upower

ffmpeg

python-gobject

libcanberra

gstreamer-1.0-libav

alsa-utils

inxi

nautilus

libassuan

gmime

sudo

xorg-driver-video-vmware

cups-filters

gedit

clutter-gtk

libgcrypt

systemd

clutter

file

xauth

gsettings-desktop-schemas

wavpack

libtelepathy-glib

libtool

curl

dbus-glib

acl

gcc

solus-hardware-config

usbutils

libgtkmm-3

libflac

alsa-lib

xorg-driver-video-radeon

libgnome-desktop

xorg-driver-video-nouveau

budgie-desktop

gparted

network-manager

gcr

libsecret

twolame

which

libatk

sqlite3

xorg-driver-video-vesa

gvfs

libsoup

libicu

gstreamer-1.0-plugins-bad

llvm

iproute2

pinentry

gnome-calculator

adwaita-icon-theme

polkit

fuse

libogg

gnome-settings-daemon

libffi

mpfr

libwnck

mobile-broadband-provider-info

gnome-color-manager

liblcms2

nano

yelp

os-installer

libgnomekbd

thunderbird

alsa-firmware

e2fsprogs

libical

nettle

arc-gtk-theme

gnome-session

pciutils

gzip

at-spi2

glibc

bzip2