Welcoming Stefan Ric to the Team!

Stefan Ric has long been a valued member of the community, helping to provide support and working alongside us and others to improve not just the Solus experience, but the Budgie experience as well. Stefan is best known for his contributions to the Budgie desktop environment, with these contributions being enjoyed by countless users around the world, such as:

• The Places applet, which enables access to a User’s Documents, Music, Pictures, removable media and more. This widget is part of the Budgie Desktop project so all Budgie users can experience it.
• The Haste applet, which enables you to publish text to Hastebin, directly from your Budgie desktop!
• The Screenshot applet, which enables you to take a screenshot of a window, region, or a particular screen. You’re also able to directly upload your screenshot to various services like Imagebin, Imgur, 0x0, or through FTP.

We’re really happy to welcome him on board the Solus team and look forward to working with him on Budgie 11 and other goodies in the future!

Ikey To Become Full-Time Solus Developer!

We’re also really excited to announce that Ikey will become a full-time Solus developer. His statement is as follows:

In 4 weeks from today I will be moving to Solus as a full time developer. Originally we planned to support “a developer” once we hit the $2500 goal. However, I personally feel that this is a move I can now make myself. In doing so this will allow me to commit full time to Solus and all of it’s projects, bringing them up to the standards I want, with the features and experience that you deserve.

Whilst we have achieved a great deal so far, this has been through spare time. With this move I’m now able to dedicate all of my work hours to Solus, which in itself will result in a massive explosion in growth and development cadence for our project.

For clarification, I’m leaving my current job at Intel as a personal choice, and not a professional one. The four years I’ve spent as a software engineer and distribution engineer at Intel have helped mould me into the engineer that I am today. I’ll always be grateful for the experience, knowledge and relationships I have as a result of that time, and will of course miss those that I’ve worked with. This transition is about me following my heart: Solus is my passion.

This move has been enabled by you, supporters of Solus. Together, as a community, we’re going to take Solus to new heights. I want to extend my personal thanks to all supporters and users of Solus, for placing your faith in me. Now, it is time to deliver on that faith.

For more discussion on his move to developing Solus full time, check out Late Night Linux episode 13 here.