On behalf of the Solus team and community, we’re extremely proud to announce the immediate availability of Solus 3. This is the third iteration of Solus since our move to become a rolling release operating system. Unlike the previous iterations, however, this is a release and not a snapshot. We’ve now moved away from the “regular snapshot” model to accommodate the best hybrid approach possible - feature rich releases with explicit goals and technology enabling, along with the benefits of a curated rolling release operating system.
All of our editions feature:
Our Budgie and GNOME Editions ship with GNOME MPV 0.12 and our MATE Edition ships with VLC 2.2.6.
This new major version of Solus is now based on the latest stable branch of the Linux kernel, 4.12.7. This switch enables various hardware improvements for the latest AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA hardware. Users of the existing linux-lts
kernel will continue to receive updates indefinitely, with the next major update to this branch scheduled to land in or around September.
Furthermore, we’ve enabled AppArmor LSM
by default to provide functionality for snapd confining, as well as the introduction of a fully functioning Linux Security Module within our kernel builds.
Mesa has seen an upgrade to 17.1.6 and libtxc_dxtn has been updated to help improve reliability and graphical performance in some games.
Bluetooth controllers are now automatically enabled and our bluez now uses a stateless configuration. Users of wireless Logitech keyboards are able to utilize them during dm-crypt unlock of an LVM / LUKS rootfs.
To improve the out-of-the-box support for printing and scanning, we now ship with sane-backends, hplip drivers, and Canon UFRII LT printer drivers. Our hplip has been upgraded to 3.17.7, which improves cups support, recognition of Solus by hp-check, and udev rule location fixes.
This release delivers ffmpeg 3.3.3, the latest in the 3.3 series, offering improvements such as a native Opus encoder, new multimedia filters, and VAAPI-accelerated MPEG-2 and VP8 encoding. We’ve also enabled support in ffmpeg for cdio, openal, webp, and other libraries.
This release features out-of-the-box support for snaps, universal software packages for Linux. Support for snaps relieves pressure from software vendors to target a specific platform by sharing a unified target across all Linux distributions. For our users, they gain access to a wide variety of software that may not meet our package inclusion criteria, such as server software, as well as enabling an improved distribution method for Third Party software.
Support for Snaps was made possible due to fantastic cross-platform collaboration between Canonical’s Snapcraft and Ubuntu teams and Solus, which is the first non-Ubuntu distribution to feature full snap confinement leveraging AppArmor, offering feature parity with the reference Ubuntu implementation.
Solus ships with our brand new release of the Budgie 10.x series, Budgie 10.4, as well as introducing our new branding defaults, adopting the stunning Adapta GTK Theme and Papirus Icon Theme, as well as complementing those design changes by adopting the Noto Sans font. We’ve also moved the primary panel from the top of the display to the bottom and tweaked panel widget spacing to make Budgie feel more spacious.
Whether it was implementing features, fixes, or improving / expanding translations, the Budgie community was integral to this Budgie release. So thank you to everyone that has contributed.
Budgie 10.4 now has maximize and unmaximize animations for applications.
In this release of Budgie, the alt+tab switcher will now prefer the theme icon instead of the X11 icon where possible. Shift+Alt+Tab support has also been implemented, enabling you to go backwards in the Alt+Tab dialog.
This release introduces a new applet, Night Light, which can help reduce eye strain by reducing your display’s blue light by making your screen “warmer”. This applet integrates into the Night Light functionality provided in Mutter 3.24.x and provides quick access to toggling Night Light on/off, as well as:
The Places Indicator applet also received some love this release, with a new option to always expand the places section when the applet is shown. The whole Places section header is now a clickable button, making toggling the section easier. The Places Applet icon has also been changed to a more apt folder icon, better representing “places” rather than “disks” as previously presented.
.desktop
file is found, use the icon referenced in it.Building upon the lessons learned when (and inspiration from) implementing the Brisk Menu for MATE, searching has been completely overhauled. We now support the use of categories for searching and provide a predictable, sane search mechanism. Items that previously would not show up as expected, such as searching for “Displays”, are now resolved.
For items that would show up in excess, we now de-duplicate search results to only showing unique entries when we’re in “search mode” or “super compact” mode (in other words, no headers or sidebar categories).
We now dynamically compute scores for a given entry during search in relation to the search term. Assuming the entry is relevant, we’ll display results in a given order and allow terms to match and display higher up in the list depending on how close it is to the term, the contents, how much a string is matched, etc.
In Budgie 10.4, you can now set vertical panels on the left and right sides of your display. Popovers will correctly indicate (with its “tail”) the point of origin, we’ve done extensive work to ensure all of our animations and applets will display and adjust depending on if they are on (or originating from) a horizontal or vertical panel, and Raven will account for right-side panels and slide out from underneath the panel, as well as anchor to left panels when no horizontal or right panel exists.
With these new panels, you will now also be able to control the panel transparency (via our new Settings app) with three modes:
As if Budgie panels couldn’t improve more, we’ve also introduced a Dock mode for panels, enabling you to put a dock on any side of your display!
This Dock mode also uses a custom CSS class, which means theme developers have the ability to implement custom styling.
For Budgie 10.4, we implemented the Budgie.Popover
widget, enabling us to replace our usage of Gtk.Popover and fix a long-standing issue with inconsistent popover animations, for example Budgie Menu animating across the screen if the user’s panel (and the menu applet) was at the bottom.
Furthermore, this Popover widget enables more granular positioning regardless of its origin (top, bottom, left, or right). This granular positioning helped to provide us the opportunity to implement panels for all sides of your display!
Budgie 10.4 moves Settings out of Raven and into a dedicated application. This new Budgie Settings application enables us to improve the user experience of managing panels, applets, and their respective settings, as well as providing us the opportunity to describe what particular settings may do, with the classic example being “Disable unredirection of windows”. To open Budgie Settings, the behavior of the Settings button at the bottom of Raven has been changed to open Budgie Settings instead of GNOME Control Center. You can also pin our Settings application to your panel, like you would any application, and launch it via Budgie Menu.
In the image above, you can see the management of the Bottom Panel. We have split panel management into two sections, with Applets being the primary section (as we anticipate users primarily making changes to applets) and Settings. Similar to the behavior of prior Budgie releases, you can move applets around using the up or down arrow buttons, or delete them. These buttons are positioned at the top of the list to make them more easily accessible for lower-resolution displays.
To the right of the applet list, you have a dedicated “Add applet” button and settings for the selected applet below.
In the Settings section of a panel, a multitude of options are exposed, such as:
Budgie Settings also enables you to manage the autostarting of applications, eliminating the need for a secondary tool such as GNOME Tweak Tool.
In addition to the above mentioned goodies, some other fixes include:
Solus GNOME Edition has received numerous improvements to its curated, out-of-the-box GNOME experience, as well as featuring our new default GTK and Icon Themes, Adapta and Papirus respectively.
Solus GNOME Edition ships with the latest stable releases of the GNOME stack, such as GNOME Shell 3.24.3, Mutter 3.24.4, and Nautilus 3.24.2, as well as continuing to provide default extensions such as Dash to Dock, Impatience, and TopIcons Plus.
Full-size image
Solus GNOME Edition now ships with Plotinus, the searchable command palette for GTK3 applications, and is enabled out-of-the-box. Plotinus makes searching menu items faster and keyboard-driven use of apps easier than ever. Plotinus can be launched using it’s default keybinding, which is Ctrl+Shift+P
or Ctrl+Alt+P
depending on your keyboard layout.
Solus GNOME Edition ships an updated GNOME Online Accounts and Evolution Data Server, resolving issues with Calendar syncing for Google accounts that some users faced.
Solus GNOME Edition ships with a patched Nautilus that re-introduces the graphical option for the “Enter Location” option that was removed in Nautilus, enabling users to more easily access the functionality to type a location to navigate.
Among the above mentioned items, we’ve also resolved the following issues:
Caja has been patched to support whitelisting and trusting symlinked vendor-provided .desktop files. This enables us to provide default desktop icons for items such as the Installer.
A message from Ikey, Solus Project founder
I would like to personally thank everyone that has supported, and those who continue to support our projects. With your support, you’ve enabled me to work full time on Solus. It is a rare privilege indeed to be able to work on that which you love, to make your passion your life’s work. Without your support, and without the community that empowers Solus, we would never be the project we have become. Here’s to a fantastic 2017, and a glorious, open and collaborative future for all of us.
Press can obtain our Press Release PDF and Media Pack via our Press Center.
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gnome-keyring
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libtasn1
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alsa-utils
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to latest LTS release (4.9.42)curl
gcc
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lame
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coreutils
sqlite3
rhythmbox-alternative-toolbar
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llvm
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zimg
kernel-glue
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eog
gnome-screensaver
libmwaw
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nettle
xorg-driver-video-nouveau
gnome-session
totem-pl-parser
alsa-plugins
udisks
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