Solus 4 Featured

Solus 4 Fortitude Released

March 17, 2019

We are proud to announce the immediate availability of Solus 4 Fortitude, a new major release of the Solus operating system. This release delivers a brand new Budgie experience, updated sets of default applications and theming, and hardware enablement.

General

Default Applications

All our editions feature:

  • Firefox 65.0.1
  • LibreOffice 6.2.1.2
  • Rhythmbox 3.4.3 with the latest release of the Alternate Toolbar extension
  • Thunderbird 60.5.2

Our Budgie and GNOME Editions ship with GNOME MPV 0.16 and our MATE Edition ships with VLC 3.0.6

Hardware and Kernel Enablement

This release of Solus ships with Linux kernel 4.20.16, enabling us to provide support for AMD Picasso and Raven2 APUs, AMD Vega20 and broader Vega10 enablement, as well as improved support for Intel Coffee Lake and Ice Lake CPUs.

Furthermore, Linux kernel 4.20 expands our support for other hardware devices, such as touchpad support for the Lenovo IdeaPad 130-15IKB and 330-15ARR.

Mesa has been upgraded to the latest release, 19.0.0, enabling us to provide OpenGL 4.5 API support (for supported cards) as well as support for newer AMD Polaris, Vega10, Vega20, and VegaM cards.

Multimedia Upgrades

This release ships with ffmpeg 4.1.1, the latest of the 4.x series. This release has enabled us to deliver improved VAAPI MPEG and VP8 decoding as well as support for AOM AV1 encoding, decoding, and parsing.

We’ve also enabled support in VLC for dav1d, an open source AV1 decoder.

Software Center

The Software Center has seen some minor refinements and fixes ahead of our planned rewrite. Specifically, we have fixed instances where search results may not show the package summary or description when an ampersand is used in it.

Additionally WPS Office has been removed from Third Party due to the introduction of an unenforceable EULA by the developers.

Budgie

Budgie 10 Budgie

Solus ships with our brand new release of the Budgie 10.x series, Budgie 10.5, as well as complimenting this release by shipping Solus 4 out-of-the-box with the Plata (Noir) GTK Theme.

Applets

Budgie Menu

This Budgie release introduces a few refinements to Budgie Menu. We no longer show applications multiple times in non-compact mode when headers are turned off. We will also attempt to eliminate the “Sundry” category by automatically moving them to an “Other” category if the category is available.

Caffeine Mode

Budgie 10 Caffeine Mode

Budgie 10.5 introduces a new applet called Caffeine Mode. Caffeine Mode is designed to ensure your system does not automatically suspend, lock, or dim when you’re hard at work.

Caffeine Mode supports:

  • Notifications when it is turned on or off
  • Setting a timer to automatically turn off Caffeine Mode
  • Turning up your display brightness to max or a designated brightness level

We’d like to thank yursan9 for their amazing work on this applet!

Icon Tasklist

Budgie 10 Icon Tasklist Popover

Budgie 10.5 provides a massive upgrade to the IconTasklist applet. Our new IconTasklist applet has improved application detection to more consistently group applications and introduces a brand new IconTasklist popover experience.

This new popover design enables you to:

  • Close all instances of the selected application
  • Easily access per-window controls for marking it always on top, maximizing / unmaximizing, minimizing, and moving it to various workspaces.
  • Quickly favorite / unfavorite apps
  • Quickly launch a new instance of the selected application
  • Scroll up or down on an IconTasklist button when a single window is open to activate and bring it into focus, or minimize it, based on the scroll direction.
  • Toggle to minimize and unminimize various application windows

Additionally, this new popover design enables you to take advantage of custom application actions by supported apps, such as launching a private window in Firefox, composing a new message in Geary, and more!

Raven

Raven, our widget and notification center, has seen improvements in Budgie 10.5.

Calendar

Budgie 10 Calendar Week Numbers

You can now enable week numbers for the Calendar widget in Raven. This can be done easily by going to the Raven section of Budgie Desktop Settings and toggling on “Enable display of week numbers in Calendar”.

Notifications

Budgie 10 Notifications

Budgie 10.5 introduces improved notification management. With this release, notification management is no longer a “clear all or nothing” scenario. Notifications are grouped on a per-app basis and you’re in control of whether or not you want to:

  1. Clear all notifications
  2. Clear all notifications for a specific app
  3. Clear a specific notification for an app

Building on this, notification summaries and descriptions are now properly summarized in their Notification popups. We will also no longer store notifications for:

  1. Power, such as automatic suspend and wake-from-suspend notifications
  2. Printer notifications, such as those for network printers

Sound

Budgie 10 Sound Apps

Our Sound widgets have been completely rewritten and redesigned! We’ve broken up the widgets into Sound Output and Sound Input, fixed some long-standing bugs, and introduced long sought after features.

For Sound Output, you can now enable the “Allow raising volume above 100%” option to crank up your volume to 150%! Great for parties or movie watching.

Controlling your volume on a per-application basis has never been easier. With our new Sound Output widget, you can now control each application as well as mute them right from Raven! No longer do you need need to dive into the Sound settings in GNOME Control Center or install a third-party tool like pavucontrol. Applications which utilize ALSA for sound playback will also have less verbose names, so you can expect to see applications like mocp (music-on-console player) showing up as “mocp” rather than “ALSA plug-in [mocp]”

With both the Sound Output and Input widgets, you can easily switch between devices, and the functionality for device switching has been rewritten to be more reliable in cases of plugging in a new device or removing an existing one.

Last but not least, in the event you have no output or input devices, we’ll automatically hide the respective widget in Raven! Plug in a device and they’ll automatically show up!

Personalization

We strongly believe that Budgie should provide a balanced, curated desktop experience for our users, enabling a reasonable level of personalization out-of-the-box and empower our users (and downstreams such as Ubuntu Budgie) to open up a world of possibilities with Budgie applets.

Budgie 10.5 introduces a wider array of personalization options via our Budgie Desktop Settings application. Let’s go over the various sections which have been refinements!

Style

Budgie 10 Budgie Desktop Settings Style

Budgie 10.5 builds on our existing support for selecting various cursor, icon, and widget (GTK) themes by ensuring that the options we present to users for icons and widgets are more likely to work well with Budgie.

To do this, we have implemented a blacklist of Icon and GTK themes which are known to not provide our users the most optimal experience. For GTK Themes, we blacklist themes such as Adwaita, Clearlooks, Industrial, etc. which are provided by GNOME and are largely aimed at supporting GNOME Shell. For Icon Themes, we blacklist Breeze and the Solus SC Icon Theme (largely leverages Papirus). Should you desire, you can still switch to these themes through a third-party tool such as GNOME Tweaks.

Thanks to the hard work of EbonJaeger, you can choose the position in which Notification pop-ups are displayed. By default, Notifications will display in the top right of your screen, however that can now be changed to any corner of your screen!

For vendors, we now provide the gschema key to hide the “Built-in theme” option. For Solus 4, we leverage this option to hide such built-in “internal” theme and prioritize our work on surfacing third-party GTK themes such as Plata.

Raven

Budgie 10 Budgie Desktop Settings Raven

Budgie 10.5 introduces a new section to Budgie Desktop Settings for personalizing Raven. This is where you would go to allow raising volume above 100% as well as toggle various widgets. We provide options for:

  • Allowing the raising the volume above 100%
  • Enabling the display of week numbers in the Calendar widget
  • Toggling Raven widgets
    • Calendar
    • Sound Output
    • Microphone / Sound Input
    • Media Playback Controls (MPRIS)
    • Power Strip (Quick Access to Budgie Desktop Settings, Lock, and Logout)

Windows

Budgie 10 Budgie Desktop Settings Windows

The Windows section of Budgie Desktop Settings introduces options for:

  • Center new windows on screen (when possible).
  • Disabling Night Light mode when a window becomes full-screen. This option will automatically re-enable Night Light mode when leaving fullscreen. This is great for late night gaming or movie watching.
  • Enabling window focus change on mouse enter and leave instead of based on clicking on a window.

Other

Some other changes / fixes of note:

  • Added dedicated CSS classes for Sound widgets (apps-list, devices-list, sound-devices) as well as various popovers to make it easier for theme developers.
  • We now prevent the dragging of desktop icons into the IconTasklist, given its purpose is to show favorited and/or active windows.

GNOME

Gnome

Our GNOME experience has seen some refinements to our out-of-the-box default experience.

  • Gedit will now default to using the Oblivion theme
  • We now default to the Plata (Noir) GTK Theme.

MATE

Mate

Our MATE experience has seen some refinements to our out-of-the-box default experience.

  • We now default to Plata GTK Theme for improved system theming
  • We’ve resolved an issue with password setting in the About Me of MATE Control Center
  • Due to various issues with broken user management, we have decided to temporarily remove the packages responsible for providing this functionality, which are gnome-system-tools , system-tools-backend, and liboobs. We are actively working with the developer of an alternative tool to resolve various issues (such as avatar and language setting) and we are optimistic we’ll have a solution to deliver to our users. When this tooling is considered ready for production, we will deploy it automatically to our MATE users.

Our MATE ISO ships with latest of the MATE 1.20 series, which has numerous improvements and fixes such as:

  • Applet fixes in Cpufreq and Eyes
  • Numerous fixes in MATE Tweak
  • Numerous fixes in MATE Panel such as for the Clock and na-tray
  • Support for background fallback on HiDPI in mate-desktop
  • You now double-click instead of single-click to edit keyboard shortcuts in MATE Control Center

Plasma

Plasma

Thanks to the hard work by Friedrich von Gellhorn (Girtablulu) and the groundwork laid by Peter O’Connor (sunnyflunk), we’re happy to introduce the availability of a new Plasma Testing ISO. This new Plasma Testing ISO features the latest of the Plasma Desktop 5.15 series, 5.15.2, and is complemented by KDE Frameworks 5.56, KDE Applications 18.12.2, and Qt 5.12.1.

This Plasma Testing ISO features various performance improvements, as well as reduced QML Engine Memory usage thanks to Qt 5.12 by upwards of 30%. It also features improvements from the latest Plasma Desktop and KDE Applications such as:

  • Crash fixes for Dolphin
  • Full support for emoji characters, including color emojis.
  • KDE Plasma 5.15 is starting up now faster.
  • Some new / improved icons.

We have also refined our default experience so windows now open in the center of the desktop, as well as the addition of a new default keyboard shortcut for showing your desktop (Meta+D).

You can download the new Plasma Testing ISO here

Thank You

We would like to thank everyone that has supported and contributed to Solus and its endeavors, including Budgie Desktop. It’s you, our community, that has made this release possible. Whether you’ve filed bugs, fixed software, contributed code, translated Budgie Desktop, or shared Solus releases with your colleagues, friends, and family, you’ve helped shape this release and improved the project for everyone.

Thank you for believing in our shared vision for the project. We look forward to working alongside all of you on many more releases in the future.

Download

To download our latest Editions, you can go to our Download page, where direct links and torrents are available!

Changelog of ISO (Budgie)

Packages added to this release:

  • aom
  • ldns
  • libpcap
  • nvidia-390-glx-driver-modaliases
  • ppp
  • solus-sc-icons
  • wireless-regdb
  • zstd

Packages removed from this release:

  • font-indic-ttf
  • font-lateef-ttf
  • nvidia-304-glx-driver-modaliases

Changes in this release:

libao

ldb

libmbim

libwpg

libwpd

qtstyleplugins

lz4

libxres

xmlsec1

libxtst

gstreamer-1.0-plugins-ugly

libnspr

gstreamer-1.0-plugins-good

x265

libxshmfence

gstreamer-1.0-plugins-base

libglvnd

tevent

gmime

gpgme

libsndfile

libxdmcp

xorg-driver-video-amdgpu

libvisio

gstreamer-1.0

xset

gstreamer-1.0-libav

libgxps

wayland

python-asn1crypto

papirus-icon-theme

xorg-driver-input-libinput

solus-artwork

solus-sc

nghttp2

lm_sensors

libheif

libboost

baselayout

volume_key

libmtp

python-setuptools

unzip

libxv

youtube-dl

geoclue

python

python-dbus

tracker-miners

aa-lsm-hook

cpio

bash-completion

mpv

xorg-driver-input-wacom

libdrm

xorg-driver-video-intel

harfbuzz

shadow

xdpyinfo

libixion

gnutls

onboard

util-linux

libdaemon

libxscrnsaver

ca-certs

ffmpeg

osinfo-db

libcaca

ghostscript

libp11-kit

luajit

hexchat

libcairo

system-config-printer

xorg-server

dbus

comar-api

talloc

python-requests

python-certifi

python-idna

libxcomposite

gnome-control-center

dejavu-fonts-ttf

libsm

findutils

zlib

libzmf

xcb-util-image

xhost

xdg-user-dirs-gtk

attr

sed

libinput

libwebp

libxslt

libglu

freeglut

pyparsing

python-cryptography

libxau

libaio

exiv2

v4l-utils

pisi

xorg-driver-video-fbdev

psmisc

hwdata

elfutils

libproxy

libetonyek

libevdev

libgpg-error

poppler

libice

enchant

libosinfo

tracker

libxt

gnome-mpv

linux-firmware

tdb

libpng

modem-manager

libxext

perl-xml-twig

libxdamage

libwebkit-gtk

imagemagick

gnupg

perl-x11-protocol

dotconf

libcap2

python-cparser

libqmi

cyrus-sasl

systemd

curl

python-urllib3

sbc

samba

gutenprint

clr-boot-manager

openal-soft

python-cffi

libgcrypt

libnss

libcmis

postgresql

doflicky

libedit

exfat-utils

vapoursynth

openssh

hplip

openssl

pyatspi2

libarchive

jansson

accountsservice

bind-utils

libcdr

libxinerama

libxfont2

python3

libxxf86vm

snapd

firefox

python-openssl

inxi

libatasmart

libtiff

brotli

libxcursor

linux-current

breeze-cursor-theme

xkeyboard-config

libndp

sane-backends

libxcb

wget

libxxf86dga

libnfs

cups

xorg-driver-video-qxl

python3-cairo

openconnect

libssh2

libxft

tar

qt5-base

opus

gnome-screensaver

font-tlwg-ttf

unrar

adapta-gtk-theme

networkmanager-openvpn

perl

tzdata

python-pycurl

libva

speech-dispatcher

libxml2

groff

libxrandr

pycups

libvdpau

audit

libmspub

sudo

libgphoto2

nvidia-glx-driver

openjpeg

libusbmuxd

libxi

kerberos

mesalib

graphite2

libqxp

python-magic

libunwind

xkbcomp

libreoffice

grep

wavpack

iproute2

evolution-data-server

gvfs

pcre2

bubblewrap

nvidia-340-glx-driver

faad

libnl

sdl2

tree

python-appdirs

network-manager-applet

coreutils

python-asn1

libxrender

xcb-util-renderutil

libjpeg-turbo

libxvmc

noto-sans-ttf

avahi

fdk-aac

libe-book

gnome-terminal

libxkbcommon

python-chardet

python-packaging

libfontenc

xcb-util-keysyms

eog

qpdf

xcb-util-wm

openexr

man-db

lightdm

libxmu

xorg-driver-video-vmware

cups-filters

pulseaudio

libffi

foomatic-db-engine

file

python-six

slick-greeter

gsettings-desktop-schemas

libgudev

gexiv2

libdmx

rhythmbox

nettle

bzip2

libssh

libgtkmm-2

xmodmap

libflac

mdadm

libtheora

gettext

budgie-desktop

gparted

network-manager

libvoikko

gnome-settings-daemon

lsb-release

sqlite3

xorg-driver-video-vesa

rhythmbox-alternative-toolbar

pam

libicu

gstreamer-1.0-plugins-bad

llvm

wireless-tools

liborcus

libassuan

font-roboto-ttf

unixodbc

zimg

lzip

gcab

polkit

net-snmp

fuse

libogg

perl-net-dbus

libhunspell

mtdev

mariadb

libxfixes

libwnck

perl-xmlparser

libwacom

glib2

liblcms2

nano

python-pysmbc

libbluray

libx11

thunderbird

libimobiledevice

e2fsprogs

xorg-driver-video-radeon

libxkbfile

xorg-driver-video-nouveau

libraw

binutils

totem-pl-parser

gzip

gptfdisk

udisks

glibc

vulkan

python-cairo