We are proud to announce the immediate availability of Solus 4.1, a new Solus 4 “Fortitude” series release. This release delivers a brand new desktop experience, updated software stacks, and hardware enablement.
All our editions feature:
For audio and video multimedia playback, we offer software out-of-the-box that caters specifically to our desired experience for that edition.
This release of Solus ships with Linux kernel 5.4.12, enabling us to provide support for a wide range of new hardware from AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA, such as:
Mesa has been upgraded to the latest release, 19.3.2. Mesa 19.3 introduces OpenGL 4.6 support (for supported cards) and enables the new experimental ACO shader compiler, in addition to a wide variety of improvements for AMD APUs (Raven Ridge) and Intel Iris Pro Graphics.
Solus 4.1 is the first ISO release to feature the use of Zstandard(zstd) compression for the SquashFS images. Compared to the XZ compressed ISOs from previous releases, the ztsd compressed size is a little bit larger. But as a result, the decompression times are significantly improved (3-4x), leading to a much faster installation process than ever previously achieved. In most cases, you can expect to spend more time filling out the questions in the installation wizard than it will actually take to copy everything to disk. We hope you are just as surprised as we were at just how fast this process has become.
This release ships with ffmpeg 4.2.2, the latest in the 4.2 series. This release has enabled us to deliver faster AV1 decoding by making dav1d the preferred ffmpeg AV1 decoder.
Solus ships with the latest release of gstreamer, 1.16.2. This release features numerous bug fixes such as:
Other libraries have seen minor updates as well, such as:
Solus 4.1 ships with the latest release of systemd, v244. systemd v244 introduces a bunch of desired features by our users as well as paves the way for future improvements to Solus around EFI support.
We have also taken care to ensure that software which currently only supports cgroups v1, such as Docker and podman (when leveraging runc, as opposed to crun) continue to work. So if you utilize Docker or podman in your development workflow, you’ll feel right at home under Solus with no additional effort around kernel command-line flags required!
Gaming under Solus just got even simpler! Solus 4.1 now ships with raised file limits to enable ESync support, raising the file limits in our PAM package to Lutris' suggested value, so you can spend less time configuring your system and more time playing games!
Solus develops an ahead-of-timer compiler for AppArmor profiles called aa-lsm-hook, which we utilize to compile AppArmor profiles leveraged by software such as snapd and improve boot performance by loading from our generated cache. During this release cycle, aa-lsm-hook
was completely rewritten in Go for simplicity and long-term maintenance, as well as enabling us to support newer versions of AppArmor which have changed cache directory locations. A benefit of this new support is the end user should no longer encounter issues where some of their snaps fail to launch after a reboot!
Solus ships with NetworkManager 1.22.4. Since the release of Solus 4 and its shipped NetworkManager 1.10.10, new features and fixes such as the following have been added:
wpa_supplicant has been updated to 2.9, which enables support for WPA3-SAE and OWE. WPA3-SAE is set to supersede WPA2-PSK eventually with wifi access points now starting to provide a WPA2/WPA3 mixed mode. OWE (Opportunistic Wireless Encryption) uses SAE (Simultaneous Authentication of Equals) to encrypt open wifi networks where possible.
Solus ships with the latest release of our flagship desktop environment, Budgie 10.5.1. Released last October, this release introduced fixes and quality of life improvements such as:
Solus 4.1 GNOME Edition ships with the latest release of the GNOME 3.34 Stack, 3.34.3. GNOME 3.34.3 introduces various fixes to the GNOME experience such as:
Solus GNOME Edition continues to ship with our curated out-of-the-box experience leveraging a multitude of extensions, such as:
Solus 4.1 MATE Edition ships with the latest release of the MATE 1.22 series, which contains numerous bug fixes and under-the-hood improvements. Some of the highlights include:
Solus MATE Edition ships with the latest release of our Brisk Menu implementation, 0.6.1. The 0.6 series features various fixes and improvements, such as:
Solus MATE Edition now ships with a new utility for user and groups management called MATE User Manager, replacing the previous group and user management functionality in MATE Control Center.
We’re proud to announce a new addition to the Solus family: Solus Plasma Edition. Solus Plasma Edition has been a long sought after experience by current and prospective users alike, melding our ability to create a curated out-of-the-box experience with the sophistication of the Plasma Desktop experience.
Solus 4.1 Plasma Edition features Plasma Desktop 5.17.5, the latest of 5.17 series, and is complemented by KDE Frameworks 5.66, KDE Applications 19.12.1 and QT 5.13.2.
Solus Plasma Edition refines the Plasma Desktop experience by:
Solus Plasma Edition ships with Solus-specific integrations for KDE Applications and Frameworks, such as:
snap
directory.Solus Plasma Edition ships with the following default applications (outside of the usual Solus Edition defaults such as Firefox and Thunderbird):
#Solus
server for support.We would like to thank everyone that has supported and contributed to Solus and its endeavors. It’s you, our community, that has made this release possible. Whether you’ve filed bugs, fixed software, contributed code, translated Budgie Desktop, validated testing ISOs, 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 more releases this year.
To download our latest Editions, you can go to our Download page, where direct links and torrents are available!
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lz4
libvpx
libxtst
libnspr
x264
x265
gdbm
gstreamer-1.0-plugins-base
libglvnd
pango
gobject-introspection
systemd
libxdmcp
libnss
gstreamer-1.0
grub2
inxi
gmp
mpc
python
python-dbus
aa-lsm-hook
bash-completion
libbluray
libdrm
libgtk-2
util-linux
ca-certs
libp11-kit
libcairo
dbus
libxcomposite
findutils
parted
json-c
sed
libwebp
libssh
libxshmfence
libxau
libicu
v4l-utils
nano
xdpyinfo
hwdata
elfutils
inotify-tools
libice
linux-firmware
libpng
modem-manager
libxext
libcap2
libqmi
gawk
libxv
dmidecode
libxft
libgcrypt
bash
libedit
sdl2
openssh
openssl
isl
glib2
libxxf86vm
cryptsetup
mesalib
libtiff
wpa_supplicant
harfbuzz
libxcursor
xz
font-droid-ttf
libxcb
perl
curl
libssh2
openal-soft
gdk-pixbuf
libva
tzdata
nghttp2
libxinerama
libxrandr
libvdpau
libdmx
expat
ncurses
libxi
kerberos
grep
ffmpeg
faad
linux-current
libtasn1
coreutils
libxrender
libjpeg-turbo
avahi
alsa-utils
man-db
sudo
file
libgudev
wavpack
gcc
lame
libflac
alsa-lib
gettext
network-manager
usysconf
libatk
sqlite3
libxdamage
pam
llvm
cups
zimg
bzip2
xrandr
libogg
libxfixes
audit
libxxf86dga
iso-codes
libx11
usbutils
binutils
pciutils
glibc
mpfr
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