New Year, new ISOs! We are proud to announce our latest release: Solus 4.7 Endurance. This release focuses on updating our editions, and refreshing the default kernels. We’ve called this release Endurance to highlight our promise to users that we will continue to deliver timely updates to keep their systems stable and beautiful.
General
Default applications
All our editions feature:
- Firefox 134.0.2
- LibreOffice 24.8.4.2
- Thunderbird 128.6.0
For audio and video multimedia playback, we offer software out-of-the-box that caters specifically to our desired experience for each edition.
- Budgie and GNOME editions ship with Rhythmbox for audio playback, with the latest release of the Alternate Toolbar extension to provide a more modern user experience.
- Budgie and GNOME ship with Celluloid for video playback.
- Xfce ships with Parole for multimedia playback.
- Plasma ships with Elisa for audio playback and Haruna for video playback.
Try a new Software Center
We encourage you to try one of the new Software Centers as a replacement for solus-sc (Solus Software Center). A new software center gets you out-of-the-box support for Flatpaks, and better app descriptions through Appstream metadata support.
Our contributors and staff have been hard at work adding and fixing the metainfo.xml files used for Appstream support. Our goal is for every packaged GUI application to have a working metainfo.xml file, so that the software centers can show users all kinds of information about an app before they decide to install it.
Curious Budgie, GNOME and Xfce users can install gnome-software, while Plasma users should install discover.
Better initial support for new NVIDIA cards
Our ISO images now include firmware support for more NVIDIA GPUs out-of-the-box. Some users with 4000 series cards were seeing black screens when trying to install Solus; this should now be fixed.
Kernels and Mesa
Solus now ships Linux kernel 6.12.9. For those who need an LTS kernel, we provide 6.6.70. We plan to move to the 6.12.x kernel series for LTS; if you are using the LTS kernel now, please try the 6.12.x kernel so we can address any issues that may arise from the switch before it becomes mandatory.
Mesa has been upgraded to 24.3.3. See the 24.3.0 notes for new features, the full release notes are here.
Budgie
Solus ships with Budgie 10.9.2, the latest release of the Budgie Desktop. The mature 10.9.x series brings some small improvements, and builds on Budgie’s reputation for stability and polish.
Upstream release notes can be found here.
GNOME
Solus GNOME Edition ships with GNOME 47.3, an update to the GNOME 47 Denver series.
Features Added in GNOME 47
- Accent Colors
- Enhanced Small Screen Support
- Screen Capture Hardware Encoding
- Faster, More Accurate GTK Rendering
- New Open and Save File Dialogs
Upstream release notes can be found here.
Plasma
Solus 4.7 Plasma Edition ships with the latest Plasma Desktop, KDE Frameworks, KDE Gear, and the KDE branch for QT.
Upstream release notes:
Xfce
Our Xfce experience has been updated to version 4.20. This is a big milestone for the Xfce project: It brings very experimental support for Wayland. You can take the tour of the latest release here.
The Xfce edition includes:
- Xfce version 4.20
- Mousepad 0.6.3
- Parole 4.18.2
- Ristretto 0.13.2
- Thunar 4.20.1
- Whiskermenu 2.8.3
Known Issues
- Plasma ISO requires creation of a kwallet key file before connecting to a network.
- When running
eopkg check,linux-currentandlinux-ltsmay show as broken. These are false positives, and can be disregarded. - Sometimes there is no image when booting GNOME in a VM.
- GNOME sometimes boots to black screen and X cursor in VM This appears to be an upstream bug.
We will keep an up to date list of known issues for 4.7 on the forums.
Download
Go to our Download page and select direct download or torrent. Happy installing!
Thank you
This release I would like to highlight the work done by our newly-minted Solus Cleanup Crew ™. This wonderful group has been working through a series of tasks that require a particular kind of dedication. As an example, take a look at the homepage task. More than a year ago, we started a clean-up of one particular field in the files that define our packages. Now, we’re very close to finishing that task, which required editing ~2,300 packages. You can follow their work in the Contributor Round-ups we publish from time to time on our forum.
Thank you to everyone who supports our work financially through Open Collective. We are grateful to all our backers. As a reminder, OpenCollective members get access to testing ISOs between formal releases. For more information, click here.
Future plans
In keeping with our Endurance theme for this release, we are proud to have delivered another year of stable updates to all our users. We plan to mix in a few interesting changes with our next release, along with the usual updates; stay tuned.