Blog
Unveiling Our New Website
Heya folks, we have some exciting news to share! Today, after many months of work, Solus has a new website! A lot of work has gone into this project, and we are all very excited to finally deploy it for everyone to use. We’ve chosen to do away with the old custom Solus theme for Hugo, and adopt the Hextra theme. It is a modern theme that supports blogs, documentation, and regular static pages. Importantly, Hextra is actively maintained, and has a good community and friendly developers.
November 22, 2025
A New Epoch Begins
Heya, folks! We have some exciting news to share with you today. Last year, we began the process of moving the remaining executable files from /bin and /sbin to directories inside of /usr, and creating compatibility symlinks from /usr/bin to /bin and /usr/sbin to /sbin. We call this “Usr-Merge” . The rollout of our Usr-Merge process was a success, and it is now time to perform the next steps. There are compatibility symlinks in some packages to make sure they work on both merged and unmerged systems, and we cannot remove those without potentially breaking systems. That is, we can’t, unless we do an “epoch bump”, and start using a new package repository. This is also an important step on the road to using AerynOS tooling.
October 11, 2025
Hacktoberfest 2025
Heya folks! It’s now October, and that means Hacktoberfest ! It is an annual event that “encourages people to contribute to open source throughout October”, while earning rewards. Hacktoberfest is an excellent way to start getting involved in Open Source, and many projects participate in the event. You can make contacts in different projects, get mentoring, and practice your skills. On top of that, you can get cool badges !
October 1, 2025
Update on Snaps
Last year we announced the removal of snaps from Solus in January of 2025. Because of recent developments, we have decided to hold off on the complete removal for the time being. What has changed There is progress on getting the required AppArmor support added to the Linux kernel itself. The changes have made it to linux-next, which means that they could land in the next Linux release (v6.16).
May 5, 2025
Solus 4.7 Released
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.
January 26, 2025
Solus 4.6 Released
The Solus team is proud to announce the release of Solus 4.6 Convergence. This refresh brings the usual collection of Desktop Environment updates, kernel enhancements, and increased hardware support. Note that the file names of the ISOs is slightly different than they used to be. Each file now has the release channel and date that the ISO was generated in the name. General Default applications All our editions feature:
October 14, 2024
Solus Hacktoberfest 2024
Hey folks! It’s spooky season, so you know what that means. It’s time for Hacktoberfest 2024 ! This is the annual event that “encourages people to contribute to open source throughout October”, in exchange for rewards. This year we have two main goals. First, as always, we want to support anyone looking to get involved in open source contributions, or helping Solus specifically. We would love to add people to our packaging team. Second, there’s been a big push recently to clean up and update our package repository, and we can use your help. Much of this work currently involves adding home pages to packages, making sure they build, fixing them if they don’t, and adding monitoring information. Related, we would like to field test and improve our “autobuild” tool. Read on for ways to participate.
September 30, 2024
Usr-Merge
Back in May, 2024, we made our initial attempt at doing what we’re calling “Usr-Merge”. While initially hopeful, it quickly became clear that there were significant problems with our approach, and that a new one would be needed. This post will go into what happened in May, and outline what we plan to do next time. What is Usr-Merge? The old way of organizing the Linux filesystem split files between /bin and /usr/bin, /sbin and /usr/sbin, /lib and /usr/lib, and /lib64 and /usr/lib64. In recent years, there has been a push to unify everything by putting all the directories in the /usr file tree, e.g. /usr/bin and /usr/lib64, and adding compatibility symbolic links (symlinks) pointing to the directories in /usr. There are several reasons for this:
September 4, 2024
Dropping AppArmor Kernel Patches
Heya folks! With the 6.9 update to our Current branch of the Linux kernel, we are dropping the AppArmor patchset from Canonical. This means that snaps will now run with partial confinement if you are using the current kernel. Our LTS kernel will still have the AppArmor patches applied. Dropping these patches is the first step in ending support for Snap on Solus. Snaps will still be supported for the rest of 2024, they will just be running with only partial confinement. Long-term, Snap users are encouraged to explore alternative solutions, such as Flatpak.
July 15, 2024
State of Solus - April 2024
April 18, 2024 marks exactly one year since Josh published the “New Voyage” post announcing the return of Solus in its current form. A good chunk of that post was dedicated to explaining the work we wanted to do in the future, having just completed the technical task of migrating critical Solus infrastructure off the previous hosting environment. In this post, I will outline what we’ve accomplished in this busy year.
April 20, 2024