Blog
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
Intro to Optimizing Packages on Solus
We’ll explore how to build packages with advanced compiler techniques in order to squeeze more performance out of the box for packages in Solus. We’ll be using the story of how libwebp was optimized for and how it led to an unexpected side quest. Cual es la causa Linux distributions have a lot of control over how a source-based package gets compiled and shipped to users as part of a binary repository. Aggressive and advanced compiler optimization techniques, as well as other methods can be used to provide greater out of the box performance for end users. This can greatly benefit users running on older hardware to provide a snappier end-user experience; reducing time waiting on a heavy workload to finish; or even improved battery life; amongst other improvements.
February 9, 2024
Dont Call Me MATE, pal!
Back in our 4.4 release post we announced that Solus would stop shipping a MATE ISO, mostly because MATE showed no signs of moving away from X11 and towards wayland. At the beginning of this year, we shipped our new Xfce ISO as a beta. And now we’re getting ready to ship the Solus MATE Transition Tool to move existing users off of MATE. The problem MATE and Xfce are similar enough that eager Solusians can, and have, installed XCFE on their MATE machines with nothing more than a couple of eopkg commands. We’re pretty sure our resident bash script enthusiast (ermo) could hammer out a working transition script in an evening. But we want a more polished experience. We know you follow Solus news; after all, you’re reading this. However, we assume there are users who dutifully update their systems, but have no interest in keeping up with our blog posts. How do we get their attention and prompt them to move away from MATE?
January 29, 2024
Eopkg Is Dead, Long Live Eopkg
Close watchers of our packages repository may have noticed some strange looking items: Initial inclusion of eopkg4-bin Testing the eopkg4-bin package Warning: Minions GIF It’s a long story. Our package manager eopkg is written in Python2. Python2 was originally planned to hit end-of-life all the way back in 2015! So Solus contributors past and present have wrestled with three thorny issues:
January 19, 2024
Welcome to the Solus Devlog
Welcome to the Solus Development Log. The Solus Development Log will be used by Solus Staff and outside contributors to highlight wins and changes in Solus. Keep an eye on this space. The Solus DevLog has been setup to facilitate improved communication with the outside world; wins, significant changes, as well as challenges, within Solus. Solus Staff and contributors are encouraged to use this space. The DevLog has been setup as a separate entity to the Solus Blog to encourage more short form development content that doesn’t require the same level of polish as an official blog post.
January 13, 2024
Solus 4.5 Released
The Solus team is proud to announce the release of Solus 4.5 Resilience. This release brings updated applications and kernels, refreshed software stacks, a new installer, and a new ISO edition featuring the XFCE desktop environment.
January 8, 2024
Solus and Hacktoberfest 2023
We are happy to announce that Solus is participating in this year’s Hacktoberfest ! We have a couple of intertwined goals with this. First, we want to encourage anyone who wants to get involved with Solus. Second, we hope to potentially get some new software packaged, fix a few bugs and improve our documentation along the way.
October 1, 2023
State of Solus - August 2023
This blog post is meant as a follow-up to A New Voyage. We want to discuss what we have accomplished, and what we have planned for the future.
August 7, 2023