Blog
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:
January 26, 2025
Clean, Clean, Clean!
Hello everyone! Alfi here, member of Solus Cleanup Crew. It’s been more than a year since I started contributing to Solus and I want to talk about it. About what I did, what we did, what we accomplished so far, and what we want to do next. A bit of background I started contributing in October 2023, when Solus participated in Hacktoberfest . Hacktoberfest is a month-long event that encourage people to contribute to open source project in exchange for some digital merchandise. Finally, an excuse to contribute to something I use every day. Although, as an accountant, all of this is new experience to me. It was confusing at first, but I persisted. Finally, I got the hang of it and I managed to submit around 100 pull request during the month of the event. I was very excited and motivated. During the month, a few people joined the event and contributed to Solus, but then November came and most of the contribution slowed down. I was the only one left that continued doing the beginner tasks, mostly adding homepage to packages.
November 21, 2024
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
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