Blog
This Year in Solus (2016 Edition)
2016 was an incredible year for Solus. We went from having our first release in December of 2015, to completely switching to a rolling release model. We had multiple Solus releases, multiple Budgie releases, several rewrites of different components of Solus, ranging from the Installer to the Software Center. We introduced our native Steam runtime and improved both our state of statelessness as well as optimizations. When I first started talking about Solus at the beginning of 2016, I used the analogy that what we were building was the engine for our vehicle, one to deliver us to our goals for Solus. While we’re still building that engine, we’re in a drastically better shape than we were in 2016, and we’re more confident, and bolder, than ever.
January 3, 2017
Solus Releases ISO Snapshot 2017.01.01.0
We’re happy to be kicking off the new year with the release of our first ISO snapshot, 2017.01.01.0, across our Budgie and MATE editions. General Improvements To The Out-Of-The-Box Experience The out-of-the-box experience for shipped applications in Solus has improved, as we’ve worked towards enabling a larger set of features for them. A larger set of devices are now supported for MTP mounting, thanks to an upgraded libmtp. Evince can now handle PS and XPS files. Our package manager, eopkg, has received performance improvements as well as a fix to statelessness that’d cause the Software Center to hang. Instances where a corrupted cursor would appear while using Firefox have been resolved. VLC can now play content from SMB shares and SFTP locations. We’ve also done work on enabling subtitles for certain content played via MKV files. Alongside those targeted improvements, Solus ships with Firefox 50.1.0 and Thunderbird 45.6.0. Firefox 50.1.0 brings security fixes on top of the various improvements to the Firefox 50 series, such as built-in emojis (those are all the rage these days, right? 🎉) and Thunderbird 45.6.0 delivers various bug and security fixes.
January 1, 2017
Solus Announces First Release of Brisk Menu
We are happy to announce the first release of Brisk Menu, our implementation of a clean, efficient, and modern menu for the MATE Desktop. Brisk Menu 0.1.0 enables quick launching of applications, as well as access to session controls (such as logout, suspend, hibernate) and the system’s Control Center. Brisk Menu is in its early days and we have a lot of plans for it going forward. Firstly, we will be working to enable launching Brisk Menu with the Super key. After that, we’ll be working on making Brisk Menu translatable, as well as introducing the following customization options:
December 30, 2016
Budgie 10.2.9 Released
We’re happy to announce the release of Budgie 10.2.9. This is solely a bug fix release, tackling some niggling issues before our focus shifts to development of Budgie 11. Widgets Numerous fixes have been made to our various panel widgets. Icon Tasklist Thanks to investigative work that occurred during our development of Brisk Menu , an issue with the spinning wheel that would persist for 30 seconds during the launching of an application has been resolved. Some previous hacks have been eliminated and we now use per-button GdkAppLaunchContext and correctly “turn off” the notify via Gdk to stop the spinning wheel.
December 16, 2016
This Week in Solus - Install #40
Welcome to This Week in Solus, install #40. ISO Snapshot On the last This Week in Solus, I highlighted our roadmap, which includes our upcoming ISO snapshot. This ISO snapshot will feature the latest kernel, which at the time of this writing, is looking like 4.9. Additionally, since the writing of TWIS #39, we have landed an upgraded libinput and xorg libinput driver, thus those will see inclusion in the ISO as well.
December 11, 2016
Solus To Be Unixstickers' December Beneficiary
Every time you purchase merchandise from Unixstickers, including merchandise for Solus , a portion of the proceeds goes to the respective project. Additionally, each month Unixstickers chooses a different project to which they donate an additional portion of their total revenue towards. We’re grateful that Unixstickers has chosen Solus to be December’s beneficiary. We intend on utilizing the donations provided by Unixstickers ’ donation program towards the cost of a new package server in the United States, meaning the opportunity for faster update speeds and software downloading!
December 1, 2016
This Week in Solus - Install #39
Welcome to This Week in Solus, install #39. Announcing Partnership with Unixstickers We recently announced our partnership with Unixstickers to provide high-quality Solus stickers for our community and fans. If you have yet to read about it, click here . Roadmap We know many of you have been curious to hear our plans for the future, now that Solus 1.2.1, and today we’re ready to share some details.
November 15, 2016
Solus Announces Partnership with Unixstickers
The Solus project is happy to announce a partnership with Unixstickers , providers of high quality apparel and accessories for operating systems, programming languages, and software. This quality craftsmanship and their continuous support of the open source community made it the obvious choice for us while determining the best provider for Solus-related merchandise. Unixstickers is making available Solus stickers to enable our community and fans to show their passion for Solus on their gadgets and gizmos. When buying from Unixstickers, not only are you getting some slick merch, but a portion of the proceeds is given Solus too ! These stickers will be shipping internationally and accessible via both the Unixstickers website as well as the Store link in the navigation on the page.
November 15, 2016
This Week in Solus - install #38
Welcome to This Week in Solus, installation #38. Lots have happened since the last one, so let’s get started. Budgie Last week, Ikey migrated Budgie Desktop to be its own GitHub organization, viewable here . This is a reflection of the direction we want to take Budgie, which is moving from a monolithic architecture to a modular one, breaking up Budgie into individually components, empowering us to independently develop, iterate and release components of Budgie.
November 1, 2016
Solus 1.2.1 Shannon Released
The Solus project is proud to announce the availability of Solus 1.2.1, delivered in the form of our main edition, which provides an unrivaled Budgie experience, as well as a new and welcomed addition to the Solus family, Solus 1.2.1 MATE edition. While Solus 1.2.1 is the first release to have a new addition, it is also the last of our traditional releases as we shift towards the ISO snapshot model , which better reflects our agility and iteration speed.
October 19, 2016