The Solus team pulled off another great release with Solus 4.3 with the latest desktop versions. We wrap up the release.
Solus is an independent Linux distribution that brings the traditional desktop experience with a modern take. The current Solus 4.0 series follows the rolling release method to deliver packages to your desktop. It has its own package manager, eopkg which makes it very easy to install software on Solus desktop. Targeted at desktop users, Solus brings four popular desktop environments. Its flagship desktop is Budgie and also offers GNOME, KDE Plasma, and MATE desktop spin as well.
This is the third point release of Solus 4.0 series “Fortitude” coming after prior Solus 4.2 which was released in early 2021. And a lot happened since then in the Linux Desktop space. All those changes clubbed with Solus specific tweaks lands in this stable version.
Let’s take a look at what’s new in this release.
Table of Contents
Solus 4.3 – New Features
Common Updates
Solus 4.3 is powered by Linux kernel 5.13 which supports all mainstream latest hardware across Processor, Graphics, Storage, network and other SOCs.
Core applications and modules are updated to their latest versions. Here’s a quick recap.
- Firefox 89.0.2
- LibreOffice 7.1.4.2
- Thunderbird 78.11.0
- ffmpeg 4.4
- gstreamer, 1.18.4
- Pulseaudio 14.2
Budgie and MATE Desktop
Solus ships with the latest release of our flagship desktop environment, Budgie 10.5.3. This features GNOME 40 stack support alongside all the fixes and quality-of-life improvements across Budgie panel applets, raven, and various window state tracking.
Solus 4.3 MATE Edition ships with the latest MATE desktop environment version 1.24 which brings updates to Atril, Engrampa, Caja and other native MATE apps.
KDE Plasma
This release of Solus brings at latest KDE Plasma 5.22.2 which brings KDE Frameworks 5.83, KDE Applications 21.04.2. This release also include back ported patches for QT 5.15.2.
Alongside with the KDE Plasma 5.22 features, this release brings Solus-specific Plasma integration as well –
- Introducing SolusLight theme. SolusLight is a brighter theme compared to Breeze Light and compliments our SolusDark aesthetic.
- Plasma-Systemmonitor replaces Ksysguard as default install for the ISO.
- Reworking of the SolusDark theme to better support blur and the new Plasma adaptive Transparency functionality.
- konversation now uses the Libera.chat server and uses TLS connection as default
GNOME
Finally, you can experience the new GNOME 40 experience with this release. The exact version is GNOME 40.2 which is the current stable one.
By this time, I hope you heard about GNOME 40 and how it changed the fundamental way of working in this desktop. GNOME 40 brings horizontal workspaces with more productive activities overview. It also brings various tweaks in the application grid.
You can read about the features in detail, here.
The Solus version of GNOME 40 ships with Materia-dark as the default GTK theme. Also, it includes Flat-Plat theme with beautiful Papirus icon theme. It looks great!
Download
Solus provides separate .ISO files for respective desktop flavors. You can get your copy in the below link. Once downloaded, you can easily dual-boot Solus with other operating systems Or, try, in a virtual machine.
Closing Notes
Solus is one of those unique distribution which has smaller user base but provides well tested rolling release system. With a different package manager eopkg, independent repository and other uniqueness, it is a well suited desktop based Linux for all use cases. I wish they get the mainstream popularity they deserve and provides a Xfce variant in the future.
