The developers behind the Solus distribution announced today the release and general availability of Solus 4.5 as the latest installation and live media for this independently developed distro.
Dubbed “Resilience”, Solus 4.5 is here six months after Solus 4.4 and introduces a new Xfce edition that replaces the previous MATE edition, which is no longer maintained, featuring the latest Xfce 4.18 desktop environment. Existing users are urged to transition their MATE installations to either Budgie or the new Xfce edition.
“Our XFCE edition features a traditional desktop layout with a bottom panel and Whisker Menu as the application menu,” said David Harder. “It is using the Qogir GTK theme with the Papirus icon theme for a sleek and modern look. Blueman comes installed for all of your Bluetooth needs. This edition has taken a lot of work, and we are excited to share it with you all!”
Solus 4.5 with the Xfce desktop environment
The Budgie flagship edition welcomed support for a dark style preference, where toggling “Dark Theme” in Budgie Settings would also set the dark theme preference for apps. The Budgie trash applet comes installed by default along with all the usual quality improvements that we see in the latest Budgie 10.8 release.
In contrast, the GNOME edition has updated to the latest GNOME 45.2 desktop environment. This version features the Speedinator extension, installed by default to accelerate animations in GNOME Shell. It also offers a uniform look for GTK3 and GTK4 apps and defaults to center alignment for new windows.
The KDE Plasma edition now comes with the latest KDE Plasma 5.27.10 LTS, KDE Gear 23.08.4, and KDE Frameworks 5.113 releases. All these have been built against the Qt 5.15.11 LTS application framework. At the same time, the Solus team is hard at work preparing for the upcoming KDE Plasma 6 release.
Another highlight of the Solus 4.5 release is the implementation of the Calamares graphical installer to provide users with a new installation experience where they will be able to use filesystems like Btrfs, specify their own partition layout, or even enable full-disk encryption.
The same goes for the default media framework in Solus 4.5, which replaces PulseAudio and JACK with PipeWire, enabling better and more reliable Bluetooth audio and performance improvements.
For AMD hardware, Solus 4.5 introduces ROCm support to provide GPU acceleration for GPU-hungry apps like Blender, but also to enable hardware-accelerated machine learning. The Solus devs said that they worked hard to extend ROCm’s compatibility to as much hardware as possible, “including some not officially supported by AMD.”
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Under the hood, Solus 4.5 is powered by Linux kernel 6.6 LTS. Of course, you will also get all the latest GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source software, such as the latest Mesa 23.3 graphics stack, Firefox 121 web browser, LibreOffice 7.6 office suite, and more.
You can download Solus 4.5 right now from the official website, where you’ll find all four editions featuring the Budgie, GNOME, KDE Plasma, and Xfce desktop environments. Of course, this release is only for new installations as existing Solus users need only to keep their installations up to date at all times.
Last updated 22 hours ago