Nine months after its previous 4.5 “Resilience” release, the Solus team announced the immediate availability of Solus 4.6, codenamed “Convergence.” This latest update includes numerous upgrades, including enhancements to desktop environments, kernel updates, and better hardware support.
For multimedia enthusiasts, each desktop edition includes tailored software for audio and video playback to deliver a more seamless experience. The Budgie and GNOME editions ship with Rhythmbox (with the Alternate Toolbar extension for a modern interface) for audio, while Celluloid is the video player of choice.
Meanwhile, XFCE users can enjoy Parole for media playback, and Plasma users are set up with Elisa for audio and Haruna for video.
Another striking feature in the new Solus release is Usr-Merge. The initiativeโaimed at unifying system directoriesโhas reached its third stage, with all current users now on a Usr-Merged system. New installations using the updated ISOs will also benefit from this change.
The distro continues to ship solus-sc as the default graphical package manager. However, experimental support for GNOME Software and KDE Discover has been available for some time, allowing users to manage both Solus repository software and third-party applications through Flatpaks.
Under the hood, Solus 4.6 is powered by Linux kernel 6.10, with an LTS kernel 6.6 available for those needing long-term support. The updated kernel drops AppArmor patches, reducing maintenance workload while enabling partial confinement for Snaps.
Mesa has also been upgraded to v24.2, introducing new Vulkan extensions and a new shader cache implementation that minimizes filesystem overhead.
On the desktop side, the different desktop environments in Solus 4.6 also bring notable changes:
- Budgie: The latest Budgie 10.9 improves stability and a polished user experience. Additionally, Budgie now adopts XApps (like XReader and XViewer) to maintain a consistent look and feel, as many GNOME apps have transitioned to GTK 4.
- GNOME: Solus 4.6 GNOME Edition includes GNOME 46.5, offering new features such as Global Search, an enhanced files app, support for OneDrive in online accounts, and RDP support for remote login.
- Plasma: The Plasma Edition of Solus 4.6 features Plasma 6.1.5, KDE Gear 24.08.1 apps collection, and KDE Frameworks 6.6, providing users with the latest advancements and continued support for Wayland.
- XFCE: The XFCE Desktop remains in beta with version 4.18 and includes updates to several default apps, such as Engrampa, the archive manager, and XReader, the PDF viewer. Notable additions to the XFCE environment include plugins like dashboard and xfce4-battery-plugin.
Additionally, all editions of Solus 4.6 feature some core application updates, such as Thunderbird 128.3, Firefox 131, and LibreOffice 24.2.
However, there are a few known issues to be aware of. Plasma users need to create a kwallet key file before connecting to a network, and some GNOME users may face a black screen when booting into a virtual machine.
Users with NVIDIA drivers and the latest kernel might also encounter a black screen after sleep mode. The team is addressing these issues, and updates will be provided.
Lastly, the next Solus release aims to bring the latest Linux kernel, GNOME 47, updated Plasma and XFCE versions, and further progress on the Usr-Merge initiative to safely enable Python 3 for the eopkg package manager.
Refer to the release announcement for detailed information about all changes. Users can download Solus 4.6 “Convergence” from the download section of the projectโs website, choosing between all four editions (Budgie, GNOME, Plasma, and XFCE) as direct download or torrent options.
