Five months after the 4.8 “Opportunity” release, the Solus team has announced the immediate availability of Solus 4.9 “Serenity”, marking its first release of 2026.
Many improvements in this release are behind the scenes. Solus now uses systemd preset files to manage default services, replacing the previous method of linking services into target.wants directories. Additionally, the default privileged group has changed from sudo to wheel.
On legacy non-EFI systems, Solus now includes GRUB 2.14, which adds Argon2 support and enables full use of LUKS2-encrypted systems. Consequently, the default disk encryption format has changed from LUKS1 to LUKS2.
The installer has been updated to Calamares 3.4.2. Solus now leverages new Calamares features, such as hybrid bootloader installation on legacy systems, where boot partitions are created for both systemd-boot and GRUB2, with one chainloading the other.
Additionally, the distro has increased the recommended EFI partition size to 2 GB to accommodate the growing size of firmware components, kernel modules, and NVIDIA packages.
Software-wise, all editions now ship with Firefox 149, LibreOffice 25.8, and Thunderbird 149. The release also features Linux kernel 6.18 LTS and Mesa 26. According to devs, Solus now shares the kernel patch set and configuration with AerynOS, which is expected to enhance hardware support.
The Budgie edition features Budgie 10.9.4. Although this is a relatively minor update compared to Solus 4.8, a significant transition is planned: Budgie 10.10, expected soon, will remove X11 support in favor of Wayland. Additionally, the default terminal is now Ptyxis.
Solus 4.9 GNOME includes GNOME 49.5 from the GNOME 49 “Brescia” series. In addition, the Solus team plans to introduce GNOME 50 soon, which will be Wayland-only and will discontinue X11 support.
The Plasma edition features KDE Frameworks 6.24, KDE Plasma 6.6.4, and KDE Gear 25.12.3. Notable Plasma 6.6 enhancements include an improved on-screen keyboard, text extraction from Spectacle screenshots, QR-code-based Wi-Fi setup, and further accessibility improvements. Solus also notes that Plasma 6.8, scheduled for October 2026, will end X11 support.
Finally, Solus 4.9 Xfce offers the latest software from the Xfce 4.20 series. As with previous Xfce releases, the emphasis remains on stability rather than major visible changes.
For more details, see the release announcement. Users can download Solus 4.9 “Serenity” from the project’s website, choosing between all four editions (Budgie, GNOME, Plasma, and Xfce) as direct downloads or via torrent.
