Targeted at desktop users, Solus is a fully-fledged, independent rolling release Linux distribution with its desktop environment and repositories.
It is a unique distribution in that it is written from scratch, meaning it is not derived from Debian, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, or other major distributions. In addition, Solus has its package manager named EOPKG, making installing software on Solus desktop very easy.
The Solus flagship desktop environment is called Budgie. It is a great desktop that aims to provide sane defaults and a beautiful interface.
So, any GNOME user looking for something lighter would enjoy it. The experience of using it is like using GNOME with the Dash to Panel extension.
What’s New in Solus 4.3 “Fortitude”
Solus is known for its flagship desktop of Budgie, but they also offer three other desktop environments to choose from: GNOME, MATE, and KDE Plasma. Some of the new features to make it to this release are updated desktop environments and software stacks.
Solus 4.3 ships with Budgie 10.5.3 desktop environment, which features GNOME 40 stack support. With this release, Budgie Desktop introduces fixes to Budgie panel applets, Raven, and various window state tracking.
The GNOME edition of Solus 4.3 features the latest stable GNOME 40.2, which ships with Materia-dark instead of Plata-noir as the default GTK theme.
At the same time, Solus 4.3 MATE Edition ships with the latest MATE desktop environment and applications. The Solus Plasma Edition ships with the latest Plasma Desktop 5.22.2, KDE Frameworks 5.83, Applications 21.04.2, and the backported patches for QT 5.15.2.
Under the hood, Solus 4.3 is powered by the Linux kernel 5.13.1, providing a wealth of new and improved hardware support. All editions feature:
- Firefox 89.0.2
- LibreOffice 7.1.4.2
- Thunderbird 78.11.0
For audio and video multimedia playback, Solus 4.3 offers:
- Budgie, GNOME, and MATE editions all ship with Rhythmbox for audio playback, with the latest release of the Alternate Toolbar extension to provide a more modern user experience.
- Budgie and GNOME ship with GNOME MPV for video playback.
- MATE ships with VLC for video playback.
- Plasma ships with Elisa for audio playback and SMPlayer for video playback.
In addition, Solus 4.3 also brings other prominent package upgrades like BlueZ 5.60, FFmpeg 4.4, GStreamer 1.18.4, and many other package updates to improve the user experience.
You can refer to the official announcement for detailed information about all changes.
Download
You can go to the download page for the latest Solus 4.3, where direct links and torrents are available. Once downloaded, you can write it to USB and install it.
