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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is here six months after Solus 4.4 and introduces a new Xfce edition that replaces the previous MATE edition, which is no longer maintained, featuring the latest Xfce 4.18 desktop environment.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.
The Budgie flagship edition received dark style preference support where toggling “Dark Theme” in Budgie Settings would set the dark theme preference for apps as well, the Budgie trash applet by default, as well as the usual quality-of-life improvements available in the latest Budgie 10.8 release.
On the other hand, the GNOME edition has been updated to the latest GNOME 45.2 desktop environment featuring the Speedinator extension installed by default to speed up animations in GNOME Shell, a uniform look for GTK3 and GTK4 apps, and center alignment for new windows by default.
The KDE Plasma edition is shipping with the latest KDE Plasma 5.27.10 LTS, KDE Gear 23.08.4, and KDE Frameworks 5.113 releases, all built against the Qt 5.15.11 LTS application framework, while the Solus team is working hard these days to accomodate it to 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.”
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 4 months ago
