The Solus Project has announced release of Solus 1.2, latest stable point release in Solus 1.x Shannon series. Solus 1.2 comes with a lot of optimizations and improvements including a redesigned software center. Solus is an independently evolved GNU/Linux distribution featuring a unique desktop environment named budgie and eopkg package manager.
Solus 1.2 is a successor of version 1.0 and 1.1 released earlier this year. It has got a lot of improvements and bug fixes over past few months. These changes and optimizations will help Solus to move towards it's goal of providing a modern and user friendly desktop operating system optimized to exploit target hardware.
Solus 1.2 is a successor of version 1.0 and 1.1 released earlier this year. It has got a lot of improvements and bug fixes over past few months. These changes and optimizations will help Solus to move towards it's goal of providing a modern and user friendly desktop operating system optimized to exploit target hardware.
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| Software Center in Solus 1.2 : (Source : Solus blog) |
Improved Budgie Desktop
One of the notable highlight of Solus 1.2 is changes and improvements made on Budgie desktop, which is the flag ship desktop environment of Solus developed by Solus project owner himself. Budgie desktop is made exclusively for Solus, however, it is also available for other major GNU/Linux distributions. Following are some of the changes made in Budgie desktop after previous stable release.
- Fix stretching of GTK Switches in CSS themes.
- Fixed some untranslatable strings.
- Icon and GTK themes are now properly detected using our new ThemeScanner.
- Notifications will no longer expand Raven.
- Resolved drawing issues for Calendar, Sound, and MPRIS applets.
- Some users experienced instances where battery / power indicators would not accurately reflect the amount of batteries on their system, typically due to changes between critical state and charging. These issues should now be resolved.
- We now ensure multiple applications abide by the user’s icon theme, such as Atom, Gnome Builder, Gnome Photos, Gnome TODO, Telegram, and more.
- While not specifically affecting Solus, Budgie has received multiple GTK 3.20 fixes.
- You can now click the desktop while Raven is open and have Raven be dismissed.
Software Optimizations
Solus is mainly targeting personal computers, especially computers with x86 architectures. Keeping this fact in mind, Solus 1.2 has made a lot software optimizations to ensure effective utilization of targeted hardware. This provides a lot performance improvements, not only for regular computer usage, but also for extensive resource consuming operations like hard core gaming. A lot of these optimizations are adopted from Clear OS project by Intel.
Improved Gaming Experience.
In addition to hardware specific optimizations, Solus is using optimized version of multilib packages and non-optimized Steam libraries and run time dependencies are replaced with optimized run time libraries developed by Solus team.
Also, Solus 1.2 includes a Linux Steam Integration tool which will enable to switch between optimized libraries and prepacked libraries, and also between 32 and 64 bit architectures. This will provide support for maximum number of games in Steam store.
Revamped Software Center.
One of the major highlight of Solus 1.2 is revamped Software Center. It is developed by completely rewriting previous one to avoid unnecessary delays, lagging and other issues. Solus 1.2 Software Center has more number of packages now and also it provides user friendly options for software management.
A complete list of features and changes in Solus 1.2 is available in release announcement published in Solus blog.
Download Solus 1.2