Budgie Desktop getting remerged with Solus Project

A while after keeping Budgie Desktop as in independent project, it is getting merged with Solus Project, the original developers. This decision was made by the team considering the lack of contribution from other projects using Budgie Desktop.

The Solus project has observed that keeping Budgie as a separate project does not help in its growth and other projects using budgie is adding their own vendor-specific values. Overall, it is diminishing the brand value of Budgie Desktop. Considering this point, the budgie-desktop repository is merged with solus-project repository and the further development activities will mainly focus the goals of Solus operating system.

Budgie Desktop on Solus 3

As of May 20th, 2018, the Budgie Desktop project has been merged back into the Solus Project umbrella, making it a distinct Solus project once more. Contributions from all distributions, projects and individuals are welcome provided they add value and are of sufficient quality. We're happy to discuss test pull requests, which should be appropriately labeled as being Request For Comment [RFC].

Please note that we will NOT accept pull requests to add Pythonic applets. Any applets should be written in either C or Vala. Pull requests modifying any C source code should ensure to stick with code compliance. Run ./update_format.sh to ensure coding standards are respected. (Requires clang-format and misspell)

This decision has been made after a long time having Budgie Desktop being a separate project, which to this date has only repeatedly harmed the Budgie Desktop project due to other projects specifically looking to add vendor specific value-add and ensuring it is never upstream within this project. As such the project is now officially back under the stewardship of Solus (original authors) and will be developed with our goals in mind, as it once was. It should also be observed that Budgie has been an incredibly quiet project for almost the entire duration of the project being split out from Solus. This will now be remedied as we merge back into Solus, and all previous decisions will now be re-evaluated (Qt? Wayland? gtk4? etc).

You can read original announcement in Budgie Desktop README page.

Solus 4 won't ship snapd-Software Center integration with initial release

In an official status update, Mr Joshua Strobl, communication manager at Solus Project has announced their plans for upcoming Solus 4 release. The major plans for Solus 4 includes experimental support for wayland in GNOME session, delaying of support for snapd-Software Center integration, integraton of linux driver manager, ..etc.

A preview of Solus 4 development edition

What is Solus?

Solus is an independently evolved desktop operating system. The main idea behind Solus is providing an ideal desktop experience with the power of GNU/Linux. Instead of targeting multiple platforms at a time, Solus just target desktop users and the system is optimized for the same. In order to provide a better user experience, Solus brings its own desktop environment called Budgie. Additionally, it provides well-tweaked GNOME & MATE editions.

You can read more about Solus project & Budgie Desktop in our gallery project.

What are planned features for Solus 4?

In an official status post published on 14th February 2018, the team shares some plans for upcoming Solus 4 release.

• As different from announced earlier, Solus 4 won't included support for snapd, a universal packaging format for GNU/Linux and other Unix like systems. The snapd integration is delayed as it will take some more time and the team don't want to delay the release of Solus just because of snapd. It will be provided as a continuous update on top of Solus 4 release.
• The Software Center in Solus 4 will bring a fresh design along with integration of Linux Driver Management tool to provide better hardware support. This Software Centre will also make use of plugin based architecture in order to simplify upcoming snapd integration.
• Enabling experimental wayland support GNOME session. It won't be used as default session in either Budgie or in GNOME as it is not stable yet for day to day use. However, the project don't want to stop their users from experimenting with latest technologies.
• UI refinement for MATE Desktop
• Budgie Desktop 10.4.1
• Updated Brisk Menu - Modern application menu for MATE Desktop environment.

When Solus 4 is getting released?

By principle, Solus is a rolling GNU/Linux distribution. So, you can always enjoy continuous updates from Solus. However, in order to keep the installation image fault free and update, the team makes releases in a while. The Solus team has not yet shared any release plans for Solus 4. However, the development is going on now. And the team has decided to delay blocking factors like snapd integration. So we can expect Solus 4 release very soon.

For more information on upcoming Solus 4 and other activities going on Solus project, see weekly status update published in projects blog.

Solus plans to develop a new distro-agnostic tool to scan licenses in various packages

After the release and well reception of Solus 3, Solus team is back again. In the weekly news letter of project This Week in Solus, the team has shared list of tasks on which they'll be working in coming days. This list includes Preston, a distribution independent tool for scanning source code for various package and determine whether all required licenses are included in correct way.

In addition to Preston, another highest priority task listed by Solus project is replacement of binman with ferryd. It will help faster indexing and synchronization of Solus repositories. In another weekly news letter, Solus team has detailed about ferryd.

After highest priority tasks, the weekly news letter has listed other tasks in decreasing order of priority.

High Priority tasks.

• Snaps for 3rd party apps : In order to avoid the complications involved in managing 3rd party applications, the team will try to create Snaps for all possible applications.
• Update X stack
• Fix issues associated with Samba network sharing.

Other tasks 
There are some other tasks which are not of high priority for the project. This includes:

• Upgrade systemd which will also unblock the entry for wayland.
• Improve existing packaging and associated tools chains
• Replace eopkg package manager using sol
• Improve GPU support
• Develop TLP alternative for improving battery life.
• Implement OEM installation mode.

For more information on each task in TO DO list, see Solus weekly news letter in project's blog.

Solus 3 released with Budgie Desktop 10.4; Ships with support for snap packages

Mr Joshua Strobl on behalf of Solus project has announced release of Solus 3, 3rd iteration of independently evolved rolling GNU/Linux distribution. This release brings various under the hood optimizations and visual improvements to make it the best operating system for laptops and desktop computers.

Vertical panels in Solus 3 Budgie Edition

Unlike previous snapshot releases of Solus, Solus 3 follows an hybrid release model. In addition to package updates expected in a rolling snapshot, it ships various new features and enables support for modern hardware stack by providing a recent version of Linux Kernel.

The main highlights of Solus 3 can be briefed as:

• Finally supports snap packages. The Solus 3 release provides complete support for snap packages, a universal packaging format for GNU/Linux distribution. This was made possible by seamless collaboration between snapcraft, Solus team and Ubuntu developers. Solus is the first non-canonical distribution to provide complete support for snap packages.

• Budgie 10.4. This is one among most notable highlight of Solus 3. Budgie 10.4 was expected to be a bug fix cum maintenance release in 10.x series. But is more than that. Budgie 10.4 brings various new features such as support for vertical panels, minimize-maximize animations, completely redesigned application menu based on experiences with Brisk Menu for Mate Desktop ..etc. All highlights of budgie desktop 10.4 is topic for a separate post.

• Solus 3 GNOME Edition is using latest GNOME stack available till date. It uses GNOME Shell 3.24.3, Mutter 3.24.4, and Nautilus 3.24.2, ..etc and continues to use various extensions to provide delighted user experience. It also includes Plotinus a searchable command pallet for Gtk3 applications.

• There is no much visual changes in Solus 3 MATE edition. Though you can avail all the under the hood improvements in MATE edition as well.

For more detailed information on each feature and corresponding illustrations, see original release announcement published in Solus blog. 

Ikey Doherty leaves Intel and becomes a full time Solus developer

If you have been skimming through open source news in past two years, you might be familiar with the name Ikey Doherty. Yes, he is the founder and leading developer of Solus and beautiful budgie desktop environment.

Ikey Dohery was working at Intel for a while and his major work at Intel is associated with Clear OS. He was leading the Solus and budgie development activities in his fare time. Owing to his hardware, dedication and vision, both these projects has been well accepted by the community and the project was able to acquire a considerable amount of fund within a relatively short span of time.

As planned earlier, the Solus project was about to hire a full time developer when they hit the mission of $2500. When the mission was achieved, Ikey Doherty stepped in to work as Solus developer by leaving his job at Intel. This means a lot for the Solus community. When Ikey becomes full time developer, he can spend more time on addressing concerns of community and shaping his vision of developing an ideal desktop operating system and desktop environment.

In 4 weeks from today I will be moving to Solus as a full time developer. Originally we planned to support “a developer” once we hit the $2500 goal. However, I personally feel that this is a move I can now make myself. In doing so this will allow me to commit full time to Solus and all of it’s projects, bringing them up to the standards I want, with the features and experience that you deserve.

Whilst we have achieved a great deal so far, this has been through spare time. With this move I’m now able to dedicate all of my work hours to Solus, which in itself will result in a massive explosion in growth and development cadence for our project.

For more information, see original message shared by Ikey Doherty as part of a blog post published in Solus blog.

Solus ships updated Brisk Menu with super key shortcut

In weekly news letter (22nd May 2017), Solus project announced availability of an updated Brisk Menu for MATE Desktop. This updated version comes with several improvements and bug fixes. The most important highlight is ability to toggle menu using super key shortcut. It was one among the most demanding features for a modern application menu.

A file picture of Solus Operating System

Other highlights in updated brisk menu includes ability to change menu label, dynamic adoption to vertical menu layout, and also Control Panel applications is now listed in both Preferences and Administration categories. There were also some implementation changes in Brisk Menu, which can be found in original blog post.

Other updates from Solus project over the past week includes:

• update Kernel and NVIDIA GLX Driver
• availability of MariaDB
• user experience improvement in Solus Software Center
• minor improvements on project website
• other regular package updates.

For more detailed information, see This Week in Solus (22nd May 2017), weekly news letter of Solus project.