Developers are keeping the package on the bleeding edge

Aug 12, 2015 15:22 GMT  ·  By

The Solus operating system finally has a launch date, but that's hardly the most interesting news about the project. Its developers have made a few very important improvements to the OS and a number of relevant package upgrades.

When you're building an operating system from scratch, you have full control over the application stack. It's more difficult than basing the operating system on something else (as Ubuntu is using Debian for example), but it also allows you to try to keep the distro on the bleeding edge. There are very few operating systems out there that dare to upgrade to the latest Linux kernel on the same day of their release, but Solus is one of them.

This is not the main attribute of Solus, although it's a pretty important one. In fact, what makes Solus different from everything else is the adoption of the Budgie desktop environment, which is developed by the same team. Budgie has been made available in other OSes as well, but Solus is unique because of it.

Solus is aiming high

Ikey Doherty, the founder and main developer of Solus, has told us about some of the most important upgrades that have landed and some of the plans for the project.

"We'll be releasing a new roadmap very soon, but you can be assured it has all the kinds of awesome you’re looking for, like integrated backup management, automated driver management, a refurbished software center with appstream integration, installer with automatic assistance, partitioning, LVM, encryption, and all that funky goodness your work laptop needs," reads the official announcement

According to the changelog, Linux Kernel 4.1.4 is now default (although 4.1.5 shouldn't be too far away), the latest Firefox is now available as well, LibreOffice 5.0.0.5 has been added, Atom has been upgraded to version 1.0.5, and Telegram is now at version 0.4.48.

Another interesting piece of news is about the hardware enabling that has been implemented in the OS. A wide range of hardware is now supported, which can only be a good thing. If you're wondering what this "hardware enabling" is, then you should remember that laptop you had and that didn't let you change the brightness of the screen, for example. Hardware enablement is usually done on the kernel side of things, but it's nice to see developers doing this willingly for their OS.

As usual, you can download the latest Solus build from Softpedia and tell us what you think about it.

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