Solus 1.2 available, all the news

The Solus operating system is the project that continues the work of SolusOS, a popular Debian-based distro that closed there in late 2013. Fortunately, a new team continued with the development of this distro, which in the last few hours released the new Solus version. 1.2 Shannon.

Solus 1.2 Shannon, faster and with Linux Steam Integration

Solus 1.2 uses its own desktop environment called Budgie, which in turn is based on GNOME. The developers have put special emphasis on the speed of the system and some additions that are well worth mentioning in the following lines, let's go there.

Solus 1.2 Shannon solves several issues that were affecting Budgie (some having to do with GTK compatibility) and introduces some changes to the artwork, debuting the Arc icon theme, which was recently released. The performance of many elements of the system has also been improved, taking inspiration from Clear Linux (a distro specialized in the cloud and Intel architecture) that "fiddles" with part of the Kernel and many applications to improve the user experience.

On the performance side, developers have bragged about testing at Openbenchmarking, where they outperform other distros like Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Linux Mint 17.

The new "Software Center" of Solus 1.2

Solus' own notification center has been rewritten to improve the experience and facilitate the installation of third-party applications such as Chrome or Spotify with a few clicks.

Possibly one of the most notable new features is the integration of Steam with the "Linux Steam Integration" application that allows you to easily switch between native and pre-packaged runtime environments, as well as force 32-bit mode on Steam. The Solus 1.2 installation process was also improved to have the keyboard and language settings at hand or to perform automatic partitioning of the disk, in general it will now be much easier to install Solus when we already have another system installed on the computer (Dual-Boot).

Solus 1.2 Shannon is available now and its ISO image is about 850 MB.