Linux distribution
Nate Drake’s Irish eyes are smiling at this latest offering from Solus, with improvements to the desktop and under the hood.
Solus (formerly Evolve OS) is an independently developed version of Linux and one of a handful to have originated in Ireland. The most recent version has multiple editions using the Cinnamon, Budgie (pictured), Gnome and Plasma desktop environments. MATE was previously supported but has been retired in favour of an experimental edition using Xfce.
The OS follows a semi-rolling release model, with new updates landing in repositories every Friday.
Ever eager, we downloaded the 2.5GB ISO of the Budgie edition and tried it in live mode in a VM. We were immediately impressed with how quickly Solus loaded (under 10 seconds).
Although we didn’t go through setup, Solus now incorporates the simple Calamares installer, when previously the team used its own, written in Python 2.
This is welcome news, given how intuitive Calamares is to use. The release announcement notes that this will simplify tasks such as choosing the Btrfs filesystem or customising partition layouts.
All editions of Resilience include Firefox 121.0, while productivity is a breeze with LibreOffice 7.6.4.1 and the default email client is Thunderbird 115.6.0.
Media handling depends on which desktop Solus has. In our Budgie edition, audio playback is handled by Rhythmbox, while Celluloid manages videos.
You can install additional apps via Solus’s Software Center, as we did to install VLC Media Player to ensure the OS had all available multimedia playback codecs.
Solus supports installation of both Flatpak and Snap packages. Its package manager, Eopkg, is actually based on PiSi from the Turkish OS Pardus Linux.
Under the hood, PulseAudio has been replaced with PipeWire. This should result in small improvements, such as better and more reliable Bluetooth audio.
Resilience also now ships with ROCm 5.5 for users with supported AMD hardware. This provides GPU acceleration for graphics-intensive programs such as Blender. It also enables hardware-accelerated machine learning with support for PyTorch, Llama.cpp, Stable Diffusion and many other AI tools.
Although there is an LTS version using kernel 5.15, the most recent it
