Mr. Joshua Strobl, experience lead at Solus project has announced the release of Solus 4.1 Fortitude. This is a stable snapshot update in Solus rolling distribution series.

Solus 4.1 Fortitude Banner

Solus 4.1 Fortitude provides a set of updated applications, updated software stacks and better hardware support with updated Linux Kernel. This release also officially introduces an installation image for Solus Plasma Edition. The Plasma Edition fulfills a long-standing demand from Solus users to have another reliable desktop.

Solus 4.1 Fortitude Preview Image Courtesy: Solus 4.1 official release announcement

With the introduction of the Plasma Edition, Sous now supports 4 different desktop environments, Budgie, MATE, GNOME, and Plasma. All these 4 editions share common Solus principles but provide alternative user experiences. It is expected that the option to choose from different desktop environments will make Solus acceptable for more users.

The main highlights of Solus 4.1 Fortitude are briefed below.

  • Updated packages including Firefox 72.0.2, LibreOffice 6.3.4.2, and Thunderbird 68.4.1.
  • Linux Kernel 5.4.12 - It extends hardware support in Solus
  • Zstandard(zstd) compression technique for the squashFS images enables faster extraction of installation images, and thereby reduces installation time. Solus 4.1 is the first release to feature this technique.
  • Better multimedia support with ffmpeg 4.2.2, gstreamer 1.16.2 and other updated libraries.
  • Systemd v244 which introduces a bunch of features.
  • Budgie Desktop 10.5.1
  • GNOME 3.34.3
  • MATE 1.22 with updated Brisk Menu
  • Plasma Desktop 5.17.5, the latest of 5.17 series, and is complemented by KDE Frameworks 5.66, KDE Applications 19.12.1 and QT 5.13.2.
  • ..more

For a complete list of changes, read the release announcement for Solus 4.1 Fortitude.

Solus 4.1 screenshots (coming soon..)

We’ll explore Solus 4.1 images in coming days & update screenshot links here.