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The Solus 4.5 Linux distribution is out today as a big update to this original distro that is known for its Budgie desktop environment and other innovations over the years. Solus 4.5 brings some pretty big changes this time around and a nice step forward over Solus 4.4 from a half-year ago.
Solus 4.5 starts things off with a new installation experience that leverages the popular Calamares installer framework. With now leveraging Calamares, it’s easier to setup Solus in different configurations such as for a Btrfs root file-system and other configurations compared to the prior old installer built for Solus.
Solus 4.5 is also notable for now using the Pipewire media framework by default to replace JACK and PulseAudio. Another big feature of PipeWire is the distribution providing support for AMD ROCm 5.5 as part of its packages for improving the AMD GPU compute support on the platform. AMD’s official ROCm support continues catering just toward the major enterprise Linux distributions while it’s nice seeing Solus and others picking up the slack in offering up packages for the open-source ROCm to make it easier to utilize.
Solus 4.5 also ships with the Linux 6.6.9 LTS kernel for the very latest hardware support, Mesa 23.3.2 is providing the latest open-source graphics drivers, and there are updates not only to its flagship Budgie desktop but also to the shipped versions of GNOME, KDE, and KDE Plasma.
Budgie 10.8.2 shipped by Solus 4.5 adds dark style preference support and various other refinements on the desktop side. GNOME 45.2 and the latest KDE components meanwhile are available if Budgie isn’t your cup of tea. Solus 4.5 is also the first release featuring an Xfce edition for those interested.
In the 4.5 release announcement today they also noted they are still working to migrate to leveraging Ikey’s Serpent OS tooling/infrastructure for the Solus 5.0 release.