20/10/2016

Solus 1.2.1 Shannon is out

There is a good news for Solus users and people who would love to try a different Linux distro, Solus 1.2.1 Shannon is released a few hours ago. This time Solus team have decided to give you guys a nice surprise, a Mate edition. So, Solus 1.2.1 is released in two flavours which are Budgie and Mate.

The team behind Solus worked hard to bring new things and features in this release. Well, according to official announcement Budgie flavour have given IBUS support. This is helpful to people who prefers different language other than English. Budgie dektop is updated to 10.2.8 and it is bringing lots of improvement here. They have made various improvements in applets which is not only be eye-candy, but also useful for users. When it comes to bug fixing they have announced a long list.

Bug Fixes / Other Improvements

Alongside all the goodies above, a plethora of bug fixes and other improvements have been made, such as:
  • Applets
    • Icon Tasklist icons are now longer squishing on login.
    • Icon Tasklist now implements Exec-based mapping as the final fallback. This specifically fixes an instance where GIMP wasn’t pinnable as the window class is “gimp-2.8”.
    • Keyboard Layout applet no longer steals input button focus.
    • Status applet has been ported to upower 0.99 API. Prior to this fix, the remove signal would always result in a segfault, as we were trying to treat a string as a gobject.
    • User Indicator now has a Hibernate option.
    • We now ensure our appsystem is reloaded to immediately make available the pinning of a newly installed application.
  • Daemon
    • Addressed shadow on EndSessionDialog in composite race-condition.
    • Ensure we always hide the User Indicator window and focus on the daemon window.
    • Fix issues with OSD placement. Basically, the window allocation inexplicablly changes between shows of the window, resulting in a larger offset the second time around, moving the whole OSD one full unit east.
  • Data
    • We now provide fallback icons for pane-{hide,show}-symbolic icons created by horst3180, which are used in the Raven Sidebar Control. These are used in absence of the named icons within the theme itself, such as when using Adwaita.
  • Iconography
    • We now import and utilize iconography contributed by Sam Hewitt, such as: Clock Applet, Icon Tasklist Applet, Lock Keys applet, Notifications Applet, and more.
  • Panel
    • Always restore focus to windows after closing popovers. We now store / restore the focused window in the window manager around expansion changes in the panel.
    • We now chain methods to fix GtkBox allocation spamming journald every half second (ticked by clock update and other applets requiring a refresh). This affects GTK 3.20 onwards.
    • You can now re-order pinned apps by dragging them around! Woohoo!
  • Plugin
    • All applets now extend GtkEventBox and not GtkBin.
      • As seen in issue #574, we have various problems with certain applet types due to extending from the primitive GtkBin. In this particular instance we have no child GdkWindow, which is why the drawing system becomes bizarely bugged and results in rendering in random locations.All applets should have at least one top level GdkWindow that is not part of the GtkWindow’s GdkWindow, to ensure separate context. As a part of this change, all third-party applets should be rebuilt against the new Budgie due to the ABI break introduced here.
  • Raven
    • Ensure all cursor themes are loaded. Previously, we made an assumption that icons and cursors were somehow mutually exclusive. The idea of the index.theme parsing was simply to test that it was a valid icon theme. However, we then only tested for the cursors directory if it definitely wasn’t an icon theme. That meant that themes shipping both cursors and icons in one directory would never show the cursor themes.
    • Added support for legacy theme directories, such as ~/.icons, ~/.themes, and ~/.fonts
    • Fixed broken markup parsing by importing our mate parser.
    • Fixed HeaderWidget & HeaderExpander expanded property mismatch.
  • Run Dialog
    • Respect OnlyShowIn and other control factors.
    • We now use the same search algorithm as Budgie Menu
  • Theme
    • Background-image is now set to none for the built-in theme in order to override any themes that may use a background image for the panel styling.
    • Our theme has received fixes for GTK 3.22.
  • Window Manager
    • Fix negated logic in screen unredirect.
As we speak, people are downloading the new Mate edition of Solus. So what's in this Mate edition? Well, Solus 1.2.1 ships with Mate 1.16 and provides GTK-3 based exprerience. It is very helpful in providing a support and opportunity to try Solus in older hardeware. Solus 1.2.1 have also  made distro-specific notification theme for mate edition which clean and modern and named mate-notification-theme-solus.

According to announcement there are other changes too.
Under the hood, Solus ships with the latest stable kernel, 4.8.2. We have also put effort into hardware enablement between 1.2.0.5 and 1.2.1, such as:
  • CONFIG_B43_PHY_N is enabled. This option enables N generation (type 4) devices to work with our B43 driver.
  • NVIDIA GLX Driver has been updated to 370.28, meaning better compatibility with GPUs such as the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 as well as the Pascal microarchitecture.
  • OpenGL 4.5 for Intel Broadwell. We continue to follow the latest developments of Mesa and intend on delivering Intel Haswell OpenGL support as soon as it’s merged upstream.
  • RADV, the open source Radeon Vulkan driver, is now supported in Solus, as well as swr driver (AVX2).
  • We enabled CONFIG_HARDENED_USERCOPY which prevents a lot of heap overflow exploits (so a further level of protection against 0-day exploits in the future until patches come forward).
  • We enabled virtio-vsock which enables native sockets over a hypervisor, which will be useful for software such as spice in the future.
  • We have support for the Microsoft Surface Pro 3’s touchscreen.
  • We have support for the “Intel Virtual Button”, which is a required driver for some newer hardware, notably the power button on the new Dell XPS 13.
  • We moved to voluntary-preempt.
So guys we request you to try out Solus at least once. It is one the most simple and clean distro in Linux world. It gives you simplicity, ease of use, beauty and now old hardware support too.

To download click - Solus 1.2.1
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