Solus 4.3 released with refreshed apps, desktop environments and new hardware support

Solus, the independent Linux distribution with their own Budgie desktop has a big new release out with Solus 4.3.

Coming hot off the code with the Linux Kernel 5.13.1, you can expect a fair bit more hardware support with this release including AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT, 6800, 6800 XT and 6900 XT cards, the Sony PS5 DualSense controller support, hardware monitoring for the NZXT Kraken X42/X52/X62/X72 all-in-one CPU liquid coolers and plenty more. It also brings in Mesa 21.1.3 with has improved gaming support, performance improvements and plenty of fixes too.

Pictured - the various editions of Solus.

There's a lot more that was upgraded too including Firefox 89.0.2, LibreOffice 7.1.4.2, Thunderbird 78.11.0, bluez 5.60 for better Bluetooth support, ffmpeg 4.4, Budgie 10.5.3, GNOME 40.2, MATE 1.24 and the Plasma Desktop 5.22.2.

With each desktop being upgraded, you're getting the latest experience there. The key desktop though is Budgie, which they develop directly. The Budgie 10.5.3 release has a lot of bug fixes and quality of life improvements. Here's some of what's new for Budgie:

• Filter out audacious notifications so they do not clutter up Raven.
• Hide “Default”, which is typically Adwaita / GTK’s internal theme. We continue to encourage the use of theming that officially supports Budgie, such as Materia and Plata.
• Mutter and WM preference schema settings are now only applied for Budgie session.
• Spacing is now configurable in the Status applet.
• The application fullscreen state tracking has been slightly rewritten to use the window XIDs, only call our track window state function on specific flags in the changed or current state, and reducing instances where some unset flags would not result in the application being removed as a fullscreen application.
• There is now an option in Budgie and exposed via Budgie Desktop Settings' “Windows” section to automatically pause notifications when a window is fullscreen and unpause when there no longer is a fullscreen window. This is useful in reducing distractions when gaming or watching content!
• To improve the default user experience of Budgie on some downstream operating systems such as Arch Linux, Budgie now ships with a default wallpaper, eliminating the need for downstreams to apply supplemental changes or ship a wallpaper package.
• We will no longer filter device added / removed notifications. This resolves issues where ejection notifications for external media would not get stored in Raven’s Notifications section.
• When xdotool is available on the operating system, the Lock Keys applet can be clicked to toggle CapsLock and NumLock!

See the release announcement for more.

If you missed the recent news, the Solus team can now be funded via their Open Collective. They've managed to hit close to $10K a year, which going by the details shows that it at least now covers their infrastructure costs. A long way to go to fund development full time though.