14 DAY TRIAL // Ikey Doherty from the Solus OS development team has had the great pleasure of informing us today about the immediate availability for download and testing of the second Beta release of Solus (formerly Evolve OS) Linux.
With a complete rebrand, Solus Beta 2 arrives on May 17 with some of the latest and greatest Linux technologies, including Linux kernel 4.0.3, the gorgeous Budgie Desktop 8.2 user interface, GNOME Stack 3.16.3, X.Org Server 1.17.1, Mesa 10.5.3, and Mozilla Firefox 38.0.1.
Another great feature of Solus Beta 2 is built-in support for UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) system, which has been implemented in boot and installation. Additionally, the distribution offers support for the latest proprietary Nvidia video drivers.
"We’d like to thank the core development and artwork team, and the community at large, for the fantastic work they’ve put in and support they’ve given our project since the last release. There’s been an awful lot of work to do since the project rename, however this has served to strengthen the project over all," reads today's announcement.
New artwork has been added in Solus Beta 2
In addition to the changes mentioned above, Solus Beta 2 switches to Solus-specific artwork. More precisely, it now uses the EvoPop theme that makes Solus one of the most beautiful Linux distributions in the world.
Among some technical changes, we can mention that Solus Beta 2 comes with packages in the ypkg format, switches to HTTPS-only software sources for improved security and safety of users, and it addresses various performance and usability issues in the Budgie Desktop, which now eats less RAM.
Last but not least, the keybindings have been repaired and now work correctly, the modesetting driver was implemented in the QEMU and VirtualBox virtualization software, and delta updates with highly compressed packages have been implemented for efficient and bandwidth-friendly software management
Download Solus Beta 2 right now via Softpedia, where you will find a Live CD ISO image that's compatible only with 64-bit machines. Please note that this is a pre-release version that might contain unresolved issues. Thus, we don't recommend installing it on production machines.