14 DAY TRIAL // The Solus development team has no time for rest, and they're kicking off 2017 with the release of the Solus 2017.01.01.0 ISO snapshot on the first day of the year, as announced by Joshua Strobl, Solus Project Communications Manager.
As far as we know, this is also Solus' first ever ISO snapshot since the Linux-based operating system became a rolling distribution, allowing users to have an up-to-date installation image of Solus that they can use for reinstalling the OS or deploying it on new computers without the need to download hundreds of updated packages.
Many of you have asked Solus devs when the ISO snapshot is coming, so here it is, shipping with lots of improvements to the out-of-the-box experience, the latest stable Linux kernel from the 4.8 series, an improved graphics stack based on X.Org Server 1.18.4 and Mesa 13.0.2 3D Graphics Library, and the latest Nvidia proprietary drivers.
"We’re happy to be kicking off the new year with the release of our first ISO snapshot, 2017.01.01.0, across our Budgie and MATE editions," said Joshua Strobl in the release announcement. "The out-of-the-box experience for shipped applications in Solus has improved, as we’ve worked towards enabling a larger set of features for them."
Software Center gets multiple improvements and bug fixes
Looking at the changes, we can notice that Solus 2017.01.01.0 ships with an updated installer that won't ignore SWAP partitions when using custom mount points, adds support for SMB shares and SFTP locations to VLC Media Player, introduces support for XPS and PS files to the Evince document viewer, and updates Firefox to version 50.1.0.
The Mozilla Thunderbird 45.6.0 email and news client is also included, and the libmtp library was updated to the latest available version to offer MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) support for a wider set of devices. eopkg is still the default package manager in Solus 2017.01.01.0 and it received various performance improvements.
Also improved is the Software Center graphical package manager, which now features new office and programming categories for note-taking, e-book and PDF viewing apps, Haskell libraries, as well as general programming libraries. It also lets users install Google Earth, Adobe Flash Player, Insync, Enpass, and many other third-party apps.
Solus 2017.01.01.0 is available for download right now and is distributed with the usual Budgie and MATE editions. While the Budgie flavor uses Budgie Desktop 10.2.9, the MATE edition comes with the latest MATE 1.16 desktop environment featuring the brand-new Brisk Menu. Check out the release notes for a complete changelog!
