14 DAY TRIAL // Solus maintainer Joshua Strobl is informing users of the independently-developed GNU/Linux distribution about the availability of some of the latest updated packages, as well as upcoming features.
According to the developer, it would appear that the feature-rich MATE 1.18 desktop environment released last week is now available for installation from the official stable Solus repositories for users of the Solus MATE edition, along with the long-term supported Linux 4.9.16 kernel and numerous other up-to-date components.
Among these, we can mention Audacious 3.8.2, Calibre 2.82.0, Filezilla 3.25.0, Mozilla Firefox 52.0.1, Mozilla Thunderbird 45.8.0, FocusWriter 1.6.4, Deluge 1.3.14, digiKam 5.5.0, HomeBank 5.1.4, irssi 1.0.2, mpd 0.20.6, MyPaint 1.2.1, Meld 3.16.4, Ninja 1.7.2, PHP 7.0.17, Pidgin 2.12.0, QOwnNotes 17.03.6, Vi valdi Snapshot 1.8.770.25, and ALSA 1.1.3.
"Several significant upgrades happened this week (all of which are shipped in the stable repo at the time of publication)," said Joshua Strobl, Solus Project Communications Manager. "Justin and Ikey landed MATE 1.18 today, which features our upstreamed patch for action icons in mate-notification-daemon."
Budgie 10.3 desktop coming soon
Also included in the recent sync of the Solus repos is the latest KDE Frameworks 5.32.0, along with Kdenlive 16.12.3 video editor and a bunch of new packages that have been added at the request of some users. These include Kitematic 0.13.1, tint2 0.13, tap-plugins 0.7.3, MATE Calc 1.18.0, and Puddletag 1.2.0.
Of course, numerous other core components, especially from the GNOME 3.22 Stack, were updated to their latest versions at the moment of writing, so make sure that you update your Solus operating system(s) as soon as possible to receive them all. Don't forget to reboot your computers for the new kernel version to take effect.
In the meantime, the Solus devs are busy polishing the upcoming Budgie 10.3 desktop environment, which should be out as soon as next week and will be one of the last maintenance updates to the Budgie 10 series. They are also preparing a new version of the Brisk Menu with support for editing menu items via right-click context.
The forthcoming Brisk Menu release also promises to let users search for Control Center items. Under the hood, it looks like there will be better UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) support for the Solus Installer, along with various improvements to the boot process. Joshua Strobl also published a new video for those of you who want to learn how to package apps for Solus.
