Budgie 11 to be released in the third quarter of 2019

Jan 14, 2019 20:19 GMT  ·  By

Solus Project's Joshua Strobl announced today in a lengthy blog post that the long-anticipated Solus 4 operating system release will finally arrive in Spring 2019 along with the Budgie 10.5 desktop environment.

It's been a year since the former leader of the Solus Project, Ikey Doherty, promised us the release of Solus 4, but after many trials and tribulations the team is now stable and ready to continue from where they left off. According to experience lead developer Joshua Strobl, the Solus 4 release is on its way very soon, as soon as Budgie 10.5 desktop environment hits the streets.

"I’m hoping that Budgie 10.5 will be ready for release in the next few weeks, which also means Solus 4 will also be released, finally moving us away from the Solus 3.x release and subsequent ISO refresh and opening the door to our previously announced change in our In Full Sail blog post to how we release new versions of Solus," said Joshua Strobl.

Of course, Solus being a rolling release distribution means that the Solus 4 release will be just another ISO snapshot with up-to-date packages and all the latest security fixes. However, the Solus community wanted a Solus 4 release for so long, and it's a good thing to have a fresh image at hand for new deployments of the operating system without having to download hundreds of updates after installation.

Besides the Budgie edition, the Solus 4 release will also bring the latest GNOME 3.30 desktop environment, which could land in the Solus 4.1 point release planned for February-March 2019. On the other hand, the team stated that they wouldn't continue updating the Budgie 10 series with further point release, but instead concentrate their efforts on a major update, Budgie 11.

Budgie 11 could be released in 2020

The development cycle of the Budgie 11 desktop environment will kick off this spring, and Joshua Strobl says it plans to release the first alpha version for public testing in August, and public beta builds of Budgie 11 should hit the streets by the end of the year. This means that the final release of the Budgie 11 desktop environment could see the light of day sometime in Spring 2020.

In 2019, the Solus Project will also concentrate their efforts on improving the Software Center, the Sol next-generation package manager, web infrastructure, the YPKG build format and packaging tool, the Linux Hardware Qualifier tool, and other developer-oriented tools. In conclusion, we can finally say that the Solus team is back and you should expect amazing things from this independent Linux OS.