It's been quite a while since we got a substantial update for the Solus project, but the developers have kindly obliged, and they have shared the progress they made with the community.

In all fairness, the Solus developers and especially Ikey Doherty, the leader of the project, have been quite active on social networks and they've kept people informed, but we really needed a bird's eye view. This is a major undertaking, especially since Solus is not based on something else, like Debian or Ubuntu. It's built from scratch, and it uses a new desktop environment called Budgie.

When you're doing things from scratch, you will encounter problems that can't be solved by upstream solutions. An operating system is a complex ecosystem, and it has the potential of being used by lots of people, so you need to be sure that it's stable and in working order. It might take longer than a regular project, but the end result is definitely better. So far, Solus promises to be a great experience, and the final release date is getting closer each day.

Solus will be an awesome release

As you can see from the screenshots, Solus has a more traditional approach to desktop design, which should be right up the alley of people who are still regretting the old days, but make no mistake about it. This is a modern desktop, and if you give the Solus operating system a spin, you will notice that too.

"We’ve moved our singular package repository on GitHub to dedicated and owned infrastructure. Every single package has it’s own repository, with very specific permissions. As an immediate benefit, we’re now enabling package owners, for the first time. We switched out our old build systems and permit package owners to issue a package update directly to the unstable repository, by way of our new build system. Now a package owner merely needs to issue a 'make publish' command, and our public-key based system will queue their package for build and inclusion into the repository by our own trusted build machines," explains Ikey Doherty in this update.

The developer adds that this greatly increased the development time, and that is always great news. The team is also in a position to provide Steam by default (some 32-bit magic needed to be done), and the broadcom-sta driver has been implemented.

The stable version of Solus should be here by the end of July or even August if everything goes as planned, and we'll have more information then.