After a long wait and a few delays, the guys over at Solus, a groundbreaking Linux kernel-based computer operating system, have finally announced the release and immediate availability for download of Solus 1.0 on December 27, 2015.

Solus has been in development for quite some time now, and it was previously known to the world first as SolusOS, and then as Evolve OS. Because of some trademarking issues with the name Evolve, the distribution returned to its origins, and it is now dubbed Solus.

Solus is the creation of the Intel employee Ikey Doherty, who also designed one of the most remarkable, modern desktop environments available to date, Budgie Desktop, which is being adopted by various GNU/Linux distributions as we speak.

After being available as both Beta and Daily Build ISO images, but also as a Release Candidate build, Solus 1.0 is the first stable release of the operating system, available for download right now only for 64-bit (x86_64) computers (see download link at the end of the article).

Gorgeous desktop environment, excellent tools, latest apps

Whoever has tried Budgie Desktop until now knows that it's simply gorgeous, has a modern design, it is very responsive and well done, designed with the new Linux user in mind. Best of all, it is based on the latest GNOME Stack, always. Solus 1.0 ships with Budgie Next, the next-gen version of Budgie.

Budgie Next also includes some awesome additions, such as the Raven notification and customization center and Budgie Menu, which lets you quickly access installed apps. What we love most about Solus is that the distribution comes with the latest versions of everything.

For example, Solus 1.0 is powered by Linux kernel 4.3 and features Firefox 43.0.2, Thunderbird 38.5.0, Nautilus 3.18.4, VLC Media Player 2.2.1, and much more. Bottom line, we recommend that you try Solus 1.0 right now and see what the fuss is all about. You can download the Solus 1.0 Live DVD ISO image from Softpedia or via the official website.