Fans of the Solus independent Linux-based operating system will be thrilled to learn that a bunch of new and updated packages made their way into the stable repositories a few moments ago.

We're using the distribution, so we just want to inform you as well about what landed today, November 24, 2016, just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday. First off, Solus is now powered by the latest Linux 4.8.10 kernel, which adds a bunch of networking improvements, and the recently released Vivaldi 1.5 web browser is available too.

It's been only three days since the last sync, but it looks like the Solus devs were quite busy updating various applications and utilities that are essential for the good operation of the distribution. If you look at the attached screenshot, you'll notice lots of goodies, including sudo 1.8.18_p1, node.js 7.2.0, Vim 8.0.0096, and GNU Make 4.2.1.

QOwnNotes and Maelstrom are now available for installation

Apart from all sorts of package rebuilds and various updated libraries, it looks like the Mozilla Thunderbird 45.5.0 email and news client and Lollypop 0.9.220 music player are there as well, along with two new interesting applications, namely the Maelstrom pseudo-3D-rendered Asteroids clone and QOwnNotes plain-text Notepad.

"Worked with QOwnNotes developer Patrizio Berkele on landing QOwnNotes in the repository," said Joshua Strobl, Solus developer and community manager. "Can't wait for all you ownCloud and Nextcloud Notes users to try it out!" If you've never tried QOwnNotes before, we recommend checking out its official website for more details.

With that being said, we'd like to invite all Solus users to fire up the Software Center application, go to the Updates tab and install all the awesome goodies mentioned in this article. There's a kernel update in this one, so make sure that you reboot your computer once all packages have been successfully installed. Happy Thanksgiving!