Solus Project leader Ikey Doherty has just informed us today that the next Solus ISO snapshot, due for release in the coming weeks, will be accompanied by a GNOME edition too.

We believe that this is a dream come true for many Solus users out there, not because they weren't able to install the GNOME Shell interface before, but because having an officially supported edition that features the GNOME 3 desktop environment by default makes Solus adoption a lot easier.

As you very well know, Solus currently offers two editions, one with the in-house built Budgie desktop environment that's based on the GNOME Stack, at the moment, and another one with the MATE desktop environment, a clone of the old-school GNOME 2 interface. So the Solus GNOME edition will be the third one for the project.

"The next snapshot of Solus will also be accompanied by a GNOME edition," reveals Ikey Doherty, exclusively for Softpedia. "The GNOME Shell image will be using a mostly vanilla shell with some extensions enabled, GDM, etc. Given that in future, with Budgie decoupling from GNOME, we still intend to fully support our GNOME loving/using userbase with a full GNOME implementation."

Solus also moving to the GNOME 3.24 Stack soon

And as you might have guessed already, the Solus devs are hard at work these days to upgrade the GNOME components used for the main Budgie edition to the latest GNOME 3.24 Stack from the 3.22.x stable series that's still being used at the moment of writing this article. Mr. Doherty says that the move will happen as soon as this weekend.

Besides the major GNOME 3.24 Stack upgrade and the new Solus GNOME edition, the upcoming Solus ISO snapshot will have two changes worth mentioning, namely the inclusion of the LibreOffice office suite by default in the live images, as well as the replacement of VLC Media Player with GNOME MPV as default video player.

That being said, after the launch of the new Solus ISO snapshot, which should happen in the coming weeks, the project will support three editions. These are Solus Budgie with the Budgie 10.3, Solus MATE with the MATE 1.18, and Solus GNOME with the GNOME 3.24. Below are a couple of screenshots of the upcoming Solus GNOME flavor.

Solus GNOME Edition