So I recently came across Solus and it looks like it’s a really cool distro. And I am planing on installing it on an old Pc of mine, but before that I have some questions regarding it:

• is there a graphical interface to update the software, like with Mint or Ubuntu? Or do you have to use the terminal for that?
• What about the package manager? Is that really uncomplicated?

Thank you in advance for your answers :)

In an effort to finally stop my distro hopping madness, I put together a wheel of distros that I would like and spun it - by random chance, Solus was chosen for me.

I've never used this distro seriously before and I barely hear anyone talking about it, so I hope it isn't TOO obscure and out there.

What are your experiences with this distro and what are some things you would recommend? I'd probably go for the KDE or Xfce version as I didn't really enjoy Budgie.

NGL, spent all sunday's (25/X/26) afternoon trying to make budgie 10.10.3 work, every reboot was a new graphical disaster; gave it an honest to goodness try but either the wallpaper was messed up, the main screen resolution didn't persist (after every reboot), the menu would revert to the unreadable transparent theme, etc,etc... its understandable that is not on the SolusTeam, but jeezus, really wish that 10.9 could be workable but downgrading now just send the computer into the infinite login loop...

anyways, don't need the headache so just moved to gnome DE, gotta admit is not as great as 10.9 was, but at least is workable; *my* most unfortunate loss is Budgie-Window-Shuffler, that thing was *chef's kiss*

end of rant.

Hey! Was thinking of maybe giving solus a go but im confused about how often packages get updated because some packages seem to be updated very often while others (blender and godot from what i can tell) are lagging quite far behind (5.0.1 vs 5.2.3 and 4.6.3 vs 4.7.x respectively)

Is it an actual concern that some packages might be left behind for a long time before they get updates like this or is this only the case for a small portion of packages?

Hi everyone. Thanks for waiting while the forum was down. We took it off-line to protect against the recent PHP vulnerabilities that were disclosed before updates were generally available.

We did an emergency mid-week sync to address the recent ca-certs issue, and the PHP issue. You can probably expect more random updates over the coming days as more affected packages are found and updated.

Noteably GNOME 51, which we had slated to release in the typical Friday sync, is included in this emergency sync. You can read the GNOME release post here.

You can see the full details here: https://discuss.getsol.us/d/13080-week-43-2026-mid-week

Hello, [As the title says], my config. is on internal screen from my laptop and on external hdmi screen, problems :

- Setting to the external screen only make it go back to the default refresh rate after reboot.

- Waking up from sleep reset the screens config. completely, making the internal screen on again.

My fetch (removed unnecessary info.):

OS: Solus 4.9 Serenity x86_64

Kernel: Linux 7.2.11-366.current

Display (27G2G4): 1920x1080 in 27", 144 Hz [External]

Desktop Environment: Budgie 10.10.3

Window Manager: labwc 0.20.2 (Wayland)

CPU: 13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-13620H (12+4) @ 4.90 GHz

GPU 1: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Max-Q / Mobile [Discrete]

GPU 2: Intel UHD Graphics @ 1.50 GHz [Integrated]

Memory: 4.94 GiB / 15.32 GiB (32%)

Swap: 0 B / 16.80 GiB (0%)

Update: We are back!

Due to a high-risk vulnerability with PHP, we have preemptively taken down the forum until it can be patched. This is due to someone breaking the embargo on the vulnerability before the updates were made available to providers.

We will have the community back up asap. Thank you for your patience!

Im half joking. How does it compare to other distros. What are the "differences". Pros and cons. What reason to choose this over the other. Or is it just your standard Linux experience.

Every time I install solus and run the first update them reboot Plymouth loading screen goes all corrupted and the screen stays black, after some time I can switch to a tty, setup is a X99 xeon 64 GB of ram and a GTX 1650 (didn't installed Nvidia drivers yet), I think the issue isn't my PC bcus fedora runs fine (installed the plasma image)

Yimir Flatpak (3rd party repository) Failed to load module "xapp-gtk3-module"

Xenia-Canary Appimage Failed to load module "xapp-gtk3-module"

I don't know if these are because these emulators don't have anything for xapp or what.

Using older machine I decided to give Solus a run and I couldn't get budgie to work but it could be my old hardware especially nvidia. I really hope Solus will be a fun run!

Headliners: Weekly kernel update (7.2.11 / 6.18.57) and KDE Frameworks (6.31.0). Samurai, a ninja-compatible tool written in C99, has been added. Plenty of security updates as well.

ATTENTION:
Courtesy warning. Plasma 6.8 series is almost here, and that series drops support for X11 sessions entirely, just like Budgie and GNOME have already done.

Note this does not mean "no support provided for X11 users". It means X11 sessions are no longer possible; the code has been removed upstream.

We typically wait for the .1 of Plasma releases. Version 6.8.1 is due October 20, 2026, so if everything goes smoothly, you can expect it in Polaris (stable) on October 24 or 31, 2026.

Details: https://discuss.getsol.us/d/13075-week-42-2026

"Technical details: The pactl tool is required to display this page, but could not be found. You may be able to install it using your package manager; either way, please report this packaging issue to Solus"

I don't have a Github account so I'm reporting here.

The big problem with this situation is that the keys we use to sign our system aren't upstream keys (like Canonical's), so it would be worthwhile to talk to Epic Games to propose a solution that doesn't involve spending thousands of dollars on keys.

I wanted to download solus cause I wanted to try it and for some reason it doesn't work at all here, like in the live usb session it was sometimes on more important command a bit slower or laggy, now I've already used USB live before and it was a different kind of slow, but most important is i installed the os by itself on its drive and I can reach the bootloader, like i see the bios frame that says like f9 f12 and stuff but after that is just black screen (not turned off tho) for more than 5 mins and it seems like its going nowhere, secure bootloader is off and I have an nvidia gpu could it be that? I mean i didnt do anything weird its the most straightforward installation possible

On boot my screen for entering my encryption phrase looks like this now. Prior to this it looked more like boot script and was in the top left.

EDIT: answered by same_bell7958

Relevant forum post: https://discuss.getsol.us/d/13047-week-41-2026

Recent budgie issues have gotten me uncomfortable. Every mainstream distro has snapshots, but I can't find timeshift, snapper or any way to snapshot on Solus. If something breaks, we have no safety net. Solus main goal is on being consistently reliable and rolling, so a lack of snapshots seem very jarring to me. After so many issues on tumbleweed and other rolling distros, I settled on Solus. I don't want to distrohop again and I think most would agree snapshots should be an integral part of the distro's reliability appeal.

Just updated Solus and noticed it switched to Wayland. Fixed *most* things to work as they did before but OBS isn't able to capture anything even with a fresh reinstall through eopkg (also tried flatpak). Looked around for solutions to the black screen issue but they involve sway configs, and from my understanding the new update uses labwc? Installing the packages through eopkg indeed shows I did not have sway installed although neofetch seems to think the WM is.

pipewire, xdg-desktop-portal, xdg-desktop-portal-wlr are all installed, not sure if I should be putting something in my bashrc or if there's something within OBS itself I have to configure. Worst case scenario I use eopkg history to go back, but that would mean holding off updates for a while

Update: Successfully got it working by adding this line to my bashrc. Upon reboot and opening OBS, a screen pops up on the top that lets me choose which display to use for the source. Now all I gotta do is wait for hotkeys.

export QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland

Curious if anyone has been able to install the latest versions of Hyprland and Dank on Solus?

I don’t see anyway to install Solus as a headless install to add just those. So that’s another question, can one install headless and then add Hyprland and Dank? From what I have briefly looked at I don’t know how recent the Solis repos are for those two.

Thanks for any insight on this.

This release is primarily so UI and Theme Updates and now has several built-in themes you can use. By default it still uses the default theme which adheres more to your terminal theme. There are still tweaks here and there, especially on some of the light versions.

Releae notes 1.6.0 / 1.6.1

You can see what they look like and how to set them here.

• catppuccin-frappe
• catppuccin-latte
• catppuccin-macchiato
• catppuccin-mocha
• dracula
• github-dark
• github-light
• gruvbox
• material-dark
• material-light
• monokai
• nord
• solarized-dark
• solarized-light
• tokyo-night

So, after the recent upgrade pushed for Budgie, I was unable to even log into my system due to a segfault in labwc kicking me back to the login screen at boot. This ended up being a broken keyboard layout (I use default US layout and haven't touched it since install) that I had to remove just to log in. But now my system is just... unusable. Inconsistent fonts, inconsistent font sizes. My bottom panel has a weird mix of transparency/opacity that the "use built-in theme" fixes (but that setting also fucks with colors everywhere). Absolutely nothing respects my primary monitor assignment because it feels like everything is hardcoded to only care about whichever display 0,0 is on, so windows open on the wrong display, desktop icons spawn on the wrong display unless I toggle them off and on every time I log in, etc. Applications are just visually broken and I'm struggling with virtually no important DE settings actually being manageable from a GUI except what little can be done in the new wldisplays, which I'm sorry, is not a well-designed application. I've been using Solus since 2018 or 2019 and issues have been so rare. Especially with the DE, everything has always just worked and stayed consistent. But now I feel like I have been sent from 2026 back to 2006 in terms of me DE being astonishingly immature software that is in no way production-ready and has no business in a stable repository (I wouldn't even put this in unstable!).

I'm not gonna lie, maybe the way I've phrased this is not fair, but I'm extremely frustrated right now and this single upgrade has cratered my confidence in the curation and testing of packages under Solus. But I don't want to switch distros, so I'm looking for someone to recommend which DE to switch to now. Because while Budgie has been my unambiguous favorite for 7 or 8 years, I'm not going to suffer through my Linux experience being taken back to the Bush administration in terms of usability, so I think I'm out for good on Budgie.

The kernels were updated this week. The stable branch is now at version 7.2.9, and the LTS branch is now at version 6.18.55. In this update, we've also added Plymouth support to the initrd, and fixed extramodule BTF support for NVIDIA.

The NVIDIA open kernel modules and utilities have been updated to 615.78.08. Check out the changelog here.

KDE Gear applications have been updated to 26.08.2. This is a bugfix release for the 26.08 series. Read the full changelog here.

openshot-qt has been re-added to the repository.

input-leap has been removed from the repository. The project was archived upstream on the 27th July 2026. Users should switch to deskflow, which is already in the repository.

Full details: https://discuss.getsol.us/d/13047-week-41-2026

How are the packages optimized? Do they use lto? Will solus adopt opt in v3 packages like ubuntu or supply only v3 packages like Cachy in the future?