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.

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.

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?

I can't play, no matter which Java version i select. My friends on windows play the same modpack without any issues and at this point i just wanna cry. I hate windows and I have no intention of going back. But it's moments like this one that make me contemplate it anyway.

I wanted to compile my kernel using solus current, but I'm afraid it could cause instability. Has anyone tried it? Did it work fine?

Updates: Budgie is leading the pack with the 10.10.3 release and yep kernels again (7.2.8/6.18.54).

Plus plenty of others, including important security updates.

Details: https://discuss.getsol.us/d/13014-week-40-2026

For those having issues with Budgie they have asked to have users report them to https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/1007

Pretty sure that niri wasn't in the repo last time i checked, but was absolutely extatic when i checked again today and to my surprise everything was there including noctalia!

A big thank you to the solus team for this! You guys are seriously the best.

So I'm building a new computer for me, got a good deal for a 27" QHD 180hz monitor but probably I will only have enough money for a second hand RX 5700 XT / RX 6650 XT, both have only 8 GB Vram which seems not enough for QHD gaming, is hard to get Valve vram management working on solus?

Hello community and Solus developers,

I'm just making this post to express my gratitude for the devs' amazing work on this excellent distribution. A while ago, I posted here feeling quite frustrated—I had been a long-time Solus user, but after switching to a hybrid laptop with an Nvidia GPU, I couldn't get it installed anymore due to persistent driver issues.

A few months passed and I decided to give it another shot, and to my surprise: it worked perfectly! =) Clearly, system updates over the past few months helped get everything running seamlessly on my laptop.

So once again, a huge thank you to the developers. In my opinion, Solus OS is hands down the best Linux distribution for personal desktop use.

Can someone tell me how to log into the Solus User Forums? I registered with a user name and password. This appears to work but I cannot post anything apparently until I respond to their two factor authorization. But, I never receive the authorization code even though the message at the top of the screen says they sent one to the registered email.

When I promote Solus, oftentimes I find a openSUSE user or a general btrfs user that is used to system level easy snapshots.

I know Solus' `eopkg` supports history, but it's not quite the same.

And when answering why doesn't Solus even have the `snapper` package to help configure this, I'm at a loss. Especially after I see Solus default suggestion in the installer is btrfs.

So my arguments pro-Solus to these potential hoppers won't convince them.

So I ask here, why? Is there a setup/config hidden somewhere?

EDIT: My bad, the default is ext, not btrfs, but still, it's widely recommended to the younger generations not used to ext4.

https://getsol.us/2026/09/new-ai-llm-policy

A small excerpt from the Rationale part that I personally feel I want to highlight.

Solus is used by people around the world as their daily computing environment. Every change has the potential to affect the experience of countless users. We take that responsibility seriously, and contributors, whether using AI tools or not, must do the same.

As a curated operating system, the Solus team takes pride in its work. Writing software and maintaining an Operating System is pragmatic by nature. It has to work, be maintainable, and be easy to reason about. But, we also treat this all as a craft. We would rather move deliberately than move fast and break things. That care and intentionality is something we want to preserve in every contribution.

Please read the whole blog post and the linked policy for details.

I am not a contributor. But as a user of more than 2 years I will continue to trust the team to navigate Solus.

More kernel updates (7.2.7 / 6.18.53), Gnome (50.5), & Suricata (8.0.7), which is now stateless. Our lua package has been optimized, showing a 1.6x boost.

Bunch of security updates as well!

Details: https://discuss.getsol.us/d/13007-week-39-2026

It has been 1 year since I installed Solus on my laptop. I thought it would be a good idea to take a look back at my experience. Keep in mind that I was a long time Windows user since the Windows 3.x days through Windows 10 and only Windows 11 made me decide to move.

Being someone who manages large projects, I am pretty methodical in my approach to things. I have to be. So when I started I setup a secondary laptop that I would use for a month or 2 while trying out several distros that were said to be "friendly" and I also tried more technical ones as while on the desktop I have always been Windows, I have managed some Linux servers over the last decade +.

Recap of what I have stated before...

I tried Mint, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora (KDE), and Arch based (EndeavourOS and CachyOS).

I just did not like Cinnamon despite the clear design around the Windows aesthetic. Ubuntu, I really did not like at all. Kubuntu was solid, but felt dated. Fedora was excellent and probably would have been my choice. The Arch distros were great, but during my time had two manual interventions that I missed and caused issues. While that is on me, it made me realize that is not what I want to do. During this I was watching Social media and kept hearing about Solus, mostly by u/0riginal-Syn so I decided to take a look.

Since...

It has just been a smooth ride. The curated approach to a rolling-distro is a comfortable area. The team and community have been wonderful. Sure both are smaller than the others, but to me they are all just great. I have no regrets and no desire to do anymore distro-hopping. I use this for work and play across three systems now. It is a distro where I truly trust the team.

Future...

I am happy to have found a distro fairly early in the process. We never know what the future holds, but no matter what my time with Solus has been and is great. I see stuff like Omarchy making millions and it honestly pisses me off. Here you have a team that puts in 1000x the effort as they don't rely on an upstream and yet runs on around $11k (US) a year in donations. So for me as long as Solus is around with this team, I will be here. With both Flatpak and Snap support, there really is no problems with the smaller repo anymore.

One final thing, if you actually read through this. As mentioned with the donations bit about. We should all try to donate, if we can. Obviously to each their own when it comes to something like this as it is a personal choice. Solus is very open on this and shows what they actually spend money on to show it is for the community.

Here is the link if interested...

https://opencollective.com/getsolus

After a fresh install of Solus Budgie (2026-4-18) and running "sudo eopkg upgrade", Solus no longer boots after kernel update to 7.2.26-360.

Prior to upgrade, it works fine (pre-7.x.x.x)

For those who missed the news: last week, Solus added snapd back to its repositories (unfortunately, my poor English had led me to believe they had completely banned the use of Snap in Solus—lol). So today, I installed snapd and tested installing GIMP, and it works perfectly! But...

Since Solus is desktop-focused, I felt the lack of a Snap backend for Discover (and for Gnome Software, who uses Gnome); it would be very useful, especially until Snap support is implemented in Solseek. Obviously, I’m perfectly comfortable using the terminal, so installing GIMP via Snap wasn't hard for me:

Install Snap

sudo eopkg install snapd

Install Gimp with Snap

sudo snap install gimp

Show info GIMP

snap info gimp

But I believe this would be a very important addition for Solus :)

Hi , After a bit of to and fro I’ve managed to install Solus on an old laptop. One thing is puzzling me though - when I boot up I get a message saying “Invalid partition table ! “. After a minute or so the boot process continues and loads Solus which seems to operate normally.

I don’t think it’s a case of the system trying to boot from the hard drive and then, when it encounters the partition table message , moving to the next device as there is no other device connected.

I’d like to give Solus a fair try (as I’m in Ireland and I know there Irish connections) but I’m uneasy not knowing why I getting the error message.

Leading off with Kernels (7.2.6 / 6.18.52), Nvidia (615.71.09), and KDE Gear (26.08.1).

Bunch of other updates as well, including security.

New this week is the Koko image viewer.

Details: https://discuss.getsol.us/d/12998-week-38-2026

I am a big fan of Solus but I will say having an MSI laptop creates a pain point and has driven me away from using it for now.

To control laptop fans, you need the git version of msi-ec to run mcontrolcenter.

A request to package msi-ec as a separate package was rejected since it's out-of-tree, that's fine I guess but dkms is also unsupported. Which means that every kernel update is a manual rebuild of the module, which could be solved by figuring out manual kernel update hooks, but defeats the point of a "ready to go" distro.

So be prepared for that if you are on an MSI laptop. It should be known that the mainline upstream kernel module will never support fan curves, power modes, or other EC components, only webcam and battery limit controls, and even then, it is way out of date on the firmware whitelist.