Solus 4.5 'Resilience' released with PipeWire, Calamares installer, and new Xfce edition

Solus, the independent Linux distribution designed for home computing, has announced the release of its version 4.5, aptly named 'Resilience'. This latest version showcases a range of updated applications and kernels, a refreshed software stack, and a new ISO edition featuring the XFCE desktop environment.

The installation experience in Solus 4.5 has been revamped with the inclusion of the Calamares installer. Notably, the software updates in this version include Firefox 121, LibreOffice 7.6.4, and Thunderbird 115.6, accompanied by updates for audio and video multimedia playback software.

In a significant change, Pipewire is introduced as the media framework for Solus, replacing PulseAudio and JACK. Solus 4.5 also packages ROCm 5.5 for users with supported AMD hardware, facilitating GPU acceleration for applications like Blender, and hardware-accelerated machine learning with support for PyTorch, llama.cpp, Stable Diffusion, and various other AI software and tools.

The release of Solus 4.5 ships with Linux kernel 6.6.9, providing wider hardware support and introducing several configuration changes. Budgie 10.8.2, the latest release of the Budgie Desktop, is included in Solus 4.5. It introduces dark style preference support, a new default Budgie Trash Applet, and numerous quality-of-life improvements.

In addition to Budgie, Solus 4.5 is available with other desktop environments, such as GNOME 45.2, KDE Plamsa 5.27.10, and Xfce 4.18.