Solus 4.9 Serenity Released

EbonJaeger

Heya, folks! It's time for the first Solus release of 2026! We've made some under-the-hood changes aimed at making it easier and more intuitive for users to manage their systems, and we've addressed some parts of the installation process.

Welcome to Solus 4.9 Serenity! In a world filled with turbulence, we aim to provide a calm harbor.

Check out our blog post to see what's new.

brent

EbonJaeger
"With Budgie 10.10, coming to Solus very soon, Budgie will no longer support X11 at all, and will be Wayland only!"

this did not get by me 🙂. I've been training with 10.10 for a while. It's got some hurdles..but I know what they are..

"For this release, we’ve changed the default privileged group from sudo to wheel. Most software assumes that the wheel group is the default sudo group, and we have to patch several packages to change it to use sudo. Switching to the usual wheel group means that maintaining these packages is easier for us, because we no longer have to worry about rebasing patches when software updates."

this is cool you found a timesaving maintainer 'hack.'

EDIT: was going to add more but changed my mind. So there is no edit per se

mkl

Good Name

Xoph

I like it! Nice little call out to the mess going on in the world right now that affects user privacy, etc. Name fits that perfectly.

Lucien_Lachance

congrats on the new release!

just a quick question, regarding the change to the systemd services. i have a custom service that i made for myself years ago, does the change mean i need to install/enable/start it in a different way or can i use the standard method from my old install script?

Teggs

If I understood the blog correctly, then depending on timing, after over a decade of put-downs, condescension, and other insults, Budgie may mandate Wayland before Gnome and KDE do? I will roll on the floor laughing if that happens. (Briefly. Then go on about my business.)

Any case, thank you to Solus devs for your efforts.

mkl

https://9to5linux.com/solus-4-9-serenity-released-with-linux-6-18-lts-kde-plasma-6-6-and-more

mkl

When do you plan to increase already installed systems?
Ups, already done 🤣
cat /etc/solus-release

elfprince

Is Solus XFCE switching over to Wayland as well? It is not mentioned in the blog.

Clintre

elfprince XFCE really just got started on their new Wayland compositor (news). So no real eta on when they will have something ready and stable.

joluveba

elfprince Please read this entry if you already didn't:

https://alexxcons.github.io/blogpost_15.html

minh

elfprince For months, I've been using Xfce Wayland (labwc) and don't want to switch back to X11. Aside from the monitor (dock connect) problem that prompted me to try Niri, everything runs really smoothly. Still end up with Xfce.

wazjf

Congrats on the new release! I already downloaded all editions to put on my ventoy stick

synth-ruiner

thanks, I could do with some Serenity. everyone who works on Solus is awesome. <3

faust

penny-farthing

In the three years since its renaissance in April 2023, and to the delight of its users, Solus has released six versions:

4.4 Harmony
4.5 Resilience
4.6 Convergence
4.7 Endurance
4.8 Opportunity
4.9 Serenity

The development team is doing an exemplary job, wisely balancing stability and new features, while staying on track with goals without getting overhelmed.

They deserve our thanks!

And who knows, when version 5.0 of our favorite distribution will arrive, perhaps they'll name it... Maturity? 🙂

Xoph

penny-farthing That along with @Clintre (Original-Syn at the time) posting on social all the time promoting Solus before he was even part of the team is what convinced me. When I first looked I winced a bit when I saw the rough patch, but then I continued looking and realized exactly what you pointed out, they really came back strong and have been putting in the work.

Lucien_Lachance

distrowatch has reviewed 4.9 budgie

https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20260525#solus