Solus 4.9 Released With Linux 6.18, Mesa 26, and Installer Upgrades

Five months after the 4.8 “Opportunity” release, the Solus team has announced the availability of Solus 4.9 “Serenity”, marking its first release of 2026.

Much of the work in this release happens behind the scenes. Solus now adopts systemd preset files to manage default services, replacing the earlier approach of linking services into target.wants directories. Additionally, the default privileged group has been switched from sudo to wheel.

For legacy non-UEFI systems, Solus now includes GRUB 2.14, bringing Argon2 support and enabling full compatibility with LUKS2 disk encryption. As a result, the default encryption format has moved from LUKS1 to LUKS2.

The installer has been updated to Calamares 3.4.2, introducing features like hybrid bootloader installation on legacy systems. This setup creates boot entries for both systemd-boot and GRUB2, with one capable of chainloading the other. The recommended EFI partition size has also been increased to 2 GB to better accommodate larger firmware components, kernel modules, and NVIDIA drivers.

On the software side, all editions ship with updated core applications, including Firefox 149, LibreOffice 25.8, and Thunderbird 149. The release is powered by Linux kernel 6.18 LTS and Mesa 26. The project also notes that Solus now shares its kernel patch set and configuration with AerynOS, which should improve hardware compatibility.

The Budgie edition includes Budgie 10.9.4. While this is a relatively small update, a major shift is coming with Budgie 10.10, which is expected to drop X11 support in favor of Wayland. The default terminal has also changed to Ptyxis.

The GNOME edition features GNOME 49.5 from the “Brescia” series, with plans to move to GNOME 50 soon—a release that will be Wayland-only and remove X11 support entirely.

For KDE users, the Plasma edition includes KDE Frameworks 6.24, KDE Plasma 6.6.4, and KDE Gear 25.12.3. Improvements in Plasma 6.6 include a better on-screen keyboard, text extraction from Spectacle screenshots, QR code-based Wi-Fi setup, and enhanced accessibility. Looking ahead, Plasma 6.8 (expected in October 2026) will also drop X11 support.

Lastly, the Xfce edition ships with the latest packages from the Xfce 4.20 series, continuing its focus on stability over major visual changes.

Solus 4.9 “Serenity” is now available for download in Budgie, GNOME, Plasma, and Xfce editions via direct download or torrent from the project’s website.