Solus 2025.01.26 Budgie

About Solus

Solus is an independent desktop distribution, built from scratch rather than derived from another project, and it is the birthplace of the Budgie desktop environment, which has since spread to other distributions. Development follows a curated rolling model: updates land continuously but are grouped and tested, with a weekly cadence for the stable channel, aiming at current software without daily surprises. Packages use the eopkg format and tooling, descended from the PiSi package manager, and the project maintains its own repositories with a deliberately tidy selection. Official editions cover Budgie, KDE Plasma, GNOME, and Xfce, each configured with care. Solus is explicit about being a home-computing desktop first rather than a server platform. It appeals to people who want a polished, self-contained system outside the Debian, Fedora, and Arch families. OpenFactory offers a browser session of Solus for an unhurried first look.

What happens when you press Try now

The button opens the OpenFactory console in a new tab and boots a fresh Solus virtual machine from OpenFactory's verified source media. The session renders directly in the browser, so there is nothing to download and nothing to install on your computer.

Each visit gets its own machine with a fresh overlay over an immutable base image. Files, settings, and desktop changes behave normally inside the session and are discarded when it ends, so every visitor starts from the same clean Solus 2025.01.26 Budgie.

How Budgie behaves in a browser VM

Budgie, which originated with the Solus project, offers a clean single-panel layout with the Raven sidebar for notifications and quick settings. It aims for a modern look without heavy customization requirements.

Questions about this target