Ten months after the previous 4.7 “Endurance” release, the Solus team announced the immediate availability of Solus 4.8, codenamed “Opportunity,” which delivers a wide range of system updates, desktop improvements, and infrastructure changes across all editions, along with a completely redesigned website.
With this release, the team finally completed its long-running Usr-Merge transition. With the new epoch, the project moved to the Polaris package repository, enabling the removal of compatibility symlinks and unblocking major upgrades such as systemd 257.10. The update also allowed the distribution to drop Python 2 entirely after migrating all tooling to Python 3.
For Solus 4.8, the Plymouth boot splash system is now enabled by default. Earlier concerns about performance no longer apply, and its inclusion provides a cleaner interface for offline updates through GNOME Software and Discover. Offline updates download packages in advance and install them at boot, reducing the chance of breakage during active sessions.