SolusOS Shows off GNOME Fork in New Alpha

It's hardly been a week since the developers at SolusOS announced their fork of GNOME Classic. Dubbed Consort, it set the Linux world abuzz last week. Today the team announced the first release with that new desktop: SolusOS 2 Alpha 7.

The news of SolusOS' fork of GNOME was covered widely last week, but today's announcement summed it up saying, "This release now features the Consort Desktop, which is a fork of the GNOME Fallback Desktop + Components (3.4). This will eventually be a distro-agnostic desktop environment providing the classic experience of GNOME 2 in a GTK3 environment."

The fork wasn't an emotional response to GNOME 3 from the developers or their users, but while their users enjoyed their GNOME 2 desktops developers were finding it harder and harder to maintain. They'd been trying to patch existing packages and keep them up-to-date, but it proved to be a herculean and "tricky" proposition.

SolusOS 2 A7 features:

* Linux 3.3.6
* Firefox 18.0
* Thunderbird 17.0.2
* LibreOffice 3.6.4
* Athena 1.0.3
* Consortium 1.0.4
* Xorg X Server 1.12.4
* GCC 4.7.2

SolusOS has received lots of positive reviews and this one surely will too. The desktop is attractive and the live system works well. If you want to test the new alpha and report bugs or just get a look at it yourself, download the 32-bit alpha here.