Solus developers revealed a couple of days ago that they plan to also support GNOME Shell, for the users who want this alternative desktop experience. Now, a series of very interesting screenshots have been published, and it looks like things are shaping up just nicely.

Solus uses Budgie as the default desktop environment, but developers figured out that maybe not all of the users will want to use this solution. The integration of GNOME Shell seemed like the obvious next step since Solus is already using many packages from the GNOME stack.

“All I can say is hot damn I was just getting GDM + GNOME Shell together so we can ship them on Solus, and ran into a bug. Currently my GDM build is having issues launching X sessions, which I will be resolving (obviously :P) So.. these screenshots are actually of GNOME Shell 3.18 on Wayland, on Solus! ” wrote the leader of the Solus project on Google+, Ikey Doherty.

It’s also interesting to notice that Solus is using Wayland, but that comes at a price. Devs had to use the Nouveau drivers, and they are obviously misbehaving.

You can download the latest Solus build from Softpedia and take it for a spin, but don't forget to update it as soon as possible. It works very well in virtual environments, like VirtualBox for example, so you can test it with great ease.