Solus Linux

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Vermillion

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So I've been playing with a smaller distro called Solus and I've never seen it talked about here on [H]. https://solus-project.com/

I first heard about this a few weeks ago when I started listening to the Linux Unplugged podcast. The founder is a regular guest on the podcast so hearing him talk about Solus and what they're doing is quite impressive and it's what made me want to give it a shot.

Solus is not based on anything. It's straight up a new rolling release distro written from scratch. It's fast and lightweight. Uses it's own DE called Budgie (MATE is now available as well and possibly other DE's i haven't explored enough to check). Budgie is open source and was written from scratch and damn Budgie is really nice.

What a beautiful distro. The install is clean with good options (including disk encryption). This distro just flat out works right out of the box. It truly could be used as a distro for acually causing the "Year of the Linux Desktop." It's that nice. This is absolutely what I'll be installing on my wife's laptop in the coming weeks. All the integration with updates and software installs it's all there and it's simple and easy to use.

Honestly, I think it may just pull me away from Arch Linux. While I love the power of Arch it is a lot of work to maintain yourself and make everything work. I always preferred Arch because it was lean and fast especially compared to the common distros like Ubuntu. Solus is both of those things but all the added little nice things on top right out of the box.

I look at Solus and think "this is what Ubuntu should have been."
 
I gave Solus a "test drive" in February as a Live CD on an under powered Toshiba Laptop to see if it ran better than Linux Lite. Unfortunately, it had problems, I can't remember what they were, so I stuck with Linux Lite 3.2. If you haven't already, and are interested, you can read the review distrowatch.com published in February 2017. Solus is 64-bit only. I have 32-bit Ubuntu Budgie on a Dell 5150 that doesn't support 64-bit and it was nice.
 
Hi All

I have Solus on my laptop, & I really like it. Like OP I'm using a Arch based Distro Manjaro on rig in my Sig. Ikey Doherty has even replied to some questions I've asked. Solus is a solid Distro that I have no qualms in recommending.
 
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I'll give this one a try on an unused laptop in a couple days. Thanks for the info.
 
Dredging up an old thread instead of making a new one for the same topic but I figured it's worth it.

Interested in mucking around with something new and since Solus is not a JADLD (Just Another Linux Distro) but something new and written from the ground up I'm going to take a look at it just for kicks.

Since the last post was back in April 2017 (only 6 months ago as of me making this post) I'm curious to know what people's experiences are after a longer period of time has passed. I haven't really found anything negative about Solus so far, and since I experiment with so many distros when I'm bored may find something of interest in this that could maybe keep me using Linux for a period longer than usual. ;)

So, anyone care to share their own experiences with Solus?
 
Tiberian said:
Dredging up an old thread instead of making a new one for the same topic but I figured it's worth it.

Interested in mucking around with something new and since Solus is not a JADLD (Just Another Linux Distro) but something new and written from the ground up I'm going to take a look at it just for kicks.

Since the last post was back in April 2017 (only 6 months ago as of me making this post) I'm curious to know what people's experiences are after a longer period of time has passed. I haven't really found anything negative about Solus so far, and since I experiment with so many distros when I'm bored may find something of interest in this that could maybe keep me using Linux for a period longer than usual. ;)

So, anyone care to share their own experiences with Solus?
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I used Solus for a few months and really enjoyed it. I had to back to Arch (with Budgie as my DE) because I needed a newer kernel for something at work. Back then Solus was only LTS but I kept a very close on what Solus was doing because I knew they were looking at also including the mainline kernel since they had merged in clr-boot-manager.

With Ikey (Solus founder and lead dev) now working full time on Solus (he left his job at Intel to do Solus fulltime) things have really ramped up and I moved back to Solus.

Solus 3 brought the linux-current kernel to Solus and made it default. LTS is still available if you wish. Solus now has full AppArmor integration and Snap support with full containment support which is OMG nice. Solus is only the 2nd non-Ubuntu distro to do that (Debian 9 I think was the first).

But Solus 3 also brought a huge update to Budgie (10.4) which really corrected a lot of the issues and brought new functionality like docks which really makes Budgie a great DE. Ikey is currently working on Budgie 11 which moves Budgie to QT and off the Gnome stack (thank god for that).

Along with all that this past week there was a huge update to Solus in terms of ferryd. https://github.com/solus-project/ferryd

Overall I couldn't be happier now on Solus and I have zero plans go back to Arch as I have zero reason to go back now. The best part of Solus is that it's completely independent of anything else. It's not a fork of a fork of a fork or some shit. Solus is actually introducing new stuff (show me another distro with clr-boot-manager for example) and not just taking Ubuntu LTS and slapping another DE and a Theme on it.
 
I'll give it a try again. Thanks for the reminder.

Been using mint as my main os.
 
I grabbed the MATE distro of Solus from the website earlier today but it's having issues with the sound not working in VMware Workstation 12.5 for some reason I haven't been able to troubleshoot as of yet. The little extra crap necessary to get VM Tools installed (added some init.d directories) isn't necessarily a show stopper but it is just another thing I suppose. I've got a spare 128GB SSD at the moment so I might just do a bare metal install (it's attached to an eSATA port) from a USB stick and see how it performs on the native hardware.
 
I'll ask here before I make another account somewhere.

Just installed Solus 3 (budgie) on an old Shuttle XPC (BE-2400, Via 890 chipset, 4GBs RAM).

Everything seems to work pretty well except the user menu. It will open then immediately close. I searched around on google for a bit but, didn't find any hits. I've used linux for a couple years as a secondary (usually on the laptop) but, quite honestly am still very much a linux nub.
 
I installed Solus and I was impressed with how much they had done in so little time. (its pretty young yet) I only really ran it for a day... I couldn't get it to boot up my USB sound device. I assume they where very aggressive when they compiled their kernel. I didn't bother compiling my own kernel or anything crazy. Check it out and headed back to arch. I am keeping an eye on them though... its promising.
 
Private_Ops said:
I'll ask here before I make another account somewhere.

Just installed Solus 3 (budgie) on an old Shuttle XPC (BE-2400, Via 890 chipset, 4GBs RAM).

Everything seems to work pretty well except the user menu. It will open then immediately close. I searched around on google for a bit but, didn't find any hits. I've used linux for a couple years as a secondary (usually on the laptop) but, quite honestly am still very much a linux nub.
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Works fine here and works fine on my work laptop as well. Budgie worked great on Arch for me as well. Do your logs tell you anything when it crashes?

I'd hit them up on Telegram or Reddit. A lot of good people to help you there and if they don't know Ikey himself will usually respond. Just don't expect an answer from Ikey quick at the moment. Canonical just flew him to New York City for their thing going on up there right now. ;)

https://www.reddit.com/r/SolusProject/
https://telegram.me/solusproject
 
I got Solus up and running on bare metal (both the Budgie and MATE variants) and played with them for like an hour each and, well, it's Linux so that means "Ok, time to get back to Windows and get shit done..." :D

I don't know why I even bother with Linux in any form, any distro, any release, ever, because I simply don't like it and I know - after 25 years of messing with it since Linus first pushed some code to the public - that no matter what I do I'm simply never going to like it enough to use it for more than simple testing and experimental purposes aka "waste some time installing it and then realizing I don't like Linux and I never will..."

Performance was lackluster, there were a lot of visual glitches (I have an Nvidia Quadro 4200M GPU in my Latitude E6420, should be fairly well supported without me having to go alter some config files anywhere to get it functioning without such problems), and yes I know Solus is a rolling release model OS like others are nowadays but even so things just didn't work well.

I have pure Intel Wi-Fi hardware in this laptop, a 6300 card and a 4965, both very well supported in Linux, but both of them were showing signal levels in the 70-75% range and I'm like 7 feet from an 11ac capable router. In Windows, using older drivers, the signal level is consistently at 98%+ (I get 450 Mbps solid with the 6300 and 300 Mbps with the 4965 from this distance to my access point. Running speed tests of various kinds resulted in sub-par performance under Solus no matter which one I tried: the beta Speedtest.net HTML5 one gave me roughly 90-95Mbps using Firefox with either Wi-Fi card while under Windows the same test results in the "needle pegging" at about 133-135Mbps (the top of my connection's speed).

Yes I verified all the variables involved with the command line as well (ifconfig/iwconfig) to ensure I was connecting with 11n at the higher bitrates (was showing 144 on the 4965 and about 190-ish on the 6300 - under Windows as noted both connect at their maximums of 300 and 450 (the 6300 is a 3x3 card and I do have all three antenna leads connected and so it's using all three for that 450 max whereas the 4965 is a 2x2 card so 300 max). And yes it was all done with 5 GHz - the 2.4 GHz radio is completely disabled in my access point/router because the other 18 apartments in my building all use 2.4 GHz and just one other resident uses 5 GHz (mine is set for the low end of the spectrum, hers is set to the high end so there is zero overlap for us).

Not sure what was going on there but, those issues and some others gave me pause to consider it was time to dump Solus like every other Linux distro I've ever tried over decades and head back to Windows. I don't want this post to become a beacon for Linux folk to try and help me fix the issues - I shouldn't have to fix issues which is the point for me and many others and dare I say it "That doesn't happen with Windows..." is something I wanted to say obviously but I'll refrain from it any more than I just have in this sentence and that's that.

The hardware in this laptop is 8 years old, literally - it was shipped to me in October 2009 - and aside from the SSD (a Samsung 840 Pro 256GB) everything in it should be supported without issues and without the need to configure basically anything from a command line or shell or text editor. Since that's not the case yet once again in my testing and experimentation, I'll have to pass. Others might have more luck with Solus, I can't say for sure, all I can say is that it's just not for me.

So yeah, that happened, didn't last as I knew it wouldn't but I gave it a shot. :D
 
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Tiberian said:
So yeah, that happened, didn't last as I knew it wouldn't but I gave it a shot. :D
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Indeed didn't work out... I knew it wouldn't. lol Yes sounds like you really want to love Linux. Anyway thanks for the review Enjoy windows I guess.
 
One day it might 'click'.

Giving up Windows is like giving up smoking, it seems insurmountable and unlikely and it can take a number of attempts until everything just clicks - Then you wonder why you put up with Windows issues that you've become so accustomed to that you don't realize were issues until you gave Windows the flick for good.

Personally, Solus sounds interesting, but there's no way I'd use it as my daily driver OS at this point in time and advise anyone thinking of trying Linux to stick with mainstream distro's.

Perhaps next time.
 
I tried to install it on a pc, but my monitors are 4k native and the only way I could install the damn thing is disconnect them and hook up a tv. All was good after I installed nvidia drivers, but that is a lot of work and frustrating as hell. Most distros still have this problem though.

Edit: Looks good in a vm though. No real way to test software compatibility in a vm though :/
 
KarsusTG said:
I tried to install it on a pc, but my monitors are 4k native and the only way I could install the damn thing is disconnect them and hook up a tv. All was good after I installed nvidia drivers, but that is a lot of work and frustrating as hell. Most distros still have this problem though.

Edit: Looks good in a vm though. No real way to test software compatibility in a vm though :/
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Nouveau should handle 4k? Unless the drivers picked up the wrong information via EDID?

So your monitors won't accept any resolution but 4k? What a PITA.
 
Yesterday I installed Antergos to my PC. Install was a bit painful due to some Nouveau bug that froze the desktop unless I set the kernel to safemode options. Then when I wanted to test the latest wine through playonlinux I find out that arch repos have an old version of POL. What's the point of running a rolling release version if it doesn't have up to date packages? :/
 
It’s my daily driver. I like it. The kernels are stupid new too: hello rolling release!
 
gigatexal said:
It’s my daily driver. I like it. The kernels are stupid new too: hello rolling release!
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If it's not an important machine, go for it!

Personally, I use my PC every day for work and I can't afford to have issues.
 
Solus has rolling releases for both userland and kernel. You can run a LTS kernel or a bleeding edge one. But your userland is still up to date. That’s why I run it.
 
I like Solus, except for one thing. The lack of some packages in their package manager, and no way to add custom repo's that I'm aware of. In Ubuntu there are PPA's, and on Arch we have the AUR. Without the ability to easily install some of the applications I enjoy Solus wont work for me. Other than that, I love the idea and polish of Solus, and I'm really looking forward to see what they do with Budgie now that they are breaking free of being based on GNOME. I'm really excited to see how Budgie is truly it's own thing, and not just an alteration of an existing DE.
 
I have been using Solus now for a couple days and have to say it is overall really good experience so far. There are pros and cons to my usual Mint.

The pros are newer kernels work with my RX 580 where Mint doesn't, 144hz works great where it flickers on Mint like crazy and has to be lowered to 120hz, I don't have to go to a PPA to get newer versions of Mesa where with Mint I do. The cons would be that out of the gate it didn't have VLC installed, out of the gate I can't set my backgrounds to change pictures from my dropbox folder, I can't run .sh files in terminal just by double clicking the file itself, and installing software from the third party section takes far longer than on Mint.

Overall the pros give me a much better gaming experience and the cons are mostly minor stuff that just requires me to do things a little differently. I am going to give Antergos a go for a few days soon as well to see which rolling release I like more but since it gave me errors installing last night I tried Solus first.
 
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I love Solus don’t get me wrong but Ubuntu budgie is the best of both worlds imo Lunar
 
I admit, I haven't tried Solus, however I've tried literally everything else. Ubuntu MATE has never given me a moments trouble and looks quite nice once customized to your liking, defiantly gets my stamp of approval.
 
gigatexal said:
I love Solus don’t get me wrong but Ubuntu budgie is the best of both worlds imo Lunar
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So, I'm personally a Manjaro fan, and I've been giving some serious thought into trying Manjaro Budgie. The only real sticking point I have with Budgie is the way it handles open windows. Now, I know this might be contentious, but I'm honestly not a fan of the old school method of expanded, non-grouped, windows in the "taskbar." I know it isn't a good reason to write off an entire DE, but something about it just bugs me. I like my mouse over previews and grouping a lot. However, with GNOME's recent decision to kill status icons and the creator of Topicons Plus dropping his extension, I may not have much of a choice but to use a different DE. I've grown to really like GNOME lately, but I'm getting really irritated with the GNOME Foundations "our way or the highway and FU if you don't like it" approach to things. Meh, I might even give KDE a go, but I've had issues there in the past too. I love customization, but I think KDE almost takes it a step too far sometimes.
 
Lunar said:
So, I'm personally a Manjaro fan, and I've been giving some serious thought into trying Manjaro Budgie. The only real sticking point I have with Budgie is the way it handles open windows. Now, I know this might be contentious, but I'm honestly not a fan of the old school method of expanded, non-grouped, windows in the "taskbar." I know it isn't a good reason to write off an entire DE, but something about it just bugs me. I like my mouse over previews and grouping a lot. However, with GNOME's recent decision to kill status icons and the creator of Topicons Plus dropping his extension, I may not have much of a choice but to use a different DE. I've grown to really like GNOME lately, but I'm getting really irritated with the GNOME Foundations "our way or the highway and FU if you don't like it" approach to things. Meh, I might even give KDE a go, but I've had issues there in the past too. I love customization, but I think KDE almost takes it a step too far sometimes.
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This irked me with Gnome also, to me it felt too limiting and the use of extensions just wasn't enough. Having said that, I run KDE on my laptop and so far my issue with it has been fairly flawless. I also use a KDE live CD to rescue Windows 10 machines when they inevitably go tits up - I totally agree that KDE has a very different way of doing things and there is a bit of an adaption curve, but when you really get into it and begin understanding the DE, some of the alternate method's KDE use are actually quite handy.

I do, however, seem to have an issue with KDE Discover updater. It works fine and it may just be me being impatient, but after applying updates it just sits there and I have to force close it as it becomes 'unresponsive'? Once again, could be myself being impatient as I'm always smashing keys on my laptop in the workshop as I search for answers to problems I'm facing repairing various machines.
 
Simmonz said:
I have been using Solus now for a couple days and have to say it is overall really good experience so far. There are pros and cons to my usual Mint.

The pros are newer kernels work with my RX 580 where Mint doesn't, 144hz works great where it flickers on Mint like crazy and has to be lowered to 120hz, I don't have to go to a PPA to get newer versions of Mesa where with Mint I do. The cons would be that out of the gate it didn't have VLC installed, out of the gate I can't set my backgrounds to change pictures from my dropbox folder, I can't run .sh files in terminal just by double clicking the file itself, and installing software from the third party section takes far longer than on Mint.

Overall the pros give me a much better gaming experience and the cons are mostly minor stuff that just requires me to do things a little differently. I am going to give Antergos a go for a few days soon as well to see which rolling release I like more but since it gave me errors installing last night I tried Solus first.
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So I came to the conclusion that my issues above weren't caused by Solus OS but by the Budgie DE. I tried Solus Mate and it had the option to run in terminal when I double clicked the .sh files. Mate still lacks all the other stuff I miss from Cinnamon but it's a start and may be a decent compromise for me.
 
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Simmonz said:
So I came to the conclusion that my issues above weren't caused by Solus OS but by the Budgie DE. I tried Solus Mate and it had the option to run in terminal when I double clicked the .sh files. Mate still lacks all the other stuff I miss from Cinnamon but it's a start and may be a decent compromise for me.
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I'm an ex Cinnamon user, what would you miss running MATE?
 
BulletDust said:
I'm an ex Cinnamon user, what would you miss running MATE?
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For me was the more modern feeling of Cinnamon over MATE. Functionally I don't think there's anything that Cinnamon does that MATE wont do, but the look and feel is the main turnoff for me with MATE. I know that for others the appeal of MATE is that it is forked GNOME 2, but for me it's a disadvantage. I didn't like GNOME 2 back when it was the main version, and I don't like it today. If it wasn't for Muffin's issues with NVIDIA hardware I'd still be running Cinnamon, as I really do like it the most out of any available DE. It has just the right balance between function and flashiness for me, but until they unf**k Muffin I won't be going back to it.
 
Lunar said:
For me was the more modern feeling of Cinnamon over MATE. Functionally I don't think there's anything that Cinnamon does that MATE wont do, but the look and feel is the main turnoff for me with MATE. I know that for others the appeal of MATE is that it is forked GNOME 2, but for me it's a disadvantage. I didn't like GNOME 2 back when it was the main version, and I don't like it today. If it wasn't for Muffin's issues with NVIDIA hardware I'd still be running Cinnamon, as I really do like it the most out of any available DE. It has just the right balance between function and flashiness for me, but until they unf**k Muffin I won't be going back to it.
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You know you can install Compiz if it's effects and animations you're after, in fact Compiz runs really well under MATE and is included with the packaged distro. I dunno, I've run both DE for extended periods and I never missed Cinnamon, in fact in my recent tests covering all *buntu distro's the Cinnamon DE was the one DE that just wouldn't allow for 'Force Composition Pipeline' under Nvidia.

Having said that, when I was running Cinnamon, the Windows judder and a slight lack of customization was my only issue and I fixed that using that setting I told you to toggle, can't remember what it was...

Personally, I just find that MATE is one of the only remaining DE's that the user has complete control over - You can literally make it look and act any way you like. But, as I've always stated, freedom of choice is definitely a major strength of Linux and I wouldn't have it any other way. :)
 
B00nie said:
I'm also a strong Mate proponent. It tends to just work.
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I can't argue that since Mate is what I am using the moment for that very reason. I still find Budgie and Cinnamon to be my favorites just on sex appeal alone. They're simply much prettier.
 
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Vermillion said:
For those who care here is everything about this weeks massive update to Solus.

https://solus-project.com/2017/10/16/this-week-in-solus-install-47/
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So, the Steam integration work they are doing looks like it will go a long way to doing Valve's job for them. I swear, I can't wait until we have a viable alternative to Steam/Valve. I'm so sick of Valve doing half-assed work and being praised for it.

EDIT: And I don't mean for just Linux, I mean Valve doing half-assed work across the board regardless of platform.
 
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