 Visitor Reviews |
Solus
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Reader supplied reviews for Solus
Average rating
7.6 from 196 review(s)
Version: 4.6
Rating: 10
Date: 2024-11-30
Votes: 142
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I've been doing a lot of distro hopping lately, trying out both various distros and various DE's. I was surprised that I liked Budgie as much as I do. I thought I might settle down with my hopping for a bit with Ubuntu Budgie, but then on further thought, I thought I'd try out what is technically Budgie's birth distro. Solus installed unbelievably quickly and boots unbelievably quickly. And I like the simplistic software installer, and so far, haven't come across anything they don't have a package for. I hope the bad times I have read about are done. Bottom line: I'm impressed with it.
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Version: 4.5
Rating: 10
Date: 2024-09-18
Votes: 105
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Solus stands out to me as a unique and thoughtfully crafted operating system. It was seamless to install. No hardware compatibility issues. The Budgie desktop environment is clean and modern looking. Solus performance on my slightly older Lenovo laptop from 2019 operates very smoothly and efficiently. Their package repo is limited, but combined with Flatpaks there wasn't anything I needed that I couldn't find. Solus is a rolling release, and while it took some time for me to grasp the benefits of rolling releases, it has been very stable with no issues during updates over the past several months. The Solus community has decent documentation and a helpful online forum. Overall, I don't see a need to leave Solus having come from a Debian (Linux Mint) background. Very happy with Solus!
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Version: 4.5
Rating: 5
Date: 2024-08-07
Votes: 0
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I've installed the XFCE version in VirtualBox. The installation process was fast, and the interface is clean and aesthetic.
However, when I opened the Software Manager to install Inkscape, downloading the dependencies and installing them took about seven minutes. Additionally, Google Chrome isn't in the repository, so you have to manually install and periodically upgrade it.
Sorry, but I'll stick to Debian-based distros with large repositories and a simple "click-on-DEB-file-enter-the-password" process for external software.
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Version: 4.5
Rating: 10
Date: 2024-07-15
Votes: 106
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It went through a bit of a tumultuous journey there, but now we're on the other side of it and things have stabilized. Solus is still the only distro that feels like home to me. The combination of a carefully curated rolling release, built exclusively for the best desktop experience, and being an independent distro with its own desktop environment is unmatched. Budgie is perfect because it's got the simplicity of GNOME while still allowing for some easy customization and personalization.
Sure, if you demand a huge selection of software available in the repos, you might end up looking elsewhere. I think they've got the average user pretty well covered and then some though, plus there's always Flathub. So while Solus may not have the biggest library of software, here's an example of what it does have: apps for some of the best VPN providers out there. To be safe I won't name them, don't want my review getting flagged, but it's the ones located in Sweden and Switzerland.
If you're on Arch Linux you'd need to dive into the AUR to find those particular apps, but on Solus they're right there in the software manager GUI. So you may be surprised by all that you'll find here. Been using Solus for about five years and despite a little bump in the road it's better than ever now, being run by great people, and it's got a bright future.
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Version: 4.5
Rating: 9
Date: 2024-07-09
Votes: 43
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I've been using Solus for years now. I moved from Windows to Linux permanently in 2015, and never looked back. I started out with Linux Mint at first, then after year or two I switched to Manjaro Linux, intrigued by its rolling model. With Manjaro, I thought initially that I had found the distro for life. It was a breeze to install, but I just couldn't rely on it like I needed. So, after two or three years, I had to let Manjaro go. Then came Solus.
Solus unfortunately didn't have quite as much software as I would like, but that never became a true problem, as I've managed to get by without really being critically shorthanded in this department - although there's software available in other distros that would be great to have in Solus as well. But aside from that, Solus has been very solid. Even though it's a rolling distro, Solus has only once broken for me in all these years, and that happened during certain transitional period of Solus. Sometimes there may be some little problem(s) with some program, but it usually gets fixed in the following update or so, and all in all, those bugs have rarely affected me in such a way that I couldn't use the said program until fix has arrived. But on rare instances, some critical component has failed for a while. Budgie has turned out to be great replacement for KDE, as it offers enough customization without being too complex to tinker or use. When I used KDE in other distros, I was happy with the freedom to customize it, but in practice it didn't work as well as it should've worked, or was too much of a hassle, taking too much time to set up the way I liked, or offering more freedom than was actually required and therefore demanded more annoying tinkering. Budgie offered freedom too, but streamlined it smartly, striking a good balance between freedom and set choices. Over the years Budgie has seen some changes, and currently not everything with it works as well with me as it used to. But it's not broken, there's just something that doesn't quite work anymore: Yakuake doesn't start closed, or accept keyboard shortcut combinations, mouse software also doesn't open minimized etc. Those are not big problems, but they used to work flawlessly and now even tinkering with options doesn't fix it. But with Solus things get fixed at some point, I've learned that. Because Solus is a rolling distro, sometimes things change after updates, requiring some additional user input like setting options again in some specific program. It's not too common and rarely breaks anything, but once in a while it's good to check the forum to see notes and experiences regarding updates. And if some program isn't used enough or package maintainer drops out without anyone continuing the work, then that program gets dropped from Solus. It has happened, but isn't much of a threat for important programs and hasn't been as much of a problem with me as it was with AUR in Manjaro. Having said this, if there's some program that user really likes or requires, it's good idea to offer to maintain it yourself. Solus isn't a distro with huge staff, so user participation is recommended. Solus also accepts donations, and I highly recommended chipping in. It can also be done anonymously.
Solus works really well, and is solid and reliable in that sense. It's the best distro I've used from technical standpoint when everyday workstation reliability matters and yet you want the software to have new versions without being bleeding edge and suffering from the instability that comes with having the latest experimental stuff. Solus isn't as rock solid as something like Debian, but Debian's software is generally much older than in Solus. To this day, I haven't found a better Linux distro for me, and I'm sure there are many others who feel the same way.
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Version: 4.5
Rating: 10
Date: 2024-06-20
Votes: 22
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I started to learn Linux in 2011 and did a lot of distro-hoping. And in my personal opinion, for a personal desktop computer... Solus is by far the best. It's fast, performant, very stable, easy-to-use, perfect for beginners despite being a Rolling-release, and since IT IS a rolling-release, it's a perfect distribution to have the latest packages, with the performance that goes with it.
Nvidia drivers has been installed easily (I have a Ge-Force 3080). Huion official driver has been easily installed from the .tar.xz file they offer on their website. My "Brother" printer driver had been found easily and was easy to make it work. I have the latest versions of Krita, LibreOffice, OBS, etc...
I was very sad when Solus 4.3 was announced dormant, but now that it revived, I'm really happy I came back to it. I hope it will have a very long life from now on.
Only "bad" point for me is Budgie. It is not bad at all... but still unfinished in my opinion. It lacks of settings, their "applications menu" can't be modified, so I can't add for example Blender from the Portable version I downloaded on Blender's website (which is the only recommanded way to use Blender on Linux) and I can't configure the list of opened application on the panel to be able to close apps with the middle mouse click, as we can do in Cinnamon, KDE or XFCE... But I fixed that issue by choosing KDE instead of Budgie, personally.
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Version: 4.5
Rating: 10
Date: 2024-05-30
Votes: 41
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Excellent distro, I used it several years ago I had read that it was inactive but I tried the version 4.5 with GNOME, it became my only system for the day to day it is fast, starting the installation was simple and fast, about I have not had problems with anything, besides eopkg works great, the resource consumption is very acceptable, it has less than 800 packages installed. And any other software you can find in Snap or Flatpak. Quite a success this distro I recommend it.
I will use the XFCE version on another computer to see if I get the same experience on a computer with fewer resources, I hope that I can get the same results in the same way.
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Version: 4.5
Rating: 7
Date: 2024-05-07
Votes: 4
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After reading the DistroWatch review of Solus 4.4 I thought it looked interesting and tried it out on a spare hard drive on my system. Settled on the Plasma desktop and was having a great time. Copied all my files over to it from Linux Mint 21.3 thinking this may be a serious competitor in case I need a change. Then 4.5 came along and at first there were no issues, but it is, after all, a rolling release and an update trashed all of my personal settings, widgets up to including including my taskbar and left me starting from scratch to get something usable. I was not pleased. I'll leave it on that drive and check in on it occasionally, but as a daily driver I have severe reservations.
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Version: 4.5
Rating: 9
Date: 2024-05-01
Votes: 2
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I used Solus with Budgie for 3 years now. I could not change now, I love it (have used: mac OS (9 to 10.5, closed), windows (awful), ubuntu (not as nice look and speed), ubuntu budgie (interface pitfalls), redhat (not as intuitive), ElementaryOS (missing stability)).
Pros:
- Very fast
- Nice look and customization with budgie
- Very responsive community (when you have a problem, you have an answer in one day max in my experience).
- Ergonomic
- Note: the budgie integration is really perfect: for those having tried ubuntu budgie, it is really another world (I really hate ubuntu budgie experience mainly because of focus lose when selecting an area with the mouse in ubuntu, also for problems with overlaps of budgie menus badly handled: this is not the case in Solus budgie).
- updates every week
- (working on a old 2009 intel macbook, starting in 3 sec with a ssd)
- eopkg with an easy way to check and reinstall broken packages (once in 3 years)
- very nice/open minded community
- direct recognition of a wacom graphical tablet
Cons:
- missing slurm scheduler
In 3 years, I had only twice a black screen with white blinking cursor when rebooting: solved thanks to the community in less than 3 hours each time: the last problem is now 2 years old
I really love the interface, some examples:
- you can activate a vpn just checking a box in the menu interface
- you can configure stop button to access directly to suspend, restart, lock, logout when you usually need 3 confirmations in many other distro
- direct access in the toolbar to:
- screenshot,
- cafein
- sound output selection volume (keyboard shortcuts recognized out of the box too for a logitech G)
- stop button
- CPU RAM overview
- calendar
- the apply shortcut you want
- steam integration
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Version: 4.5
Rating: 1
Date: 2024-04-29
Votes: 0
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First installation was the KDE plasma desktop . The installation makes not problems so far but after reboot and during update a lot of errors scrolling on screen and after reboot all icons and programs are gone on screen . Empty sceen ! I tried it again and same happens. Next installation was the budgie desktop and after reboot the update process hangs up complete . Tried again and again but hangs up all times - in the software center and also in console !! That was only wasting time to try this distro !
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Version: 4.5
Rating: 10
Date: 2024-04-18
Votes: 24
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I stopped distro hopping since I found this Solus. I'm a Blender artist and of all the distros I've tried clear linux is number 1 for me. Although nvidia is difficult to install but once you manage to install it the speed is flawless. I looked for other Distros that are close in performance to clear linux, at first I thought it was arch but when I found solus here I saw that the performance is close to clear linux. I hope more people support this and I hope this distro will last a long time. Good bless you all guys!
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Version: 4.5
Rating: 10
Date: 2024-04-13
Votes: 16
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Very good linux distribution, no errors, very fast, stable, for beginners as well as experienced users. I use it for development and virtual machines, I recommend it to everyone. I've tried many Linux distro, stability was the first for me, I stayed with Solus, never had a slowdown. I use the Budgie desktop, it suits me perfectly, I don't need to set anything on it, the default settings are good. Solus has all the applications you need and it works, unlike other distros. I am very happy to have found it, thanks to the developers.
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Version: 4.5
Rating: 10
Date: 2024-03-28
Votes: 16
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I was bored of my garuda installation (gnome is always the DE of choice for me), and installed Debian 12.5. But it seemed very sluggish and heavy and even it seemed to me that web browser was struggling opening pages. Debian original distro versions usually disappoints me, 12.5 was no exception. Then I recalled Solus was very responsive and slim gnome version, so I installed it. The installation was easy and also faster then debian. The default software has no bloat, flatpak suportrt was ready to go. Update took a considerable time but at the and I am amazed how responsive and stable it is. The system firefox has a bug that remains open when closed and gives crash reporting, so I installed flatpak firefox and deleted defauld firefox simply. Flatpak has no problem.
At the end I am glad that I found such nice fast distro. Definitely if you search different flavours, Solus is a definite choice to try
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Version: 4.5
Rating: 9
Date: 2024-03-05
Votes: 22
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I've been using solus with Plasma desktop for the last 4 months and so far I've had no excuses to move away from it. I am not a power user but I've been using linux for quite some time. I use solus for every day normal usage and been using it for taking online courses on python, etc.
I always wanted to use a rolling linux distribution not necessarily with cutting edge software but reasonably updated applications that also offers not so heavy on plasma desktop and solus fits perfectly for what I need.
The Software Centre can use some polish and better user friendliness and features however, it still does the job. I could give it a full 10 but since every linux distributions in my opinon could use some improvements including solus, I think a 9 is better suited. I appreciate the work and hope the team continue to improve upon it.
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Version: 4.5
Rating: 5
Date: 2024-02-26
Votes: 0
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I'm someone that has relied on grub for booting, even through the transition to uefi and gpt. I have a slightly better grasp of how it all tries to work, but distros like Solus, which I just installed, baffle me. Solus puts its boot stuff, including the kernel and initrd, on the invisible efi partition. I've seen this before only with extreme niche distro Paldo. It makes it impossible for grub's os-prober to provide an entry for the os that chooses this way of doing things. In Solus' case, their os-prober didn't find a thing before dying. At least it didn't become the actual boot loader...
I didn't spend much time with Solus this time (I've tried it a few times over the years), but it seemed fine. Plasma worked fine, the usual sparse repo selection still there. Ultimately it was not a keeper for me, mainly due to the hoop jumping necessary to boot it.
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Version: 4.5
Rating: 10
Date: 2024-01-25
Votes: 113
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After saying I'd give up in my previous review due to NVMe drives not being read in the installer, I decided to give it one more try since the newest version switched to Calamares. Seems to have been the magic bullet for fixing my install issues, as the installer was ready at ramming speed with the partitions on my NVMe drive. Also seemed to configure EFI properly for once.
Now that I'm in the system, everything seems to work fine for me out of the box. No complaints on my end now. Repos maybe a little sparse but we also have flatpak to compensate. Only wish is that they had more 3rd party source install support.
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Version: 4.5
Rating: 10
Date: 2024-01-12
Votes: 44
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As soon as the release of 4.5 came out I jumped at the chance to give it a try on bare metal. The addition of the Calamares installer is a very welcomed change. The installation went well with no issues whatsoever. I installed the XFCE Beta to give a test run on my gaming rig and I have encountered no problems whatsoever. As far as gaming goes I was pleasantly surprised to see it's performance comparable to that of Nobara. Everything just works as intended and I just might leave it and use it as a daily driver for a while. Hats off to the Solus team. Very nice release.
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Version: 4.5
Rating: 9
Date: 2024-01-12
Votes: 20
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Since I have decided to not use Windows anymore, I have tested a lot distros and desktop enviroments. The Solus 4.5 was released (I have used Solus in the past) and downloaded Budgie, Gnome, KDE iso's for checking (XFCE not yet, as it is still beta). I've installed all of them and tested with e.g. gaming. I have had no problems and I have decided to go with the Gnome desktop (personal preference and it is the only one having Wayland as default). Why not a 10 out of 10? There is always room for improvements. To the Solus team, good job! I am happy you are back!
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Version: 4.5
Rating: 9
Date: 2024-01-12
Votes: 22
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Solus used to be my standard distribution, then the project fell into complete turmoil for a couple of years. It is now recovering and I decided to have a go again with 4.5 Budgie.
The immediate obvious change is a switch to Calamares. I always thought the old installer was to the point, but it was unique to Solus and technical debt has killed it - it is written in the now-deprecated Python 2 and a rewrite in Python 3 would have taken too many resources. On the other hand, the install now feels like that of any other distribution.
Because the same people are involved Budgie 10.8.2 feels very much like Fedora - the implementation is minimal. However, the big difference here is that "budgie-extras" is packaged and, even better, is broken up into parts. So you can have your choice of the various addons Ubuntu Budgie has developed although, unfortunately, the very useful accented character picker appears not to be among them.
Other than that, it is a standard set of accompanying applications with a mix of GNOME, MATE and Cinnamon; the file manager is nemo.
From observation it appears that Solus is sticking to its update strategy of one update a week although there may be intermediate packages if there is a serious problem noted.
Solus' big selling point has always been performance, and rightly so. Boot speed and, more importantly, the startup speed of applications - even flatpaks - is outstanding. Firefox opens notably quicker than on Debian-based distributions and, in fact, is indistinguishable from my fastest-ever opener (Void Linux). Configuration is good; even though my machine is generic with Intel parts everywhere a major trap for a lot of distributions (being unable to play videos on BBC News Online in the browser, or playing them with degraded quality) is avoided and, in my experience, Celluloid can play and/or show anything thrown at it. Again, that is a big win over Fedora Budgie.
Overall, this is a very slick distribution. It has known weaknesses and there are hints about improving the biggest, the software manager, by replacing it with GNOME Software plus plugins for eopkg and flatpak, in 4.6. This is great because it has been known for a long time that the software manager has fallen well behind that in most other distributions, both in general design and functionality, and because it only handles native packages. (In 4.5 flatpak and its main repository are not included in the build and have to be installed by hand).
The only remaining concern I have is that, as I noted, Solus and Budgie have had distinctly up-and-down pasts. I do not see these coming back, but they are always in the back of my mind. I would certainly not be using Solus in any sort of commercial situation, but for a home machine it is excellent.
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Version: 4.5
Rating: 4
Date: 2024-01-11
Votes: 0
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I have been using and following Solus since his birth. He has a hard time. But gradually it acquired its own physiognomy, and there was a period when it was close to perfection. Then there was a decline. More recently, an attempt at abandonment and murder. And a new attempt at revival. - 4.4 was a life-saving operation that somewhat succeeded. What can I say about 4.5? I tried to install KDE on an external drive by preparing a partition on it. Instead of installing where indicated, the installation erased the entire disk and located on it, formatting the empty space to FAT 16. And inexplicably, a new installation icon appeared on the start screen in the way that Debian live disks do .Xfce installs correctly, but it turns out that it can't distinguish between keyboards and won't allow any keyboard setting other than the one it was originally set to. I couldn't even mount Budgie because it didn't find the external drive. These initial setbacks made me hesitant to do any more in-depth testing. I think releasing the version as it is is rushed and not well thought out. In this form, it cannot be evaluated.
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 9
Date: 2023-12-25
Votes: 24
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Solus is back as my daily driver after the lag from 4.3 by the devs. (Plasma version for me)
Positives is ease of use and lacking any bloat. And I like an independent distribution. Rolling updates are now back, quick and without quirks. Discovered my wireless (Canon) colour laser printer too, out of the box.
Som negatives are; 1 the install ISO had som trouble with Intel sound and some of the USB ports/devices. These issues have solutions that works.
2 After installation Solus failed to find a boot entry that worked. I solved this on my Asus laptop by just removing all entries in the UEFI boot menu. Weird but it works.
So once up and running you immediately get upgrades and a new kernel that is pretty much equal to the latest stable in the Linux Kernel Archives.
Things I do after installing are changing to my favourite browser and installing the graphical tools I use, including three from the Windows world which work perfectly with Wine/winetricks. Then follows setting up Audacity and Pavucontrol so I can record sound. I also use Google Earth Pro , which Solus is one of the few distributions to have it in their repo. BCompare by Scooter software also work well on Solus, although it is not free.
Solus is just lean and mean . Merry Christmas to all!
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-12-24
Votes: 27
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After installing it and after a few weeks with it, I can say that it is practically perfect. Fast, (the firefox browser flies as I have never seen in another disbribution), stable, comfortable to use, beautiful. That it has few applications in the software center? , it seems to me that they are enough, and to carry integrated flatpak easily install the apps you want. That comes from being discontinued?, the important thing is that it is now active and you can see that they have put a lot of effort to make a great product.
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 8
Date: 2023-12-23
Votes: 3
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Pretty speedy OS. Repository is a bit small, but it is much larger than it was several years ago. No problem finding the applications I use. Solus is an underrated Linux distro. The installation process is fast, taking only a fraction of the time compared to other distributions. The boot are great, contributing to an overall performance that feels faster than many. It's a rolling release distro that keeps packages relatively up-to-date. It's not bleeding edge, but it has a sane update schedule that keeps packages more up to date than a fixed released distro.
Solus seems to be doing better than in the most recent past, where it almost appeared dead. It lives, and lets see what the future holds.
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-12-21
Votes: 11
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In my opinion, Solus is a good distribution for beginner Linux users. I like the Budghie desktop, which is similar to Gnome, but much lighter. You can run programs from Bin on this system like on Slackware. Eopkg does not have many programs, but it can be done run programs from tar archives and BIn files by creating activators in the menu editor program. I personally recommend this system, especially to beginners in Linux. The system has the latest kernel installed by default. I recommend this system for newer computers. For older devices, in my opinion, Sparky Linux is better or Antix.
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-11-24
Votes: 58
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I would characterize Solus Linux as exceptionally speedy. The installation process is notably fast, taking only a fraction of the time compared to other distributions. It is like install a mid-weight application, making the initial setup remarkably swift. The boot and shutdown times are pleasantly surprising, contributing to an overall performance that feels significantly faster, almost like experiencing a hardware upgrade.
This accelerated performance is particularly noteworthy, and I can see why it would be favored by gamers seeking a responsive and nimble operating system. Kudos to the developers for their incredible job!
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-10-21
Votes: 105
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Solus is a rather underrated Linux distro. The OS focuses keenly on developers, gamers, and content creators by including the tools required to get started with development, gaming, and content creation. The flagship flavor of Solus OS uses their in-house Budgie desktop, which is one of the cleanest desktop environments you can try.
What makes Solus different is that it doesn’t follow in the same footsteps as other Linux distros. It’s an independently developed distro with a completely different user experience compared to others.
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 1
Date: 2023-10-10
Votes: 0
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Don't understand why this distro is so popular. My hardware is not necessarily bleeding edge. But here's my four attempts to install over three years:
1. Did not install bootloader, had to go into UEFI settings to boot to Windows.
2. Did not install bootloader even though I made sure that /boot/efi/ was being created and mounted as such.
3. Did not even start installing, as the installer hung looking for my hard drives because I had installed an NVMe drive that they claim to support.
4. Tried 2 years later, same hanging on detecting hard drives.
I have never been able to check out any of the special things about this distro as I can never get it installed. Just don't see the point in trying again.
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-09-24
Votes: 60
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This is the best Linux distro I have seen so far. I have been distro hoping for some time and I have seen many distro's, but none of them gives me such a great experience as Solus.
This is just a perfect distro for everyday use, it has great support for a lot of apps and even gaming platforms, like steam works perfectly.
It is very user friendly and customizable, I think almost anyone can install Solus and learn how to use it, even if you have been using Windows or Mac OS for a long time.
I will always use and recommend Solus from now on, as long as nothing goes completely wrong with this distro.
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 6
Date: 2023-09-18
Votes: 0
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Solus is fine as a simple, lightweight and fast home OS. But for gaming purposes, I simply cannot recommend it. I will list 2 examples, I play games with Steam and switch between Arch and Solus frequently. Solus has an outdated glibc, meaning currently I cannot play games online that use EAC. Another example is, TF2 is sort of broken out the box on Linux, and workarounds have been shared that involve installing an AUR/COPR packages and using a launch option. For obvious reasons, a Solus user is left in the dark in this situation, an updated tcmalloc does not exist on this distro. Now when this issue happens on Arch or other more widely used distros, you can pretty much assure someone will go and report it or it will be a known issue. On Solus, if you experience an issue or a bug, you're likely among the first, and will have to go and report it. It's too much to worry about for a supposed suite-type operating system such as Solus that's supposed to handle everything in a curated fashion. If you don't care about games, it's a great fast desktop with actually unbelievably stable updates, just be sure to check its pulse every month or so.
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-09-15
Votes: 9
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Great OS,very stable.fast and amazing!I am using the KDE version of it on wayland and i must say it works well.the only problem i found is TOR web browser not lauching in wayland session,but i do not know if its a problem with wayland or with the TOR web browser not supporting wayland.
Anyway thank you all SOLUS team members for all your hard work and for letting us users enjoy this wonderfull Linux distro.
I have tried many many linux distros but my heart belongs to Solus:)
Greetings from Portugal:)
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 1
Date: 2023-09-14
Votes: 0
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It's days of glory have come and gone.
The instability of the team affects the project which is just a no go for me.
Budgie itself is not that great. However it beats GNOME.
KDE Plasma is my desktop environment of choice. However Solus manages to dampen that experience.
The software center... you're better off using the CLI but this defeats the purpose of "for beginners". o_O
Fun to poke around in but not something I'd use for anything serious.
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-08-29
Votes: 15
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Quit Windows about 3 years ago after decades of use (and disappointment). I distro hopped for a year or two, finally settling on Solus. Flatpak does work, if you want access to more apps that aren't included in the Solus "world". Just go to flatpak's website.
No major complaints. I haven't figured out how to arrange icons/shortcuts around on the desktop. Maybe it isn't possible. To get a printer to work, you may need to do the typical Linux fiddling (trial and error).
Updating has NEVER resulted in breaking it. (Can't say the same for other distros I've tried.)
Disclaimer: This is from the perspective of someone who has used Solus to facilitate the following:
- use the world wide web
- use Zoom
- record streaming video
- transfer files to-and-from phone and PC wirelessly
- do some graphical design/photo editing
- connect to various peripheral devices like Flipper Zero, SD card adapters, cell phone, etc.
- burn DVDs
- play SuperTux Cart
- print wirelessly
- make Bluetooth connections
- watch shows/movies using Kodi
- read e-books
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-08-29
Votes: 16
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Quick , simple & easy.........a function that everyone deserves to try , the only changes i made was to install VLC , Chrome (software center - third party) , Dash to Dock from extensions . yt-dlp it was pre-installed....
I rate it a 10 , because it was a pleasant surprise
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 1
Date: 2023-08-25
Votes: 0
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Use to be great way back when. I have since moved on since its implosion.
Decided to check it out since the AED provided a pulse back into this project.
Honestly, nothing has changed. Still sports the crappy software center which has a annoying GUI and zero Flatpak integration. Budgie itself it very generic and dated looking. You do not get the full desktop environment experience when using GNOME, KDE Plasma or MATE. Instead you get whining and complaining how they refuse to use and that leading to many things being degraded or removed entirely. The future of this distribution looks bleak and uncertain as things seem to be constantly changing behind the scenes. The distribution itself is more stable than the team supporting it therefore I won't be putting any eggs in this basket.
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-08-15
Votes: 4
|
I knew that Solus was a good distro, but it didn't have Wayland support. I wasn't sure if Solus 4.4 had Gnome Wayland support either. I installed it on my computer to see how it would work. After installation, I updated the system and rebooted. The Gnome Wayland option appeared when I rebooted. Pipewire was installed by default, which gave me LDAC codec support. I had all the codecs that I wanted. The software center is well-designed and I didn't need to install anything from the terminal. I am currently using a very smooth, fast, and responsive operating system. However, I can say that I am using an AMD GPU and that is probably why I can run Gnome Wayland without any problems. I am very happy that Solus has finally offered Gnome Wayland after 2 years. Congratulations!
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-07-31
Votes: 26
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Stable, beautiful, user friendly. I was an addict distrohopper until I found this awesomeness. Budgie is cool and very stable. I can't wait to try the xfce version too.
Congrats devs keep up the good work!
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-07-31
Votes: 3
|
I'm using Solus since years already and the rolling release worked impressively good with no significant issues on any update.
I like the Budgie desktop and the Solus software center. I found nearly all programs in the repository and Solus also supports adding packages via snap or flatpack.
Currently I use Solus on two quite old laptops (6-8 years) and the performance is really good.
It was also easy for me to start building my own packages and contribute to the Solus package repository thanks to the great packaging system.
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-07-28
Votes: 2
|
Hi there. I've installed Solus OS 4.4 Mate as I didn't like budgie just about a week ago on 15 years AMD Athlon 250 with 12 gig of ram, a SSD drive for the OS and a 16 tb HDD drive and an AMD Readon ATI video card. So far, Everything is working fine. It plays my music, movies and series very well without problems.
Some software were not there, such as rkhunter and clamav antivirus and forensic software.
So far, everything's working fine and it's pretty fast loading. One more thing, I wish they had a XFCE ISO instead of Mate or Budgie. It would be grand. Anyway, keep up the good work and I hope more people will use it.
Thank you.
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 8
Date: 2023-07-20
Votes: 6
|
It is good to see Solus back. I installed the Budgie edition, mainly because I like Budgie, Solus is the reference distribution for it, rather like Mint for Cinnamon or Neon for KDE, and I have had problems with Budgie on Fedora and EndeavourOS.
And it is excellent. The big winner is the responsiveness of the desktop, something Linux frequently lacks and compares badly with Windows. Solus clearly has some very able packagers and kernel experts because the only remotely comparable distribution in my experience is Pop OS, which is also obviously developed by technically savvy contributors.
Budgie is as it should be - minimally configured with no glitches, and the general set of packages is minimal too. That said, there are a large number of plugins in the repository. I have a bizarre liking for the weather plugin, which is just right and doesn't bombard the viewer with information.
The big risk with a non-derivative distribution was lack of packages. I use the past tense as, since Solus' heyday, flatpaks have largely filled that gap, but the repository has a lot of non-mainstream but welcome packages where a flatpak is not technically possible or undesirable due to the amount of machine access required. For example, I was resigning myself to configuring my VPN by hand then noted that the Mullvad client is there. And Solaar is there, at the latest version unlike almost every other distribution, for my Logitech MX Keys Mini.
It appears that the semi-rolling release model is still being used by Solus - large updates each Friday with subsystems updated in a block (for example, GNOME 43 applications and background technologies are default in 4.4 and GNOME 44 is being considered now that we are past the .0 release), and small updates in between where there is a major security issue. From experience this is the right speed for a distribution update, allowing testing before release.
I take off two points; one for the Software Centre, which as many others note badly requires an update (could a plugin be written for GNOME Software which understands Solus' package format, rather than reinventing the wheel - the standard version of Software, not the Ubuntu fork, works well) and one because the project has had a tumultuous time over what feels like eternity and a period of stability is desperately needed and just beginning to be demonstrated.
If Solus can keep knocking the updates out every week that is enough for me - it is a welcome return as it is a fast and technically impressive distribution.
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-07-20
Votes: 4
|
I have come back to Solus Budgie on my work box.
Pros
-> It is every bit as good as Solus always was for me, quick and simple to install
-> Fast to boot up
-> Intuitive to use
-> Really easy to resolve any concerns
Cons
Only one
-> Will it now stand the test of time.
Solus is really up there with the big names, love it.
New users to Linux will find their way around really easy.
For the experienced users, that are fed-up with fussy systems and have gotten over all the tweaking and playing, but just want something to work, Solus offers this.
Respect to the Devs.
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-07-17
Votes: 4
|
I have been trying to find a suitable distro for an older laptop. After trying Mint, Peppermint, Q4OS, and others without success...I came upon Solus again. The MATE version worked! Wonderful and simple and everything installed correctly. The others I have tried had installer issues. Solus and their webpage was very helpful also. I can't wait to try Budgie on my other machine. Great work guys! Solus is alive and well! Great OS!!! This is a wonderful distro for those that don't want all the crap installed.
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 9
Date: 2023-07-14
Votes: 2
|
Really glad to see Solus back up and running. They'll have some goodwill to recover, but I sincerely hope they succeed with the new team.
I took the KDE spin for a spin and I would rate it as follows:
- Right back to the super responsiveness of previous versions. Probably the most responsive KDE experience I've had.
- All software works the first time - again superb return to form,.
- Same great selection of wall papers.
- No updates as of yet, but previous versions never gave me a problem. The only issues I had were with installations from the ISO - and that was clean this time round.
Docked a point for the following:
- Software store needs an update. I know it's in the works and the team was working hard to get a new release out to improve the projects image, but I hope this is a top priority as it needs to come sooner rather than later.
- Plasma is a bit buggier here than with other distros. KDE wallet pop ups are really annoying. The wireless would require re-login at random times,
- Issues with the Solus themes: Window controls are hard to see with some apss, effectively invisible. Subjective, but dark theme is too dark and text in light theme is not black enough.
I haven't tried the other desktops, so the negative points may be entirely limited to the KDE implementation.
Otherwise, this is a very impressive second (third?) chance effort by the team. I'll be checking new releases for a while (hopefully less time between ISO updates this go round)..
Bravo guys!!!!!
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-07-12
Votes: 106
|
I'be been using Solus since 2019 - it put an abrupt end to my distro-hopping. I started out with the Budgie edition, which was then being created in-house, and it was dubbed the "flagship" DE for Solus. Later, I switched to KDE Plasma, because it offered more configuration options that appealed to me, such as fractional scaling.
Solus is usually described as a "curated rolling release." That means it offers a selection of software that is carefully selected as being actively developed, and is usually among the "best in class," in my opinion. Typically, updates are released on Fridays, and they install very quickly, depending on what packages been upgraded recently, so it's no burden to keep Solus up-to-date. A simple "sudo eopkg up" at the command line is all that's needed, or you could update graphically from the Software Center.. In fact, it's possible to progress from one version to the next simply by updating regularly. There's no need to install updated versions from new .ISO files every few months, or settle for an LTS (long-term-support) version.
Solus is also very quick in general. It starts quickly, and exits quickly. I believe this is because it doesn't load and enable a large number of unit files during startup. While I've typically found that other distros load between 70 or 80 of these at startup (and sometimes more), Solus loads just 3 or 4, depending on the DE. The more a distro needs to load during startup, the more it needs to get rid of during shutdown. The difference between Solus and other distros is very noticeable.
Solus' .ISO files boot to a "live" session that allow it to be evaluated fully before any changes are made to your computer, and when you're ready, the excellent installer can be run from that live session. The installer will make use of disk partitions you've already defined, and allows you assign mount points to those. Alternatively, it can do all the work itself when started with an empty disk, or replace an existing OS, or even install itself next to an existing OS. All of this is easy to do, and nothing is ever written to your disk until the very end, after you've hade an opportunity to examine the tasks that are to be done and confirmed that they're correct. Installation is fast, and typically takes only a few minutes.
All the Solus editions come with a good selection of software pre-installed, so that users are ready to do useful work immediately after installing. So-called "right out of the box." Yet Solus doesn't stuff your computer with software you'll probably never use, like multiple browsers, numerous editors, and so on. That's what the repository is for, and it's easy to find and install more software using eopkg at the command line, or the graphical Software Center application. It's also easy to remove software after you're sure you'll never need it.
Solus' forum is outstanding, with experienced Solus users and team members happy to help users with any problems they might encounter. It's not unusual to see someone to jump in to help within a few minutes after an issue has been raised.
Cons? Sorry, I don't know of any.
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-07-12
Votes: 5
|
PROS:
Sound leadership has been restored to Solus, and that makes all the difference in the world as far as usability and the unique Solus experience that it is known for. It is literally re-energized and it's vision is back.
This distro has a dedicated global crew--don't sell this aspect short. Tireless.
I updated an existing 4.3 to the 4.4 and the distro is even better. Budgie keeps evolving in better ways. Wrinkles that arise are dealt with swiftly.
This time around Solus feels like it's on a mission.
I've run all sorts of distros and this is stlll the best and most hassle-free.
Still renders beautifully/crisply compared to many distros, and I've seen nothing stumble OOTB.
Small repo is a myth anymore but flatpaks integrate pretty well, too.
I stand by the score of 10. I could not be anything else.
CONS:
I have another distro that I liked and installed and I have no reason to fire it up anymore:)
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-07-11
Votes: 3
|
I've used Solus Budgie as my daily driver (for Linux) for the last several years, and the 4.4 update does not disappoint! The latest challenges I've tinkered with has been trying to find a systemd free distro that can run well on old/odd hardware. I purchased a KingJim Portabook XMC 10 (with the groovy fold out keyboard) that runs on a decent 64 bit Intel Atom processor but it only has 2gb of RAM. Also, there's an optical mouse embedded in the keyboard. I first tried Refracta but had a frozen screen (otherwise a great distro), next I tried Antix (it didn't freeze but the built in optical mouse was not recognized), third I tried Solus 4.4 and it worked like a charm! It surprised me that Solus could do what Antix couldn't do. Also, since Solus OS activates zram by default the speed was exceptional given the unit only has 2gb of RAM.
I'm going to stick with Solus OS as my daily driver. Budgie is so clean; it's a pleasure to use. Plus (rolling) updates are very convenient.
I also like the fact that Solus 5 is just around the corner. The Solus team seems to hell bent (in a good way) on leveraging the latest technology to do things better than the rest. They are experimenting with Rust. Plus, the build system (move to boulder) and package manager (move to moss) and packaging format improvements are just around the corner when version 5 is released.
If you go with Solus, you may find--like me--that there's nothing quite like it.
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-07-11
Votes: 0
|
Coincidentally, I read the blog that outlined the recent problems. I was impressed by the consequences of this, such as a robust server structure and an extremely competent team. I find the innovative future base (Serpent OS) and the crossover cooperation of Solus and Serpent OS so fascinating that I installed Solus 4.4 KDE (Wayland). In my user case, everything works, and it's stable, fast and responsive. I like the software center, especially since I find everything I personally need. The future of Solus looks good and I can see myself migrating more machines to Solus.
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-07-11
Votes: 4
|
I had reviewed before (then, also positively, before the distroś ¨wobbly¨)
Firstly I have to say that I am overjoyed that Solus has returned to the Linux arena.
All the plusses are still there:
- fast boot
- independent Linux
- excellent up-to-date app selection in the store
- light on CPU
- gets out the way for workflow
- stable rolling release
- love Budgie desktop environment
A huge plus is on my old MacBook late 2009, everything works, no lag, wifi is fast. Manjaro (which I also love on my Lenovo) didn´t play so well on this older hardware. So here I am, running a fabulous modern operating system on an old bit of kit - how green can you get!
Minor niggles:
- Flatpak support is there, but needs to be integrated into the Software Center
- some consistency with theme on different apps needs ironing out (though there are work arounds with Dconf editor)
So so so glad you are back Solus devs - Please, stay this time :-) xx
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 6
Date: 2023-07-10
Votes: 0
|
I have used solus os since the 3.999 version untill 4.3 and i had no problems with those.but with the 4.4 KDE release its a no go for me,i have horrible screen tearing on desktop when i move windows around and on youtube videos,youtube videos on full screen is ok but on the default video size its horrible screen tearing,this on x11 if i change to wayland screen tearing goes away but the system becomes unstable,lags and crashes firefox,Im just a regular user with little linux experiance,i tried to fix the screen tearing but i had no luck,also i find strange to have so few screen resolution when i go to choose the correct screen resolution for my screen on solus 4.4,on solus 4.3 i had more to choose from.I also tried the solus budgie 4.4 edition but its the same problem.i am sad but i can not use the system like this.My pc specs intel i5/2400 with a gtx 750ti.
Maybe on the next Solus release all that will be fixed.Chears from Portugal and sorry for my bad english
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 5
Date: 2023-07-10
Votes: 0
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Solus at one time was awesome... and unfortunately they have fallen behind the pack. Currently as it stands it's not something I would jump back into again. I used it for a few years and moved on from its decline.
The software center needs a major overhaul. It's dated and still does not support Flatpak installation from the UI.
Budgie is still pretty much the same as way back when. Personally, I love KDE Plasma (LXQt for older machines) and prefer QT in general over GTK.
With their other offered desktop environments you don't get the full experience like in a Ubuntu/Kubuntu, Fedora/Fedora KDE Plasma Spin, openSUSE, etc... What you get is a big chunk of it. You'll find things missing here and there which makes it feel incomplete.
It's nice to see some life coming back into this project and I wish them the best. But I've opted for a distribution with a major financial backing, maturity and long history of success.
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 7
Date: 2023-07-09
Votes: 0
|
Solus 4.4 is a nice and stable OS, easy for new users, beautiful desktop environment.
However, during installation, the bootloader installation destination can not be changed.
After installation, when I tried to reinstall Grub2 and change the bootloader to another ESP partition, It seems it doesn't support grub2 x86_64-efi.
$ sudo grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=Solus
grub-install: error: /usr/lib64/grub/x86_64-efi/modinfo.sh doesn't exist. Please specify --target or --directory.
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-07-09
Votes: 4
|
It is so good to see Solus up and running like a dream. I used Solus for years but after having concerns for the future of the project I moved to Arch based and then Void. Solus has now addressed those issues and has this latest iso point release and it is wonderful to see. I have returned to Solus and it feels great. For a rolling release Solus is as stable as anyone could hope for. Thank you Solus team for your dedication to the project even through some difficult times. Im back back home with Solus.
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-07-09
Votes: 2
|
I switched to Manjaro when Solus went Dormant. Once the new team took over and started working, I closely monitored and saw cool updates and changes. Switched to Solus once again 2 weeks back and everything is super smooth and nice.
I use very less softwares and everything is found in Solus. Budgie is a awesome, please give a it a try. It is light, awesome, timely updates no breakage. Keep up the good work team!
I highly recommend this to new users, you won't find it difficult. It is super easy. (long time Windows user here)
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-07-09
Votes: 2
|
As a long time Linux user, I stumbled upon Solus in 2017. Over the years I watched it growing up to a really mature, user-centered, modern and very well curated MS Windows replacement.
Since about two years Solus is the only Linux kernel based OS that I have been actively recommending to less experienced computer users who were finally fed up with their Windows environments. And all of them still are happy Solus users.
The Solus development team suffered from a few very nasty accidents in the first months of 2023, partly caused by really bad luck, but also because of weak project management. The team learned from it, and established in no time a much more solid way of managing the distribution. In my opinion it also is a very good sign, that the founder himself and a few long time co-developers returned to the team to support the future of the OS.
This newest release 4.4 "Harmony" is an exceptional achievement: in relatively short time the OS got completely up to date, maybe even ahead of its competitors in the Linux world.
Worth mentioning is also that the development team and the supporting community have had, and still have a high standard of quality and sincere friendliness from the very start. Everyone with a problem is helped out fast and with enthousiasm.
Summarized: Solus is first choice for regular computer users!
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-07-08
Votes: 14
|
The best linux distro is back. 7/7
4.4 iso has been released.
Solus is alive, healthy, well, and anything but dormant. what a relief.
Phasing out Mate for XFCE and heading in new directions.
Since leadership changed hands end of March there has been a dedicated effort by a large global team to restore this solid sleek distro back to mainstream. Updates continued and forums, main site, and help are back online.
Budgie is still the flagship with Plasma and Gnome behind it. If you read any of the releases they have rejoined on a limited basis (he has another gig) with Solus/Budgie creator Ikey Doherty to build this independent with a blueprint.
Right on.
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Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-07-08
Votes: 16
|
I'm very happy that Solus is back, my favorite system. The installation is fast, the booting is fast, all the necessary software is there, I never found any slowdowns or problems in the previous systems either. I happily switched back from Manjaro to Solus. I use Budgie desktop, I don't need a lot of settings, it's completely suitable for the purpose. I think everyone should try it, and I'm sure it won't jump between distributions, but will stay with Solus. I hope the upward trend continues at Solus.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 9
Date: 2023-04-22
Votes: 70
|
Everything was great until the January server crash , now works again with the return of the founder and the Budgie dev back , first update after almost 4 months , awesome .
I'm using the main "flavor" with the Budgie DE , it is lightweight and very stable , comparing to other version for example kde or GNOME , i love so much the budgie and i install it on my secondary distro in my pc the Nobara 37 (fedora 37 customized for games) and the budgie their isn't as stable as it is on SOLUS . The main difference vs fedora is the semi-rolling release since it will update weekly and after some internal testing first , for the last 2 years that i have it as my main NEVER had broken after an upgrade (in compare to Arch based distros)
Highly recommend it but for newer users i would suggest to wait for a month to be fully distribute any upgrades needed and then do the jump.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 5
Date: 2023-03-30
Votes: 12
|
RIP Solus...
I was very happy with Solus since 2018. Recent catastrophe with leadership has sent this one spiraling downhill. Unfortunately, there has not been an update since January, and the website had an outage that lasted a couple of weeks. Overall, my experience has been great, but with needing to be on an up-to-date machine and no future in sight for this distro, sadly I'm onto the next one.
Hope to see this one come back in the near future as the dev has briefly mentioned on Twitter, but even there it seems like it will not be likely.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 2
Date: 2023-03-28
Votes: 1
|
Please, if you want a distro with up to date packages but stable and with a secure future, just choose openSUSE, Fedora, or Void.
While these distros have their flaws, they are more likely to survive and not die out than Solus.
Many people in the linux community don't like distros that are backed by a company, but for me it is nice. It allows me not to worry about if my distro is going to malfunction or die just because a few project leaders left. For example, Ubuntu has lost many community members but that does not stop the distro. If you want a community based distro choose Debian, Arch and Void.
If a distro has been without any updates for 2 months, then that means it is not reliable.
For Solus to get back up, its developers need to Communicate more about what's happening. I mean if the distro is discontinued, tell us. If the infrastructure can't be recovered tell us. We need news about what's happening.
There's a reason why distros like openSUSE and Fedora are rising in popularity. Its because they are more communicative and less likely to die.
So, in this present day basically, there is no reason to choose Solus over Fedora, openSUSE and Void. The performance of Solus is now present in most other distros out there. And how do you expect new users to use an almost 2 year iso while other beginner distros, like Ubuntu and Linuxmint, have up to date installation images?
TLDR: Don't use Solus. Its like flagging a dead horse at the moment.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-03-28
Votes: 6
|
Solus was built as an answer to where the linux desktop was around 2016-2017. When a point release upgrade was more of a risk of nuking your desktop, Ubuntu and its derivatives were leading the scene, Arch needed manual intervention practically every day, and package dependency issues in general were way more rampant. To say things have come much further since than would be an understatement. It's all in the kernel these days. As others have stated, a reliable backing should really be among the first things you consider when choosing a distribution. In my opinion, the most reliable/reknowned distros out there are Fedora, Arch, Debian, and Opensuse. Others do exist and may fit your needs but these 4 are the ones I think should be at the top of the pyramid, only straying from them for niche interests or hobbyist purposes. Void to me is similar to Solus, curated rolling while unique and rewarding to use, but it is managed by a very small team and has had a history of bus factor halting development of the project.
Solus being so great is what made many realize the potential and usability of Linux. But this doesn't have to be the end of the line for users out there whose introduction/comfort zone in Linux was with Solus. I understand that feeling but instead of putting your faith in others for curating your perfect desktop, find a more "vanilla" distribution and do these very tweaks yourself. You'll find it to be as rewarding as using Solus ever was and your system will be more stable as a result of you knowing what you did to it. Instead of grieving take the lessons learned from what Solus did and use them as your guide to perfecting your desktop on a more reliable base.
Solus' timeline has become the most definitive example of "bus factor" negatively impacting a distro I've seen in my 20 years of using Linux. It is true that when it comes to a distribution, having a reliable foundation/backing/infrastructure/team is essential for the life of a desktop OS made from Linux. Solus itself was built upon passionate ideas and genius implementations, probably the best package curation I've seen for a desktop distro period. But it didn't take long from the distro's conception for its creators to begin abandoning the project and causing serious rifts for those who stuck around. It happened to Solus several times in different phases, some giving reasons (resigning) or just straight up going MIA without a word (twice now). And overtime those who were maintaining the project going forward (volunteers, btw) have appeared to have abandoned the project as well. I personally was warned of the risks of using "passion projects" or a concerning "bus factor" but I always ignored them, that didn't matter to me because Solus just felt so perfect and too good to be true. It was.
I will never forget Solus however. Nothing but the best memories and beneficial lessons taught to me. It will live on as (in my own personal opinion) the best "feeling" OOTB desktop linux distro that has ever existed.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 1
Date: 2023-03-27
Votes: 0
|
Solus is in crisis right now, and I suggest that potential adopters hold off on Solus until the current issues are resolved, one way or the other.
Solus encountered a "perfect storm" of several single points of failure coming together at the same time in mid-January, and the issues have not yet been resolved. Solus, in a word, went down, and has not yet bounced back. As a result, Solus has not been updated since mid-January, and should be considered a security risk at this point.
The team has released no external communications to the Solus community since February 27. It is not clear whether Solus will survive.
In two decades of Linux use, Solus is flat out the best distro I've used, by far. I wrote a full review a year or two ago and won't repeat, but Solus had a laser-focus on ordinary home desktop use and a carefully curated rolling release model that always worked flawlessly. Solus stood alone as a shining beacon of what a distro could, and should, be. But for the fact that Solus is now a security risk, I would give Solus a solid "10" rating, as I have in the past.
I hope that Solus will work its way through the crisis and survive, but because the team is not communicating with the community, I have no idea about the future.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 1
Date: 2023-03-26
Votes: 6
|
user since 2017. It's been in a spiritual vacuum chamber since the very communicative Josh Strobl left. Since then it's delivered several months of tepid silence bordering on disingenuous when it came to issues of distro commitment. Even the package maintainers don't know what to say anymore. This was my digital family and it's very painful to watch.
This operating system cannot be used right now.
It's linux, I get it, everything is free, and volunteers have never owed users anything. The decline of maintenance was also apparent.
these things happen but watching a Camaro morph into a Corolla in an act of self-immolation has been rough to witness.
I had to find my Budgie experience elsewhere, Solus. If you come back for reboot 3.0, I will cross that bridge when it comes.
Possession of the distro should go back to Strobl and Doherty.
cons: unsafe; doesn't update; security risks and cve's unaddressed; iso is archaic; unmaintained
pros: was the best out there; may again be someday
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 1
Date: 2023-03-22
Votes: 7
|
Shedding a tear for this one.
It was a top tier distro for a long time, but its staff have taken hits over the past few years and it basically has not been properly maintained for at least a year now. Communication from the team is almost entirely lacking. The official website has been DOA for nearly two years.
It seems to be fictionally dead. If it is still alive, there is not much easily accessible info to say that this is the case.
To the team - if you have real problems that are keeping you from maintaining and communicating plans and status, close shop on this one and reopen under a new name with new infrastructure that you can control. If you really have staffing issues preventing you from properly keeping the project going, state this and close the doors.
Solus, you were great while you lasted, but the time for change is well past. Please, end this or change course - nobody wants to dance with a zombie
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 8
Date: 2023-03-22
Votes: 1
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Solus gave us a taste on how a rolling linux distribution from scratch should look and feel, although there was never any support for fingerprint locks, smart card e-signature tokens, or lots of proprietary printers. I prefer to think that nobody from the developer team is dead or impaired, while they are definitely incomunicando, but are just moving on to an even more wondrous Serpent OS in preparation (Beatrice alongside Doherty, Strobl, and others...) Rather than reinstall, I bought a new laptop for a fresh Manjaro (Budgie and Plasma all along), so I can keep an eye on this ever more buggy Solus, while it lasts. I suppose someday MS Windows will be also dead and all those users who saw little change over the decades, will be a lot more desperate and inadequate, in a funny way.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-03-20
Votes: 15
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Yesterday, the developer of Budgie demoted Solus as a "recommended distro" on their site.
This comes after over 60 days of the distro having no package updates and the users becoming increasingly frustrated and worried about the operating system they're using. There have been many times I have stood by Solus through hardships and seen it to the other side, but this time the hole feels too deep to be able to climb out. My system hasn't had a package or security update in 2 months. There are no signs or reasons to believe it will get back to normal at this point, this situation cannot be justified by responsible leadership. I don't feel safe using this distro anymore and I don't feel comfortable recommending it to others.
I'm scoring it a 10 because I believe that's what it is, in my opinion the best user-rolling-distro that has ever been available to users. An indie FOSS phenomenon. Genuinely speaking, I will hold onto the memories of Solus dearly and forever, I will miss it like a lost family member.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 6
Date: 2023-03-08
Votes: 18
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User since 2018. After Josh Strobl left the project, things sailed south. The Budgie experience and flagship became hobbled and mostly unusable; an unworkable experience due to upkeep and stack update. For many weeks. The other three offerings are fine.
It's unique, one-of-a-kind, visually luxurious operating system. It was a pleasure for a long time. I feel safer with solus than the distro I recently moved to.
By the time its woes are sorted out, and the package updates pushed, it likely will have been two months Solus has been almost entirely offline, without updates.
That says everything right there.
It was already withering with no communication and nervous longtime users, but after this long blackout I can't see any return to the norm.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-02-10
Votes: 28
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This is a very good Linux distro. Very fast, very strong!..
Runs like a charm. Should be placed in the top 20.
Using a different package manager... So what.. No big deal.
This distro is a big contender.
Easy setup. Nicely configured desktop. A good selection of colors on terminal window.
No problems with audio or video. All works fine with no additional fine tuning...
I highly recommend this distro , either you are a new Linux user or experienced, doesn't matter. It will serve you good.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 8
Date: 2023-02-08
Votes: 1
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I have been distrohopping for most of my life and I settled on Arch for a long time, but recently an update broke all of my systems triggering me to jump onto something else and I cam across Solus. I think that my biggest take away that I found useful and best about this distro is the amount of modern pacakges that I always use and have difficulties installing and keeping updated, specifically like bitwarden, mullvadvpn, prusaslicer,telegram,signal and element . They have packages for all of these and I don't have to chase down appimages or flat paks
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-01-27
Votes: 6
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Solus is a well-born distributiom.
I've been using it since the 2019 mate edition, is among the top 3 i've ever used with this desktop, side by side with the debian testing and arch. It's solid for a rolling, much more functional compared to the other big ones with the same programs they offer and that i use.
I think the problems they are going through right now, shouldn't tarnish the reputation of the distribution and their team. I believe they will get over it soon.
Another point in relation to the iso, somewhat outdated, after all a major update is necessary when installed for the first time, but the fact is that in the last test i did, before the official website went down, about dns failure, the mate version worked without problems, both in the installation, as well as the big 1.23 gb upgrade.
It takes the necessary time for the team to fix the problems, we cannot compare in this regard distributions that have a large team behind them to solve this type of problem, so solus deserves one more chance and not a condemnation.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 2
Date: 2023-01-22
Votes: 5
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The things that made Solus great are still embedded inside of Solus, but the issue is ever since its creators left it has been in maintenance mode, purely, 0 developments or ideas or plans or commitment to the OS they "run". These very things are finally breaking.
Solus can't even be downloaded right now, all of the websites have been down for nearly 2 weeks as a result of the team being unable to handle the workload and unequipped for DNS changes. You can find an ISO if you find yourself on their Reddit page which is the only source of information on this outage- "we're working on it" the usual type stuff. Solus is finally collapsing after years of being held together by strings and duct-tape.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 1
Date: 2023-01-15
Votes: 3
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I really loved Solus, Sadly its fallen badly. Its pretty much on life support/a dead distro despite the denials. Only the package maintainers are keeping it going. Things went bad when Josh Strobl resigned a year ago. It would be very dangerous to install it now as there are errors that have not been addressed and a lack of updates. With every day its losing relevance and with the growth of independent distros like Void or good old Slackware, Solus is just getting left behind. I really hope it rebounds from its problems but doesn't look like it at the moment. So I would stay away from Solus until everything is addressed.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-01-15
Votes: 1
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Solus is very fast distrib and now quite customizable and complete compared to a few years past, kde chrome and wine work very well for my desktop. Very fast in startup and in applications. Gentoo and arch seem slow as turtles by comparison. In my opinion a revolutionary distro hope that Solus makes the community grow . Now that I have installed it, I am convinced to use it, I will also test the efficiency of the updates. I am a linux user for many years, in my humble opinion it seems an excellent way for the future unfortunately not advertised enough. I had a good look at the KDE verson of Solus and I must say, I am really impressed. It's clean, very fast and has most programs that are worth their salt already "in the box"
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 1
Date: 2023-01-10
Votes: 0
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Solus is a very sad case of neglect and incompetence.
I'll start with what made Solus great. Solus is (was) the only rolling distro that:
+is actually usable on the desktop OOTB
+doesn't require manual intervention with updates
+survived/avoided multiple distro-wide errors across 2021-2022 causing steam or steam games to not launch, ie freetype2 glibc/eac pipewire so on
+can run games at a framerate comparable to Arch with zen kernel or even Windows
The problem? It's dead. There's noone besides the package maintainers themselves working on it anymore. The project has become stagnated and irrelevant. It is beyond just on life support, it is borderline dangerous to use Solus at this point.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 3
Date: 2023-01-09
Votes: 0
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Solus 4.3 Budgie has a lot of promise but fails to deliver. The iso to usb process went off without a hitch and Solus live loaded without problem. The test run was mostly good with addition of a browser and a few dress up apps succeeding without problem. There are a few issues such as no useful welcome screen to advise new users, especially those without in depth Linux skills. The machine i ran Solus on is a 2015 iMac and all the hardware worked without complaint. But, when I tried to install Solus to my hard disk in dual boot mode everything ground to a halt.
Compared to other distro's like Mint the process was sparsely documented and left a lot of questions. There is a basic 'clean install' or 'advanced install' offered. The clean install does not seem to be a candidate if you want to dual boot. That leaves the advanced install where you need to 'assign mount points to partitions you have previously created'. No mention or gui are offered to hint at what partitions you need, their size or formatting. The default result in the 'next' screen gives a plain text grid where the choices of mount point for the displayed partition/device and to format or not leave it to you to play detective on where the link to the selections are. The text indicates only swap and system part's are displayed, that you you should edit as necessary, and then restart the installer and begin all over again. In hit or miss fashion you can eventually get the 'next' link and move on. Solus asks for a network name, indicates a mandatory bootloader install if you have UEFI, and displays the dev where the bootloader, apparently will go. 'Next' takes you to the user setup. Again, not explained, not intuitive, and a bit of a job of detective. The 'next' screen is a Summary of the setup.
The summary would be nice if it just had more info on what is about to happen. Something like: 'Solus will now be installed on (device) with X GB. of disk space formatted as (filesystem). (Name of user) with administrative permissions will be created (or more if you set up for them). The name your network will see for this device is (name you specified) and a bootloader will be installed on (device). The existing operating system will remain in place and be accessible through the bootloader.'
Instead, you get some of that info, hints at other info you need to be confident before proceeding, and some foreboding implications that you have some nasty surprises coming your way. There is enough commonly understood terminology among Linux users to warrant that developers of these distro's make the effort to be explicit, clear, and concise in guiding users through installation. As it is, the attractive eye candy and some novel approaches to utilities and applications in Solus goes to waste for those using other products, like Mint which goes in almost automatically, comports with existing OS'es and can come pretty darn close to being as fun to use as Solus.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-01-03
Votes: 33
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Solus is awesome, a pleasure to use. Lightning fast OOTB and super stable over time, something you cannot say about most rolling distros. I've had it installed since 2017, and here we are in 2023 that exact same installation is as lean fast and reliable as it was one day 1. If there's anything against it I could possibly say, it's that it's "boring", but that's only because it works so well. While most other Linux distros feel the same, Solus feels like it goes out of its way to be unique, it is a distro that is truly in a class of its own.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 5
Date: 2023-01-02
Votes: 3
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Solus was an excellent distribution. Unfortunately, it is currently running on life support only.
There has been zero progress on the software center for quite some time. Been waiting for an updated interface and full Flatpak integration. But EOPKG applications are still updated separately from Flatpak (which must be done by command line).
Budgie is OK but again there has been zero progress for as while. KDE Plasma is much better and way more powerful. As well as up to date.
Solus still offers a fast, stable experience. And for that it's a 10/10 from me. But for how long is the question.
I gave it a 5/10 as it has not been progressive for quite a while. It's really too bad. I think they have a ton to offer the Linux world.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 4
Date: 2022-12-17
Votes: 7
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Solus seems very promising on the surface, but it is a poor choice for multiple reasons.
Linux Steam Integration, which comes enabled by default on Solus, breaks most Proton games. The team is aware but refuse to fix or remove or even simply have it disabled by default. Because of this alone, I cannot recommend Solus.
1. The ISO is old and this wouldn't be a problem if the user was made aware that they should update before installing new packages, but there is no notice of any kind. Because of this you will frequently see users trying out Solus and having their installs break shortly after installation. eopkg works great besides this though and the update scheme of Solus is quite reliable if you know what you're doing.
2. The current version of GNOME apps don't mix well with the current state of Budgie so as a result the current Solus Budgie looks like a Frankenstein desktop. You need to tweak and workaround to get dark mode running properly and it's a poor redundant implementation. The team have posted workarounds and have settled with this for months instead of properly addressing the issues. Nautilus is still broken months later on Solus and Budgie and there is no cohesion to be found in any of the desktop elements, which was once a big appeal of Solus Budgie, it looked premium and modern. It's kinda ugly now.
3. The Solus software center has trouble remembering which apps are currently "installed" once you remove one from the install section. You need to close and reopen the SC every time you install one package. Very buggy software, has been this way for years.
4. The team doesn't communicate with their users. The bus factor is to be considered as well- if you have an issue, Solus is so small that you're likely the first one to encounter it and bring it up. So Solus lives up to its name as an independent distro, but not exactly in the best ways.
5. The website is years-outdated and full of grammatical errors that the team are aware of. It represents a lack of interest and integrity in their product.
Solus is unique in that it is the only rolling distro that is (supposed to be) easy to use and desktop curated and performance tweaks. It boots the fastest I've ever seen any distro. But that's where the compliments end, and these benefits were thanks to the original developers of Solus who are no longer around. The current ones keep breaking these very things..
Considering these numerous shortcomings and the remaining team's incompetence to address them or inform users of their future intentions with the distro, I cannot in good faith recommend Solus.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 10
Date: 2022-12-15
Votes: 8
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I love Solus... I really do.
They are doing so many things right. It's not perfect but no distribution is.
This was my daily for a few years but have since moved on to Fedora due to things seemingly falling apart within the Solus team. So I was unsure of its future.
Just decided to check in on Solus and installed the KDE rendition. And... it's still great!
It has the latest KDE Plasma desktop environment, a very recent kernel and performance is still outstanding.
Independent, Rolling, Relevant, Swift, Stable.
I'm not going to hop back to it yet till I'm confident it's sticking around for a while. In the mean time, I'll continue with Fedora KDE Spin but keeping an eye on Solus.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 10
Date: 2022-12-11
Votes: 14
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Focusing on Solus as a Windows replacement for desktop gaming PCs.
Not many people seem to talk about this or point it out, but beyond being a great desktop OS, I believe Solus is the best Linux option for gaming.
-Rolling release, meaning (as of recently) you get the latest kernel and drivers for your hardware. And you can rest assured that you aren't getting a bunch of server or business enterprise related packages because Solus is...
-Desktop currated, it is not your traditional rolling release that required maintenance overtime, Solus comes preinstalled with custom tools/services/scripts/hooks (such as usysconf, the ease of eopkg, unique clr-boot-manager configs and more) that handle all of this for you. But the system is extremely lightweight and bloatfree despite this. You will be astonished how rock solid Solus stays overtime due to its...
-Independent base. Not based on Debian Arch Fedora none of that, Solus lives up to its name, it built its own base. Because of this, Solus is able to exist not only as a linux distro but as a desktop OS in its own right. It is undoubtably linux, but it's an extremely unique and premium take on it, performance tuned and intended only for desktops. And that's what users with gaming PCs who care about gaming, something that can turn on launch Steam and launch their games, they want a....
-Desktop that just works. Gamers don't want to have to fix their OS first to join their friends ingame. They want to turn it on, update real quick if required via a (in-house!) GUI package manager, and move on.
(I would like to mention that if you can use Windows, you should probably just use that for gaming, but this speaks for Solus as an alternative for Windows, in case the user does not have access to it, doesn't want to buy it, doesn't prefer it, or is simply bored of it and wants to try something new. Not every user out there is passionate or knowledgeable enough to install Arch with a performance-patched kernel and keep it maintained through updates overtime, just to have Windows-like gaming performance outside of Windows. In my experience for this use case, most other distros besides Solus will lead to headaches down the road with the point upgrades or focus on non-desktop crowds.)
All of this is why I believe Solus is the most headache-free, premium feeling rolling distro for desktops in the current Linux landscape, at least when it comes to needing a non-Windows OS for PC gaming.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 10
Date: 2022-12-04
Votes: 7
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With the latest kernel updates and boost in maintainer/user activity, I think Solus is fully recommendable again. From my experience it's the most unique and usable desktop rolling distro that exists. How and why has been stated before, it would be redundant to just copy paste what others say, but it's true- Solus is desktop Linux bliss. In ways other patch-it-up-from-the-parent-distros try to be but fail, Solus succeeds. I'm glad it's at a point again where the future is bright, it would be a true loss for an open source phenomenon such as Solus to just die out.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 9
Date: 2022-11-25
Votes: 12
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I like Solus.
pros:
- It boots fast
- fairly light on resources
- budgie is a pleasant desktop environment
- Solus gets out the way to allow productivity
- doesn't require hours of tinkering to get a useable system
- independent linux and not just another version of arch, debian or redhat
- rolling release
- flatpak support
- good update scheduling (not incessant)
- works well on older 64bit computers
cons:
- suffers from 'small team' scepticism
- gnome integrated nextcloud online services doesn't seem to play well for me (there are workarounds)
I keep coming back to Solus as when I turn my computer on and want to quickly get to whichever function the computer is being used for, Solus just works. It works perfectly with MacBook late 2009
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 1
Date: 2022-09-18
Votes: 0
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the solus installation process completely destroyed my computer system, so I had to wipe off the hard disk and do a clean standalone install of it, but still the installer refuses to register itself with the BIOS, and I was unable to boot into it. previously i was trying to dual boot it with windows, which allowed me into solus but windows became unbootable. I have never come across such an awful OS in my life! absolutely terrible, it was nice to run on a live usb but such a disappointment when it comes to the installation process! I am now on Manjaro thanks to solus.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 3
Date: 2022-09-09
Votes: 2
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Solus would be a great choice, if it weren't dead. And it was a great choice up until a year or two ago. As of September 2022, the kernel for this rolling distro is still on 5.15 (mainline is well into 5.19) leaving gamers or necessary advancements in the dust, the ISO is over a year old preventing new hardware from working with Solus at all. The reasonings for this aren't intentional or for stability like some like to claim- it is purely the inability or lack of time to do so. Clearly if they were in a position to catch up they would, but they simply aren't.
The ones who run the distro currently aren't the ones who created it. They lack the passion that clearly went into its creation. The initial selling points aren't even of focus anymore, for over a year now it's just been maintenance mode with no plans or information about anything. They love saying how they have no deadlines due to people annoying them, when in reality it is because they lack the ability to come up with a coherent plan for what they're going to do. The former experience lead was the one taking charge of such things for a long time, keeping the distro alive and engaging with the community regularly, but this individual has resigned from Solus, likely due to the very reasons I'm explaining here. There are things in its current state that are either system-breaking, or prevent the user from installing Solus at all, and the team is aware of these things, but they don't seem to care much. Any other distro such things would be priority, instant, if they cared about the product they were maintaining. All of these things would be fine if it were the team's own personal project for their own use, but it's supposed to be an operating system targeting everyone for home computers, and they still market it this way.
So I'm not sure who Solus is for anymore, and I think it's time to say the responsible thing would be to just discontinue maintenance on the distro. For the sake of the existing user base's sanity and whatever lasting reputation they intend to leave Solus with when it's officially discontinued, just pull the plug already.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 10
Date: 2022-09-04
Votes: 24
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Imagine a desktop OS that just works. Imagine an OS that boots and starts programs in an instant. Imagine an OS where you don't have to go download files on the web or find some repo URL or even use a terminal to get the software you want, but just used a centralized GUI app called Software Center with wonderfully curated software. Imagine an OS that was built solely for desktops and nothing else. Imagine a desktop OS made by humans intended to be used by humans. Imagine the perfect, free desktop operating system. Solus.
Imagine a Linux distro that just works. A distro that was rolling release, but without the instability of bleeding edge software. Imagine a desktop-focused distro that is mostly unburdened by upstream pressures and isn't based on anything else but was made from scratch. Imagine not having to tweak the kernel or other things to get blazingly fast performance or a clean setup due to deeply embedded Clear Linux patches. Imagine being on the same installation of a rolling release distribution for nearly 5 years without having one breakage or bad experience or need to intervene. Solus.
There, I've covered both crowds- the new users and the seasoned Linux user. For newbies, I feel like if a person's first experience with Linux coming from Windows or MacOS was only with Solus, they would have a wonderful time with Linux. And for experienced users, Solus is a greatly underrated and remarkably stable rolling home, the defaults of which likely out-human the distro you're used to using. Solus is great for everyone who uses a desktop computer. And if you can find the software you need, sufficing with Flatpak if needed, Solus is right there. What're you waiting on?!
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 10
Date: 2022-08-22
Votes: 1
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i keep Solus on my "entertainment" laptop.
And i got to say - its been on it for years now, and it still works. Thats probably the only linux distro that never borked out, always updated fine. I have a USB stick with it for the borked scenario on other machines - that means a lot.
Everything good said doesn't need to get repeated - its stable, beautiful, fast, customizable, budgie is awesome and probably the best DE.
The reason for this review - is a lot of misinformation that some people purposefully or not post everywhere. Mainly, the OS being "dead".
Its a rolling release. The fact that its been at 4.3 doesn't really mean anything. Its been updated every week on fri/sat. Still is. Forum is alive and well. In fact, just updated last week.
Writing this from the latest firefox version, with all software i got up-to-date.
So Solus is alive and well, and will keep being an amazing distro its always been
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 10
Date: 2022-08-11
Votes: 30
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Solus is, for me, the only Linux distribution worth using.
I've managed to break every Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora daily driver I've ever tried. Learning Linux was always a path to get away from Windows. The stability of Linux distributions prevented me from feeling confident enough to make that transition.
Enter Solus.
I've had the same installation of Solus since 2019. I've never, ever been able to break this OS so badly that I couldn't fix it. Some people seem to think that constant, flashy new features are what make a distribution worthwhile. For me, that couldn't be farther from the truth. I like Solus BECAUSE it is boring. Boring, stable, reliable, dependable, consistent, and always there when I need it.
It has both a bleeding-edge kernel and an LTS kernel. It features Budgie, KDE and Mate Desktop distributions. Gnome is available as well but for how long is uncertain. It has a hand picked, curated repo full of packages that are maintained and work. Flatpak gives me anything else I need.
Solus is simply the only distribution that I feel is suitable for both new and advanced users, students, orogrammers, enthusiasts, and everyone else. It does what it is supposed to do..
It just works.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 10
Date: 2022-08-06
Votes: 5
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I'm writing this as a eulogy to the greatest operating system of all time, Solus. There is, was never, and never will be anything else in the Linux world like Solus again. Careful rolling curation, perfect desktop experience, 0 breakages. It seems too good to be true.
It is. It's dead. It was in the process of dying slowly but I'm calling it unofficially dead. There is exactly 0 evidence the end user can get from looking up anything Solus, or anything that the devs say, that suggests we have a future. It is nothing but excuses, broken promises, false hopes, long months of years of radio silence, and setbacks.
I had a pride using Solus from 2017 - 2021. It was the only Linux I felt a certain special "home" feeling when using, I felt a euphoria suggesting it to other new users and hearing how awesome it was. I believe I would say I liked Solus more than the Solus team liked Solus. The whole time I knew it was sort of a "hobbyist" distro and ignored warnings from others out there about its lack of a "future proof" foundation. They were right. As much as I was in love with Solus, and still am, I sleep better since switching my system over to Arch Linux.
It was great, and I hope another inspired FOSS team out there emerges to create something as great as the Solus team originally did to fill its place in the Linux world. And I hope this team would be passionate enough about their product to ensure it has a bright, hopeful, honest, TRANSPARENT future.
Until then. Rest in Peace the real Solus OS, the best in the Linux game, period.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 10
Date: 2022-07-23
Votes: 72
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Solus is a targeted and carefully curated independent rolling release, laser focused on home desktop use. Solus is remarkably fast, remarkably clean, remarkably stable and remarkably useful for its intended purpose.
Kernel: Solus is a rolling release, but carefully curated, keeping up with kernel development. The Solus team tests new versions of the kernel, and occasionally skips a release or two. I saw this happen a few years ago, when two successive kernel versions created problems with some Samsung NVMe drives, and because Solus tested carefully before implementing, Solus users dodged that bullet. In short, rolling but not mindlessly rolling.
Operating Systen: Solus is a ground-up built, designed initially by Ikey Doherty, and now maintained by team. Solus, by design, has all the tools needed for home computing, but does not load down the OS layer with network management, enterprise management and other tools not needed for home computing. As a result, Solus is trim and efficient, significantly faster to load and run than enterprise-focused distros, and is a complete out-of-box home computing environment. Solus is EFI-only and 64-bit only, which further cuts down on cruft.
Desktop Environment: Solus offers four DE's -- Budgie, Gnome, MATE and Plasma. I use Budgie exclusively. Budgie was designed by Ikey Doherty, refined by Josh Strobl, and was developed hand-in-hand with the Solus OS layer until late 2021, when the Solus OS and Budgie DE teams separated in order to allow both to develop independently. Budgie is well-designed, intuitive and visually elegant. Budgie is reasonably configurable through the Budgie Desktop and Budgie Control Center GUI tools, but is not overwhelming for users, as "everything but the kitchen sink" desktop environments can quickly become. For users coming from Windows, Budgie is a good choice because Budgie follows "traditional" design motifs familiar to Windows.
Applications: Solus comes with a standard suite of applications appropriate for home computer use -- browser, office suite, photo and video editors, video and music players, notebook, calendar, and so on -- that allow a home computing user to do everything that a normal home user does. The Solus repository contains several thousand other/substitute applications, supplemented by Flatpak and Snap repositories. All of the applications in the Solus repository are curated and maintained by the Solus team, so the applications work well with Solus. Solus supports all of the standard browsers (e.g. Brave, Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi) either directly through the repository or through Flatpak/Snap. What is true of browsers is generally true of office tools and other applications. Because Solus is a rolling release, applications in the repository stay current, although, as is the case with the kernel, application updates are carefully tested before being included in the weekly updates.
Solus is the most stable distro I've ever used. I more or less run Solus Budgie out-of-the-box and I've run my current build without a glitch or reinstall for several years. The updates have been flawless. Solus works and just keeps working.
I think that Solus is a good choice for users coming over from Windows, and for home computer users in general. I would not recommend Solus for enterprise use or network management, because Solus is not designed for those use cases.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 10
Date: 2022-07-19
Votes: 19
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Basic info- Solus is a "curated rolling release" distrobution built from scratch, made for home computers. The team isn't focused on server or business centric users, it's here for the day to day people who need a fast reliable OS to be greeted to when going to browse, game, code, do some homework, the usual personal computer stuff. In this, Solus excels. It'll limit the repos because of this- but if you're an average user like me and many others you'll find most of what you need is already in the repos. In my journeys, I believe it to be the only one that's reliable enough to suggest to other users. Not that I've ever suggested it to anyone but if I were to, other distros would have dealbreakers that I know would make the experience less than satisfying coming from say Windows. Solus never fails, it's easy to install easy to use and has great benefits compared to other distros. It's also proper stable rolling release, meaning you never have to reinstall or have a huge version upgrade, you're always running the most up to date version Solus.
Performance- The best, period. It boots the fastest I've ever seen a desktop OS, idling at 600mb RAM. It's like its takes your hardware and rings out all possible usable free juice in there like a wet towel. This is thanks to a mixture of Clear Linux influences, well applied kernel modifications, and good old Celtic Magic. All out the box.
Package management- eopkg. Simple and effective. It was built in-house when Solus was once called EvolveOS and has prevailed since. Uses the usual terminal commands you'd expect from a package manager, install remove upgrade etc. But there's also a brilliant Software Center there to do all the work for you. Just be sure to upgrade the system before installing. It even notifies you of available updates. Eopkg is (was?) slated to be replaced by a new package manager called Sol, but shifts in development and team may have put those plans off for a while.
Desktop- I use Budgie. Solus created the Budgie desktop themselves and was once the "home" of Budgie, but its creator has since moved on to expand the project. I haven't used any other DEs with Solus so I cannot speak for them, but I have been with Solus Budgie since 2017 when it was Budgie's "home", and nothing has changed. It's still the beautiful desktop that feels like it was made by actual humans. Simple, lightweight, visually appealing, highly functional, and customizable enough for me. The panel customization is actually better than Plasma in my opinion, which has practically broken my desktop before from just trying to move one widget or resize one thing. Budgie isn't nearly as extensive or tinker-free as Plasma, but what's there is very solid and sensible. Especially if you enjoy the defaults, Budgie is simply a great DE.
Current status- Solus has had a significant shift in management, the aforementioned developer of Budgie left the project about half a year ago due to unspecified reasons, and the team has had their hands full since. That didn't shake their confidence however, because Solus remains a great OS all the while with no signs of slowing down despite the hubbub. The dev who left now works on Budgie with a new team Buddies of Budgie. They're working on getting a Fedora spin out there. Personally, I'd suggest Solus over Fedora anyday.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 8
Date: 2022-07-17
Votes: 0
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Must rely almost entirely on the "Software Manager" program to install stuff, which many Linux veterans might not like. Has Brave web browser available so not everything is bad, however it fires up *very slowly* and even more so after the near-weekly updates. A few programs like QB64 might need a bit of working within (make a small change in source code from "xmessage" to "zenity" so runtime error messages could be displayed), for BASIC programming cannot pick Freebasic, for example because there's no package for it and otherwise, installing the "tarball" keeps asking for a shared library, for GNU Assembler and just ugh. Note that the installer script for QB64 might detect which Linux distro to know how to download packages. It's a good thing I first installed it before this OS updated its "kernel" in May I believe, while there was still plenty of space in the EFI partition for it to hog.
I'm sorry I had to split this review up but the original was over 3k characters, probably wouldn't have shown all or not allowed.
PART 2 OF 2 by "mnrv-ovrf-year-c"
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 9
Date: 2022-07-16
Votes: 4
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So I've been a Solus users since version 3.99999 and have come to fall in love with this distro. It's home to me now. I used to distro hop quite often, and probably had installed and wiped over a dozen distro or distro/DE combinations before finding Solus. It was still off and on for a while there. It was my second distro on the machine, my primary that I had kept around the longest at that time ended up being Linux Mint. Then 4.0 came around and while it wasn't a reality bending change or complete rewrite of the distro, I just noticed I was using it more and more. Solus Budgie became my daily driver for all my personal stuff. I was still using openSUSE for work at the time, but soon transitioned all of those activities to Budgie as well. I still maintain other distros, but now it's in a virtual machine, and it just helps reinforce why Solus is home.
The eopkg package manager is something to get used to, but once you are familiar with the shortcuts and syntax, it's wonderful. It's so much faster than apt, the commands feel and seem more intuitive, and it's generally a joy to use.
So let's talk desktop environments. Budgie was the "flagship" unofficially of Solus since it was developed in-house. It's amazing, it's fast, it's lightweight enough, and a terrific user experience. If you are new to Linux or migrating over from Windows, the Budgie release will not disappoint you. With Budgie development now separated out, it's great to see it expanding with official support to more distros. I still maintain two Budgie machines, but it's not my go-to DE anymore.
Mate, well....it's Mate. If you have a low powered or older machine, Mate runs just as good as Lubuntu or Xubuntu in my experience. You just have to deal with all the Mate stuff and that Gnome2 design language. If you have to have the most lightweight option, this is for you. It was just never my thing as far as the look and feel and customization, so it didn't stick around.
Gnome is the one desktop environment I actively avoid. Not just on Solus, but everywhere. I don't like or enjoy using the Gnome DE on any distro I've tried it. With SUSE, Ubuntu, and Fedora I had a ton of extensions installed, played with Tweaks, and even modified config files to get it to a usable place for me. Then a Gnome update comes and everything breaks. I just can get into the workflow. Pop was the closest to converting me with Cosmic and Pop_Shell, but I still don't think I'd want to run that DE every day. I had a Solus Gnome VB for about a week....it got deleted. If Gnome is your thing, you'll probably love it.
Plasma, my favorite DE (even when you include Pantheon, deepin, Cinnamon, LXQt, and the others). I hated Plasma at first, there are soooo many settings and sooooo many options. Every time you click on something to make a changes, it's like "hey would you like the option to change 36 more things related to this one label on your title bar?" It was probably about 3-4 years into using Linux full time that I finally installed Plasma again to check it out, thinking I'd ditch it and run back to Budgie quickly. Started in a VB, and to my surprise, I loved it. The blur, the options I used to hate, the themes, the control. This was it. I switched over to Solus Plasma on metal and haven't looked back.
So If you find a DE that fits your need here, you can take the time to learn and get comfortable with eopkg package management, and you want the latest and greatest that isn't bleeding edge, then Solus could be a good fit for you. By the way, did I mention it's also rock solid. In the entire time I've used it, I've only had one system break, and that was my fault. The community, amazing and so helpful. You should really give it a shot, if you truly try to use it and not just say "this isn't X" or "why can't I just install this .deb file" then you'll probably love it.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 8
Date: 2022-07-15
Votes: 1
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At first I tried to get the KDE Plasma version. It's a good thing it failed to boot because it was going to affect my entire opinion about it. Actually have MATE, otherwise it was going to be XFCE and this was before I discovered whatever "Budgie" was.
I cannot recommend this distro to beginners. This is VERY FUSSY to install. Cannot do it to an external USB disk which would have been the deal-breaker for me but I just needed to know how this was like. The installer wound up resizing the Windows partition, now cannot go back and change this OS's file system to give it 10GB more or so. The installer ignored a 32GB empty space, however. I fire up Windows sometime later and get a BSOD... lesson learned.
This OS wants like an EFI partition which is at least 1GB or maybe much larger. Right now I have less than ten megabytes remaining because the stuff for this OS takes about half the space, with two "initramfs" things and a few other files each one like 8MB. Tried to leave only one "kernel" object and the latest related files but this stupid thing then refused to boot. Even worse is that the awful "eopkg" terminal program might check the "kernel" first and if there's not enough space to copy another one, it gives up and totally refuses to install anything.
There's even more. My computer always boots directly to Windows without any intervention. When I get the computer to show the boot options, it shows the EFI entries for Windows and for Manjaro (which now has that 32GB space), and maybe for that which happens to be on a pluggable USB drive, but never for this one. Must go and hunt down the EFI file. After this OS installs successfully, it creates a "com.solus-project" folder but doesn't copy the EFI file into it, had to do it manually, and left it at its original location or it might refuse to boot. Nothing that has to do with "grub" could even get this OS to display on the menu for some other Linux. I had mentioned what happens *before* my computer could get to "grub".
This is a very good distro IMHO. The developers might be looking for somebody else to help them, only to avert those people that grade a product chiefly by the "activity". This OS avoids the trap of having to look great rather than also working well and being easy to customize -- after installing it and booting into it successfully. I'm sorry if this is TL;DR
PART 1 OF 2 by "mnrv-ovrf-year-c"
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 9
Date: 2022-07-10
Votes: 1
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There are so many different distributions of Linux, which one should I choose to use? Solus Plasma is one of six different Distros that I've fully installed and tried. The installation was exceptionally fast and smooth on my new Surface Go Laptop, and then when booted up everything is just quick and snappy. I do have a few complaints about the Plasma Desktop on Solus, so I may end up trying out Solus with the Budgie Desktop instead, take it for a test drive, but for the time being I'm sticking with Solus. Hopefully Solus will be around for a long time.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 5
Date: 2022-07-06
Votes: 2
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I have been using Solus for a few months now, but my conclusion is ambivalent. On the one hand, the Budgie Desktop is a visual blessing, very fast and there are no problems with the installation, but on the other hand, it gives the impression that there is no more development.
LibreOffice and Thunderbird, for example, are completely outdated and, unlike other distributions, no updates are offered.
But for my configuration, Acer All in One with Intel i3, the biggest shortcoming is the constant "switching off" of the display without any warning for a few seconds, not reproducible.
Happens every now and then, no idea why, but the problem exists only with Solus, does not occur with any other distribution, of the many I have tried over time.
So definitely a Solus problem, not a hardware problem.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 10
Date: 2022-06-19
Votes: 11
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Hi there, I have tried Kubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Fedora Workstation, Fedora KDE, Fedora Kinoite and POP OS before to name a few, I'm no Linux expert, I'm kinda average user and this is what I have to say about Solus BUDGIE:
Simple, Clean and WORKS
It just works
Two monitor detection works (laptop and second screen), lock screen and hibernation works, no crashes on kernel startup or shutdown and I have a freakin HP laptop from 2014. It have the basic codecs (unlike Fedora). Just to name a few.
Until now the system didn't broke, running smooth, as I said Simple, Clean and WORKS.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 10
Date: 2022-06-14
Votes: 12
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Solus 4.3 budgie
Perfection in an operating system. I thought this computer was toast. Turns out, it works perfectly. This is one of the absolute best operating systems I have ever used. I have struggled to find one that works properly. This is the one.
Everything works. It starts up. It never freezes or crashes. It plays all files I have tried. It always shuts down cleanly. The great thing about this one is that I don't have a single question about anything. I understand it all and it all works.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 7
Date: 2022-06-14
Votes: 2
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Solus is still good after all this time despite its recent plunders and stumbles. It has some of the most sensible design choices in the desktop Linux game, and is probably the fastest desktop OS you'll ever use. Development is slow sure, but it isn't behind enough to affect compatibility or usablility of a working system, in fact this reluctance is intentional to avoid regressions. A current big issue is that the ISO is getting very old, meaning users of both new and old hardware are having problems installing. This is something that seriously, seriously needs to be prioritized as it is killing the reputation of the distribution. I'd like to point out the review from 6/09 plagiarized some of my words regarding distro-specific issues and completely recontextualized them to sound piercing, when it reality it was referring to one specific gaming related issue at the time. I would still recommend Solus to both new and old Linux users, any day. I just look forward to when they get their acts together in terms of moving forward! Good luck friends
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 1
Date: 2022-06-09
Votes: 0
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There is NO support for new-ish, let alone newEST hardware. NO updates of any kind either. With the developers now at the lead, it almost feels like an abandoned project because you never hear from anyone. It doesn't do much to boost confidence in the future of Solus. Maintainer and dev response is something that is telling of the problems with this distro: "Sorry, I'll be AFK for a few weeks you'll just have to wait." Clear Linux patches and amazing desktop performance mean nothing when the things I need to do aren't working due to distro-specific issues that have no signs of being solved. R.I.P. Solus.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 9
Date: 2022-06-04
Votes: 1
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After the end of Scientific Linux 9.10. Rockstable I tried several distro's.
This one works fine, with no problems until now.
Vivobook ASUS E410MA, the windows S crashed almost after ten minutes,
wiped the the virusware and installed in a couple of minutes Solus.
C-compilers work fine as on Scientific and later on I will test LaTex.
Beautiful distro! The disk-utilities not as good as on SL.
Its nowadays a pity you have to test too many distros to make a choice.
In the older days a used Debian and Venix and Scientific and Slackware;
They had the virtue of stablity and a no nonsence approach.
The lack of standard a root user separated from the user is a strange choice
since the start of the ubuntu wave.
Hope they keep up the standard, because I am a bit afraid of rolling relaeses!
Till now +++ and I will comment later on after a couple of months.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 6
Date: 2022-06-03
Votes: 2
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Solus is good but only if you don't care about Linux or the inner workings of Linux.
If you are just using your PC and need an OS to replace Windows or Mac OS, use Solus.
Do not use Solus as a "linux distro", because it is here that you will find it falls short.
Solus may be built on Linux, but it doesn't fit within the landscape of Linux or its developments. It is content to do its own thing for its own needs, which are becoming increasingly niche and gate-kept in the past. This could be a good or a bad thing depending on your use case. For example, that cool article you probably read detailing coming advancements in the new Linux kernel or something else cutting edge or a gaming technology? Irrelevant for you if you use Solus. Again, if the rapidly advancing Linux world is too fast for you but you still want the advantages of a rolling release, all of this might actually be a benefit for you. What is left of the distro currently was made by a genius who left the project early on, and this is the way it's been maintained since by who is left, with no advancements being made at all. It's all maintenance mode right now for like a whole year. They claim they're doing this for stability, apparently unaware that all that it's doing is digging themselves deeper and deeper into outdated hell. With Linux, staying in the past won't make things better, it'll just make the better stuff perpetually further away. And this team simply refuses to move forward, their reluctance is too high for their words to be taken seriously. Anyway.
That's why I say, Solus is for the typical desktop user who just wants to use their PC. If you are the type who cares about coming advancements in the Linux kernel, or hold pride as a Linux user- or in general if you are a Linux enthusiast- you'll probably be driven away fast by how much the team goes against FOSS fundamentals and freedom as a whole.
If you just need to turn your PC on and do something real quick, Solus is great. But as a "linux distro", it's an outsider than shows no interest in what makes Linux great in the first place.
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Version: 4.3
Rating: 10
Date: 2022-05-30
Votes: 8
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After settling in, Solus has become my favorite desktop OS ever, period. It's fast, stable (in the true sense, not just "reliable") and it comes prepackaged with some of the most sensible, "human" feeling design choices in the Linux game. Solus is still the only distro out there to not buckle to upstream pressure. Take your time with the development, maintainer folks.
If you haven't tried Solus yet I highly suggest you do. It goes beyond distro, it's a magnificent operating system in its own right.
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Latest Reviews
Project: Solus
Version: 4.6
Rating: 10
Date: 2024-11-30
Votes: 142
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I've been doing a lot of distro hopping lately, trying out both various distros and various DE's. I was surprised that I liked Budgie as much as I do. I thought I might settle down with my hopping for a bit with Ubuntu Budgie, but then on further thought, I thought I'd try out what is technically Budgie's birth distro. Solus installed unbelievably quickly and boots unbelievably quickly. And I like the simplistic software installer, and so far, haven't come across anything they don't have a package for. I hope the bad times I have read about are done. Bottom line: I'm impressed with it.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.5
Rating: 10
Date: 2024-09-18
Votes: 105
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Solus stands out to me as a unique and thoughtfully crafted operating system. It was seamless to install. No hardware compatibility issues. The Budgie desktop environment is clean and modern looking. Solus performance on my slightly older Lenovo laptop from 2019 operates very smoothly and efficiently. Their package repo is limited, but combined with Flatpaks there wasn't anything I needed that I couldn't find. Solus is a rolling release, and while it took some time for me to grasp the benefits of rolling releases, it has been very stable with no issues during updates over the past several months. The Solus community has decent documentation and a helpful online forum. Overall, I don't see a need to leave Solus having come from a Debian (Linux Mint) background. Very happy with Solus!
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.5
Rating: 5
Date: 2024-08-07
Votes: 0
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I've installed the XFCE version in VirtualBox. The installation process was fast, and the interface is clean and aesthetic.
However, when I opened the Software Manager to install Inkscape, downloading the dependencies and installing them took about seven minutes. Additionally, Google Chrome isn't in the repository, so you have to manually install and periodically upgrade it.
Sorry, but I'll stick to Debian-based distros with large repositories and a simple "click-on-DEB-file-enter-the-password" process for external software.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.5
Rating: 10
Date: 2024-07-15
Votes: 106
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It went through a bit of a tumultuous journey there, but now we're on the other side of it and things have stabilized. Solus is still the only distro that feels like home to me. The combination of a carefully curated rolling release, built exclusively for the best desktop experience, and being an independent distro with its own desktop environment is unmatched. Budgie is perfect because it's got the simplicity of GNOME while still allowing for some easy customization and personalization.
Sure, if you demand a huge selection of software available in the repos, you might end up looking elsewhere. I think they've got the average user pretty well covered and then some though, plus there's always Flathub. So while Solus may not have the biggest library of software, here's an example of what it does have: apps for some of the best VPN providers out there. To be safe I won't name them, don't want my review getting flagged, but it's the ones located in Sweden and Switzerland.
If you're on Arch Linux you'd need to dive into the AUR to find those particular apps, but on Solus they're right there in the software manager GUI. So you may be surprised by all that you'll find here. Been using Solus for about five years and despite a little bump in the road it's better than ever now, being run by great people, and it's got a bright future.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.5
Rating: 9
Date: 2024-07-09
Votes: 43
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I've been using Solus for years now. I moved from Windows to Linux permanently in 2015, and never looked back. I started out with Linux Mint at first, then after year or two I switched to Manjaro Linux, intrigued by its rolling model. With Manjaro, I thought initially that I had found the distro for life. It was a breeze to install, but I just couldn't rely on it like I needed. So, after two or three years, I had to let Manjaro go. Then came Solus.
Solus unfortunately didn't have quite as much software as I would like, but that never became a true problem, as I've managed to get by without really being critically shorthanded in this department - although there's software available in other distros that would be great to have in Solus as well. But aside from that, Solus has been very solid. Even though it's a rolling distro, Solus has only once broken for me in all these years, and that happened during certain transitional period of Solus. Sometimes there may be some little problem(s) with some program, but it usually gets fixed in the following update or so, and all in all, those bugs have rarely affected me in such a way that I couldn't use the said program until fix has arrived. But on rare instances, some critical component has failed for a while. Budgie has turned out to be great replacement for KDE, as it offers enough customization without being too complex to tinker or use. When I used KDE in other distros, I was happy with the freedom to customize it, but in practice it didn't work as well as it should've worked, or was too much of a hassle, taking too much time to set up the way I liked, or offering more freedom than was actually required and therefore demanded more annoying tinkering. Budgie offered freedom too, but streamlined it smartly, striking a good balance between freedom and set choices. Over the years Budgie has seen some changes, and currently not everything with it works as well with me as it used to. But it's not broken, there's just something that doesn't quite work anymore: Yakuake doesn't start closed, or accept keyboard shortcut combinations, mouse software also doesn't open minimized etc. Those are not big problems, but they used to work flawlessly and now even tinkering with options doesn't fix it. But with Solus things get fixed at some point, I've learned that. Because Solus is a rolling distro, sometimes things change after updates, requiring some additional user input like setting options again in some specific program. It's not too common and rarely breaks anything, but once in a while it's good to check the forum to see notes and experiences regarding updates. And if some program isn't used enough or package maintainer drops out without anyone continuing the work, then that program gets dropped from Solus. It has happened, but isn't much of a threat for important programs and hasn't been as much of a problem with me as it was with AUR in Manjaro. Having said this, if there's some program that user really likes or requires, it's good idea to offer to maintain it yourself. Solus isn't a distro with huge staff, so user participation is recommended. Solus also accepts donations, and I highly recommended chipping in. It can also be done anonymously.
Solus works really well, and is solid and reliable in that sense. It's the best distro I've used from technical standpoint when everyday workstation reliability matters and yet you want the software to have new versions without being bleeding edge and suffering from the instability that comes with having the latest experimental stuff. Solus isn't as rock solid as something like Debian, but Debian's software is generally much older than in Solus. To this day, I haven't found a better Linux distro for me, and I'm sure there are many others who feel the same way.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.5
Rating: 10
Date: 2024-06-20
Votes: 22
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I started to learn Linux in 2011 and did a lot of distro-hoping. And in my personal opinion, for a personal desktop computer... Solus is by far the best. It's fast, performant, very stable, easy-to-use, perfect for beginners despite being a Rolling-release, and since IT IS a rolling-release, it's a perfect distribution to have the latest packages, with the performance that goes with it.
Nvidia drivers has been installed easily (I have a Ge-Force 3080). Huion official driver has been easily installed from the .tar.xz file they offer on their website. My "Brother" printer driver had been found easily and was easy to make it work. I have the latest versions of Krita, LibreOffice, OBS, etc...
I was very sad when Solus 4.3 was announced dormant, but now that it revived, I'm really happy I came back to it. I hope it will have a very long life from now on.
Only "bad" point for me is Budgie. It is not bad at all... but still unfinished in my opinion. It lacks of settings, their "applications menu" can't be modified, so I can't add for example Blender from the Portable version I downloaded on Blender's website (which is the only recommanded way to use Blender on Linux) and I can't configure the list of opened application on the panel to be able to close apps with the middle mouse click, as we can do in Cinnamon, KDE or XFCE... But I fixed that issue by choosing KDE instead of Budgie, personally.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.5
Rating: 10
Date: 2024-05-30
Votes: 41
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Excellent distro, I used it several years ago I had read that it was inactive but I tried the version 4.5 with GNOME, it became my only system for the day to day it is fast, starting the installation was simple and fast, about I have not had problems with anything, besides eopkg works great, the resource consumption is very acceptable, it has less than 800 packages installed. And any other software you can find in Snap or Flatpak. Quite a success this distro I recommend it.
I will use the XFCE version on another computer to see if I get the same experience on a computer with fewer resources, I hope that I can get the same results in the same way.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.5
Rating: 7
Date: 2024-05-07
Votes: 4
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After reading the DistroWatch review of Solus 4.4 I thought it looked interesting and tried it out on a spare hard drive on my system. Settled on the Plasma desktop and was having a great time. Copied all my files over to it from Linux Mint 21.3 thinking this may be a serious competitor in case I need a change. Then 4.5 came along and at first there were no issues, but it is, after all, a rolling release and an update trashed all of my personal settings, widgets up to including including my taskbar and left me starting from scratch to get something usable. I was not pleased. I'll leave it on that drive and check in on it occasionally, but as a daily driver I have severe reservations.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.5
Rating: 9
Date: 2024-05-01
Votes: 2
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I used Solus with Budgie for 3 years now. I could not change now, I love it (have used: mac OS (9 to 10.5, closed), windows (awful), ubuntu (not as nice look and speed), ubuntu budgie (interface pitfalls), redhat (not as intuitive), ElementaryOS (missing stability)).
Pros:
- Very fast
- Nice look and customization with budgie
- Very responsive community (when you have a problem, you have an answer in one day max in my experience).
- Ergonomic
- Note: the budgie integration is really perfect: for those having tried ubuntu budgie, it is really another world (I really hate ubuntu budgie experience mainly because of focus lose when selecting an area with the mouse in ubuntu, also for problems with overlaps of budgie menus badly handled: this is not the case in Solus budgie).
- updates every week
- (working on a old 2009 intel macbook, starting in 3 sec with a ssd)
- eopkg with an easy way to check and reinstall broken packages (once in 3 years)
- very nice/open minded community
- direct recognition of a wacom graphical tablet
Cons:
- missing slurm scheduler
In 3 years, I had only twice a black screen with white blinking cursor when rebooting: solved thanks to the community in less than 3 hours each time: the last problem is now 2 years old
I really love the interface, some examples:
- you can activate a vpn just checking a box in the menu interface
- you can configure stop button to access directly to suspend, restart, lock, logout when you usually need 3 confirmations in many other distro
- direct access in the toolbar to:
- screenshot,
- cafein
- sound output selection volume (keyboard shortcuts recognized out of the box too for a logitech G)
- stop button
- CPU RAM overview
- calendar
- the apply shortcut you want
- steam integration
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.5
Rating: 1
Date: 2024-04-29
Votes: 0
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First installation was the KDE plasma desktop . The installation makes not problems so far but after reboot and during update a lot of errors scrolling on screen and after reboot all icons and programs are gone on screen . Empty sceen ! I tried it again and same happens. Next installation was the budgie desktop and after reboot the update process hangs up complete . Tried again and again but hangs up all times - in the software center and also in console !! That was only wasting time to try this distro !
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.5
Rating: 10
Date: 2024-04-18
Votes: 24
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I stopped distro hopping since I found this Solus. I'm a Blender artist and of all the distros I've tried clear linux is number 1 for me. Although nvidia is difficult to install but once you manage to install it the speed is flawless. I looked for other Distros that are close in performance to clear linux, at first I thought it was arch but when I found solus here I saw that the performance is close to clear linux. I hope more people support this and I hope this distro will last a long time. Good bless you all guys!
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.5
Rating: 10
Date: 2024-04-13
Votes: 16
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Very good linux distribution, no errors, very fast, stable, for beginners as well as experienced users. I use it for development and virtual machines, I recommend it to everyone. I've tried many Linux distro, stability was the first for me, I stayed with Solus, never had a slowdown. I use the Budgie desktop, it suits me perfectly, I don't need to set anything on it, the default settings are good. Solus has all the applications you need and it works, unlike other distros. I am very happy to have found it, thanks to the developers.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.5
Rating: 10
Date: 2024-03-28
Votes: 16
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I was bored of my garuda installation (gnome is always the DE of choice for me), and installed Debian 12.5. But it seemed very sluggish and heavy and even it seemed to me that web browser was struggling opening pages. Debian original distro versions usually disappoints me, 12.5 was no exception. Then I recalled Solus was very responsive and slim gnome version, so I installed it. The installation was easy and also faster then debian. The default software has no bloat, flatpak suportrt was ready to go. Update took a considerable time but at the and I am amazed how responsive and stable it is. The system firefox has a bug that remains open when closed and gives crash reporting, so I installed flatpak firefox and deleted defauld firefox simply. Flatpak has no problem.
At the end I am glad that I found such nice fast distro. Definitely if you search different flavours, Solus is a definite choice to try
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.5
Rating: 9
Date: 2024-03-05
Votes: 22
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I've been using solus with Plasma desktop for the last 4 months and so far I've had no excuses to move away from it. I am not a power user but I've been using linux for quite some time. I use solus for every day normal usage and been using it for taking online courses on python, etc.
I always wanted to use a rolling linux distribution not necessarily with cutting edge software but reasonably updated applications that also offers not so heavy on plasma desktop and solus fits perfectly for what I need.
The Software Centre can use some polish and better user friendliness and features however, it still does the job. I could give it a full 10 but since every linux distributions in my opinon could use some improvements including solus, I think a 9 is better suited. I appreciate the work and hope the team continue to improve upon it.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.5
Rating: 5
Date: 2024-02-26
Votes: 0
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I'm someone that has relied on grub for booting, even through the transition to uefi and gpt. I have a slightly better grasp of how it all tries to work, but distros like Solus, which I just installed, baffle me. Solus puts its boot stuff, including the kernel and initrd, on the invisible efi partition. I've seen this before only with extreme niche distro Paldo. It makes it impossible for grub's os-prober to provide an entry for the os that chooses this way of doing things. In Solus' case, their os-prober didn't find a thing before dying. At least it didn't become the actual boot loader...
I didn't spend much time with Solus this time (I've tried it a few times over the years), but it seemed fine. Plasma worked fine, the usual sparse repo selection still there. Ultimately it was not a keeper for me, mainly due to the hoop jumping necessary to boot it.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.5
Rating: 10
Date: 2024-01-25
Votes: 113
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After saying I'd give up in my previous review due to NVMe drives not being read in the installer, I decided to give it one more try since the newest version switched to Calamares. Seems to have been the magic bullet for fixing my install issues, as the installer was ready at ramming speed with the partitions on my NVMe drive. Also seemed to configure EFI properly for once.
Now that I'm in the system, everything seems to work fine for me out of the box. No complaints on my end now. Repos maybe a little sparse but we also have flatpak to compensate. Only wish is that they had more 3rd party source install support.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.5
Rating: 9
Date: 2024-01-12
Votes: 22
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Solus used to be my standard distribution, then the project fell into complete turmoil for a couple of years. It is now recovering and I decided to have a go again with 4.5 Budgie.
The immediate obvious change is a switch to Calamares. I always thought the old installer was to the point, but it was unique to Solus and technical debt has killed it - it is written in the now-deprecated Python 2 and a rewrite in Python 3 would have taken too many resources. On the other hand, the install now feels like that of any other distribution.
Because the same people are involved Budgie 10.8.2 feels very much like Fedora - the implementation is minimal. However, the big difference here is that "budgie-extras" is packaged and, even better, is broken up into parts. So you can have your choice of the various addons Ubuntu Budgie has developed although, unfortunately, the very useful accented character picker appears not to be among them.
Other than that, it is a standard set of accompanying applications with a mix of GNOME, MATE and Cinnamon; the file manager is nemo.
From observation it appears that Solus is sticking to its update strategy of one update a week although there may be intermediate packages if there is a serious problem noted.
Solus' big selling point has always been performance, and rightly so. Boot speed and, more importantly, the startup speed of applications - even flatpaks - is outstanding. Firefox opens notably quicker than on Debian-based distributions and, in fact, is indistinguishable from my fastest-ever opener (Void Linux). Configuration is good; even though my machine is generic with Intel parts everywhere a major trap for a lot of distributions (being unable to play videos on BBC News Online in the browser, or playing them with degraded quality) is avoided and, in my experience, Celluloid can play and/or show anything thrown at it. Again, that is a big win over Fedora Budgie.
Overall, this is a very slick distribution. It has known weaknesses and there are hints about improving the biggest, the software manager, by replacing it with GNOME Software plus plugins for eopkg and flatpak, in 4.6. This is great because it has been known for a long time that the software manager has fallen well behind that in most other distributions, both in general design and functionality, and because it only handles native packages. (In 4.5 flatpak and its main repository are not included in the build and have to be installed by hand).
The only remaining concern I have is that, as I noted, Solus and Budgie have had distinctly up-and-down pasts. I do not see these coming back, but they are always in the back of my mind. I would certainly not be using Solus in any sort of commercial situation, but for a home machine it is excellent.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.5
Rating: 9
Date: 2024-01-12
Votes: 20
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Since I have decided to not use Windows anymore, I have tested a lot distros and desktop enviroments. The Solus 4.5 was released (I have used Solus in the past) and downloaded Budgie, Gnome, KDE iso's for checking (XFCE not yet, as it is still beta). I've installed all of them and tested with e.g. gaming. I have had no problems and I have decided to go with the Gnome desktop (personal preference and it is the only one having Wayland as default). Why not a 10 out of 10? There is always room for improvements. To the Solus team, good job! I am happy you are back!
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.5
Rating: 10
Date: 2024-01-12
Votes: 44
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As soon as the release of 4.5 came out I jumped at the chance to give it a try on bare metal. The addition of the Calamares installer is a very welcomed change. The installation went well with no issues whatsoever. I installed the XFCE Beta to give a test run on my gaming rig and I have encountered no problems whatsoever. As far as gaming goes I was pleasantly surprised to see it's performance comparable to that of Nobara. Everything just works as intended and I just might leave it and use it as a daily driver for a while. Hats off to the Solus team. Very nice release.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.5
Rating: 4
Date: 2024-01-11
Votes: 0
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I have been using and following Solus since his birth. He has a hard time. But gradually it acquired its own physiognomy, and there was a period when it was close to perfection. Then there was a decline. More recently, an attempt at abandonment and murder. And a new attempt at revival. - 4.4 was a life-saving operation that somewhat succeeded. What can I say about 4.5? I tried to install KDE on an external drive by preparing a partition on it. Instead of installing where indicated, the installation erased the entire disk and located on it, formatting the empty space to FAT 16. And inexplicably, a new installation icon appeared on the start screen in the way that Debian live disks do .Xfce installs correctly, but it turns out that it can't distinguish between keyboards and won't allow any keyboard setting other than the one it was originally set to. I couldn't even mount Budgie because it didn't find the external drive. These initial setbacks made me hesitant to do any more in-depth testing. I think releasing the version as it is is rushed and not well thought out. In this form, it cannot be evaluated.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 9
Date: 2023-12-25
Votes: 24
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Solus is back as my daily driver after the lag from 4.3 by the devs. (Plasma version for me)
Positives is ease of use and lacking any bloat. And I like an independent distribution. Rolling updates are now back, quick and without quirks. Discovered my wireless (Canon) colour laser printer too, out of the box.
Som negatives are; 1 the install ISO had som trouble with Intel sound and some of the USB ports/devices. These issues have solutions that works.
2 After installation Solus failed to find a boot entry that worked. I solved this on my Asus laptop by just removing all entries in the UEFI boot menu. Weird but it works.
So once up and running you immediately get upgrades and a new kernel that is pretty much equal to the latest stable in the Linux Kernel Archives.
Things I do after installing are changing to my favourite browser and installing the graphical tools I use, including three from the Windows world which work perfectly with Wine/winetricks. Then follows setting up Audacity and Pavucontrol so I can record sound. I also use Google Earth Pro , which Solus is one of the few distributions to have it in their repo. BCompare by Scooter software also work well on Solus, although it is not free.
Solus is just lean and mean . Merry Christmas to all!
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-12-24
Votes: 27
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After installing it and after a few weeks with it, I can say that it is practically perfect. Fast, (the firefox browser flies as I have never seen in another disbribution), stable, comfortable to use, beautiful. That it has few applications in the software center? , it seems to me that they are enough, and to carry integrated flatpak easily install the apps you want. That comes from being discontinued?, the important thing is that it is now active and you can see that they have put a lot of effort to make a great product.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 8
Date: 2023-12-23
Votes: 3
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Pretty speedy OS. Repository is a bit small, but it is much larger than it was several years ago. No problem finding the applications I use. Solus is an underrated Linux distro. The installation process is fast, taking only a fraction of the time compared to other distributions. The boot are great, contributing to an overall performance that feels faster than many. It's a rolling release distro that keeps packages relatively up-to-date. It's not bleeding edge, but it has a sane update schedule that keeps packages more up to date than a fixed released distro.
Solus seems to be doing better than in the most recent past, where it almost appeared dead. It lives, and lets see what the future holds.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-12-21
Votes: 11
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In my opinion, Solus is a good distribution for beginner Linux users. I like the Budghie desktop, which is similar to Gnome, but much lighter. You can run programs from Bin on this system like on Slackware. Eopkg does not have many programs, but it can be done run programs from tar archives and BIn files by creating activators in the menu editor program. I personally recommend this system, especially to beginners in Linux. The system has the latest kernel installed by default. I recommend this system for newer computers. For older devices, in my opinion, Sparky Linux is better or Antix.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-11-24
Votes: 58
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I would characterize Solus Linux as exceptionally speedy. The installation process is notably fast, taking only a fraction of the time compared to other distributions. It is like install a mid-weight application, making the initial setup remarkably swift. The boot and shutdown times are pleasantly surprising, contributing to an overall performance that feels significantly faster, almost like experiencing a hardware upgrade.
This accelerated performance is particularly noteworthy, and I can see why it would be favored by gamers seeking a responsive and nimble operating system. Kudos to the developers for their incredible job!
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-10-21
Votes: 105
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Solus is a rather underrated Linux distro. The OS focuses keenly on developers, gamers, and content creators by including the tools required to get started with development, gaming, and content creation. The flagship flavor of Solus OS uses their in-house Budgie desktop, which is one of the cleanest desktop environments you can try.
What makes Solus different is that it doesn’t follow in the same footsteps as other Linux distros. It’s an independently developed distro with a completely different user experience compared to others.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 1
Date: 2023-10-10
Votes: 0
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Don't understand why this distro is so popular. My hardware is not necessarily bleeding edge. But here's my four attempts to install over three years:
1. Did not install bootloader, had to go into UEFI settings to boot to Windows.
2. Did not install bootloader even though I made sure that /boot/efi/ was being created and mounted as such.
3. Did not even start installing, as the installer hung looking for my hard drives because I had installed an NVMe drive that they claim to support.
4. Tried 2 years later, same hanging on detecting hard drives.
I have never been able to check out any of the special things about this distro as I can never get it installed. Just don't see the point in trying again.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-09-24
Votes: 60
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This is the best Linux distro I have seen so far. I have been distro hoping for some time and I have seen many distro's, but none of them gives me such a great experience as Solus.
This is just a perfect distro for everyday use, it has great support for a lot of apps and even gaming platforms, like steam works perfectly.
It is very user friendly and customizable, I think almost anyone can install Solus and learn how to use it, even if you have been using Windows or Mac OS for a long time.
I will always use and recommend Solus from now on, as long as nothing goes completely wrong with this distro.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 6
Date: 2023-09-18
Votes: 0
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Solus is fine as a simple, lightweight and fast home OS. But for gaming purposes, I simply cannot recommend it. I will list 2 examples, I play games with Steam and switch between Arch and Solus frequently. Solus has an outdated glibc, meaning currently I cannot play games online that use EAC. Another example is, TF2 is sort of broken out the box on Linux, and workarounds have been shared that involve installing an AUR/COPR packages and using a launch option. For obvious reasons, a Solus user is left in the dark in this situation, an updated tcmalloc does not exist on this distro. Now when this issue happens on Arch or other more widely used distros, you can pretty much assure someone will go and report it or it will be a known issue. On Solus, if you experience an issue or a bug, you're likely among the first, and will have to go and report it. It's too much to worry about for a supposed suite-type operating system such as Solus that's supposed to handle everything in a curated fashion. If you don't care about games, it's a great fast desktop with actually unbelievably stable updates, just be sure to check its pulse every month or so.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-09-15
Votes: 9
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Great OS,very stable.fast and amazing!I am using the KDE version of it on wayland and i must say it works well.the only problem i found is TOR web browser not lauching in wayland session,but i do not know if its a problem with wayland or with the TOR web browser not supporting wayland.
Anyway thank you all SOLUS team members for all your hard work and for letting us users enjoy this wonderfull Linux distro.
I have tried many many linux distros but my heart belongs to Solus:)
Greetings from Portugal:)
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 1
Date: 2023-09-14
Votes: 0
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It's days of glory have come and gone.
The instability of the team affects the project which is just a no go for me.
Budgie itself is not that great. However it beats GNOME.
KDE Plasma is my desktop environment of choice. However Solus manages to dampen that experience.
The software center... you're better off using the CLI but this defeats the purpose of "for beginners". o_O
Fun to poke around in but not something I'd use for anything serious.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-08-29
Votes: 16
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Quick , simple & easy.........a function that everyone deserves to try , the only changes i made was to install VLC , Chrome (software center - third party) , Dash to Dock from extensions . yt-dlp it was pre-installed....
I rate it a 10 , because it was a pleasant surprise
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-08-29
Votes: 15
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Quit Windows about 3 years ago after decades of use (and disappointment). I distro hopped for a year or two, finally settling on Solus. Flatpak does work, if you want access to more apps that aren't included in the Solus "world". Just go to flatpak's website.
No major complaints. I haven't figured out how to arrange icons/shortcuts around on the desktop. Maybe it isn't possible. To get a printer to work, you may need to do the typical Linux fiddling (trial and error).
Updating has NEVER resulted in breaking it. (Can't say the same for other distros I've tried.)
Disclaimer: This is from the perspective of someone who has used Solus to facilitate the following:
- use the world wide web
- use Zoom
- record streaming video
- transfer files to-and-from phone and PC wirelessly
- do some graphical design/photo editing
- connect to various peripheral devices like Flipper Zero, SD card adapters, cell phone, etc.
- burn DVDs
- play SuperTux Cart
- print wirelessly
- make Bluetooth connections
- watch shows/movies using Kodi
- read e-books
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 1
Date: 2023-08-25
Votes: 0
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Use to be great way back when. I have since moved on since its implosion.
Decided to check it out since the AED provided a pulse back into this project.
Honestly, nothing has changed. Still sports the crappy software center which has a annoying GUI and zero Flatpak integration. Budgie itself it very generic and dated looking. You do not get the full desktop environment experience when using GNOME, KDE Plasma or MATE. Instead you get whining and complaining how they refuse to use and that leading to many things being degraded or removed entirely. The future of this distribution looks bleak and uncertain as things seem to be constantly changing behind the scenes. The distribution itself is more stable than the team supporting it therefore I won't be putting any eggs in this basket.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-08-15
Votes: 4
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I knew that Solus was a good distro, but it didn't have Wayland support. I wasn't sure if Solus 4.4 had Gnome Wayland support either. I installed it on my computer to see how it would work. After installation, I updated the system and rebooted. The Gnome Wayland option appeared when I rebooted. Pipewire was installed by default, which gave me LDAC codec support. I had all the codecs that I wanted. The software center is well-designed and I didn't need to install anything from the terminal. I am currently using a very smooth, fast, and responsive operating system. However, I can say that I am using an AMD GPU and that is probably why I can run Gnome Wayland without any problems. I am very happy that Solus has finally offered Gnome Wayland after 2 years. Congratulations!
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-07-31
Votes: 3
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I'm using Solus since years already and the rolling release worked impressively good with no significant issues on any update.
I like the Budgie desktop and the Solus software center. I found nearly all programs in the repository and Solus also supports adding packages via snap or flatpack.
Currently I use Solus on two quite old laptops (6-8 years) and the performance is really good.
It was also easy for me to start building my own packages and contribute to the Solus package repository thanks to the great packaging system.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-07-31
Votes: 26
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Stable, beautiful, user friendly. I was an addict distrohopper until I found this awesomeness. Budgie is cool and very stable. I can't wait to try the xfce version too.
Congrats devs keep up the good work!
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-07-28
Votes: 2
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Hi there. I've installed Solus OS 4.4 Mate as I didn't like budgie just about a week ago on 15 years AMD Athlon 250 with 12 gig of ram, a SSD drive for the OS and a 16 tb HDD drive and an AMD Readon ATI video card. So far, Everything is working fine. It plays my music, movies and series very well without problems.
Some software were not there, such as rkhunter and clamav antivirus and forensic software.
So far, everything's working fine and it's pretty fast loading. One more thing, I wish they had a XFCE ISO instead of Mate or Budgie. It would be grand. Anyway, keep up the good work and I hope more people will use it.
Thank you.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-07-20
Votes: 4
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I have come back to Solus Budgie on my work box.
Pros
-> It is every bit as good as Solus always was for me, quick and simple to install
-> Fast to boot up
-> Intuitive to use
-> Really easy to resolve any concerns
Cons
Only one
-> Will it now stand the test of time.
Solus is really up there with the big names, love it.
New users to Linux will find their way around really easy.
For the experienced users, that are fed-up with fussy systems and have gotten over all the tweaking and playing, but just want something to work, Solus offers this.
Respect to the Devs.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 8
Date: 2023-07-20
Votes: 6
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It is good to see Solus back. I installed the Budgie edition, mainly because I like Budgie, Solus is the reference distribution for it, rather like Mint for Cinnamon or Neon for KDE, and I have had problems with Budgie on Fedora and EndeavourOS.
And it is excellent. The big winner is the responsiveness of the desktop, something Linux frequently lacks and compares badly with Windows. Solus clearly has some very able packagers and kernel experts because the only remotely comparable distribution in my experience is Pop OS, which is also obviously developed by technically savvy contributors.
Budgie is as it should be - minimally configured with no glitches, and the general set of packages is minimal too. That said, there are a large number of plugins in the repository. I have a bizarre liking for the weather plugin, which is just right and doesn't bombard the viewer with information.
The big risk with a non-derivative distribution was lack of packages. I use the past tense as, since Solus' heyday, flatpaks have largely filled that gap, but the repository has a lot of non-mainstream but welcome packages where a flatpak is not technically possible or undesirable due to the amount of machine access required. For example, I was resigning myself to configuring my VPN by hand then noted that the Mullvad client is there. And Solaar is there, at the latest version unlike almost every other distribution, for my Logitech MX Keys Mini.
It appears that the semi-rolling release model is still being used by Solus - large updates each Friday with subsystems updated in a block (for example, GNOME 43 applications and background technologies are default in 4.4 and GNOME 44 is being considered now that we are past the .0 release), and small updates in between where there is a major security issue. From experience this is the right speed for a distribution update, allowing testing before release.
I take off two points; one for the Software Centre, which as many others note badly requires an update (could a plugin be written for GNOME Software which understands Solus' package format, rather than reinventing the wheel - the standard version of Software, not the Ubuntu fork, works well) and one because the project has had a tumultuous time over what feels like eternity and a period of stability is desperately needed and just beginning to be demonstrated.
If Solus can keep knocking the updates out every week that is enough for me - it is a welcome return as it is a fast and technically impressive distribution.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-07-17
Votes: 4
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I have been trying to find a suitable distro for an older laptop. After trying Mint, Peppermint, Q4OS, and others without success...I came upon Solus again. The MATE version worked! Wonderful and simple and everything installed correctly. The others I have tried had installer issues. Solus and their webpage was very helpful also. I can't wait to try Budgie on my other machine. Great work guys! Solus is alive and well! Great OS!!! This is a wonderful distro for those that don't want all the crap installed.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 9
Date: 2023-07-14
Votes: 2
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Really glad to see Solus back up and running. They'll have some goodwill to recover, but I sincerely hope they succeed with the new team.
I took the KDE spin for a spin and I would rate it as follows:
- Right back to the super responsiveness of previous versions. Probably the most responsive KDE experience I've had.
- All software works the first time - again superb return to form,.
- Same great selection of wall papers.
- No updates as of yet, but previous versions never gave me a problem. The only issues I had were with installations from the ISO - and that was clean this time round.
Docked a point for the following:
- Software store needs an update. I know it's in the works and the team was working hard to get a new release out to improve the projects image, but I hope this is a top priority as it needs to come sooner rather than later.
- Plasma is a bit buggier here than with other distros. KDE wallet pop ups are really annoying. The wireless would require re-login at random times,
- Issues with the Solus themes: Window controls are hard to see with some apss, effectively invisible. Subjective, but dark theme is too dark and text in light theme is not black enough.
I haven't tried the other desktops, so the negative points may be entirely limited to the KDE implementation.
Otherwise, this is a very impressive second (third?) chance effort by the team. I'll be checking new releases for a while (hopefully less time between ISO updates this go round)..
Bravo guys!!!!!
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-07-12
Votes: 5
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PROS:
Sound leadership has been restored to Solus, and that makes all the difference in the world as far as usability and the unique Solus experience that it is known for. It is literally re-energized and it's vision is back.
This distro has a dedicated global crew--don't sell this aspect short. Tireless.
I updated an existing 4.3 to the 4.4 and the distro is even better. Budgie keeps evolving in better ways. Wrinkles that arise are dealt with swiftly.
This time around Solus feels like it's on a mission.
I've run all sorts of distros and this is stlll the best and most hassle-free.
Still renders beautifully/crisply compared to many distros, and I've seen nothing stumble OOTB.
Small repo is a myth anymore but flatpaks integrate pretty well, too.
I stand by the score of 10. I could not be anything else.
CONS:
I have another distro that I liked and installed and I have no reason to fire it up anymore:)
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-07-12
Votes: 106
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I'be been using Solus since 2019 - it put an abrupt end to my distro-hopping. I started out with the Budgie edition, which was then being created in-house, and it was dubbed the "flagship" DE for Solus. Later, I switched to KDE Plasma, because it offered more configuration options that appealed to me, such as fractional scaling.
Solus is usually described as a "curated rolling release." That means it offers a selection of software that is carefully selected as being actively developed, and is usually among the "best in class," in my opinion. Typically, updates are released on Fridays, and they install very quickly, depending on what packages been upgraded recently, so it's no burden to keep Solus up-to-date. A simple "sudo eopkg up" at the command line is all that's needed, or you could update graphically from the Software Center.. In fact, it's possible to progress from one version to the next simply by updating regularly. There's no need to install updated versions from new .ISO files every few months, or settle for an LTS (long-term-support) version.
Solus is also very quick in general. It starts quickly, and exits quickly. I believe this is because it doesn't load and enable a large number of unit files during startup. While I've typically found that other distros load between 70 or 80 of these at startup (and sometimes more), Solus loads just 3 or 4, depending on the DE. The more a distro needs to load during startup, the more it needs to get rid of during shutdown. The difference between Solus and other distros is very noticeable.
Solus' .ISO files boot to a "live" session that allow it to be evaluated fully before any changes are made to your computer, and when you're ready, the excellent installer can be run from that live session. The installer will make use of disk partitions you've already defined, and allows you assign mount points to those. Alternatively, it can do all the work itself when started with an empty disk, or replace an existing OS, or even install itself next to an existing OS. All of this is easy to do, and nothing is ever written to your disk until the very end, after you've hade an opportunity to examine the tasks that are to be done and confirmed that they're correct. Installation is fast, and typically takes only a few minutes.
All the Solus editions come with a good selection of software pre-installed, so that users are ready to do useful work immediately after installing. So-called "right out of the box." Yet Solus doesn't stuff your computer with software you'll probably never use, like multiple browsers, numerous editors, and so on. That's what the repository is for, and it's easy to find and install more software using eopkg at the command line, or the graphical Software Center application. It's also easy to remove software after you're sure you'll never need it.
Solus' forum is outstanding, with experienced Solus users and team members happy to help users with any problems they might encounter. It's not unusual to see someone to jump in to help within a few minutes after an issue has been raised.
Cons? Sorry, I don't know of any.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-07-11
Votes: 4
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I had reviewed before (then, also positively, before the distroś ¨wobbly¨)
Firstly I have to say that I am overjoyed that Solus has returned to the Linux arena.
All the plusses are still there:
- fast boot
- independent Linux
- excellent up-to-date app selection in the store
- light on CPU
- gets out the way for workflow
- stable rolling release
- love Budgie desktop environment
A huge plus is on my old MacBook late 2009, everything works, no lag, wifi is fast. Manjaro (which I also love on my Lenovo) didn´t play so well on this older hardware. So here I am, running a fabulous modern operating system on an old bit of kit - how green can you get!
Minor niggles:
- Flatpak support is there, but needs to be integrated into the Software Center
- some consistency with theme on different apps needs ironing out (though there are work arounds with Dconf editor)
So so so glad you are back Solus devs - Please, stay this time :-) xx
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-07-11
Votes: 0
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Coincidentally, I read the blog that outlined the recent problems. I was impressed by the consequences of this, such as a robust server structure and an extremely competent team. I find the innovative future base (Serpent OS) and the crossover cooperation of Solus and Serpent OS so fascinating that I installed Solus 4.4 KDE (Wayland). In my user case, everything works, and it's stable, fast and responsive. I like the software center, especially since I find everything I personally need. The future of Solus looks good and I can see myself migrating more machines to Solus.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-07-11
Votes: 3
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I've used Solus Budgie as my daily driver (for Linux) for the last several years, and the 4.4 update does not disappoint! The latest challenges I've tinkered with has been trying to find a systemd free distro that can run well on old/odd hardware. I purchased a KingJim Portabook XMC 10 (with the groovy fold out keyboard) that runs on a decent 64 bit Intel Atom processor but it only has 2gb of RAM. Also, there's an optical mouse embedded in the keyboard. I first tried Refracta but had a frozen screen (otherwise a great distro), next I tried Antix (it didn't freeze but the built in optical mouse was not recognized), third I tried Solus 4.4 and it worked like a charm! It surprised me that Solus could do what Antix couldn't do. Also, since Solus OS activates zram by default the speed was exceptional given the unit only has 2gb of RAM.
I'm going to stick with Solus OS as my daily driver. Budgie is so clean; it's a pleasure to use. Plus (rolling) updates are very convenient.
I also like the fact that Solus 5 is just around the corner. The Solus team seems to hell bent (in a good way) on leveraging the latest technology to do things better than the rest. They are experimenting with Rust. Plus, the build system (move to boulder) and package manager (move to moss) and packaging format improvements are just around the corner when version 5 is released.
If you go with Solus, you may find--like me--that there's nothing quite like it.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 5
Date: 2023-07-10
Votes: 0
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Solus at one time was awesome... and unfortunately they have fallen behind the pack. Currently as it stands it's not something I would jump back into again. I used it for a few years and moved on from its decline.
The software center needs a major overhaul. It's dated and still does not support Flatpak installation from the UI.
Budgie is still pretty much the same as way back when. Personally, I love KDE Plasma (LXQt for older machines) and prefer QT in general over GTK.
With their other offered desktop environments you don't get the full experience like in a Ubuntu/Kubuntu, Fedora/Fedora KDE Plasma Spin, openSUSE, etc... What you get is a big chunk of it. You'll find things missing here and there which makes it feel incomplete.
It's nice to see some life coming back into this project and I wish them the best. But I've opted for a distribution with a major financial backing, maturity and long history of success.
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 6
Date: 2023-07-10
Votes: 0
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I have used solus os since the 3.999 version untill 4.3 and i had no problems with those.but with the 4.4 KDE release its a no go for me,i have horrible screen tearing on desktop when i move windows around and on youtube videos,youtube videos on full screen is ok but on the default video size its horrible screen tearing,this on x11 if i change to wayland screen tearing goes away but the system becomes unstable,lags and crashes firefox,Im just a regular user with little linux experiance,i tried to fix the screen tearing but i had no luck,also i find strange to have so few screen resolution when i go to choose the correct screen resolution for my screen on solus 4.4,on solus 4.3 i had more to choose from.I also tried the solus budgie 4.4 edition but its the same problem.i am sad but i can not use the system like this.My pc specs intel i5/2400 with a gtx 750ti.
Maybe on the next Solus release all that will be fixed.Chears from Portugal and sorry for my bad english
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Project: Solus
Version: 4.4
Rating: 10
Date: 2023-07-09
Votes: 2
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As a long time Linux user, I stumbled upon Solus in 2017. Over the years I watched it growing up to a really mature, user-centered, modern and very well curated MS Windows replacement.
Since about two years Solus is the only Linux kernel based OS that I have been actively recommending to less experienced computer users who were finally fed up with their Windows environments. And all of them still are happy Solus users.
The Solus development team suffered from a few very nasty accidents in the first months of 2023, partly caused by really bad luck, but also because of weak project management. The team learned from it, and established in no time a much more solid way of managing the distribution. In my opinion it also is a very good sign, that the founder himself and a few long time co-developers returned to the team to support the future of the OS.
This newest release 4.4 "Harmony" is an exceptional achievement: in relatively short time the OS got completely up to date, maybe even ahead of its competitors in the Linux world.
Worth mentioning is also that the development team and the supporting community have had, and still have a high standard of quality and sincere friendliness from the very start. Everyone with a problem is helped out fast and with enthousiasm.
Summarized: Solus is first choice for regular computer users!
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