Solus

Reader supplied reviews for Solus Average rating 7.5 from 194 review(s) What are your thoughts on Solus? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- 4.54.44.34.14.03.999932017.04.18.01.2.1 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 4.5 Rating: 5 Date: 2024-08-07 Votes: 1 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. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 4.5 Rating: 10 Date: 2024-07-15 Votes: 41 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. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 4.5 Rating: 9 Date: 2024-07-09 Votes: 37 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. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 194 reader reviews of Solus...