Solus is a Linux distribution built from scratch. It uses a forked version of the PiSi package manager, maintained as "eopkg" within Solus, and its flagship edition uses the Budgie desktop environment. Budgie was originally developed-in-house, but is now maintained as a separate project by the Buddies of Budgie team. Solus is available in GNOME, KDE Plasma and Xfce editions.
To compare the software in this project to the software available in other distributions, please see our Compare Packages page.
Notes: In case where multiple versions of a package are shipped with a distribution, only the default version appears in the table. For indication about the GNOME version, please check the "nautilus" and "gnome-shell" packages. The Apache web server is listed as "httpd" and the Linux kernel is listed as "linux". The KDE desktop is represented by the "plasma-desktop" package and the Xfce desktop by the "xfdesktop" package.
Colour scheme:green text = latest stable version, red text = development or beta version. The function determining beta versions is not 100% reliable due to a wide variety of versioning schemes.
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Reader Ratings
Reader supplied reviews for Solus
Average rating
7.7
from 249 review(s) Please specify which version of the distribtion you are reviewing. Please select a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters.
After 6 months of Mint and a whole lot of distrohopping (including Ubuntu, Debian, MX, Fedora, Cachy, Manjaro, Mageia, OpenMandriva, SUSE, Pika, Nobara and less well known distros like Blend, Siduction, Rhino and several others) I'm settled on Solus as my favourite,
KDE feels snappy and everything worked ootb (proprietary NVIDIA was a post-install step, but super easy thought the GUI).
They've really cracked the release schedule- it's rolling (so no anxieties about big updates) and close to the edge, but packages are held back long enough to make for a very reliable system, and released at a sensible pace (mostly bundled into one weekly update).
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Maybe what I appreciate most is that it's genuinely an independent and community distro, with no corporate associations, but that it has enough people behind it for it not to fall into the category of hobby distro where you might worry about maintenance.
The only negatives stem from the fact that it's not one of the big distros- so the repos aren't as big and you won't find as big an online community around it. But this actually hasn't proven to be a problem- even on the subreddit I've got questions answered pretty quickly (their own forum is more active and the devs are on there quite a bit). And when I was missing a package I needed, I just requested it and within a few days someone had stepped up to volunteer to maintain it.
One feature I really like is Solseek, which is a TUI package manager (you can use Discovery/GNOME Software Manager if you prefer). It convinced me TUIs are the future- more powerful than the GUI but much easier than doing everything in the terminal.
Version: 4.9 Rating: 9 Date: 2026-04-20 Country: Japan Votes: 1
Version: 4.8 Rating: 10 Date: 2026-04-08 Country: Austria Votes: 9
Why I Love Solus
* I’ve never seen a distro using systemd for PID 1 boot this fast
* KDE feels incredibly responsive
* No bloatware
* Independent distribution
* Developed by a small team of Linux enthusiasts
* Stable rolling release model
* Updates arrive every Friday (with changes posted on the Solus Mastodon forum)
* Far fewer updates compared to Arch-based distros or openSUSE Tumbleweed
* I haven’t had a single issue in a year
* Supportive and friendly community