Another Gander at Solus OS: V3 This Time!

Alright, so I am re-reviewing Solus. I said I would do an update post from my first Solus post, so I thought now is a better time as any with all the tiny adds to the kernel lately. Add to that that the small things added to Solus recently and talked about on Jupiter Broadcasting shows I’ve been relatively excited to be honest. I am writing this on my test machine while I dig through Solus.

First off I am impressed with Solus already. The software center is grand IMO, and the options to change to dvorak were not hard to find. Good touch typing practice!! On with the review.

First off, I like the pre-packed software. I forgot how much I like rhythmbox and not enough OS’s come with any IRC client installed. As I said earlier, I do like the Software Center a lot. I like how its formatted; like a shiny Synaptic Package manager. Only thing is theres no apps in it past what the devs probably use day to day but missing some stuff like Vivaldi, Kdenlive, and other apps that are a must have for me at least. So, requests will be made on that end. Positive there though, the devs are MUCH more open to suggestions now compared to the last time I used Solus. Baby steps, but at least their attitudes are better now and in turn, mine is as well.

Though the bonus of watching it develop over time helps with the user side angle for me. Probably adds bias though so I’ll be careful here with what I tackle.

I know Budgie is based off gnome, so I don’t know if the options menu’s are just carried over from that, but a nice consolidated menu would be neat to have rather than digging through the start menu. With that, if I could add XFCE that would be super chill in all honesty, seeing as thats how I normally set my stuff up.

Back on package management, I am completely ignoring the terminal with this OS. Until Eopkg is replaced, I still think that terminal package management is completely pointless. It could be replaced with the BSD manager PKG, I don’t care, FU to Eop. I hate it because it over-complicates everything. That, and it has 3 different ways to do everything but has different descriptions for everything!!! I’m not familiar with gentoo either, but Eop still makes 0 sense.

Solus now gives an interesting question, for me at least. How many people are using snaps versus appimages? I would love an OS based on appimages completely and I think that would be very convenient. Now, whether app devs would be willing to actually bend to that as a format is another story. Of course you can always build by hand, but even still theres libs missing to build by hand that have yet to be added. Due time though.

File manager is meh. Its just the ubuntu browser. I prefer thunar personally. I haven’t looked into themes yet; if its possible or not I mean. Again I use XFCE for everything and really only care about themes in that, so someone else can take the torch for that. I will say, though, that the basic theme looks fine. I would prefer a dark theme by default but I have eye problems, so thats why. Other small things that bug me?

  • No keyboard format selector in the task bar
  • Clock is meh
  • Missing apps such as Gparted and other management apps, or small things like screenfetch
  • UI scaling like Ubuntu?

Having looked into it a little more, there is a consolidated settings menu, I just don’t know where it is… Thats a bit annoying, but I may just be blind too.

Despite my hate for Eopkg, the terminal app is awesome. I like the theme and the options provided. I’m used to Terminator, so the change is nice, though having terminator available would be nice, but thats back to making a request for it.

So past all the tiny shit, do I recommend it now? Hmmm…… Well I am definitely more impressed with it now. I could indeed call Solus 3 the polished release. Good job Ike! I would like to see the ability to add other DE’s in an uncomplicated manor, such as XFCE, as well as other repositories that you could make yourself and attach to the package manager. What else? Well if vivaldi could be in the repo’s for the installer app that would be nice. Other than that, its pretty nice. If you want something new to try, Solus is now a good try to go for. I would love to see more things added soon, and to have a different package manager in terminal.

In any sense, yeah. Give it a shot. 7/10.

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As far as the package manager goes, they are working on replacing it with a new one, Sol.

My OOTB experience with it has also been great, there was only 1 thing I needed to install manually; Zoom. Which was a piece of cake. However, there was a feature request to get it added to the official repos 6 months ago, so its in the works but its slow.

The DE borrows some stuff from GNOME, in the fact that it is written with their programming language, Vala.

I’ve only had one hiccup so far, and that’s that with running a vertical monitor with horizontal ones, the budgie taskbar doesn’t register its boundaries properly and when ever something is in full screen the bottom gets cuts off. Same thing happens with the top, only fix I have found is setting it as vertical. Not a problem for single monitors though; once I upgrade down the line to an ultrawide I should be good.

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