Hi there. I thought I’d make a general thread for this wonderful OS. I have been distro hopping since I began using Linux back in 2012. However, this one made me stay. It’s an independent distro that’s super high quality, I think it’s the 2nd most well-made OS I’ve used right after macOS. It’s desktop and 64 bit only, which makes the repos clean and server stuff free. The system is very stable whilst providing modern package versions. Besides its great default repos, it has snap installed by default and flatpak available as well. It comes in Budgie (it’s the original Budgie distro), GNOME and MATE variants. It’s very easy to use, provides useful GUI tools and automated scripts for installing third party applications.
Please note that you have to burn the ISO onto the USB drive in dd mode, and not iso mode.
Now some distrowatch info:
OS Type: Linux
Based on: Independent
Origin: Ireland
Architecture: x86_64
Desktop: Budgie, GNOME, MATE
Category: Beginners, Desktop, Live Medium
Status: Active
Popularity: 9 (693 hits per day)
Solus is a Linux distribution built from scratch. It uses a forked version of the PiSi package manager, maintained as “eopkg” within Solus, and a custom desktop environment called “Budgie”, developed in-house. The Budgie desktop, which can be set to emulate the look and feel of the GNOME 2 desktop, is tightly integrated with the GNOME stack. The distribution is available for 64-bit computers only.
What is there in Ubuntu that’s not available for Solus specifically? What do you mean by “supported”? There are lots of packages for Solus as well, and they are in default repos, PPAs are a mess and a hell to deal with. Plus you get snaps and flatpaks for all the extra stuff.
I picked it over Ubuntu because Ubuntu was always buggy for me since about 5 years ago (previously I had a much better experience), crashes, funny stuff. Ubuntu has outdated software. Ubuntu isn’t rolling release, and upgrades to a new .10 or .04 version often break. The repo is generally a mess, with lots and lots of php packages for example, whilst on Solus you have on php package with all the plugins. Solus is also much faster than Ubuntu, people always wonder why it boots up and shuts down so quickly. Solus has really nice defaults, with a pretty theme, whilst Ubuntu’s theme looks like garbage.
Solus has an order of magnitude less packaged applications available than Ubuntu. I was going to get an actual count to compare but their packaging site returns a “503 Backend is unhealthy” error right now, which is… well, not a great confidence builder.
Ubuntu boots up extremely quickly now, and of course Ubuntu Budgie also runs Budgie DE so it looks the same.
The website doesn’t work because they changed the domain from solus-project.com to getsol.us, here is the working link: https://packages.getsol.us/
The total number of packages on Solus is way smaller than on Ubuntu, but that’s a very bad way of measuring software availability. The number will always be much smaller for several reasons:
Solus doesn’t include software needed for servers, which Ubuntu does. For example, there is a terribly outdated rails package on Ubuntu, a version from 2014. For some reason, it might be needed on servers, but the sane way of getting rails is by using Ruby’s gem package manager, that’s what developers do. It’s the same for other web frameworks and such.
Solus doesn’t include old, unsupported and unused software. They have a very high standards for their repo.
Solus maintainers package software in a way smarter way than Ubuntu does. For example, like I said before, you only have one php package with all extensions you need. However, Ubuntu packages php and all its extensions separately (there are like 20 extensions, if not more).
In conclusion, Ubuntu’s repo is a mess. The total number of packages that start with php for Ubuntu 18.10 is whopping 663 whilst on Solus it’s 3. It’s all because Ubuntu is a primarily server distro, so they package their software for that purpose. This approach is unnecessary for desktop, and can lead to a lot of confusion.
DKMS. I’m currently trying to get my Netgear WiFi adapter working in Solus but all the tutorials I found for other distros call for DKMS. MaybeI’m just stupid, but I just haven’t been able to find a solution for Solus, where as Ubuntu Forums offer some help. The Solus Forums, from what I’ve found, have basically said meh you’re outta luck. Buy a different adapter. So I basically have to be wired, which is fine for now, but I’m not sure what my furniture arrangement will look like when I move into my new apartment in a couple days.
Still, Solus has been the most reliable distro I’ve ever used, so I’m sticking with it. Getting my GTX 970 working was effortless. It may not have the vast amount of software that Ubuntu offers, but there’s never been a time where I broke shit simply by doing an update, which has happened to me with every other distro including Ubuntu.
Really? I’ve been using Ubuntu since Dapper and I’ve never had a minor update break my system, and only one major update ever had issues.
It was actually 18.10-- the upgrade itself failed for some reason and didn’t rollback, so I just did a manual apt-get dist-upgrade, prayed to Lord Satan, rebooted, and it worked, booting up in 18.10.
Yes. I’ve never looked into it in-depth, but I assume my issues have probably been hardware related. Not faulty hardware, just not Linux-friendly hardware. Problems on my laptops have been rare no matter what distro I’ve been using, but my desktop has never really gotten along well with anything except Solus.
I actually moved away from Ubuntu because Antergos seemed to work alright with my GPU out of the box, but then a couple updates later and that was bugging out as well. Maybe there’s something extra I’m supposed to do when using proprietary GPU drivers in Linux, but with Solus I haven’t had any issues just doing the basic sudo eopkg upgrade.
Ah. Your situation was identical to mine. Solus has been the only reprieve. Gigabyte Z97x-SLI, GTX 970, i7 4790k… Plagued with issues until Solus came around lol.
I’ve since upgraded some components, and I have a “modern” Intel rig for gaming and stuff. But that one is still a beast.
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