So Antergos shat itself last night and I started looking for another os. This is the third time ant has done this (update, forget what /home is) and I'm pretty sick of it. So, after hearing about solus on LAS for the last month I thought I would try it.
Heres the thing, if you jack off to your favorite os, good. I know there are people here that use solus, good for you. What I am posting here are my problems with it, bugs, and what they need to do. So before you turtles crawl out of your hole with autistic screeching...
shut the fuck up
Now then.
Solus, and independant project from Ireland that intends to expand the linux desktop to the simplified space of the market. It boasts easy install, the budgie desktop, and a good community. While some of this is true, I have some problems.
The installer
Going in it has everything set to qwerty. Expected, set, move on. Language preferences come up, set to dvorak, but it stays at qwerty. This is an easy to fix little niggle that not a lot of os's do.
Past that you get to disk set up. Its very simple in design and is similar to the old old ubuntu installer. Select a disk, overwrite previous os, burn everything, manual instruction. I love separating root and home so it makes installing a new os simple so I do manual. First problem is lt only selects the disk you have in the previous menu. If I select my /home for some reason, it only presents that. Single disk priority is not good.
At that, this drive menu is not a partitioning tool at all. Its disk selection only. Set the mount points and move on. So you have to open gparted to set settings and after you change stuff you can't refresh the menu, you have to close, reopen, go through all the other shit, and get to this menu again.
For note the rest of the installer goes as expected. I installed on my single disk laptop (which appears to be the target audience) and you select timezone, make your log in, check settings, off ya go.
Package Manager
This is the package manager FROM HELL. This is not a good one. Solus uses eopkg, which appears to be gentoo, apt, and bsd all slapped together randomly in the hopes that something will work.
The build system is not clear as to how to use it nor as to what does which. You have three options to build. Emerge, build, and -b. They each have different descriptions but all seem to do the same thing. This bothers me because I come from arch, which if you don't know, has a separate build tool from the package manager as well as the built in protocols in pacman itself. If I do pacman -S steam it will pull dependencies as I need and just build steam. However if you just updated your repo listings and install steam you have to build gcc separately, upgrade it, then go back and install steam. It should do it all at once, not be tedious as shit.
On top of that there are packages not even in the repos that I would expect to see. In ubuntu for example, I can install vivaldi from the repos or from the site. Vivaldi isn't in the repo's, so I have to use the bugtracker on their site. Speaking of...
The website
While its relatively fine, its impossible to find the bugtracker. To submit bugs or ask for apps to be packaged and set in you have to use their. ug tracker on their site. There isn't anything in the os as far as I can tell to send bugs and the support page just leads to their twitter and emails. At the bottom of each page there isn't a link, but rather a list of sponsors, back to top, and a contact us button. Clicking that I would think it might be a completely separate page but its just the support page from before again. So you have to google the bugtracker to even find it easily without a shovel.
Now I know its a new os
I get it, its just starting, but this seems like foundation stuff to me. I'm not saying I am expecting something like apt or pacman, but the functionality of as many os's as possible isn't needed. Basic description or a pdf manual on the desktop ir home folder would be nice. Some documentation pages right there on the site, first thing, would be A+ for a power user or someone discovering something completely new. Other filesystems that aren't basic as shit and a real partition manager in the installer is greatly needed, as well as the keyboard bug needing a fix.
But is it good?
As a demonstration, sure. Certainly not as a daily and definitely not as a recommendation. As a project? Sure. I'll put it in league with SliTaz and Icaros. Unless you implement a custom version of Solus yourself, its not worth using in my opinion.
So, look to netrunner, salix, and other os's that are already polished and will suit your needs. Solus? No, just watch how it develops for now.