General Feedback after 6 Months

Axios

Original-Syn That seems to be the typical Solus user either your hooked or not
its one the few less stressful distros.
Their is a handfull of us that are not devs and mods that help out with the less complicated or off the wall stuff
under the watchful eye of mods and devs if we get to screwed up...lol
I think it works out pretty well all in all.
I am to Electronics geek from the 80's..haha but dont do it for work anymore.

Original-Syn

Axios "its one the few less stressful distros"
You may be on to something there. Trying to figure out how to program on a TRS-80 and an old IBM XT was fun for me as a kid. I remember installing Linux distros via 40+ floppies, hoping one of those damn floppies wouldn't fail. Did a lot of development work on a few projects, mainly around security and some drivers. Not a lot of simple being a Linux user in the 90s and even well in the 2000s. Now days, I just like something more simple, but not necessarily boring.

Harvey

AppArmor was only ever used for snaps on Solus and the patches to the kernel were only required for full snap confinement to work. To my knowledge we were the only non debian/ubuntu based distribution which carried these patches which means snaps have never had full confinement outside of those distributions.

When we updated the lts kernel to the 6.12 series the AppArmor patches were dropped there too. We have held off on our planned full deprecation of snaps since it looks like those patches may be upstreamed in kernel 6.15.

Original-Syn Trying to figure out how to program on a TRS-80

That was my first PC! Apps came on cassette tape and the tape deck broke so I had to resort to using the coding books that came with the PC. I couldn't save my work so that was a lot of typing to play hangman for a few minutes. 😛

Axios

Original-Syn I was in Electronics school at the time mc6800 programming
Also cut my teeth on TRS-80 was in the big city shit would glitch the 80 if you didnt save your programming work
you were out of luck. (Did run across my old tapes the other day..lol)
Forgotten times..Floppy Hell...lol

SethStorm666

Ya! Another from the 80's tech geek! I started myself in the early 80's with a vic-20 and soon c-64. Though my Linux experience started late. I was on the linux wagon in 1999. 🙂

WhiteWolf

I must say I'm younger than you it's almost the same story for me.
Solus runs all my personal machines but for working laptop I have Fedora. The same issue security requirements from clients don't allow me to use Solus.
Looking forward for Aeryn as this can be something that will let me move away from Fedora.

snowee

I thought Solus always had AppArmor installed and enabled as default?

Original-Syn

snowee Not anymore.

CorvusRuber

Original-Syn No AppArmor / SELinux (prevents business use)

Define "business use", because I've been using Solus on the workplace (big companies, a couple multinationals) for at least 5 years and nobody ever complained.

Original-Syn

CorvusRuber We work in high security areas, it is a requirement for many that we go into. Would they notice if I didn't? Likely not, as the reason that we are in many of the companies or government agencies is because the security is not up to where it is required to be. But it would look really bad for me or any of my employees to be caught not meeting the requirements ourselves. We also do system and app security testing for our clients.

brent

Original-Syn everything has a paper trail, and if you were ever audited you would lose work and you are only as good as your reputation. Even though Solus has apparmor on in the repo (for some reason) I'm not even sure a Dev would tell you it would be good to re-introduce it in Solus since they worked so hard to surgically remove it.
edit: so Fedora it has to be right now. I spent a month with Fedora once. SELinux always reported false positives to me since I did not feel compromised. It didn't give the electric charge Solus did but it's an established stable OS, etc.

Original-Syn

brent Yeah I think they have it there for the LTS kernel which still has it in there, but is just for the deprecated Snap support. I am a small business owner, so I cannot take the risk. With Fedora or Ubuntu (hard no), I can use their tools to meet the compliance level we need. I may actually switch to AlmaLinux when 10 is released. We also maintain a RHEL laptop that is at a very high level as we have a couple of clients that requires clearance.

Having compiled my own kernels and dealt with SELinux and AppArmor, I do get why they don't want to maintain it. AppArmor itself is not hard, but dealing with Canonical's upstream changes can be.

Original-Syn

Harvey Yeah, I just the news on my submission on the git that it may be back with 6.15 upstreamed to the kernel.

Good old "Trash" 80. I learned a lot due to what we had to go through 😉

Harvey

Original-Syn
I still had it until maybe 8~ years ago and decided to bin it... Awhile later I found out the monitor alone was selling for $300-400 AUD. The manual was like $50~ etc etc. 😢

Original-Syn

Harvey Wow that is crazy. I actually had mine until around 2010 and my wife made me get rid of it. I did get a little lucky as I collected a few retro systems, so I was able to sell it, but not quite for that much.

TraceyC

Original-Syn
Thanks so much for this detailed overview of your experience with Solus. Feedback like this helps us make sure we're doing what we can reasonably do to make Solus the best it can be for as many of our users as possible. I'm happy to hear you're enjoying Solus overall.

The TRS-80 was also my first computer! My mom brought it home from her office after they replaced it. It was the machine I learned how to do word processing and (very basic) database work on.

I wanted to share an update about AppArmor, to follow up on what Harvey said. We've just published a blog post about our plans for AppArmor and snaps. The part you may be interested in is:

There is progress on getting the required AppArmor support added to the Linux kernel itself. The changes have made it to linux-next, which means that they could land in the next Linux release (v6.16).

For SELinux, we do provide libselinux (which is out of date, I've submitted a request for us to update it). I don't know if it would meet your requirements, I haven't worked with SE Linux in a long time. I'm not trying to convince you to switch your business system, I just wanted to mention that it exists.

We're interested in your thoughts about improving the Plasma install. Feel free to open an issue requesting the improvements you're interested in seeing (just use the blank issue template).

To wrap up, welcome to our little community. I very much agree it has great people in it, filled with friendly helpful people. I hope you're happy here for a long time to come 🙂

Original-Syn

TraceyC Thanks for the information.
I actually got a little heads up on the AppArmor blog post as I had submitted a pull request for some of the docs to be updated with it going away, but was then made aware of the coming post. So that is good news.

I will check out the SELinux, but with AppArmor making a potential comeback, that may be an avenue to explore at some point as well. I am not afraid to get my hands dirty and test some stuff out to see if I could get it where I could use it and maybe provide a guide for others interested.

I am enjoying this distro and the community. I plan to help out as much as I can as I get more spare time outside of business over the next year or two. I truly appreciate the warm welcome!

Original-Syn

Was able to move two of my main work systems to Solus. These do not have the requirements since we verified they do not touch sensitive data. You can see the result here: https://discuss.getsol.us/d/8-show-your-solus/2288