dlalinsp there are many essential applications that are not directly supported on Solus
Well if "essential" applications were really missing as you say, nobody would use Solus. And when a package is refused, almost everytime alternatives are proposed.
Could you please give an example of essential application that is missing ? Meaning what common/casual task a new comer wouldn't be able to perform on Solus that he would be able to perform on another distro ?
dlalinsp Take Viber or Google Chrome for example.
They both are in the 3rd party repo. Viber is also available as a snap and as a flatpak package so there are 3 possibilities to install it. Regarding the browers, a newbie will most likely use Firefox as it's the preinstalled brower. Should he not like it and have issues with chrome, there are still plenty of alternate browers in the repo.
There are no reason for not recommanding Solus to new linux users because of this.
dlalinsp However, it is our job to make a suitable environment for professionals to use Linux.
Nope this is not our job. Solus mainly targets home computing. There are distributions dedicated to professionals. Professionals usually need to support multiple architectures (which is not the case of Solus and only supports x86_64), they need helpdeks/support services that aren't free of charge and that are irrelevant for home computing, Professionnals need fixed point release, most of the time even LTS because the applications they use might expect specific version of components to work, Solus has a rolling release model and components are constantely updated. Targetting home computing, Solus has not server edition. Professionals won't make their life harder and more costly by using many different distributions.
Also professionals can be everything. For example, a professional musician interested in linux would use a specialized distribution and that's the beauty of linux.
dlalinsp Otherwise, they will surely never try Linux.
Well perhaps you should stop mixing newbies who discover linux for the first time and professionals (if they use linux for their activities it's on purpose, they don't discover it for the first time and if they do they get trained anyway).
dlalinsp There are a lot of average users who might want to use Linux due to Windows 7 losing support
I am not sure there are lot of users, the end of windows XP which was a big thing compared to the end of Windows 7 didn't cause a massive migration to Linux. Such machines are old and are going to be replaced at some point and since it's very hard to find computers sold without an OS, they'll get a new windows license anyway. Other people won't care and will keep on using their computer as it is. The few people interested in recycling their machine, are anyway pro-active and willing to try. This does not concern any professionals.
dlalinsp if they are told to dual boot just to use a few specific tools. Also, we may lose many serious professionals
We woudln't loose professional since we don't target them. Also if they are really professionnal they would simply keep on running their windows application on native windows. Using emulation or things like virtualbox for such case is just unprofessional. Even if you pay lot of money for a software a supplier would never give you support if you run their applications if you don't follow their requirements.
My conclusions are the following (and I'll end here)
- You are mixing newbie and professionnals although they have very different needs
- Home computing and profesionnals are different segments and you expect Solus to target the 2nd one while it's designed for the 1st one.
