Roadmap

dbarron CorvusRuber See... c432 clearly demonstrated that even with a few blog posts focusing on the main news is already very hard to follow for some...

c432 And what major changes Budgie 10.5 brought to the table if we exclude updating it to the latest Gnome stack and some cosmetic changes?

Everything is detailed in this blog post
And this other blog post clearly says there won't be any major change in Budgie 10.5 (as big things will be implemented on Budgie 11)

c432 Name one big feature that Solus got after Ikey left.

Solus 4 ... huh... wait... oh there is a blog post about this too...
(in the less fancy things, the infrastructure move from OVH to the RIT servers, the new weblate instance, these forums with the 0auth integration, the work on ferryd, cuppa, the upgrade of phabricator, etc... of course these aren't "bling bling" shiny visible things, but just try to run the distribution without this and you'll see it would not work so well... without the servers & ferryd, you wouldn't get any update and without these forums, you won't be able to complain here, ...)

crom5 02.11.2018
Ikey Doherty, the founder and lead dev of Solus, has left the project...

Alright, so you point out the terminal event and not the events leading up to this. Ikey left Intel and became a full-time developer for Solus because he was already spending 40+ hours a week on Solus in addition to the 40+ hours a week at Intel. That was a train headed for Burn-out Central. Once Ikey went full-time with Solus, he began spending his new-found free time on personal development. Something that he had basically put on pause for years. Not long-after, Ikey started expressing annoyance over people not respecting his clearly defined working hours and demanding support from him all the time. Then, in August of last year, Ikey made the team aware that he was moving to England where he would be starting a family.

After several weeks of little to no communication, Josh and I were forced to take full control of the project in order to keep moving forward. During this time we made significant strides in future-proofing the project and eliminating bus factors.

Ikey announced that he would be stepping down from leading Solus and pursuing different things. He clearly indicated that this was a personal decision and he thought that "Solus will stand head and shoulders above the crowd forever more."

crom5 07.09.2019
Justin: due to personal issues between myself and the team, I will be moving on from Solus...

Again, terminal event without context. Justin had already been on leave from Solus during the Summer of last year. He didn't start contributing more heavily again until the Spring of this year. I appreciate his contributions, but him leaving isn't a death-knell for Solus. We also would welcome him back if he so desired.

crom5 17.09.2019
sunnyflunk: Stepping down from Core Team

Again, terminal event with no context. Peter has been on unofficial leave from the project while he focuses on work, for most of the last year. @Girtablulu was asked to take on Peter's maintainership of Qt and KDE/Plasma and has been doing excellent work keeping everything up to date, and making the Plasma Edition his own. Peter decided to officially step down from the Core Team because he is focusing on his financial future and does not have the time to serve in that role. He has not left the project and is free to retake his role on the Core Team whenever he pleases.

crom5 17.09.2019
c432: After Ikey's departure Solus is in the maintenance mode. Roadmap is just a list of good wishes I'm afraid.

I've already addressed this several times. If my responses are insufficient in your eyes, I'm waiting for questions.

crom5 2018
crom5: Please don't get me wrong, the following thoughts are expressed with best wishes and intentions. It is my understanding that Solus is an "independent" distribution. The bad news is that in this "strange" times it is forbidden to survive as such. Recent Ikey important life decisions were just so predictable. Similarly, it is very easy to guess what will happen with Solus within a relatively short period of time if the developers doesn't start to earn something from their hard work and efforts...

1. Solus is an independent distribution. The sole requirement for this is that we are not built on top of any other Linux distribution.
2. Your view of "strange times" appears to us as just another decade of Linux. Distros come and go, names change, people move on, new people rise. That's the way it always has been.
3. Ikey's decision to leave was understandable, but not predictable. The transition would have been much less painful if that were the case. We would have been able to plan much much better.
4. It really isn't that easy to guess what will happen with Solus in a short time. That has never been the case and I will happily continue to defy all of your expectations.
5. Solus is a reward in itself and does not solely rely on praise or donations to continue existing. I think I can safely say that for most, if not all, of the Solus Team that we continue to work on Solus because it's the distro that we want to use. Giving up on it would mean going back to distros we were not happy with in the first place. While I am overjoyed by how many people use Solus every day, that has never been a requirement for my continued involvement in Solus.

crom5 08.09.2019
Manjaro is taking things professionally. While the Manjaro community will be responsible for the development of the project and other related activities, a company has been formed to work as its legal entity and handle the commercial agreements and professional services.

And we have already made it perfectly clear that when time allows or the need demands it that @JoshStrobl and I will be pursuing a relationship between Solus and a non-profit organization so that we can guarantee a legal and financial future for Solus. Right now that isn't our highest priority, even if you think it should be. And Manjaro is taking the very different approach of becoming a company in order to use a different funding model for their distribution. They also have the key difference of having multiple full-time developers who would benefit in many ways from corporate status.

viyoriya
I agree, however at the same time, every time such a thread arises, the responses we get eg. by DataDrake are imo extremely insightful, even to someone who's been familiar with Solus for a while. Probably even more insightful than any blog post.

My own one cent - it really bugs me that a lot of people seem to equate Budgie with Solus. It's not. Budgie is just one flavor of the distro, its flagship one perhaps, but it's just a part of the bigger Solus project.

To quote DataDrake

Again, you are trying to apply invalid definitions. Solus is receiving regular updates of software, new software, and continued support. These are not merely "updates" to the OS, but normal operations.

As a GNOME user, THIS is what Solus mainly means to me. I mean I use it, because it performs the aforementioned activities in the most reliable manner out of all the distros I've used so far. It just nails the normal operations part hard.

I get my updates, I get new software, and I enjoy the stability. Figuratively speaking, this is what it's all about to me.

I've been reading this thread with interest. I can't remember some of the people here from the time Solus OS started. And, from the days of Solus OS, then to Solus, in between Evolve OS. The thing is nothing was continued. Started something, went on for a while and then dropped. I remember the Debian based distro times, dropping debs to pisi and so on. The fighting with the community etc. And, dropping the project. I've seen all that. Well, if you guys can create Budgie 11 and go forward, it'd be nice. Wish you all the luck, really do!

In the early days, it was something like the Chromebook, then sort of like DDE and so on. You start something, and never finish it. That's the problem. Now, he is doing something else, not far from you guys in GitHub. And, he doesn't even mention that he was once connected to Budgie and Solus there and in other places, but mention only Clear OS!

DataDrake Ikey's decision to leave was understandable, but not predictable.

No, it was predictable. Knowing the history!

One can also Google "SolusOS: Life Happens…Distros Die"

ostrol Ikey left Intel (again) earlier this year. If you actually looked at his recent Github activity, that much would be obvious. According to LinkedIn, he has started a company and is doing his own thing: https://lispysnake.com/

As for the history of Solus, let's be perfectly clear. The original Solus OS was Debian based. Ikey worked very hard on it but ended up burning out without enough people helping. When he decided to try again, Ikey made the switch from deb to eopkg and changed the name to Evolve OS. Budgie was the sole DE for Evolve OS and saw a lot of major development in that era. Because of a trademark dispute over "OS" in the UK, Evolve OS was renamed to Solus (without OS) in 2015. Solus is a direct continuation of Evolve OS, with mostly changes to branding due to the rename.

Ikey has had a number of open-source programs that he has ceased development of over the years, but I think it's unfair to say that he never finished them. Some projects are dead-ends and just aren't worth the time. Most of the work done in preparation for Budgie 11 was just research into Qt5 to see if it was worth pursuing. The code most likely won't get reused, but we still learned from it. Other projects like ypkg, ferryd, the Software Center, and Budgie were very much taken to completion for each new release. As for his distance from Solus, that's his decision. He's free to do as he chooses and if he wants to distance himself, that's his prerogative. There is such a thing as moving on to new things.

DataDrake
I've been there with all those distros he made, or tried to make. They never got to the finish line. There was always some sort of a fight with the users, or the community at large. I remember all that deb to pisi discussions, trying to prove that debs are bad and so on. When, he felt budgie won't move further, he left. Solus with Gnome or Mate is not the same. Solus with Budgie is what it should be, and won't be.

I know about lispysnake, and also about him not mentioning Solus or Budgie there or anywhere. One has to be so ashamed about something one had done to do so. Anyway, if you can keep on running this, it'd be nice, but would you be able to? Budgie at 10.5 is going to stagnate. At the same time DDE is getting new looks.