why Solus not others ?

Junglist MATE is extremely customizable. Just take a look at some of the themes available in Ubuntu MATE. It has settings to make it look like Windows, MATE 2, Unity, MacOS... I wish other MATE releases had that built-in.

I'd had issues with MATE though. I seem to break things a lot more frequently in MATE than other DEs. I want to like it because it's so flexible, but only Ubuntu MATE has all of the themes available from the start. Mint's release seems very stable, but doesn't have all of the features available like Ubuntu.

What I would say is that I chose Solus because it was easy. A lot of other distros out there require a bit more finagling around to get things working just right. I had this problem a little bit with Manjaro (the first distro I used for any significant length of time), and it's a big part of why I left Manjaro and went to Solus. Now as far as the other easy distros out there, distros like Linux Mint, or Ubuntu Mate, most of them are not rolling release. Meaning their software may or may not be as up to date as Solus. They may have more options to choose from in terms of applications you want to use, but many of them will be redundant, and as I just said they may or may not be as up to date as what you get with Solus. The main advantage of Solus over it's competitors is that it offers a small stable and up to date repository of software, while other distros either tend to offer large up to date unstable repositories, or large not up to date stable ones. Solus strikes the balance giving just the amount of software you need whilst maintaining stability and frequency of updates.

As for what Desktop environment? The one with the most customization options is KDE Plasma. However, if you are new to Linux I would give you a word of caution about Plasma. The Plasma iso still isn't an official version of Solus yet. It's currently still considered testing. Further KDE (in my experience) tends to have more releases that can be a bit wonky than the gtk based environments. If you go with KDE you may, on rare occasions, be faced with an odd bug or two that you have to deal with. I don't mean to dissuade you. I use KDE Plasma on my main pc right now, and I love it. It's great. It's just that occasionally it will give me a problem I have to deal with. For example, for the past little while Kmail (the default mail client if you use KDE) hasn't wanted to work properly with my Gmail. There was once a long time ago that a KDE update got pushed that somehow managed to bork half the KDE applications on my computer. These things happen rarely, not enough that it's bothered me, but your mileage may vary. I'd say KDE is overall a more complete, but a slightly less smooth experience than some of the other desktop environment options.

Both the Budgie, and Mate environments are relatively easy to customize (using Gnome Tweaks, and Mate Tweaks software respectively), and will give you a bit of a smoother simpler experience. So if that's what you're looking for then I'd try one or both of them out. I personally run a distro called Debian using Mate on my laptop so I can vouch that Mate is very very good. I also used to use Budgie a long time ago, back when I first started using Solus. It was really good then already, and from what I've heard it's only improved since. Both of these are easily customizable and easy to use. They may not have the sheer girth of options KDE offers, but they get the job done.

The Final option would be GNOME I don't know that I would recommend this to new Linux users or not not. It can be a bit finicky to customize, and it's a completely different desktop paradigm from any other environment I know of. It is very unlike windows, and I'm not even sure it's that similar to Mac. Only use GNOME if you're looking for something completely different then you're likely used to. I used GNOME for a few months before switching to KDE early this past year. It was enjoyable, interesting, and elegant. However there was a slight learning curve due to it's different paradigm of use. I had a few issues with it being a little slugglish, but I've heard that these have recently been resolved. Gnome is good, but strange, worth trying out, but very different from the others. Also it's probably the least customizable .

Honestly I would advise downloading all 4 versions of Solus, and then trying each of them out in turn. You can do this by just running them off a usb stick. You have to do this before you install anyways. when you plug the usb stick with the solus iso on it into a usb port and select it to boot from when you turn on your computer you will be taken to a live environment where you can try it out before you choose to install. It will likely be running a little more sluggishly like this then it would once you install it, but it would be good enough to get the feel for which environment you'd feel most comfortable with. Also keep in mind that people on these forums (as far as I can tell) tend to be eager to help each other out so if you run into any roadblocks when installing or afterwards never be afraid to post here, or even over on the reddit page for help

A lot of great replies here but OP never said their level of experience (linux) or comfort level or background.
I think I should make all my questions this poetic. There is an uncompromising beauty in the simple question but it's probably google translate.
My response: I chose what I call the "scrappy independent" for one reason, no, two reasons: easy on the eyes and functional.
No distro ('flavour') I tried had both. Plus the independent part was the sell.
I don't think I've explored 1/10 of Budgie's customizability, if that is a word.
See Max_The_Bear : mate workmanline and a nice bridge. When official I can see KDE in my future. Gnome an acquired taste (why is desktop always yelling at me?)
All this stuff you can tweak to your heart's content without forcing your way into an admin position (I think). If you get in a jam you will be helped fast at the forum.

I use Solus because you all force me to. I'd much rather be using EvolveOS.

imeanwat

JoshStrobl Poor Josh, we know he's so pliable.

About a year, a year and half from now, i knew nothing about linux. What I was looking for:

1. good looking DE
2. not asking me to learn everything about computer architectures and science to get it installed and usable, ie plainly working
3. not bloated, as few features as needed in order to enforce 2.
4. Updates: rolling release and actively maintained so that I would not have to change in a foreseeable future
5. scalable: I intend to learn linux and change the few things that I find myself needing that would not already be shipped so I need sensible documentation, people willing to help me. Solus have both, plus being based on 'standard' linux, there's a whole world of already solved problems to look into (systemd, gnome…)

I tried a few other distro, none of them provided me those points, at least not as seamlessly. Solus' dev vision of a DE just makes sense to me.

Max_The_Bear If you don't want to go that route, you can test Budgie, GNOME, and MATE right from your browser.

https://distrotest.net/Solus

cynical13 Please no. Test it through actual hardware like we intend and actually support.

Sorry, thought I was helping.

I do not think that I am able to add anything new to the discussion, but I still want to express my delight, that Solus, this small, independent project, is able to deliver a distribution that does some crucial things right in my opinion.

The world of Linux is one of choice and fragmentation. While this is in one way a beautiful thing, it also is something that led to Linux being in its own way. Instead of putting a lot of manpower behind a few mainline projects, there are thousands of them and a lot of them more or less orphaned.

I likewise get the feeling that distributions are prone to what in software development would be called feature creep. By supporting all those packages, applications and desktop environments, the distribution is never really able to polish a unified experience, it's just spread too thin personnel-wise.

What I now like about Solus is the fact that it focuses on package curation, on a polished experience, has a rolling release model so that once installed, it can be run forever, that it opts to offer GUI-driven solutions for common tasks instead of plunging new users deep into the depths of terminal commands.

It's great that Linux offers the user the option to use all these powerful command-line tools, but I also think that it's very much overdue, that everyday administrative tasks for home desktop systems do not require command-line input. This was true back when I first started using Linux in the early 2000s and it is even more true now. That the Solus team just gets this is the reason I have decided not to distro-hop and stay here for hopefully many years.

ender same as mine. I knew nothing about Linux, I just use as complementary with Windows 10 (Dual-Boot).

First time installed Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 4 years ago for tasks in college. That was my first impression about Linux especially Ubuntu. It's like fancy glowing OS than Windows (because it's Gnome DE). I use Ubuntu 14.04 for nearly a year before started getting bored because some bugs, high RAM consumption, boring DE, etc.

Then I started to distro-hopping to Debian, Linux Mint, Deepin, vacuum for a year, and then Ubuntu Budgie 16.10 for half a year before I switched to Solus after I learnt Budgie DE made by Solus. Since then, I feel so comfortable with it's simplicity of DE, light-weight OS, curated rolling release, less bloated, fast update, simple learning curve, nice community, etc.

I have a plan to look another OS intended to switch. BUT, I don't think I can find Linux OS as good as Solus.

• Solus (I'm using Budgie flavour) is beautiful, it has this perfect blend of usability and eye candy for me and on top of that it's very, very light. With little tinkering Solus Budgie use the same resources as Xfce 4.14!
  • Solus is a rolling release done right. I like Arch but updating it daily can be a pain. Weekly update schedule is simply more right.
  • Solus is independent
  • Solus is truth.

Because it's the best?

• because of Budgie and default look (only distro for me with theme that needs no customizing, it's beautiful)
• it's not bloated like Ubuntu
• it's not company, like Manjaro now is https://www.news1.news/2019/09/manjaro-changes-its-structure-to-respond-to-the-challenge-of-its-popularity.html

And, I bet You didn't heard this one before...
It's The best sounding distro I have ever heard (with Gnome MPV only) on my FineArts/ScanSpeak combination.
As soon as I played some FLAC I was hooked.

Shadoware

The only, perhaps, down side is that eopkg may not offer great software variety availability like others distros.

Actually, it's more like a good thing, for stability and security, we need packages to be updated and fixed frequently, so abandoned applications are removed, and not so good alternatives and forks that changes only the name will not enter the repository.
Because of this selective packaging, they always offer the best suitable application and other two excelent alternatives for variety... it's not like we need twenty different image editors, if the best ones are already here.

And of course, this is not so bad, today linux distros are becoming more and more globalized, like the world we know, not only we can compile and install from source code, but we can use appimages, flathub/flatpak, and the "other" alternative by canonical.

Soon or later, using linux will be a matter of choice of company, the team behind it and the decisions they make, and the in-house software technology. Of couse, Solus wins this competition by a far length, they care about the user, and always prefer to have quality over quantity.
Also Sol and Budgie 11 are coming.

I think I fear I may face some need been unsupported some day, like if I want to use some old hardware, like a webcam or other, and dont find the driver to it.
I like the rolling release idea very much but I tried Manjaro a year ago and it was a very bad experience. Is was unstable out of the box and after 3 days trying make it more stable I gave up. I couldn't reach a satisfactory state. After that I installed Debian which is very stable but it always uses too old software.
I just want a rolling release distro that doesn't break easily. I'm gonna try Solus in my next install.