If not solus, what distro would you be using

Fedora.
I've checked it recently to see the pure Gnome experience. I really liked it. My Brother printer was automatically installed and working fine.
However I'm staying with Solus due to it's fast boot, forum/community and all other things which I might but will not enumerate here.

This is hard to say ... I was a long time sticking to Ubuntu. But now I see that Arch - like Distros are much quicker in handling with packages e.g. when updating. I would stay with Arch-like Distros - probably I would then change to BlackArch. If not Arch - like Distro I would then take Manjaro.

Well, on my laptop I actually run Debian. So, I suppose that would be my default answer. That said, I'm running Debian on my laptop more because I got used to it, and already have it configured how I like it rather than me actually having enjoyed the experience of installing it / getting it configured.

Thus, if your question is more about what I would switch my main machine to in the apocalyptic imaginary scenario in which Solus disappears, then it would be a different answer. In such a situation I think I would probably be looking at Fedora (I've heard some good things about its stability and up-to-datedness), or Manjaro which was actually the first distro I gave a proper chance to. While I hated Manjaro when I first tried it, a lot of that hate came from me not having yet learned the difference between desktop environment and distro. I was using the - at the time default choice for Manjaro - XFCE desktop and really reaaaallly reeeeeeeaaaaaaaaallly didn't enjoy it at all (and still don't). I was also not really prepared for the finickiness of Arch. As a much more experienced user now, I would probably be able to handle it a bit better than before; though, definitely with the KDE desktop this time.

That said, If I'm being honest those above picks would really be emergency, apocalypse, last chance before the sky starts falling, choices for me. Using a distro other than Solus is fine on my laptop which I only use for very light occasional coding practice, online chess, and hulu watching. Actually having to switch environments for my main machine would be terrible. I would be a little lost without Solus quite frankly.

I just started trying Solus, being a Salient OS user(Arch based) and even though I am only technically using this for a chance to try it out for the Big Daddy Linux Distro Challenge, I am slowly getting torn away from my Salient. If Solus wasnt around for sure it would be Salient OS

My trajectory was Slackware -> Redhat6 -> FreeBSD4 -> MacOSX -> Slackware -> Ubuntu -> Solus. There is a pattern of cycling between a mainstream distro and a niche one. So if I didn't find Solus, I will be using another lesser known distro, perhaps nixOS or gentoo.

hashhsah I know the cycling I started in Linux with Slackware in 1998, since then I have tried so many distros that I am a chronic distro hopper. I am hoping I can stay for a change with Solus, I just always worry with small independent distros that they could easily go under

[unknown] Thank you for your answer, this information is indeed very interesting, however I had no problems with KaOS and I loved their philosophy, too.

If I wasn't using Solus...(past RedHat, Debian, SuSE, Ubuntu, Fedora) it would be Arch. But that's what dual boot is all about

I was doing a lot of research before impulse, and luck I suppose, brought me to Solus. That said, I would have been running Linux Mint.

I would use Zorin, because it doesn't break and it's idiot proof.

adurante Yes, I have used Zorin since 2013 and tried many distros last year. They all had problems like freezes and crashes or the default music player not working when I try to put my Cd's on my pc. I had to return to Zorin because it was reliable. It just got slower over the years, using the same desktop PC.

I having only been using Solus since last week and have only experienced one crash in the game 0AD this morning. It's not that important and only the game crashed, not the whole system.

I was looking at Zorin too, but like Ubuntu there seems to be a bit of the telemetry stuff going on that I DESPISE. I did not want to go through the hassle of disabling any of that stuff, so I passed it up all together. The only thing I can think of that I'm not stoked about with Solus is that mandatory updates will get installed any time you run updates (or perhaps whenever you use the software manager). It's not that the updates themselves are bad, it's just the principal. However, that's a matter for a different thread.

Mandatory? Don't you have a choice to update or not?

Thaeris I'm not too concerned about telemetry. I don't have any info the Americans or Chinese would want.

synth-ruiner another rolling-release distro I forgot about is Void Linux. anyone have any experience with it? looks a little bare-bones but maybe that's a good thing.

Void is very bare-bones. Without a strong background it would be hard to manage Void. I'd say that Void is like Arch, how it was around 2005, not now.

Void offers ready-to-use ISOs with various DEs. But installed systems are just a bit more than a pure terminal. Freshly installed Cinnamon = 3G. Freshly installed Mate = 2G. No preinstalled tools, no software of any kind, no systemd, no running services, no graphical package managers, nothing is pre-configured. It's up to user to build a system from ground up.

You get nude and crude terminal governed by xbps. Like vanilla Arch with pacman only. It's just luxurious.

There's no systemd in Void, so I can't measure exact boot times, but Void roughly boots up twice as fast as Arch. Seems impossible, but the impression persists on each boot.

Void uses runit as init and supervisor subsystem. A user isn't forced to learn Poetteringish to break through the maze of a confusing systemd. Runit is clean, logical, simple to manage. All services, daemons - much less than in systemd - are under a full user's control, at any time.

I run Arch since 2005, so building a system from scratch with CLI is not a problem, but a few times Void has made me to desperate. I hated Void at those moments, but a day later was returning back to it. Reward and satisfaction are enormous when you make Void to run as you wish.

Even when you get a fully working Void system it doesn't grow up too much. Void Cinnamon, started from 3G, grew up to 4G+ here.

Arch is tediously stable. Only Debian Stable is as stable as Arch. I was bored with it, so started to look for new adventures, preferably similar to those in vanilla Arch.

Void seems to be the only competitor for Arch. It's very enjoyable system.

just thanks for the perspective! I am pretty curious to try it out- maybe in a VM or on one of my lesser-used computers.

KDE Neon and Debian Stable (with Openbox). Two best distros I've used. So far.

I think Solus Budgie, Solus Mate or perhaps Solus Plasma. So far I will stick to Solus Gnome.

Pop OS or ubuntu budgie.
Maybe reborn os or endeavor. But I really prefer something more stable as ubuntu rather something edge like arch