If not solus, what distro would you be using

Not many good options for me.

codewizard1975 I'm surprised no one said they'd be totally lost without Solus yet.

I'm not about to say that I'd be lost without Solus, but I'd miss it. I used Ubuntu 2006-2017 for work, and then, freed of Canonical, went looking for a distro I wanted to use. I found Solus Budgie and I've stuck with it, and will continue to do so. I've looked at any number of distros in Gnome Boxes during the last couple months, and I haven't seen any I'd be willing to adopt for daily use. I'm 75 and not willing to put up with unstable, unintuitive, poorly-designed distros just for the sake of using Linux. If Solus Budgie disappeared, I'd use Windows or buy a MacBook.

codewizard1975 I'm surprised no one said they'd be totally lost without Solus yet.

More or less, that is my case, I'd be almost totally lost without Solus. There are other cool rolling release distros, but Solus is the one that gives me less trouble. Antergos was great, but it doesn't exist anymore. Manjaro always ends up exploding in my computers. PCLinuxOS is one of my favorite distros, but I have lots of little problems whenever I have used it. Geckolinux? I couldn't make heads or tails of it. Void Linux looks great, but installing it is a little too difficult for my low Linux skills.

I have uninstalled Solus several times to install and try other distros, and I have always regretted it, always came back crying to Solus. Once I used the Anarchy installer to install Arch on my laptop, when I rebooted I had lots of little annoying glitches, whenever I solved one, another one arouse, and a Jiminy Cricket little voice in my head repeated "In Solus this wouldn't happen". One of these little glitches was the final straw, and said to myself "Screw it, I'm going back to Solus"

Perhaps, perhaps, some day I will try Openmandriva Rolling, Openmamba, or Void Linux. Perhaps

Been using Solus Budgie since November 2016 as my main system.
For almost 3 years the OS has been running on a System76 Thelio Desktop.
A wonderful daily use platform that is so practical to use.

I am also involved in other Linux communities.
On my 2 Alienware M15x laptops I am running:
a) PCLinuxOS Trinity - a quirky but fun rolling distro. Also have this distro, Plasma version, on a testing PC as I am an official tester.
b) PeppermintOS - rejoined the project with the new release, and am a Trusted User in their forum.

Unsure at this stage which of these 2 other distros could replace Solus on my main system.
I know for sure though it would be a rolling distro.

Avidgamefan For those who like OpenSUSE, I found a variant called Gecko that seems to add a few things, like improved fonts and such.

Having been an openSuSE user since something like v6.0 (until I met Solus), your mention of Gecko got me intrigued. I decided to create a Gecko VM and take a look around. Installation was very smooth and straightforward, as was connecting to my network printer. Yast is still Yast, although I was surprised that no repository I could add included Vivaldi. As the greatest browser on the planet, that seemed like quite an omission to me. Not even Pacman included it.

I was able to browse to vivaldi.com using Firefox and download their .rpm file, which was immediately loaded into Yast for installation. I haven't looked at Tumbleweed for quite a while, so I don't know whether that feature's the same, or it's a Gecko improvement. I remember loading external packages being a little complicated back in the day.

Anyway, I did get Vivaldi loaded and configured, and decided to take a new look at its email client. Seems much improved over the earlier versions I'd seen, but still not a replacement for Thunderbird.

Overall impression, operation of Gecko felt like driving a school bus compared to Solus' sports car experience. I had totally gotten used to Solus' speed and responsiveness, whereas I'd previously thought openSUSE (and now Gecko) was very normal for Linux. It's interesting to see what they've done with the old lady, but she's certainly no threat to young Solus!

N1X3L If not Solus, I would use GeckoLinux. It's a curated and polished version of openSUSE, with out-of-the-box functionality. I've been trying it out, and it gives me Solus vibes, because it offers a rolling-release model, a Budgie desktop environment, and the kind of user-focused experience I want in a daily-driver distro.

Gecko Budgie is one of two permanent installations** in my Gnome Boxes collection. Gecko Budgie is permanent because it is the only distro I've found that gives Solus Budgie any competition at all, for all the reasons you've pointed out.

The Budgie DE is well designed, but an older version from an outdated repository, and has real limitations compared to Solus Budgie (e.g centered taskbar only, top bar, limited ability to customize). I hope that as the Budgie project gets underway and develops, the Gecko version of Budgie (and other non-Solus versions) will be brought up to Solus standards.

Avidgamefan For those who like OpenSUSE, I found a variant called Gecko that seems to add a few things, like improved fonts and such. Seemed a bit spartan for my tastes, but I guess it was OK.

Gecko is spartan by design. To be blunt, openSUSE is a monster -- the ISO is 4.5 GB, most of the included packages irrelevant for ordinary use -- while Gecko is curated for ordinary users, with an 1.7 GB ISO. It is a bit on the spartan side, but I prefer spartan to overloaded.

WetGeek Overall impression, operation of Gecko felt like driving a school bus compared to Solus' sports car experience. I had totally gotten used to Solus' speed and responsiveness, whereas I'd previously thought openSUSE (and now Gecko) was very normal for Linux. It's interesting to see what they've done with the old lady, but she's certainly no threat to young Solus!

That's my impression, too. My canary is a Dell Inspiron 3180 with an AMD A6/R5 4GB setup. Solus Budgie is fast and efficient on that minimal rig. Gecko Budgie is almost as sluggish as Windows 10. Not quite, but sluggish enough to notice.

The update process is also arduous. Following openSUSE practice, Gecko updates replace the entire set, not just updated packages as Solus and most other distros do. I'm updating Gecko as we speak, and 1189 packages are being updated. That's a lot.

Although I would probably call it a day if Solus disappeared and use Windows 11 or (maybe) buy a MacBook, Gecko Budgie is a solid distro, Budgie issues and update issues aside, and a good candidate for Solus Budgie replacement.

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** The other is Zorin 16, which I keep on tap because I have been helping a fellow-geezer newbie deal with Linux, his son having convinced him to move to Zorin rather than replace his Windows 10 computer in 2024-2025. A bad decision, in my opinion, and I won't be at all surprised to see my friend on Windows 11 before this is all over.