If not solus, what distro would you be using

WetGeek This has been a very pleasant adventure so far.

If anyone has been following this thread with interest, I'll mention a few first impressions. A lot of other distros have been described as "like Solus, or "similar to Solus," but none that I've tried actually were. A close contender was Gecko, I guess, based on openSUSE. I created a VM to explore Gecko, but I couldn't get much to work for me. Dunno if it just hates to run on VMs or it just isn't ready for prime time yet.

Pisi (Turkish for "cat") however, although it's a beta at this time, seems more like an RC to me. And so far, it seems to provide a very good implementation of KDE Plasma. If you go to the Download section of the Pisi web site,be sure to download the second .ISO file (v2.2). The first one is, as it says, a "minimal" version. I.e., no desktop despite appearing to be newer (v2.2.1).

The Pisi .ISO creates a live version of the distro when it's executed. Once it's started, F2 will allow you to change the language from the default (Turkish) to whatever works better for you. And in order to install it, look for the YALI installer in the ISO's "Favorites" menu.

If you install this on a VirtualBox VM as I did, in order to load the Linux Guest Additions so you can take it full-screen, you'll need to start a terminal and load Dolphin with elevated credentials. The application name is just "dolphin," so the command is sudo dolphin. Once it's up, you can locate the .run script to load the Linux modules. Run that, then reboot, and now Host + F will make the VM full-screen.

Everything I've seen so far confirms that eopkg and pisi (the Pisi package manager) are very closely related. From a command line, every eopkg command I've tried with pisi has worked just fine. I just ran the command sudo pisi up, and got 566 package upgrades. The whole process looked exactly like an eopkg update.

I posted the sizes of my VMs recently, so I checked to see how Pisi compares. In fact, it's not tiny. The amount of space it's currently using of its 32GB dynamic virtual disk is 11.57GB, almost twice the size of the Solus Plasma VM. In fact, it's just slightly bigger than my Windows 10 Pro VM! Keep in mind, though, that if this is really still a beta version, it will probably get much smaller in a release build.

IN SUMMARY
For those who like to explore interesting distros, Pisi is certainly one you'd enjoy taking a look at.

WetGeek Pisi is certainly one you'd enjoy taking a look at

FOLLOWUP
While in the KDE session, you can load the Budgie DE with this command: sudo pisi it budgie-desktop. Then reboot, and Budgie will show up together with KDE Plasma as an option on the login screen.

Unfurtunately I wasn't able to actually try Budgie on Pisi, because every attempt to log on to a Budgie session failed. That's the first beta-like problem I've seen so far from this beta OS. Hopefully it'll be fixed before long. Maybe in time for Budgie 10.6.

EDIT: Unlike openSUSE and Gecko, Pisi DOES have Vivaldi available for installation. The pisi command is just sudo pisi it vivaldi-browser.

WetGeek Pisi is certainly one you'd enjoy taking a look at.

In fact, I'm logged on from Vivaldi on Pisi right now. There were just a couple of beta-type bugs that I reported to the Github bug tracker.

I was able to modify /etc/fstab to include my NAS shares, and modify /mnt to provide their mount points, but unable to actually mount them. Neither nfs-utils nor nfs-common were in the repository. A search showed that libnfs was there, but after I installed that and rebooted, i still could not mount those shares, despite the description from pisi info nfs that said that libnfs would allow mounting nfs shares.

And despite setting Vivaldi as the default browser, Pisi still used Firefox by default. I needed to add the Lastpass extension to Firefox in order to log on to my account at Github to post the bugs.

Hopefully those will be fixed in the beta.

WetGeek For those who like to explore interesting distros, Pisi is certainly one you'd enjoy taking a look at.

My Pisi adventure was fun for a while, but unfortunately, it seems that no one is seriously working on making it viable. I reported some beta issues I'd found, and every time I checked back, my reports were still the top three in the list. And the number of issues had not changed.

I tried to join the Pisi forum, and provided all relevant info, after which I was told to look for an email with a link I should click in order to "activate" my membership. (Typical email verification.) By the nextday that email hadn't arrived, so I added another report noting what happened, and letting them know that if that process was automated, it was apparently broken. I actually got a response a couple of days later thanking me for the report, and telling me that their "web team" was working on it. But as of today, the email still hasn't arrived.

As I said, it was fun for a while, and I thought that Pisi ("cat" in Turkish) looked like it had a lot of potential, especially as a distro supporting Budgie, but it seems to be virtually abandoned. Such a shame. But since I'd encouraged others to take a look at it, I thought I should follow up with a retraction. Probably not worth your time.

elfprince This possibly could be a one person project

Yes. And I understand and appreciate that. And maybe I'll check back with them in another year or so. (It only takes me 4 or 5 minutes to create a VM.)

But after encouraging others to take a look at Pisi, I wanted to make it clear that this probably isn't a good time to do that, after all. Their experience would almost certainly be the same as mine.