What is your favorite Solus edition ?

AlucardNoir

Justin It is my understanding that Plasma isn't ready for prime time yet - not on Solus that is.

As for the second, that's quite simple, Budgie is to Solus what Unity was to Ubuntu. If Budgie isn't the preferred DE of people using Solus that will mean one of two tings:

Solus has moved past Budgie and as such Budgie development is likely to suffer since Budgie is developed by the Solus team or
Budgie development has been stalling and Solus users end up moving to other DE's with more of a perceptive future...

In both cases, the outlook for Budgie won't me the rosiest.

stalebrim

We're just receiving an update to GNOME stack, which affects Budgie too.

JoshStrobl

@AlucardNoir That is complete and utter non-sense. When Solus MATE Edition was released, it had more downloads over Budgie. When Solus GNOME Edition released, it had more downloads over Budgie. When Solus Plasma Edition releases, I would not be surprised if it has more downloads than Budgie.

Why? Because it always happens when we release a new, polished experience for people to try out. Even existing Solus users will end up downloading the new edition to see what it's like.

But guess what? Budgie didn't die off, download numbers level out and Budgie eventually edges ahead, or on future releases where that edition already exists, most will download the Solus ISO because it ships with our flagship desktop.

Budgie continued development, it continues development. I'm literally updating our GNOME Stack to 3.32 and Budgie to a git build with support for it and various fixes, as I type this.

Frankly, I do not use download numbers as some indicator as to whether or not we should continue developing Budgie. It isn't going away, period. This whole idea that Budgie development has been stalling is also complete non-sense. Did you see how many changes, fixes, and improvements were in Budgie 10.5? Have you see the changes since then? Have you seen our roadmap where we make it quite clear our plans to develop Budgie 11?

You're right, there's totally no future to it. There totally isn't plans for Budgie 11 and I totally don't already have plans for Budgie 12 either. Nope. Turns out we should just look to you to determine whether or not we should spend our time on Budgie, sure seems you have all the answers.

AlucardNoir

JoshStrobl When this, when that. How about the general statistics of since Solus started. Is Solus gnome still received more DL then Budgie? has Solus Gnome received more DL then Budgie in the long term? Have most people that were using budgie and kept on using the solus they had installed moved to the "new hotness" or did they stay on budgie?

abelinux

JoshStrobl here's my toast 🥃 for those who do as opposed to those who say 😉

kyrios

AlucardNoir Figures don't mean anything. When a DE recieive major update at the moment ISOs are released, that particular edition will have more download. Some time later, it's another DE that will have a major update when the ISOs and magically that particular edition will have more downloads.

When ISOs will Gnome 3.32 will be released, it will be the most downloaded since the other DE won't have such major release. When an official Plasma edition will be available, it will magically be the "preffered" DE, then when Budgie 11 will be available, that edition will be the most downloaded... and so on... The only thing it demonstrates is that trendings follow the major DE release at the moment the ISOs are released...

JoshStrobl

@AlucardNoir We do not have complete metrics because many of our mirrors are from the community and it is entirely up to them to disclose download numbers. For official mirrors, I have no interest in disclosing previous download numbers. We also do not perform any telemetry or analytics to determine what packages people are using / have installed, and therefore such data on how many installs there are, what desktops those installs have etc. simply does not exist.

AlucardNoir

kyrios I disagree. This is supposed to be a rolling release. Why dl a new iso? There are two kinds of people that dl new iso's all the time, people that distro hop and people that are still looking for that one perfect distro. The whole point a rolling release is so you no longer have to dl the next iso to reinstall your os.

kyrios

AlucardNoir that's your point of view but reality is another thing.

After Solus 3, no ISOs were released for a very long period of time. Since it's a rolling release only new users should eventually care but it appeared that actually Lot of people (among which many claimed to be Solus users) kept on asking about new release date.

JoshStrobl

@AlucardNoir There are perfectly good reasons to download a new ISO, just as there are perfectly good reasons to have new releases. They act as milestones for various features and packages to get in, and in the case of new ISOs sometimes they are necessary to ensure newer hardware is able to actually load Solus and install. This has been the case for newer AMD Ryzen processors in the past, newer NVIDIA graphics, etc.

Newer ISOs also reduce the amount of post-install package upgrades you need to perform.

dbarron

And they also allow you to do a 'reset' on your installation, which is somewhat desirable if you get too package install, compile crazy.
I appreciate that part of doing a reinstall (as well as checking out new installation programs).

arkhenius

Outside of Solus branding (which one can add themselves, for the most part) and some quite minor issues, I do not understand what is not complete about the Plasma release? I am writing this using it right now and have not realized any lack of implementation of the Plasma desktop compared to, say, Kubuntu or Manjaro KDE. Have been using it for the past half a year or so too.

yursan9

arkhenius Maybe @Girtablulu is a perfectionist. ( ＾∀＾)

lallmon

I think Budgie is the value proposition of Solus.

If I was going to run Gnome or KDE , I don't think Solus would be the distro I picked.

JoshStrobl

lallmon

arkhenius

lallmon Not many distros boast the speed and sensible rolling release structure of Solus though. Personally, if I did not use Solus I would either have had to use Clear Linux for its speed (not very end-user friendly for day-to-day use), or build by own Arch system and personally compile a lot of packages/libraries with optimization flags.

Completely beside the DE point of view, I view Solus itself (the backend, with all its curated packages, stable rolling release cadence, speed, etc.) as probably the most solid desktop Linux distribution around. I honestly do not think the DE should have any importance in the distribution choice. What's the difference between using Plasma here or on Manjaro? I would say it is in the backend. What is stopping me from using Ubuntu Budgie, if Budgie was the main point? Because Ubuntu as a base is not attractive to me, for example 🙂

lallmon

JoshStrobl 😂 That's kinda what a poll is.

Fragmenting the fragments is the FOSS way though, so it's not surprising.

lallmon

arkhenius And I find that Solus backend to support the Budgie DE better than many other Gnome based distros even support Gnome. There's a balance between speed and usability that Gnome shell seems to lose in the distros I've tried. I find my DE to be super important. GUI UX is a second class citizen in the FOSS world, so any distro that has an edge is ok in my book (though the multi touch screen support in Solus is nonexistant it seems). How my comments got mistaken for criticisms is super weird. I hope the focus isn't removed from Budgie, but if community members have that time and drive, more power to em. However, If I just wanted rolling release I'd go Manjaro, if I wanted just UX I'd use Elementary.

¯_(ツ)_/¯

Justin

lallmon What would lure you to Manjaro over Solus?

lallmon

Justin My overall priorities include Modern Hardware Support (HiDPI, touchscreen, accelerometer, stylus), Desktop Integration and Ergonomics (UX), Package Selection, and Community Support.

Manjaro's appeal is the focus more on user community and stabilization of the varied Arch packages, that give you a much wider array of software rolling release, rather than Solus' strangely "curated" approach. I also don't really know Solus' focus, or actual target market. Maybe I should give Ubuntu Budgie a chance 😄

For example, my first touch point to the community: Solus flat rejected Firefox Developer Edition to the package repo, even though it really is a separate tool (I am a UI Engineer for Red Hat, and I concur, it's my go to development tool after code editor). https://dev.getsol.us/T5781

I thought the responses from the community in that thread were respectful and comprehensive, additionally a community member offered to build and maintain the package for Solus.

And the response from the Solus was team was "You can easily just download the tarball.", which like...you could say for basically everything. 🤔

stalebrim

lallmon

For example, my first touch point to the community: Solus flat rejected Firefox Developer Edition to the package repo

Yet it's available as a tarball you need to just extract and execute.

kyrios

lallmon Solus targets desktop computer users and more specifically the home computing segment (source: home page of the official site). 😁

Regarding Firefox Developer Edition, I agree with you that it's kinda strange to have Vivaldi stable & snapshot or Chrome stabe/beta/dev but only Firefox stable while it got a different engine, but Chrome for example is a binary package and it offered through the 3rd party repository which means no need to have frequent long builds and it can be updated independently from the ongoing activities on the main repository.
Unlike what you say, using the tarball isn't straightforward with basically everything (but it is with firefox), otherwise why would people work on universal packages solutions like flatpak, snap or appimage for example ?
Also a developer probably know how to extract & run a software from a tarball while this might be complex thing for a casual user, so the question to ask is should this be a priority ?
Manjaro relies on Arch which has a huge community. Solus should control its growth as it has a relatively small team and not so many contributors. What would be the point of growing fast and not being able to keep things up-to-date?

Now if you don't want to work with the tarball because it's annoying to download & update manually all the time, snap packages are available and also (unofficial) flatpak packages provided by Fedora/RedHat maintainers. Perhaps this could be a better alternative for you?

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