yursan9 Well, it's been a crazy year so far, even in the Linux world of things I'd say. The devs have been super hard at work as of late (and as always really), putting out new updates constantly, doing KDE upgrades, OpenSSL, haskell, tons of rebuilds and updates honestly too many to even mention, but those are the ones that stick out in my mind at the moment. Yes, Nautilus is at 3.26.4, but the devs are very aware of that and once desktop icons can be implemented properly, it'll get updated. Work on Budgie 10.5.2 is underway, which is just getting a bunch of bug fixes (no new features until B11). I'd love to have the new Nautilus, but honestly features wise it's pretty much the same as the one we have now, so aside from a few small tweaks, I'm really not missing anything other than having that "latest" version.
In regards to activity, I dare say Solus (from the developmental side) has never been more active. There's been numerous hackfest and streams from the team on updating usysconf and Plasma and general coding cleanup and updates these last few weeks which have been great to watch. Also, if you're curious for a bit more information, one of the devs posted a reply here from a topic about how future proof Solus is and I think it more or less perfectly sums up anything else you might be curious about: https://discuss.getsol.us/d/4979-how-futureproof-is-solus
Sorry to hear about your laptop, but hopefully you can get a new one sometime in the future. Be well, take care, and thanks for stopping on by!