fishyman65712 . "if anybody can screw it up it will be me."
ah.....another person shares my modus operandi to linux.
Have nothing to contribute to this thread at all. Just gave you a like for asking about this. I have an older rig as well and unlike Harvey had heard more praises than complaints about plas.
The USB I have solus gnome in will have plasma by the end of the day.

    dbarron it seems to use more CPU than budgie does, while using less memory

    Negligible trade-off, so that's a positive. What is the Plasma experience?

        Leave it to me ........... I used the USB that had a work Solus Budgie install to write the Plasma on.
        Never did get it to run as if it was a full install , thought well it should just revert back to Budgie - oh crap I used that USB to write the other on. Oh well I will just go get a new ISO of Solus Budgie and start over ........ only it did not work out that way. Budgie would only run as a LIVE OS never gave the option to install any farther.

        Like I said if anybody can screw it up ......... it will be me.
        Now I have nothing Solus running on it. I did notice after I got a fresh new ISO of Solus 4 Budgie when it writes the usb it gets to the part for LIVE OS and never goes past it the file count wrtier stops at 13 files wrtten and never goes higher, yet is shows it wrote 1.4 gigs of files but nothing past Live OS ? ? ? Seemed odd to me - was using a windows laptop to write the files after the other Linux would not write a readable USB install of the Budgie.

        Could it be the USB writer - - using Universal-USB-Installer-1.9.8.7 to write with, used it before when I first tried Solus, but it works fine to write Mint / Ubuntu and other Linux just not Solus, just weird ? really weird .. !

        Even Rufus is showing to write a Live OS as well not a bootable version - I downloaded from the Atlanta link ......
        For all the version so far. Could a different link download offer a different version by chance ?

          fishyman65712
          In Gparted last month I accidentally erased my Windows 7 on the host disk that I'm am running Budgie USB off of.

          If I have an .iso, and 3 usb sticks, I guarantee you install will be botched, mutilated, and a 3-day affair since I won't remember which sticks have what, will have entered the wrong data in rufus or the dd program, and re-arrange the bios boot order wrong time after time because of this forgetting.

          Because of my continued klutiziness, my Budgie USB, my only operating system left, has a lowered chance of 1 in 5 of actually surviving me until I can accidentally install a 3-year old live usb as my main install. That's if its still on a usb.
          When they make a third Dumb & Dumber movie we should go to the casting call. We'd probably get jobs right away.

            16GB and a quad core CPU no matter how old will run any desktop.

            I have no idea ......... the first try at Solus was with 3.9999 / I got the iso around the beginning of the year.
            It basically was stick the USB in the slot, turn on the computer and wait for the prompts, then click through the install process and then do a restart to a running working Solus OS.
            What began as hey I will try that has morphed into - huh can't get anything Solus to do anything but give a LIVE look at the USB it will not do an install of Budgie or Mate. It gets to the point of asking for name / user name / password click for the next step after it shows what it is going to install and just stops.
            Tossing up a FAILED TO LOAD screen with a Warning.
            I took a pic with phone and I would post it to show what the window looks like but it will not allow me to login to forum from my phone. Linux won't let me pull the pic from my phone either .... odd ?
            the install shows this
            Format/dev/SolusSystem/Root as ext4 root partition

            the pop reads as follows
            Installation has failed, and changes were made to disk
            The installer will now exit.
            Failed to update disk: Partition(s) 1 , 2 on/dev/sda have been written but we have been unable
            to inform the kernel of the change, probably because it/ they are in use. As a result, the old partition(s)
            will remain in use. You should reboot now before making further changes.
            Failed to apply disk strategy

            It matters not which of the DE I use the results are the same. So I thought well I will look for an old Solus version which I found an iso for early 2017 it gave the same result. I thought well I'll see if some other distro will load, so I grabbed 2 different distros with different DE - to which both go through the install then give the restart to finish installation.
            Both yielded a full working version of both installs, so I tried it again and again with Solus and still it gives the same results each time.

            Now I am wondering what is it I am missing or not doing to get it to work again as it did on original install of 3.9999.

            Ok update - I found an old version of Solus / it shows Solus 3 64 bit is all it shows.

            After it got to where you have entered name - user name - password / I left everything like it was not changing or clicking on anything except the next button. It paused read the files then began the install process, waited for all of that and it gave the restart to finish install notice.
            Could the clicking in the option to LVM had been the problem ?

            Souls 4 Budgie YES YES YES
            got it installing a fresh Solus 4 Budgie as of this posting it was reading and prepping everything for install.

            clicked to wipe the whole drive and do a fresh install
            then at the LVM I left everything blank and just clicked next
            it loaded the install screen paused started reading and prepping everything for install.

              fishyman65712 Congrats. Panic is normal (for me). Sometimes you got to burn it down and start fresh. I swear to the (deity of your choice) that installation success depends on nuances I believe are out of my control.
              I've never got past checking LVM either. Never worked.
              I love me my solus but sometimes I could not even get it to see target drive until I made some moves. None, of course, that I remember.
              My method of fixing in linux is to throw everything I've ever read against the wall to see what sticks. Eventually something sticks but you will never know what! It makes computing exciting again if you've been around...heh.
              Budgie is probably glad you are back.

                Lol, and that is why you try to change one thing at a time, to see what makes the difference (methodology of troubleshooting). But, yeah, I've been there...I think i was there first time I tried to install Solus (don't remember cause either (lol)).

                  dbarron
                  Yes without question method/sequence is the right way to troubleshoot and many times it works EXCEPT I've noticed that re-booting or not re-booting adds an extra=wrinkle into the equation either nullifying your results or confirming them. But I've gone beyond the realm of install issue and I apologize. It might be a good idea to remind myself (or be reminded) to re-boot after every tweak, that way that variable is eliminated. But sometimes I don't see improvement til the next day after shut down and some time has passed. I like the mystery of Linux; starting to understand it.

                    When I left everything alone ......
                    and in default - - and stopped checking something besides the default it gave, magically it worked.

                    You know basically / stop screwing with it before you break it.

                    brent I had to give Plasma a good run to get an opinion. However, I will say this, it's the best Plasma experience I've had, having tried with manjaro, kde neon, kubuntu in the past. Of course, you have to consider that this is the most recent, so all performance tuning and bug fixes since I ran it last.
                    I'm pretty darn happy with it, I miss some budgie stuff, but KDE kinda does have it all (much more mature). For the moment, I think I'll run Plasma on my desktop and probably budgie on laptop. After I do the linux install-fest I have planned in May, I will probably think about moving the laptop to a tiling manager because that'll just be faster and I won't have to mess much with the darn trackpad.
                    I love budgie and I hope it continues to evolve and I'm sure I'll be looking/using it some too. I absolutely love the notification handling in Budgie, Plasma notifications (at least stock) are dismiss all like Budgie used to be.

                      Excellent review, thank you. Will DD my .iso soon and take it for a spin.

                      I just put everything back in a work order and am going to leave well enough alone.

                      Picked this wee tiny laptop for guest to use. Solus Budgie is running very well for as limited as it is.
                      1 gig AMD dual core acer ....... surprisingly well to be honest - better then it did with MS Win 7 ever thought about.

                      I just want to throw it in here that the Plasma desktop generally scales to be as fluid as possible in regards to your pc specs. If you have a lot of ram it will use a bit more to make it feel smoother.

                      For me it beats Gnome and Budgie memory consumption most of the time. The only merit in saying it is bloated comes from it being slower to start...

                      4 months later

                      Well I reloaded Plasma, and so far I have managed not to screw anything up.

                      I installed Solus 4 Budgie on my desktop as soon as it came out. Since then, I installed Mate and Gnome to test out the various Desktop Environments and haven't had any problems.

                      I see that the KDE Desktop Environment is available for download and I would really like to test it out.

                      Does anyone think that installing KDE while also having all of the other available Desktop Environments installed will cause any instability?

                      Any thoughts before I try and install?

                        My first Solus was Budgie - reloaded Plasma and have both running on the same SSD.
                        I did notice today using Brave browser to surf a forum with music links to Youtube the plasma DE would play the music in headset right side speaker at set volume but the left side speaker would only play at little to no sound. I use a USB plug headset by Steelseries, so I switched DE back to budgie and same Youtube links played the sound and set level in both sides in same Brave browser at same level to each other.