Is Solus good for a daily driver?

ashahir05

I have been distro hopping for a long time. However Solus seems to be just the distro I want. But the low amount of packages and low support (as in from companies making software) has been a thing of concern.

Do note I will mainly use Solus for programming.

What are your opinions on this?

davidjharder

ashahir05 What programming languages do you focus on? Some languages get more effort than others.

bvdlingen

ashahir05 go for it!

Running Solus exclusively - except on servers - for more than 2 years on 2 notebooks, 1 desktop, and work notebook.
Solus has proven to be very stable and reliable for me, and made me stop distrohopping.

Brucehankins

Not sure on the programming front, but as for a daily driver, 100% yes!

ashahir05

davidjharder PHP, Node, C/C++, C#, Python, Flutter, Java and Kotlin. .NET and Flutter are available as snaps afaik.

kyrios Buiding programs from scratch is an option if not already available, and I would definitely like to learn more about eopkg packaging. Also eopkg seems to have troubles updating. At some package it will get stuck and I'll manually restart for it to continue. And the other thing is the software centre. It's uh, well not good.

Staudey

Like @davidjharder said it depends on what exactly you're trying to do. But as a programmer you shouldn't have much trouble compiling the few missing pieces of software yourself (if there are any).
Personally I have used Solus as my daily driver for three years now and it has been the most pleasant experience I had with any OS (not just Linux). Only rarely do I need something outside the repository, and then it's mostly experimental stuff.

sebastian-brandt

Solus is, by their own statement, also geared towards developers. I use Solus for Java and web development and I am very pleased with the experience. We also get the popular IDEs (IDEA, Android Studio, VS Code), up-to-date OpenJDK and gradle packages from the repos. Node, Python, Ruby, Go, C/C++ - it's all there. Some online tutorials use Ubuntu as reference platform and packages might be named slightly different on Solus but I got everything I wanted running easily. Solus is also very stable and devs react quickly on issues.

WetGeek

sebastian-brandt Node, Python, Ruby, Go, C/C++ - it's all there

You seem to have forgotten Vala. I was much impressed with what I've seen of it so far.

kyrios

Regarding the "low support", it is the same with all non-professional distributions : you rely on the community.
The amount of packages doesn't mean anything the only thing that should bother you is are the packages I need are in the repository; if not, shall I build/update the one(s) I need and eventually make packages requests for them and eventually propose myself as maintainer to contribute back or shall I go for another distribution.

Justin

Yes.

CorvusRuber

ashahir05 PHP, Node, C/C++, C#, Python, Flutter, Java and Kotlin. .NET and Flutter are available as snaps afaik.

If you rely on snaps instead of containers/virtual envs for development (especially for multiversion stuff like Python, Java and Node, where frequently you have to code on a specific version instead of the latest one) you are doing it wrong.

ashahir05

CorvusRuber Snaps for .NET and Flutter. Not the other stuff.

kaktuspalme

ashahir05 I use Solus as my daily driver to program in PHP, JS, C# and a little bit of Go.
I use rider and .Net Core. For .Net Core I just download the binaries from the official .net core website.
I extracted it to /opt/dotnet and symlinked the dotnet executable to a location which is in $PATH. That works wonderfully.

Snaps didn't work well for me for .NET Core. But maybe I made I mistake. In the end i found it just easier to get the binaries from the website.

CorvusRuber

ashahir05
An auto updating development environment ? What could go wrong .....

just

@ashahir05 Is Solus good for a daily driver?

No, it is not. It randomly crashes on boot up here.

Arch and Debian Stable seem to be more stable. Sorry for tautology. A drawback is that both depend on systemd.

Void and Devuan Stable are as stable as Arch and Debian Stable. The advantage is that none of two depends on systemd.

Links to systemd, fedoraproject, redhat, poettering.

kaktuspalme

just Well the drawback is your opinion. In my opinion systemd is, at leat by now, a huge plus for the linux ecosystem.

Justin

just Sounds more like a hardware issue if it's random.

ashahir05

CorvusRuber Nothing really. At least for Flutter and .NET. Especially Flutter. If it was Java or Node or Python a lot could go wrong.

just Haven't got a single crash during boot (or anywhere) for now. And systemd is not a drawback for me 😀.

kyrios

just So your personal case is a generality ?
How come then I don't have any boot crash on my machines ?
Also do you swear than you'll never find any user complaining about crash and boot issue on Arch, Debian/Devuan & cie ?
Not even mentioning that Debian/Devuan stable can be very outdated which might be an issue for some developers depending on their objectives.

just

Justin Sounds more like a hardware issue if it's random.

Sounds convincing.

Will try to run Solus on less outdated hardware.

Thanks for a thought, @Justin. And for many other things.

brent

Justin Sounds more like a hardware issue if it's random.

It took me a long time to realize that.

just

kyrios So your personal case is a generality ?

No, it is not. It's a description of what's going on here. Solus, Arch, Debian, Void, Devuan run on the same laptop. Solus crashes. Others do not.

kyrios How come then I don't have any boot crash on my machines ?

Looks like a rhetorical question.

kyrios Also do you swear than you'll never find any user complaining about crash and boot issue on Arch, Debian/Devuan & cie ?

No, I do not. Nothing is perfect.

kyrios Not even mentioning that Debian/Devuan stable can be very outdated...

That's true. Some people prefer to use old and reliable software. Other prefer modern software.

Max respect to Solus developers, maintainers, contributors, community, users.