Boiling Steam comparison of Solus and Arch

aeroplain

Boiling Steam published an article about Solus as a rolling-release distro.
https://boilingsteam.com/solus-arch-rolling-in-the-deep/

The writer was, over all, pretty critical of Solus:

He strongly opposed the policy of having a small repository. He often needed programs that were not in the repository, so he constantly needed to compile from source code.
He pointed out that for a rolling release distro, Solus is relatively slow on updates. The example he gave was Digikam 6.0 not arriving in the Solus repositories even two weeks after it was released.
He had issues with packages being broken in Solus. The examples he gave were Blender not supporting GPU Acceleration for Nvidia cards, and libpoppler causing Japanese text in PDFs to render incorrectly.
He criticized how when Solus changed the repository URL, they didn't properly alert users.
He claimed that Solus was a terrible choice for gaming, because it gets stuck with outdated Nvidia drivers.
He also criticized the soon-to-be-rewritten Software Center.

I find most of these criticisms to be relatively vague, but I still believe that they're worth addressing.

dbarron

Yes, there's some truth in some of their criticisms, but there's also horseshit (so to speak) in others.
He bashes because the apps are two weeks behind, then he bashes because they're untested. Hey, you can't have both unless you have a massive staff.
I think Nvidia drivers are an issue in themselves (imo).

Harvey

1.) Who cares, if it isn't in the repository and you need it, request it.

2.) Why people confuse rolling release and bleeding edge is beyond me, Solus actually tests things. An I for one won't update software in the repository I have no idea how to use thus test properly.

3.) If it hasn't been fixed yet there must be a reason o look if you have a look at the dev tracker you'll see its not a trivial task.

4.) They announced it on all official social media and a blog post what more did he expect a personally written letter? It was also done months before the move actually took place. An was only a problem if you didn't update AT ALL during that time. Also kind of ironic as when you update Arch or Manjaro or many other rolling releases and it breaks. They blame the users for not following the forums / website / mailing list to see if manual intervention is required.

5.) Umm... So his complaint is that Solus didn't have the nvidia-developer-driver branch for example, and now it does... An has had for a long time. Wow.

6.) How can you criticise something that hasn't happened yet?

Honestly that was a waste of my time.

aeroplain

Harvey Point 6 was a typo. I meant that he criticized the current software center, which is about to be rewritten.

dbarron

Yep, that was just internet drama happening, pretty much.

brent

I read half of it (other half was arch.)
I share SC sentiment and avoid it for terminal.
That's as close I got to that "review." Understand that was a fulltime gamer view of Solus and credit aeroplain for being accurate. Not all of us view Solus from F/T gaming lens. It's OK.
Like dbarron above: whatever, Drama.
Like Harvey: whatever.
Don't get me started on peeps that "review" the live .iso and pass it off as longtime installed operating system experience. This review reminded me of those types except different context. I imagine if you core/dev around here you have thick skin!
Long way of saying I agreed with one criticism of the writer, but not to the point I'm going to remember it tomorrow.

aeroplain

I was pretty surprised when I read it. Personally, I've always found Solus to be the most polished distro. It's always the first one I recommend to newcomers.

Harvey

aeroplain
That makes more sense.

But his out right dismissal of the project is laughable considering I've been using it for 2 years. An finally ditched windows from my last hold out system because of it. (An yes I've used Arch before, for many years prior).

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but his criticisms could be summed up with his line:

Also, for all the good things people have to say about Budgie, I don’t find it much more usable than GNOME. Budgie has almost no applets/extensions, and recently introduced “Caffeine Mode” as if it were new, while GNOME has had this applet for just 6 YEARS.

Budgie doesn't need a heap of extensions / applets Solus is about sane defaults. If its important it should be integrated. It's also much younger than gnome so the comparison is invalid. 20 years vs 5.

I'm also not sure he understands that "caffeine mode" isn't just the gnome extension added to budgie, it is its own thing. Budgie doesn't use gnome-shell an thus doesn't use its extensions.

Justin

Meh to "reviewers". Like movie reviews, I find them pretty useless. Especially in the case of a free product.

Justin

Also thanks to everyone who read it and basically saved me some time. 😃

kyrios

When I look at the issue raised for the Japanese text in PDF's it was closed because the user did not reply... And for blender if it requires cuda and cuda license does not allow redistribution (if that's the problem), Solus isn't going to do illegal things...

For the rest, he got some good catches imo but also some bad ones like the changes in the repository URLs (which weren't pleasant for anyone) but that was transparent for the users. Only people like packagers could have been impacted but that category of people must follow the activity of the distribution, you can't just package things on your own without worrying about stack upgrades, activity on the unstable branch, etc.

moctir

He posted this on r/linux and responds to comments so you could respond directly to the author there. Some of his criticisms are valid in that it's a small-ish new project compared to Arch but some are wrong, eg. waiting a package, he seemed to miss that Solus is curated vs Arch being bleeding edge. At the end he wasn't entirely critical of Solus really. I thought it was stupid that he said Arch is hit and miss with games compared to Ubuntu though but then didn't mention Solus, if it will run on Ubuntu it'll most certainly work on Solus and probably better as it will have newer drivers.

Kyrios if that's the case with cuda license for Blender then does that mean all Linux distributions have the same problem? I only occasionally use Blender so didn't know there was anything different between say Windows and Linux.

Girtablulu

Reg digikam https://dev.getsol.us/D5534 yea sorry that we try not to push broken stuff to the users

[deleted]

The comments are gold

Manjaro isn’t quite as bleeding edge as arch because they take the time to test updates before pushing them to users.

Fatih19

As a rule of thumb, if you want convenience more often than not you need to sacrifice freedom. Solus was built with convenience in mind while Arch is designed for freedom.
Gnome is much older compared to Budgie and it also has more developers.
You don't have a cool sidebar that's integrated with your favorite music player in Gnome. The last point is a checkmate IMO.

Justin

Fatih19 >.> Solus allows just as many freedoms as any other Linux OS.

Fatih19

Justin I'm sure it does. But it's just more convenience in Solus than in other distros.

ncbeachbum

I have broken many distro installs, too much spare time! The AUR is a rich repository. That being said I nuked a Manjaro install last week due to a painfully slow resume on a lenovo which was an ongoing problem. Speed matters and Solus kicks A$$!