I'm trying out different distros and people told me to try Solus. I downloaded the distro onto a flash drive and logged in. I like the distro and wanted to install it. When it got to the section just before installing where you see what is going to be done to your system, the installer didn't say it was going to install a swap file. I went onto youtube and watched someone install, and he did exactly what I did, and when he got to that section it did say it was installing an 8GB swap file for him. I've had issues with non-Debian distros on my computer which is an AMD FX-4130 with 16 GB of DDR3 ram and a 1TB HD dual booting with Kubuntu. I was going to install over Sparky Linux so I'd have a dual boot with Solus and Kubuntu.

I'm not sure if I did something wrong, I didn't see anything.

The Solus Plasma Live Iso comes with the KDE partition manager, which is a GUI way to see exactly if, where, and what size your swap partition is.
Hope this helps.

It doesn't look like its going to put in a swap from the partition manager. Why wouldn't it be putting in a swap for me but it did for another person? Should I reformat the partition I'm going to use first instead of having Solus write over it? I don't see how that would make a difference but I figured I'd ask anyway.

Thank you for the prompt response BTW.

It might be some kind of a bug, I recommended you try an installation with manual partitioning then.

Are you using UEFI? If so, it's the following.

First you'll have to use KDE partition manager to create 3 partitions:

  • /boot/esp/ (ESP - Efi System Parition) partition, with a size of 512MB and FAT32 as the filesystem, you'll need to set esp and boot flags on it. More information on it in the help center.
  • / (root) partition with ext4 as the filesystem (your main system partition)
  • SWAP partition with a size of 4-16GB (If you're planning to use hibernation, make it as big as your RAM, so 16GB)

After you make these 3 partitions, you can start the installer and choose the manual install option. On one of the next steps you'll need to select the appropriate partitions accordingly.

You could also try sharing the ESP and SWAP partitions between Solus and Kubuntu, but I'm not sure how well it would work. In this case you'll need to create only / partition, and pick the already existing ESP and SWAP partitions (don't format the old ESP partition tho, because then Kubuntu will no longer boot).

    Junglist Thank you! I'm using regular Bios though. Its an older machine AMD FX 4130 I'm putting it on with AMD graphics and DDR3.

        RobertK If you're using Bios, then you don't need to create the ESP partition, you'll be good with just the / and SWAP partitions.

          Hi Robert! I am the guy who told you about Solus Plasma on the youtube channel. I am sorry you are still having problems installing Solus. Your hardware is better than mine and as I only have 4gb ram on the machine I installed Solus on and as I installed Solus first using automatic install it created a 4gb swap file automatically. I then installed Lubuntu next to it with no problems. However even in Bios mode you can click something else on the installer and set your partitions up manually. A 4gb swap partition is sufficient especially as you have so much ram 16gb available already. Junglist has directed you perfectly to create just / and a swap partition manually and all should then go smoothly.

            DJSupertel I went into KDE Partition manager and created a swap. All the other distros created a 2gb swap so I did the same, I can always make it bigger if I need it, but I don't suspend so I don't think I'll need it. In the past my swap has been used very little, I think the most was like 21kb.

            I want to thank you and everyone that has given me info on getting Solus up and running. So far it's running well.

            One thing I think the Solus team should add Timeshift. It would make it easy for people who are coming from other distros. Other than that so far I'm enjoying it.

            I found a reddit that showed how to install Timeshift but when I try it I get this
            E: Unknown distribution and package manager
            E: Dependency packages must be installed manually:
            > libgee
            > libvte
            > json-glib
            > rsync

            Thank you again!

              Hi Robert! Congratulations on getting it up and running! Your 2GB swap partition should be OK and swappiness should be set at10 automatically on install, you can check this from the terminal. cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness On Ubuntu and Mint it's usually the default 60 and on MX Linux its normally set at 15 you can change this if required but I find it a perfect set up on Solus. Maybe if you have a spare drive you could try the flagship Solus Budgie? It's a bit faster than Plasma I find, and the Mate version a bit snappier still. I have a couple of small HDD's with those two on which I just plug in when needed. With 16GB of Ram you won't have any problems with those two DE's. I have yet to try Solus on an SSD but I expect it would fly supersonic considering how responsive it is on my stack of HDD's.
              P.S Remember my tip about updating Solus via the terminal sudo eopkg upgrade. This is the one thing I find annoying on what I consider the best Linux I have used so far; update downloads getting stuck. Using the terminal is definitely the way around this problem. Updates are normally released on Fridays or Saturdays I get them Saturday in the UK which is handy only having to update once per week instead of a steady drip of updates at random times as with some Distro's

                DJSupertel Thank you again DJ! I did check the swappiness. I watched your video the first thing after installing, they're very helpful and appreciated! I really didn't like Budgie, there were a few things that bothered me. One was that you can't right click on a file to get other options like pin and in some distros uninstall. Also the start menu doesn't have a favorites tab which I put all the programs I use regularly in for quick access. I also really like the audio controls in KDE, in other distros I have to install pulse audio panel icon so I can switch between speakers and headset quickly. So KDE and Cinnamon are my to favorite environments, Mate is ok and Xfce has some things that are annoying to me as well. Gnome is good after I customize it a ton. I guess I'm picky? lol

                I'm looking into installing Timeshift and I installed it but having dependency issues that I don't know how to fix. I edited my original message showing what I get. I found on the Solus website someone said to install dcron? But I don't know how to do that. I have the Timeshift program installed but it won't run because of the dependencies needed.

                Thank you again!