I found Solus several years ago when I was trying to find a good "home" distro and Doherty was till involved. I enjoyed it's refreshing take on desktop usage, it's speed and more. That leads me to what I love about Solus:
- It is pretty; the UI is well thought out and just looks professional; comparing that with some other UIs out there, I began to really appreciate the time and effort that's gone into its development;
- eopkg and, by extension, the Software Center; eopkg is not a horribly difficult package manager, in fact, compared to some (like pacman), it's downright pleasant;
- Now on rolling release; one of the reasons I do not go with any BSD is due to outdated drivers; Solus usually has no problem whatsoever with any of the drivers I've thrown at it and is pretty current on hardware support;
- App selection; awhile back, I found Strawberry Music Player and fell in love; however, Solus did not have it and that was pretty much a deal breaker for me; now it's in the repository (yaaay! and thank you!)... oh, and other important and cool apps 😁 ;
- Fairly rock solid; I've had a few hiccups now and then, but nothing compared to Windows 10 (yeesh!); I don't get too many interruptions from my daily work or personal routine, and I like that; and
- And, the ease of deployment; when my elderly father asked for a Linux distro, this is the one I put him on and I had been working on him since 1996 to get on Linux; Windows 10 finally drove him to come to me and ask for help installing a Linux distrubtion O.O
Now, what I do not like:
- eopkg and, by extension, Software Center; I can almost guarantee that if I run the Software Center for any length of time at any given time, it will fail; it just stops downloading right in the middle of something; this install, eopkg has timed out and I've had to fix several broken downloads, as well;
- systemd; as a security expert, and used-to-be-coder, I am highly aware of the complexity of systemd; I tried reading their code once, but man, that's a LOT of code; and, I just don't trust Redhat, Lennart Poettering, Kay Sievers et al.; not trying to start a flame war, just stating my dislikes;
- The last time I checked, I couldn't disable listing login names; in a heavy multi-user environment, this could be a security issue; I haven't checked thoroughly lately, but on cursory examination, I did not see an option for that; and
- Implementing wireguard is non-trivial; I recently left Void Linux due to UI issues and had been using wireguard for some time; it worked from the second I installed it; same with Artix and Windows 10, even; but here, no dice and searching the Internet, there seems to be an issue with systemd-resolved; this may be a deal breaker for me and it seems as if it is most likely not tied to anything to do with Solus itself
Solus is, by far, one of the nicest, most well-designed systems I've seen; I like the Budgie UI better than any I've tried and its speed is impressive. For the most part, it's stable and behaves as expected. For a hobby level system (not trying to belittle the developers' time, but it sounds like they work on it after their full-time jobs), it's awesome; hell, for almost any system, it's awesome. So, thank you to the developers.
