Solus always had a rather slow development, but it seems that recently it has almost stopped. Budgie desktop, desktop view, sol and new software center. It seems neither have been getting any kind of development, at least according to what I'm seeing on github and software updates. Budgie desktop view was last updated 2 months ago. I don't understand why the Solus Dev team deployed it, when it's barely functional. This is not intended to be negative, just curious.

    Xrey274
    The Budgie desktop icons view was never intended to be a full on replacement for what was provided by the old version of Nautilus. Gnome ripped out the feature long ago, Solus held back the Nautilus update until they had something to provide basic functionality. This was explained in several blog posts and forum discussions.

    Sol code on github is not representative of the current design of sol, it is not public nor is it currently the highest priority. New software center is waiting on sol which has also been discussed several times.

    Bryan has been working on ypkg3 on twitch streams recently and before that ferryd, yabi, usysconf etc etc

    So I would say your perception is just off.

      Xrey274 I'm not sure what you're expecting from a very small dev team (all volunteers who all work full time jobs btw), but Solus is still very much active contrary to what you might think it appears to be. IRC is active, these forums are active. Their dev tracker is active. Maintaining a distro is not always just about putting out new shiny stuff, sometimes it takes equal or even more work just to maintain things, patch things, etc to keep things moving smoothly in a direction for a majority of users. Solus is still very active my dude, case in point Budgie 10.5.3 was released just earlier this year. Solus also consistently puts out new software sync updates every Friday.

      There's a new .iso refresh planned. Sure a new Software Center, a new and improved package manager, and other things would be nice, but don't things work well already? What is a new Software Center really going to give us users that we don't have already? Also, one of the devs has spent much of their time so far this year developing their own software called Koto, which will be available on Solus when it's finish, so the team is still very active. The Solus Plasma dev is getting KDE 5.22 ready soon for the stable branch which was just released this month all set (it's in the unstable repos now for testing).

      It take's a lot of effort and time for things to work out. Life gets in the way, bugs and patches and server issues get in the way. It's just part of the chaos of the nature of it all. I'm always surprised how small teams can manage it all so well, if it was just me I'd be a strung out ball of stress all the time and burnt out within the first year probably. Just let the devs work at their own pace. Trust them. Appreciate them. Thank them. What else can we ask for when they provide such a great little distro that many users are very passionate about.

        This irony of reading this post while I'm literally cooking Solus 4.3 testing ISOs, on a Sunday, for OpenCollective folks, is not lost on me.

        • Budgie Desktop View is feature complete. I am happy with where it is as. @Harvey elaborated on it, I am not going to talk about it for the 10th time already. You are welcome to use the search. It shows icons, on your desktop, that you put in your desktop folder. It does a few other things. Just be happy that it exists, I could've just dropkicked desktop icon support entirely and used the excuse of "oh well upstream GNOME dropped it from Nautilus so go yell at them". Don't like the implementation? Build your own or find something else. I don't owe anyone a massive implementation that is literally compared to a file manager to the point where I don't want to touch it, and I am tired of people claiming it is "barely functional". No, it is exactly as functional as it needs to be and within reason of its implementation (using GtkFlowbox instead of weirdness with GtkGrid).
        • Budgie Desktop 10.5 series is a maintenance series. I have explained this, it is explained in basically all the blog posts, this should not be a surprise. It intentionally receives only bug fixes, some minor updates / features, and mostly new GNOME stack upgrade support. Budgie 11 was waiting on GTK4, which was only released in December of 2020 and its release / featureset has been nothing but a major disappointment. Regardless, we have a model of how we want to work on Budgie 11 that is more toolkit agnostic, so the relevancy of the toolkit at this point is pretty much nil.
        • Software Center was waiting on Sol, the new package manager. It isn't as simple as just rolling out a new package manager, we want to do it right to avoid major rewrites and fundamental rearchitectures in the future. The work @DataDrake has been doing with ypkg3 (our next generation build tooling), the pspec and yaml parsing, libeopkg, etc. all informs on Sol development. Software Center development is not the highest priority, although I will be able to work on it with my intended plugin architecture with Flatpak and snap support first, then plug in sol when it is ready, which will enable me to unblock most of the work I need to do on it.
        • It isn't just about software development. We are building an entire operating system, maintaining and upgrading it as time goes on. Our latest release was just a few months ago and one is right around the corner. This is all done by volunteers and while I am hopeful I will be able to work on Solus full-time in the coming months if our OpenCollective continues its current trend, people should have reasonable expectations. Would people rather me work on the Software Center that isn't going to see the light of day yet, or make sure their system isn't riddled with security vulnerabilities and outdated packages from 6 years ago?

          JoshStrobl Would people rather me work on the Software Center that isn't going to see the light of day yet, or make sure their system isn't riddled with security vulnerabilities and outdated packages from 6 years ago?

          In case this wasn't a rhetorical question (Narrator: It was.), personally I'd much rather have a secure & as up to date as possible system that's operating as intended than something new aka sol when eopkg still does a decent job like 99% of the time.

              Xrey274 Solus always had a rather slow development, but it seems that recently it has almost stopped.

              Solus is clearly worked on around the clock. You are forming an opinion based on a timestamp of a component it seems.

                Just want to add that I find Solus to be in a very usable, functional, and stable state now. I know ppl like seeing new things, but this is currently a very reliable daily driver. Why not just enjoy that? lol

                Xrey274 I think it's still offensive. You disrespect the work of the maintainers: Josh, Joey and Brian recently rebuilt the repository, Friedrich made updates to the Plasma stack, other maintainers are also contributing. Solus has big plans, but it takes time to implement them.

                If you are so interested, then the road looks like this:

                ypkg3, gnome 40 (Spring) > ferryd, kde plasma 5.22 (summer) > sol, kde plasma 5.23 (early fall) > updated installer, Software Center, Budgie 11, Solus ISO OEM (To Be Determined)

                We saw what happened to windows 10 when the development team focused on killer-features: bug on bug, more bug

                I think that to all of us who love solus and feel part of solus, the question is not when there will be new killer-features, but how I can help the project in addition to donations.

                    George We saw what happened to windows 10 when the development team focused on killer-features: bug on bug, more bug

                    I remember that well. Finally they woke up and released a version that was almost all bug fixes and no new features.

                        George If you are so interested, then the road looks like this:

                        ypkg3, gnome 40 (Spring) > ferryd, kde plasma 5.22 (summer) > sol, kde plasma 5.23 (early fall) > updated installer, Software Center, Budgie 11, Solus ISO OEM (To Be Determined)

                        This does not reflect any official or unofficial roadmaps or priorities.

                        GNOME and KDE stack upgrades are contingent on (1) when they are released and (2) when they are stable enough to update to. We have a rough idea of when (1) will happen after the last time (2) happened, but we can't plan until the .0 is released, giving us an idea when .1 will be out and if we need to wait to .2, which can vary quite a bit.

                        As far as my development projects go, that largely depends on the time I have available and what the highest priority is at the moment. ferryd is a higher priority than ypkg3, but I don't have enough time at the moment to give it the multiple consecutive days of my attention it needs. So instead, I'm focusing on ypkg3 development which I can easily work on in short bursts and which happens to have overlap with some of ferryd and sol's needs. Unless I am able to work on Solus full-time this year, I would not anticipate that sol will get finished by the end of the year. The installer is going to need some love sooner rather than later, as well. Everything else is much lower priority at the moment.

                            WetGeek yes, that's right, I think it's due to the new director of Windows Development Mr. Panay

                              DataDrake in our last conversation, you mentioned something like this (with the exception of De stacks). Yes, I should have emphasized that this is just an approximate direction of where the project is heading and what are the plans

                                I'm still not convinced that Solus is real. I've never seen DataDrake or JoshStrobl outside of Twitch...

                                Jokes aside, as a fairly active contributor to Solus, I can say for certain that work is being done on the things you've outlined. As Josh and Bryan have mentioned, though, we're all volunteers right now. The more people step in to help maintain packages that they use, and the more people contribute to Solus projects like Budgie, the more time the core team can spend on infrastructure and shiny new features. Plus, with donations open again, they can now invest in hardware for a faster development cycle! Solus development is far from stopped.

                                4 days later

                                Xrey274 Is it really that innocent to go on a community's own forum and make broad assumptions about the devs not doing enough work to meet your standards of "development"? I'm just looking at this objectively. Nowhere in this post do I see anyone getting "defensive" as you say. All I see is people expressing their objective views on the matter, which comes from both maintainers & devs and some users as well. If you call being given objective facts getting defensive then I suppose that's your own prerogative, but I would hope that at the very least, you appreciate that various users took the time to read and reply to your post to shed some light onto the topic at hand. Unfortunately, since you didn't participate, or reply to any comments or offer up a single follow-up question out of curiosity or concern, I don't believe you have any desire to have an open, and honest discussion about this topic. The Solus forums are meant for helping troubleshooting user issues and a place to have meaningful and respectful discussions about Solus, open software, or the occasional off topic discussion. Do please try to keep that in mind for next time.

                                    Xrey274 We get this type of posts on the forums several times a year. You never know which one is a genuine, albeit maybe poorly worded question, and which one is yet another Solus naysayer coming here to stir stuff up (yes, we get those from time to time).

                                    The reason for the 'Over Dramatic' tag is to make it plainly visible for all forum users that there are some factual errors / inconsistencies contained that might be misleading to someone who is not deeply knowledgeable about how Solus operates.

                                      Scotty-Trees eopkg still does a decent job like 99% of the time

                                      Agreed. I've used eopkg ever since I first found out about it, and apart from the occasional dropped connection, it's been remarkably comprehensive, fast, and reliable. And that occasional dropped connection is trivial to restore. This week I installed 3 updates for an average of nearly 500 upgrades each, and did not experience a single dropped connection on any of them.