Warning ⚠️ Long and winding post ahead. Read at your own risk
Like many users here I'm sure, I'm what you would call a distro hopper. I've never stuck with one thing and one thing only for more than a couple months, at least that was until Solus. Also like many on these forums I first installed Solus Budgie with the 3.9999999 release and became enamored by the Budgie DE, the fork of PiSi, and the individuality that was Solus. I still tried others, Ubuntu Budgie, Manjaro, and even SUSE.
For a period of time, I ran openSUSE as my environment for work and left my Budgie pc idle for days or weeks on end. I kept an extra HDD or two around to throw another distribution on when I felt the urge. One week I'd be booting into Solus, the next week it would be Fedora. Then I'd move to something like Garuda, or Lubuntu, or Arco. Each distro serving its own purpose, each having its own use in my eyes.
Eventually, this basically came to a stop, now I have one or two VMs at a time to play around with other distrobutions, but I rarely, if ever boot anything but Solus. While playing around with Pop Cosmic and Elementary 6 Odin, it hit me, I don't want to hop anymore. Elementary has lofty goals of becoming an entire OS in the same vane as Mac perhaps, and they have a quality product. Pop Cosmic is the closest thing to a likeable Gnome experience I've had out of the box ever, and the auto-tiling is very nice. Each one though just didn't "feel right". I kept thinking, well in Solus this feels a lot faster, or I like this feature, but Solus executed it a little better.
Take Pops auto-tiling, pop_shell, for example. It's lovely, it's well executed, and it's really fun to play around with. I've heard many people complain that when told you can do basically the same thing with this "insert tiling wm" here, they get frustrated because it isn't the same. Well, as someone who didn't use a tiling wm until recently when I started using a Kwin script on my Solus Plasma install, I can honestly say I prefer it to Pop. I get it though, if you were a Gnome DE user, you didn't have a good integrated way to tile windows automatically before Pop, and it comes along and makes Gnome feel good again. But to me, it feels a lot like what Kwin does. Yes it has some better customization and such, but it didn't make me want to switch.
Elementary has retooled their distro with Odin, and it's wonderful. Redefining what it is to have an App store on Linux is no easy task, and I'm sure they have a number of users who are mad at they way they're doing things. But is this really that far of a stretch to me? No. Solus provides a curated app center already. It has a process for inclusion, requirements to stay in the software center, and not everything can make it. Sure, the software center GUI isn't as nice as some Elementary, but the concepts are similar. At the same time though, the App store for Elementary, while curated to a high degree, feels and looks like every other Ubuntu based app center, but with less stuff available. Don't get me started on the differences between apt and eopkg. One is the default, and the other is the clearly better option in my humble opinion. Faster, easier to used more logical, and has never let me down....the there's the default apt.
This is when it really hit me. I've always said Solus is my "forever distro", but I've always kept something else around just in case. I don't want anything else around now. If I have an itch to try some new Gnome thing, I'm not thinking hey let's go grab a Fedora iso, I'm thinking, "well, I still hate Gnome, but just maybe something has changed, let's spin up a Gnome (Solus) VM and give it a go". The same goes for Mate. Sure I'll grab a different distro to check out something like LXQt, Pantheon, or Cinnamon because it isn't available on Solus, but instead of being enticing now, the others just make me want to run back to the comfort of my Solus even faster.
I want to say thank you to the core team, the global maintainers, the package managers, and everyone on the forums who make this distrobution and community feel like home to me.