Building An Alternative Ecosystem

Gnome: "Extensions are bad! Themes are bad! Users choices are bad! Wait, where did everyone go?!"

All joking aside, it seems like the writing was on the wall for a while now, it was all just a matter of time before upstream caused a big enough shift that alienates users enough so that a split was almost enviable. Being what the open source community is, it's only natural now to pursue a new path for Solus going forward. What exactly that will all look and feel like I have absolutely no idea, but I'm curious to follow along and see how it all develops over the coming months and years to come. Remember, Solus is going to be around for a while!

Y'all do some great work, and I'm always happy to hear about any news or progress or thoughts related to the Solus project. It probably wasn't easy, but I feel you all made the best choice for the vision that you have for the desktop and I look forward to seeing how things go from here moving forward. Y'all have my respect, my gratitude and my support!

My biggest concern is about the look and feel, but I know you won't disappoint us.
This is a gigantic change for budgie, and it will affect not only Solus, but other distributions as well, I'm optimistic and excited to see what lies ahead of us... since gnome ship is sailing off in another direction.

This is very good move in long term for us users at least I see it this way. As a long time GNOME user last version release was so bad, that I moved to Budgie and I love it. It's very intuitive and productive compared to GNOME 40 with lost it's all pros and started to become irritating. So, fingers crossed for You guys&gals.

Hi, all.

I think the linked post was really well explained and completely justified. It sounds like Solus is trying to embrace new technologies and drop main effort support for harder to maintain solutions. It's great to see the move towards Rust. I fully support the Devs/ team, and look forward to the future of the distro. Be great to see a rough roadmap, when things settle down.

Well done, all.

Chris
chris_debian
2E0FRU

This will be a big task, but I think the Solus team has demonstrated that they can put in years of consistent effort. This is exciting!

I'm super excited, especially for Budgie. As I've stated in other forums, I also think it would be super cool for increased collab between #TeamSolus and System76's Jeremy Soller and company. Jeremy is working on Redox OS and the thought of the potential synergy between these top shelf devs is truly exciting. Can't wait to see where this goes.

B and Josh, I think if you had one or two more (higher) monthly tiers at OpenCollective, individuals would support. I guess I can look if there is a name your monthly donation category too.

jppelt B and Josh, I think if you had one or two more (higher) monthly tiers at OpenCollective, individuals would support.

There's no upper limit on the Crew tier afaik. We don't have any plans for higher tiers at the moment, but we appreciate your support!

It's a very, very good idea.

I am all for it. Drop the 'crud' and move onward! ️

JoshStrobl I have faith that you will do what is best to keep the Budgie desktop environment flowing smoothly (It is in good hands).

I support @JoshStrobl in his decision as well. The point behind Linux is choice. Taking that away will make people go elsewhere. Can't wait to see Budgie 11.

Adding my support to Josh and Beatrice, agreed with the arguments presented and fully back the devs
decision to push forward in a new direction.
Its an exciting time to be part of the Solus community. Sadly I'm not a programming guru but you have my moral and if needed, financial support going forward. Go for it

As long as I can use Vimix on Budgie I'm happy *

(* Comment voted least useful comment in September 2021)

The problem itself it is not theming... gnome devs are hard to work, a bit arrogant, and don't like different opinion, it doesn't look like a community project;
And theming is too the problem... system76 has offered help with theming, as some others, and they insist in not working together, they want to send their libadwaita down our guts, liking or not, and worst, they want it to be implemented as the only way to experience an GTK+ app... take as example KDE, they never forced anyone to use breeze, it is their main appearance, but you can change that easily within their config app, gnome actually has hidden this possibility from us.
Removing freedom of choice, is removing the essence of our community, the only choice is to move away, and wait.

as I understand it, GTK themes were always sort of a hack (?) but from a user perspective they always worked well. all the complaints I've heard about themes seem to follow a pattern of "well, it makes it hard to do x" without any questioning of whether it made sense to do x in the first place.

icon packs have wildly different ideas for their icons! our icon buttons in our GtkHeaderBars might not make sense!

I could rant about my issues with headerbars, but basically, GtkMenuBar doesn't have this problem and I don't see a good reason to move away from it.

users' themes will cause our custom styling to break!

who thought it was a good idea to allow GTK programs to override colours in the first place? what benefit does this give? I've yet to see a good example.

I always thought Adwaita was just a bit of a weird theme and headerbars a bit of a weird idea until I used a friend's recent Mac laptop and realised that Gnome is just trying to rip off MacOS. now it all makes sense and it's frankly pretty embarrassing. how about we just build something better than Mac or Windows instead of just copying?