Thaeris @Harvey,
What would NOT make Solus a ready suggestion to a new user?
Not what I said.
Harvey Reality is if you are new to Linux the only distros you should even think about in my opinion are: Debian, Ubuntu, Pop_OS, fedora, linuxmint and opensuse. I would not recommend Solus for Linus or Luke but I would in general.
I like Linus I am not trying to be toxic but in my opinion the average new user to Linux is better at dealing with issues than him. Linus has absolutely no patience and has done little to no research / googling / asking questions to try and present a novice use case that is unrealistic.
It is a deeply flawed methodology; I have been using Linux since 1998 and I have seen thousands of people who can barely turn their PC on that have asked for help over the years. For me this stance has ruined the series.
While the issue with pop_os and steam should not have occurred in the first place thus avoiding Linus taking action that removed the DE. If he actually read what it was doing it warned him. While you might not understand what the packages are, with how it was phrased I do not understand how anyone would think it was a good idea to proceed. But pop_os have now made it even harder to break your system and from memory debian was going to adopt the changes so it will make all debian/ubuntu based distros harder to break, so it is a net positive.
Solus does many things differently from other distros such as not using grub on UEFI installs to not supporting some things he will probably want such as running inside a type 1 hypervisor (https://dev.getsol.us/T8274)
He would probably want some out-of-tree drivers for his niche setup that Solus would likely not be willing to patch into the kernel (They should be upstreamed so they are part of the kernel not patched by distros) and Solus not supporting DKMS makes this more of a PITA for him to maintain himself.
They will expect everything including the kitchen sink to be in the repository and Solus will never be a distro that does that. I could go on and on, it is very clear to me that it is a bad fit for them which is why I do not recommend it to them but I do in general.