Good morning! I probably should have joined this forum sooner. I've had Solus installed and used regularly for 15 months and had a VM for what feels like forever ago, prior. I was once a server engineer early in my career for an organization that used mostly OpenSUSE/SLES and a few Ubuntu servers. Pretty uncommon for a US company in the mid 2000s. I'm pretty far removed from the *nix life these days, but I still like to play in the sandbox from time to time. After all, I've been playing with the Linux kernel since the 90s, breaking the family computer many times haha.

Anyway, the sole purpose of Solus for me is to have a usable desktop experience for my dedicated garage PC. It's a little Zotac mini PC with an i5 and 8GB. The weak link is really the mechanical hard drive. I need to remote to and from it, be able to run my web browser of choice (Chrome) for music and quick Google searches/parts lookups, and print.

I am soon retiring my gaming rig in favor of a new build, and would like to turn my old fileserver (also a former gaming rig) into a Linux host and replace all my Windows sync tools with rsync or something (I have a NAS in the garage for DR...because nerd).

I'm just curious how you all use your instance of Solus and hoping you don't keep it vanilla like mine!

    harner I'm just curious how you all use your instance of Solus and hoping you don't keep it vanilla like mine!

    I use Solus in parallel with Windows 11 (Dell Optiplex Micros sitting side-by-side), switching back and forth from one to the other during the course of the day, perhaps using one for Steam and the other for e-mail, browsing and word processing. I don't do anything demanding with either. Both are vanilla builds for the most part, with minor settings tinkering, by design. Because I have both set up more-or-less identically, I can move from one to the other without disruption, and which computer I'm using for which purpose on this day or that is more-or-less random.

    Recently, frustrated by the difficulties of self-maintaining the Edge browser as a private eopkg, I have been using Ubuntu Budgie 22.04 LTS a lot, and may cut over to UB at the end of the year if Microsoft has not released a Snap or Flatpak by that time.

    I also have two Dell Latitude 7000-series laptops, both currently running Windows 11. I spent two weeks evaluating Linux for use on the older of the two Latitudes, which is used as a remote laptop at a railroad museum where I spend two days a week and for travel. Linux battery life continues to be 70-75% of Windows 11 battery life and runs hotter, despite improvements in the kernel. In my case, battery life and heat are a deal-breaker. Windows 11 is back on the Latitude as of yesterday, and I have no plans evaluate again unless there is a dramatic change in Linux battery efficiency.

    I came to Linux (via Unix) somewhat by accident after I retired in 2006. A friend's son set him up with a home-built Ubuntu build after my friend retired, and he was quickly in over his head because the university where he taught used tightly controlled Windows. I had a spare computer at that point and set it up with Ubuntu so that I could learn enough about Ubuntu to help him out. Over the course of a few years, I got interested in Linux more generally, looked for a disto I wanted to use for myself, and settled on Solus Budgie in 2017. For me, Solus Budgie is a near-perfect desktop environment.

    At this point, I am coming to what I think will be the next fork in the road. I am 75 and decided that I am not going to try to maintain Windows and Linux running in parallel indefinitely, as I have been doing for years. Within a year or two, I am going to slim down to one Optiplex and one Latitude (or maybe just one Latitude), and, when I do, make a choice between Windows and Linux going forward.

    So which? I'm not sure yet, but probably Windows, to be truthful.

    harner Zotac mini PC with an i5 and 8GB. The weak link is really the mechanical hard drive.

    Have you considered installing a minimal SSD instead? Dirt cheap these days.

          tomscharbach

          Fascinating. 75 years old and still playing in the sandbox! That's awesome. I couldn't agree more about Solus being a great desktop distro. I've used many flavors of Linux, and even for a while thought converting distros like Slackware and Arch into a desktop distro would make me part of the cool kids club. Now I just want something to work out of the box with minimal effort.

          I'm also surprised that Windows 11 has better battery performance.

          I put SSD's in nearly everything that has had a mechanical hdd for the last 10+ years. But, this system is "sealed" and it was cheap on ebay. The hdd isn't a performance bottleneck for what I do, but the day it becomes one is the day it gets upgraded lol. Or the system swapped for some kind of solid state mini pc or even a raspberry pi.

          Thanks for sharing your story!

              harner All of my PCs are either Solus or Windows, and I only keep Windows around for gaming. I've got an HP Envy Tower (my wife's) that has Solus Budgie as her daily on a 2TB HDD and Windows for gaming on a 3TB HDD. An HP Mini (think stream netbook) with Budgie as my primary WFH set up, a Lenovo IdeaPad with Solus Plasma on an m.2 as my daily whatever and for packaging/testing for Solus, it has a separate 500GB SSD with Windows for firmware updates and gaming on the go. I'll probably nuke Windows sooner because I only game through Stadia on that laptop, and I can do that just fine in Solus. I've also got a early 2009 iMac that now runs MX Linux, an HP Pavilion with Windows only as my dedicated gaming rig, and our family PC that has drives with Windows and MX in it. My wife thinks I have a problem because I keep salvaging these older machines, but I don't think you can ever have too many.
              With all that, Solus is still the primary daily driver for all the PCs that are used regularly, for work, schools, bills, web browsing, got, and all that. It just works wonderfully. MX is the outlier, and that's mostly because my son needed specific software that was only available as .deb or .rpm and I didn't want to maintain it specifically for his use. The iMac only had 4gb of ram, and while Solus Mate ran fine, I just don't like the Mate DE and MX did an amazing job with XfCE, it runs like a champ on that old thing.

                harner I'm also surprised that Windows 11 has better battery performance.

                My experience on my laptop is W11 will last about 3-4 hours while Solus averages around 2.5 hours. Keep in mind, this is a low end $350 laptop that was never going to have all day battery life.

                  harner I'm also surprised that Windows 11 has better battery performance.

                  I think, to be fair, that it varies from laptop to laptop, depending on a lot of technical issues involving hardware and firmware interactions, and the way in which the laptop is used.

                  Based on what I've consistently read over the last several years, though, Linux usually gets less battery life on Intel-only computers than Windows does. Intel has worked hand-in-hand with Microsoft to tune the interaction between Windows and Intel components to save power, and that makes a difference. In my case, Dell does a good job of keeping drivers/firmware up-to-date on Intel/Windows business computers, and that makes a difference, too. Other OEM's might not tune their laptops as aggressively and results might be quite different.

                  I can't speak to AMD or to NVIDIA.

                  I would not rush to generalize from my experience. I ran tests approximating my actual use (e-mail, browsing, Steam and Zoom) that took 3 hours each to run. I repeated each test cycle three times for each OS to reduce the risk of outliers. Linux results averaged 73% of the Windows baseline. But, again, that is testing of a particular use case on a particular laptop, and I would be careful about drawing general conclusions from my testing.

                    harner I use Solus continuously since 2017, I do not dual boot. This is where I do all my work as a health researcher, mainly working with R. This is the right balance between updated packages, together with overall snappiness of the system.

                    All troubles I really run into over the years, were solved by eopkg reverting abilities.

                    Pretty happy with it, also Budgie all the time. It is a very interesting feeling when you update your computer and the whole system becomes a tiny bit faster than before the update, whereas in Macs and specially on Windows it is often the opposite.

                        These days, after my laptop gave up the ghost, I only have a single PC, which I use to dual-boot Solus and Windows 10.
                        I only start Windows when I absolutely have to for some (multiplayer) game that won't work on Linux (or with extremely poor performance); and am incredibly grateful to Valve for their outstanding work making it possible to play almost everything I want on my favorite OS. Soon(ish) I want to finally upgrade my PC hardware, and since a translation layer will then be even more unnoticeable, I might ditch Windows completely.
                        Apart from that I mostly spend my PC time browsing the web and working on Solus (updating/fixing packages, minor code contributions, etc.), sometimes embarking on a spur of the moment project, which can involve anything from image manipulation, drawing, to music production, 90% of which ends in the bin in the end 😃
                        So yeah, pretty basic, uneventful usage, for which I want a system that stays out of my way and doesn't need constant tinkering (and when it does require tinkering, I try to fix it so next time it doesn't; ideally for every user)

                        I mainly use Solus through out the day, for studying, listen to music, working, etc, but i also have a other partition for W11 to runs some games that don't have support for Linux (anti-cheats), if i could i'd only use Solus because it just works great in my Lenovo Ideapad 3i, bluetooh works better and i'm more used to the Solus way. Also, it's very nice to see some of you that are enthusiasts on this open source world, i'm just 24 e my journey only began like 4-3 years ago when i was introduced to Debian, lot's to learn form now on.

                        I personally only use Solus at home (no dual boot); I switched to linux years ago because of a crash disk and I was too lazy to look for the restoration DVD of my laptop to restore my system so I downloaded and installed Linux Mint on a USB stick until I purchase & install a new SSD for my laptop then since my wife didn't complain about it, I decided to install it on the SSD once I got it. Then a couple of years later when my laptop had to be replaced, the first thing I did was to wipe windows and install another distro which was Solus. This was in very early 2017 and we are using it daily since then without encountering any major issue !

                        I have to admit that I also have a windows laptop from my company but it's only used for my job.

                        I had put Mint on an old laptop I use for traveling and don't mind if it gets beat-up/breaks. With the pandemic, returning to it a few years later, only to find there wasn't a means to update it from its current state (WTF?).

                        So went looking for something more manageable in this regard, and happened upon Solus (primarily a windows user).

                        Beginner friendly, compatible enough, and doesn't demand more from me than copying a line of code now and then.

                        And it worked. Covers the basics with minimal fuss.

                        And then I have a collection of older machines that parallel all of the Windows releases and lack of drivers (sniff... the dual P3 server board just died). Some get applianced into DAWs (Windows software still holds a considerable edge here), some into graphic design workstations (not using Solus specifically, but OSS is comparable enough so that move may be happening soon enough), game machines (the emulators available out of the box with Solus are pretty good), and my main file server/web machine.

                        I'm noticing most of the software I already use is part of the Solus software package (with one or two stragglers), so I am eyeing putting Budgie there and dual boot some flavor of windows for those situations where I can't be arsed to make a program work in linux.

                        So no, pretty vanilla, which is EXACTLY what I wanted from an OS. I no longer have the time or energy to force things to work, figure out a decent upgrade path, or hunt drivers all weekend long. Nevermind adding yet another machine to my hoard for lack of drivers or obsolete OS. Everything is overpowered for most of my uses now as it is (but just powerful enough to run Windows smoothly). I'm hoping Solus will be my set it and forget it OS.