I've done a bit of testing recently after the issue of hardware vs. virtual machine was raised. It happens that my recent purchase of a newer DELL Latitude laptop as my daily-driver meant that my former one (a bigger, heavier DELL Precision M4800) has become surplus. That freed it for other uses.
Two things are important, if anyone is to understand the rest of this message. One is that I have several hardware computers here that run Solus. Each of those is fitted with a very small SSD (i.e., 120GB or so), and none of them needs anything bigger, because years ago I installed a NAS device from Synology (Network Attached Storage) that contains four huge (10TB) disks. All of our family photos, music collection, ripped videos, source file archives, git repositories, and backup repositories for all our computers are stored on that NAS. And there's still lots of room for more.
So, when I install a new distro to see how well it would work for me, it's essential that it be able to connect with my NAS using the network file system protocol (nfs). Otherwise I won't be able to easily connect to data I access on a daily basis. That's why I mention any trouble I have doing so when I write about my experiences with a distro, even though I realize that I'm probably one of the few here who use such a system.
The second thing is the metal vs. virtual issue. Even though I now have an unused laptop that I can devote to testing other distros, doing that requires burning a DVD key from the .ISO file, installing it on the one machine that's free to use for that purpose, and replacing what was on it before (which I might have wanted to keep). Testing on a VM is obviously far more convenient. And in a lot of years using VirtualBox for testing (even at work), I'd never had any reason to suspect that its VMs didn't work just like hardware.
With VMs, I'm not limited to just one testing computer. Backups (Snapshots) are trivial to create and restore. And I don't need to remove one distro that I've been testing in order to try out another one. When I am done with a distro, it's easily erased from the VM manager. There are plenty of reasons to test interesting distros by using VMs to run them.
Recently there's been much discussion of the virtual vs. hardware issue, so I thought, "Why not"? I'm not using the DELL Precision laptop for anything else now. It still had Ultramarine Budgie installed from a while ago. So I burned some USB keys and tried a few of the most recent distributions that had given me problems in VMs (mostly having to do with connecting to my NAS). Those that failed in virtual form also failed when installed on that hardware.
That left me wondering if there was something to do with that laptop that was causing the problems. I installed a fresh USB key of openSUSE Tumbleweed, believing that if anything should work well, that would. Again, I was unable to connect to my NAS. It's possible it was a firewall issue, although I'd not configured a firewall for SUSE, and the NAS is simply another URL on my home network, just another computer here, not a distant "cloud."
It had been many years since I'd modified a SUSE firewall, and I remembered that it was very complicated and easy to get something wrong. I didn't want to get involved in that now, so I bailed out and installed what I considered to be my ultimate test of that hardware -- Solus 4.3 Plasma. I already have a USB key for that. And it ran Plasma before, when it was my daily-driver, but I wanted to make sure that nothing had changed -- that it still would.
Needless to say, the installation went without a problem. As most of you know, it was both uncomplicated and very fast from a USB 3.0 key. Since Plasma is on all but two of the computers here, I've installed and configured it many times, so I didn't need to waste time looking for settings, and so on. In less than an hour, I'd installed the OS, updated it, changed some settings, created 10 virtual workspaces, installed macro, installed nfs-utils, installed my macros for bash, added my NAS shares to /etc/fstab, installed aisleriot, kshisen, gnome-mahjongg, and vivaldi-stable, which I configured to match Vivaldi on my other machines.
BOTTOM LINE: None of the installing and configuring caused any drama at all. When I was finished, I started Dolphin, which listed all my NAS shares without my doing anything to make that happen, other than having earlier modified /etc/fstab and issued a mount -a command. And I could open each share and access the contents within them with no trouble.
CONCLUSION: Solus rules! I've lost much of my curiosity about other distros, as well as any interest in trying them for myself. As far as I'm concerned, Solus is not only small, fast, and beautiful, it's curated, refreshed nearly every week, and has been remarkably trouble-free on any computer here -- even on my VMs.
So don't expect to see any more Distro Reviews from me. I simply no longer see a need to do any. And if I do any in the future, for newly released distros that sound interesting, I no longer see a need to write about them.
