I'm planning on posting a review of Solus on my blog. Feedback welcomed.
Looking for Mr. Good Distro, or how I stopped worrying and learned to love the Solus Distro
(Ok, no more metaphors)
Searching for a Linux desktop distribution? The good news? You have lots of choices. The bad news? You have lots of choices, like hundreds.
A few months ago, a circa 2010 Macbook Pro came into my possession. It had a dead battery and hard drive (the spinny kind). For fun, I thought I would see if I could update it and maybe give it to someone who couldn't afford a laptop. Forty-five dollars later and 20 minutes of fiddling, it had a new battery and 120GB solid-state drive.
[picture of laptop here]
Now, what do I use for an operating system?
Well, it's a Mac so let's install a Mac OS. After a few hours, I had the "High Sierra" version of the Mac OS installed. It was abysmally slow and rebooted often. It was not looking good so far.
Then I started trying Linux distributions. A quick Internet search and the usual distributions popped up, including Unbuntu, Linux Mint, MX Linux, Manjaro, Zorin, Elementary, etc.
To my surprise, most of these distributions would not boot. Most would simply go into the void, although a few were kind enough to print an error message. A few did work, including Manjaro, Elementary OS, and Fedora Workstation.
After installing a few dozen different distros I found anything Debian, Arch, or Unbuntu derived would not boot or was unstable after installation.
Of the 3 distros above, Fedora seemed the most stable and reliable. It also booted the fastest of the three. However, the daily updates were distracting. Also, it would occasionally crash using the Wayland version of the Gnome desktop. It was stable using the X11 version of the Gnome desktop. It wasn't perfect, but then again, the hardware was 12 years old. I probably couldn't expect more.
[picture of Fedora here]
Then one day while browsing Distro Watch, I saw a distribution called Solus. Being an independent distribution caught my attention. So I flashed a USB with the .ISO and started the boot.
A few seconds in the screen scrambled with random characters. Great, another, dead-on-arrival boot. And then just as fast, the desktop appeared.
Damn! That was fast, and from a flash drive no less. The wallpaper sucked but that was easy to change. After about 15 minutes of driving the live ISO, I decided it was worth installing. Ten minutes later and it was installed and running.
Of course, the first thing is to update the operating system. I used the software center desktop application to do this. It took a while. The .ISO has not been updated in over a year so there was a lot to download and install. However, the process was entirely hands-off.
[picture of Solus]
So why is Solus better than the previous Fedora install?
Quiet. Fedora was always nagging me for updates. Solus updates are once a week.
Stable. Fedora on rare occasions would lock up.
Fast. Yeah, everybody says they're fast but on my old hardware, you can see and feel the differences between distros.
Vanilla Gnome Desktop. Solus has several desktop distributions including their flagship Budgie desktop. The Gnome desktop is minimal, which I like. They didn't try to, "Doll it up" with useless crud. I appreciate that.
The package manager is fast. Much faster than DNF or APT. And the commands are simple words like, "install" and "remove".
Less Crud. I could have done without the Libre Office Suite and some of the other programs like HexChat, but otherwise, it's relatively lightweight compared to other distros.
Boots Fast. It takes 20 seconds to get to the login screen on a 12-year-old chunk of hardware. Nice!
Sleeps without crashing. Solus is the only OS that sleeps without crashing on this hardware. Every other distro, including Fedora would hang when waking up from sleep.
Mostly what I like about Solus is that I don't have to manage Solus. It feels like a quiet, dutiful partner, ready to serve at a moment's notice.
