Solus Mate---An Under-Appreciated and Hidden Gem
AWESOME THINGS:
*Bare metal. Wiped HDD, gpt-formatted, installed a grub distro first in order to make Solus install next to it. The inverse has never worked for me. I forced Solus into its own /boot and /ext4 and shared swap. I disabled the boot ans esp flags in Grub Distro. Let Solus have the boot. RESULT? Complete success and a true dual boot on the same disk with automatic bios boot menu.
--Caja well-integrated here. It was not in budgie for me.
--Love the defaults but replaced Pluma with Gedit. Thats about it. I prefer Evince, but giving Atril a chance. Notice no measurable difference. I did hear Artil does documents with fillable fields (evince does not) but have not proved it to myself.
Everything just damn works. Hey hoppers, myself included, when was the last time you said that about a distro?
-My Brother monochrome already had an eopkg because I harangued the crew years ago at the infamous T44 thread.
-Most distros I hopped lately (not Solus) have a native package (pretty all in one) to accommodate most Epson scanners and thus deprecating Iscan and Utushi. It’s called EpsonScan2. I found it in Flatpak to my dismay. Not as efficient as Utsushi but then again I don’t have to rig and symlink folders/files to make Utsushi see scanner any more. "Push" as they say in Blackjack. I despise the push to Flatpak and Snaps and prefer native and curated but times change I know.
-Super key still brings up app menu. Software Center and Control Center prominent there. It’s the Solus menu we know and love and I hope they never change it. Dear Solus: you are the only app menu I’ve seen that is not redundant or overkill.
-First time using a dock. Big fan of plank.
-Default terminal is mate-terminal and it looks and acts like my beloved boring gnome-terminal. Happy. Strangely I see no difference. Dear Solus did you just change the name?
-Gnome-disks is already here and that’s fantastic.
--Like all Solus distros, I don’t make any resolution/pixel adjustments. This thing just is just rendered so perfectly and makes itself inviting on any display. MATE is fluid and beautiful. Default fonts, like Budgie are sensible. I do bump them all up a size or two because I’m not 20...but fonts, dpi, resolutions still the best I’ve ever seen. Never had rough pixelization or low res on any solus I’ve run. I’ve never knew what Solus’s secret was there…
-shilling for my preferred password manager above😉 It's an appimage that works in my flatpak browsers. Native keepassxc and flatpak keepassxc would not work for all browsers in Budgie. I carried this mindset over to MATE.
-I hear the talk about ‘old’ and ‘like Windows’ and ‘out of style’ but don’t believe any of that. This is a hidden gem. It’s customizable enough. The market for Mate is the no frills type. Not sure that’s me ‘cause I love bells and whistles. But I love this. I just do my work. It looks great; I’m not unhappy. MATE does not bite me. It does not get in my way. It does not crash. It does not fail. All apps function.
-Every day I appreciate it more. When the new Budgie .iso comes out my plan was to get back to my first and only love. We are experiencing a trial separation right now because Nautilus degrades the Budgie experience, for me, to a nearly inoperable computing experience. (I know it’s not this way for everyone).
MEH:
-Non-native task bar icons goofy in relation to native task bar icons. Much more uniform in Budgie. This task bar can be easily hid. Devs were thinking ahead😉.
-speaking of task bar you can’t do much with it-- this is tweaked at much as it can be.
-Control Center and Mate Tweaks are no Budgie DS or Budgie CC but they are close.
-Compiz settings is a bunch of micromananging horse hockey and truth be told, of its several tabs, I do not understand a single setting. But don’t really need it.
-I miss Raven but not losing sleep.
-Theming GUI not as finessed as budgie’s and some themes/icons I’ve installed show up as not existing. But since I’m easy to please it’s not a hassle.
-Default picture viewer is Eye of Mate and I haven’t changed it yet but I haven’t warmed up to it. A meh app.
Bottom Line: I could never find a number #2 for Solus Budgie. Nothing came close. We have been joined at the hip since 2017---simply the finest DE I've used even across platforms. I won't rehash how big of a nightmare Nautilus became--enough for me to bolt.
It is well documented here that after Nautilus wigged out I looked really hard to replace Solus Budgie.
Solus Mate was the best distro I found. I tried dozens. A hidden gem and a true everyday operating system, so pretty and hassle-free.
It's not even an underdog; it's really superior to most and not many know it.
I dig it.
edit/my third word was a typo yikes
