Long post ahead....you've been warned.
Glad to have Solus back and operational again, it was a really interesting time between January and today.
When the outage first happened, I had no idea what was going on. I couldn't update my packages, I couldn't connect with phabricator, and couldn't check the forums to see what was happening. I felt like a little ship lost at sea.
I ended up moving to EndeavourOS and was happy there for a bit, but it didn't feel "right". I couldn't replicate the performance I got from Solus and couldn't find the right blend of packages/services and minimal resource usage on Plasma I was looking for. Plus, the fire hose of daily updates from Arch can be a lot to keep up with.
I tried LXQt on Endeavour and it was good, but still wasn't quite right. I tested Lubuntu and Kubuntu in VMs. Kubuntu didn't provide any benefit or reason to move from Endeavour, but Lubuntu I could set up almost identical and have 70% of the resource usage compared to Endeavour with LXQt. I ended up moving to Lubuntu for a bit. It was great, light, performant, and I was able to theme it the way I liked. It still didn't fit though. I'd added the latest kernel, moved to Kwin, switched to Nala (the apt wrapper), and it was stable. But I missed the quality of life things I'd grown accustomed to with Plasma and Wayland. I couldn't find a way to replicate them with Lubuntu. It worked great, but it didn't feel right.
When I first heard the news that Solus was alive again, I was thrilled! Then I felt uneasy. Would it just die again in a few months? Was it here to stay? Did I want to go back after the way things went with the lack of communication to the users and the months of downtime?
All this to say that I'm now back home on Solus Plasma, and the main reason for it is this community. Through my Linux journey, I've learned how to quickly get my systems installed, themed, and overall set up how I want. The one thing I couldn't find was a community that felt so welcoming, friendly, and helpful as we have with Solus.
I still have work to do with themes, config files, and getting the dev tools back to start building packages again, but it's good to be home.
