1. Highly optimized builds for x86 based on Intel's Clear Linux. Clear Linux is consistently the best performing Linux distro in Phoronix tests. Provides near-instant boot times on Solus.
2. A usable Gnome environment out of the box without the need for a lot of extensions to get things like a decent dock or system tray icons back.
3. A fast package manager that provides all standard Linux apps plus one-click access to third-party apps without bothering with snaps and flatpak.
As opposed to a distro like Arch which is bleeding edge rolling release.
Packages are tested and if they cause issues they are held back until patched. They are just rammed through. This recently happened with Gnome Web app (aka epiphany) on Solus, which is still on 3.26 because of issues with 3.28 upgrade.
It is the not same as CentOS, an old Ubuntu LTS, or Leap, but it strikes the right balance for me.
If you want, you can also disable app updates on Solus other than critical security updates, creating a de facto leap release.
Austin Rodriguez
Call me when they have Sol package manager and / or budgie 11
David Sanders
Because gnome isn't usable and is killing what makes the open source community worthwhile
Jack Sanders
Solus vs fedora? Lots of things are readily available in rpm and have guides with fedora.
Ethan Perez
Why?
eopkg is already incredibly fast compared to dnf, yum, or apt.
Budgie 10.4 is fine, most Gnome 3.28 apps have been ported over and look fantastic.
Just because Solus hasn't yet shipped it's bluesky next-gen software doesn't mean what it shipping now isn't better than other distros.
FWIW though Solus 4 is expected in the next few weeks.
Jonathan Cook
Solus 4 wont have budgie 11 yet tho right?
Gavin Rivera
Eopkg is shit because I hate typing it. Even if they just renamed it Sol I'd be happy Budget 10.4 is fine but it's not great. It's not even as good as gnome. Everything GTK that isn't gnome is not worth using over gnome.
Call me when they have Budgie 11. I'll be waiting 4 or 5 years.
Mason Clark
I use ubuntu with budgie. Is it ok?
Connor Wilson
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
Ryder Wilson
Default gnome is bad. The GTK stack is still useful and the gnome ecosystem has decent apps.
Budgie just makes the gnome/GTK stack make sense on desktops.
Purism is going with a gnome/GTK default stack on the Librem 5.
Google is going with gnome/GTK for Linux app integration on ChromeOS.
Like it or not, gnome/GTK is not going anywhere.
That being said Solus is the best distro I've seen at handling Qt app integration in the GTK environment, you usually cannot tell a difference between a GTK and Qt app unlike other distros.
Benjamin Flores
Solus doesn't have the packages I use, such as metv, game-data-packager, and it doesn't have a large community I can rely on for support. It's a good distro for people who know what they are doing, but not a good daily driver for people who are just using Linux to get basic work done like me (am tech support gremlin)
Easton Rogers
Budgie is great, even on Ubuntu.
But Solus has a lot of build optimizations for x86 that make it about 2-3x as fast as Ubuntu, even on legacy hardware.
The Solus package manager is also a whole lot faster than apt or snap.
If you like Ubuntu Budgie, try Solus in a VM, you might be surprised with how well it performs even in a VM.
John James
No, Budgie 11 is basically on hold right now.
It was going to be a complete re-write in Qt.
Solus 4 is on the way though.
Sebastian Perez
fuck off, Kevin
Christian Fisher
I found that almost all of my packages I use were available on Solus.
I was worried about that coming from Ubuntu.
Enpass, Spotify, Telegram, CoreBird, Polari, Plex, Firefox are all there OOTB.
Your use case may differ, obviously.
If you still need some obscure packages, I would probably recommend Ubuntu Budgie if you cannot build yourself.
As for community, the few bug reports I have filed with Solus or on Budgie have been responded to by a high level contributor usually within hours. I have several bugs open at Ubuntu and Fedora that have never even gotten a response.
Easton Martinez
>Packages are tested and if they cause issues they are held back until patched Arch has a testing repo, you don't know what you're talking about
Jacob Rodriguez
I'll try it, but don't shill so hard if you want to be able to ever make another thread on solus here.
long time Solus/Budgie user here this happens every thread get used to it
Michael Ward
I get it, yet another Linux distro.
I only ask you to consider Solus:
-from scratch, not a Debian, CentOS, or Ubuntu derivative -ships with a unique GTK3 environment -fast package manager -only end-user distro shipping with Clear Linux optimizations making it super fast
>another there really arent that many, and Solus has been around awhile newfags ruining my board.
Gabriel Hernandez
Cool, if it ever becomes the most popular/supported distro by third-parties I'll switch to it. In the meantime I'll stick with the buntus.
Kevin Watson
>Clear Linux optimizations what are these about?
Easton Price
in fact arch have not only testing but staging as well
Brody Parker
>Default gnome is bad. The GTK stack is still useful and the gnome ecosystem has decent apps. uh no Default gnome is good. The GTK stack is still useful and the gnome ecosystem have abandonware apps with years long bugs.
Brayden Miller
>solus >sol >sun illuminati confirmed
Chase Reyes
Clear Linux is a mostly cloud-based distro from Intel.
It's a reference OS with tons of optimizations for features in Intel x86 chips.
It's basically Intel's attempt to head off ARM in the server sphere by speeding up Linux on x86.
Clear Linux builds Linux libraries and packages with x86 compiler settings set to 11.
The primary developer on Solus is a former Intel open source developer before he was able to quit and work full time on Solus thanks to Patreon.
It is possible to re-build Ubuntu with the same library and kernel optimizations but if you're going to do that you might as well run Gentoo.
If it also possible to install default Gnome on Clear Linux but the swupd package manager is very slow and can't handle individual packages besides flatpaks, so if you're going to do that you might as well run Solus Gnome.
Justin Anderson
>Default gnome is good. The GTK stack is still useful and the gnome ecosystem have abandonware apps with years long bugs. uh no Default gnome is bad. The GTK stack is somewhat useful and the gnome ecosystem has dogshit.
Anthony Robinson
There are dead or dying apps in both Gnome and Qt.
For example, PDFMod on Gnome. Sad.
Andrew Myers
I was cautious leaving buntus too, particular those sweet sweet PPAs.
I haven't missed anything though and the performance improvement is noticeably.
Justin Ward
>Default gnome is bad. uh no Default gnome is good. it just works bad
Luke Cruz
I have the same wallpaper. Good shit.
Hudson Gray
Maybe when Budgie 11 is released and if it turns out to be good. Or maybe when the KDE flavor is properly released.
I don't like Budgie right now for a daily usage, Mate is good but I want something more modern looking, and Gnome is just no. If the Plasma release turns out to be as good as the other ones, it will be a good contender.
Jack Carter
I don't particularly care for the default overly-animated touch-focused layout in gnome.
I always ended up installing Dock to Panel and other extensions to get back to something minimal, sometimes just xfce. Solus is basically what I want OOTB.
I also don't particularly care for how gnome-shell works, or works badly, because it's just so buggy, particularly across multiple monitors. Problems with gnome-shell is what prompted the creator of Solus to write Budgie in the first place.
I found budgie to work exactly the same as gnome with multiple monitors. If budgie can do two monitors with different scaling then I'll use it.
Michael Hernandez
But I'm. It's simply the only Linux distro that looks decent. The only complain I have is about that shitty package manager, they should just drop that pile of shit and get APT
Ian Lee
I wouldn't wait for Budgie 11, not sure if that's going to happen anytime soon. If they do switch to Qt for Budgie 11 I will probably switch to Solus MATE to stay in the GTK ecosystem, just my preference. Solus MATE has a custom MATE menu co-written with the Ubuntu MATE team.
KDE Plasma is available as a preview ISO and in eopkg (sudo eopkg install -c desktop.kde) but a final KDE flavor is not done.
I can't install it. I'm using usb and did everything as instruction said, but nothing happens. No boot.
Joseph Wright
Solus 3 runs on X, Wayland support is coming.
You either have to chose the problems with X or the problems with Wayland when running different monitors.
YMMV based on your setup which one is better for you.
I find managing X with xrandr to be more granular than Wayland.
Josiah Flores
You're retarded, then. Can't help that.
Ryder Sanchez
eopkg is much faster than apt.
It would be nice if Solus had access to apt, .deb, and .rpm but I've found most everything I need in Solus's repos and the community to be responsive to new package requests.
There is snap and flatpak support, for what that's worth.
I had to give up PDFmod, which was really old, build it myself, or swtich to PDFsam, which was fine.
Chase Williams
Try a different USB stick.
Try a different port.
Check your BIOS/EFI setting.
I would recommend IRC for live support with installation.
#solus on Freenode
Blake Price
>overly-animated click it off >touch-focused applications grid does not make it touch-focused >I always ended up installing Dock to Panel and other extensions to get back to something minimal, sometimes just xfce. you're doing it wrong if you want xfeces use xfeces, it's stupid to use gnome as xfce
1. I don't like some compiler options in particular packages and i'm not going to compile it manually every update 2. Anything Gtk can suck my balls When budgie will finally switch to qt in budgie 11(if it even going to happen at all), then i'm most likely will give it another chance, but for now i'm satisfied by manjaro kde.
Camden Kelly
It reminds me that SunOS/Solaris/OpenSolaris are dead and I don't want to use distros that give me depression.
Ethan Ortiz
who cares about that botnet.kek shit kys cuks
Gabriel Nelson
Does the file manager have a search function? That's the only thing that matters.
Christian Cox
>systemd >pulseaudio >openssl i'll stick with gentoo thanks
Isaiah Long
Fuck off Kevin. I thought your shilling contract with solus devs ended.
Nicholas Gonzalez
No, it is still very useful and fast on AMD.
However it will not take advantage of some of Intel's custom x86 instructions in some applications.
Adam Hill
Solaris is still very alive. 11.4 beta is out. It runs Gnome 3.26. It just costs $1,000 USD.
OpenSolaris is still alive as the illumos kernel with several actively developed illumos distros, e.g. SmartOS, OpenIndiana, OmniOS, DilOS, Tribblix, and XStreamOS.
Budgie is available for Gentoo but only in the Sabayon overlay
I would be interested to see an optimized Gentoo build go head-to-head with Solus and it's optimized compiler settings.
Julian Garcia
ok ill bite. i use manjaro, i like it because its simple to install and has a LOT of packages.
aside from the packages what will i notice diferent? just the increased performace? can i install xfce on it?
Matthew Rodriguez
Solus has many but not all packages you will find on Arch or Ubuntu.
You will notice the increased performance. You might be able to achieve similar optimization by rebuilding your high-demand apps in Majaro. Someone has also ported the Clear Linux kernel to AUR: aur.archlinux.org/packages/linux-clear/
You can build XFCE for Solus but it is not supported:
I see you mentioning that it's based on Intel's Clear Linux, how does it perform with Ryzen? Has anyone tested KDE on Solus?
Cooper Perez
I moved to it a while back but then I spilled water on the laptop I was using it on. It was far more stable than Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, despite being a rolling release. Can't wait until I can move back to it. I'm stuck on OS X for now, which is okay, but not ideal
Landon Rogers
Solus is not exactly based on Clear Linux, it uses the same compiler and similar kernel optimizations.
Wait, it uses the Clear Linux compiler, which was made by Intel, and Ryzen performs well? Do you have any links or pics comparing Ryzen performance to Intel performance on Solus?
Ok, so buggy with my DE, and won't perform as well on Ryzen compared to Intel Yeah thanks but no thanks
Cameron Edwards
Solus and Clear Linux use gcc 7/8 with special platform optimizations enabled in glibc. They don't use Intel's own proprietary C compiler.
I don't have any specific Intel v. Ryzen for Solus, just those stats for the best Linux distros on Ryzen showing Solus to be consistently at or near top.
It's worth noting that AMD still licenses it's x86 instruction set from Intel, so they get some new x86 features, but they are just not going to get the best in the latest Intel chipsets. Whether or not that extra feature in Coffee Lake really makes a difference, probably not unless you are running massive server farms.
Jace Bennett
Eh, it was faster in certain tests but I others Ubuntu was faster than Clear, also does Solus have the same issue as Clear where it won't work with Nvidia or Radeon hardware?
Tyler Diaz
"won't perform as well on Ryzen"
The two tests from Phoronix I've posted above show Clear Linux and Solus lead other distros on Ryzen. It's still consistently the fastest. The only way you are going to get something faster would be to re-compile optimizations for Ryzen, but AMD hasn't offered or upstreamed optimizations for Ryzen for GCC, there might some coming later in GCC 8.
As a result almost every Linux distro is going to run slightly faster on an Intel chip versus a Ryzen chip, so by your logic you shouldn't use any Linux distros.
AMD have pushed some Ryzen optimizations into clang, which I guess is useful if you're running BSD or some of the obscure Linux distros compiled in clang.
It supports Nvidia and other proprietary third-party drivers with one-click install.
Ditto proprietary apps like Spotify, Skype, Pycharm, Slack.
Ryder Parker
Solus has systemd, therefore Solus is lame.
Michael Lopez
>A fast package manager that provides all standard Linux apps plus one-click access to third-party apps without bothering with snaps and flatpak. Vis is a year old.
Thomas Gomez
Kevin I thought you were done...
Dylan Allen
THIS
Nathaniel Watson
Been testing kde on solus for the past 5 months. It works flawlessly. Ironically enough ive never had kde lock up on me like manjaro and suse on the same rig. If budgie wasnt perfect for id be using kde right now. I just find budgie is better suited to my workflow so ill be switching back soon.
Michael Campbell
ok newbie here, whats the lightest DE for solus? their official website it offers 3: budie gnome and mate.
looking to try solus on my laptop and just want to maximise performace!
Benjamin Wood
Filepicker thumbnails
David Sullivan
>says the windows user
Kevin Bailey
old unfunny meme
Anthony Scott
Manjaro kde doesn't have that problem either. I can't even use any other distro because of how well they've configured kde everything else is completely inferior. Solus is good but it doesn't have enough software. It doesn't even have the kde version of Firefox.
Xavier Sullivan
You can convince me to use this meme with a single answer: Does it have support for the Ralink RT 3290 wireless card? Every single distro I've tried so far doesn't support it, the driver is always dodgy and crappy, or it just straight up doesn't work OOTB. It's the only thing keeping me from switching to gahnoo/lenny
Levi Jackson
>Highly optimized for x86 >x86 HOHoHoHo
Liam Young
Solus? Kevin XDDDDDD top jej
Dylan Robinson
t. Kevin
Ian Butler
Budgie and Mate are the most lightweight DE options on Solus.
Lucas Reyes
Is this the half-mini PCIe card in HP laptops?
Just replace it with an Intel card off eBay for $8. Process takes about 2 minutes.
Search for 717381-001.
No more driver issues on any distro.
Brandon Flores
>imagine valuing the opinion of a goofy looking mother like you
Anthony Taylor
I am pretty sure KDE Firefox is just Firefox with an OpenSUSE patch.
You could probably fork the official Firefox snap to pull and apply those OpenSUSE packages, and then distribute for everyone on every distro.
If you want a light, fast browser on KDE, you may want to look into Falkon, a Qt front-end for Qt5 web engine, based on Chromium.
Blake Gutierrez
I find budgie to run smoother than mate for me but I still like the new menu system they added to mate.
