Solus Project [short review]

gluconolactone · August 18, 2015

Solus Project

This review will be short and from the prespective of someone who hasn't tried that many linux distributions, and is not that deep into the ecosystem. Therefore, I am not familiar with many of the technicalities and as such I will only provide thoughts as to how this distro could serve an average user.

Installation

The installation process did not go as smoothly as I would have expected it to. Coming from the seamless Ubuntu install experience this seemed a little bit more “rugged” per se. Firstly when I arrived at the partitioning screen and the installer redirected me to Gparted, it wouldn't automatically refresh to show me the partitions that I have just formatted, and I would have to exit the installer and restart it. The installer also crashed a couple of times, but in the end all went smoothly – sort of.

In UEFI mode, I would be taken directly to Windows rather than a boot menu, and Solus only showed up when I booted using Legacy BIOS.

Looks

Sure, it's a linux distro, if you don't like how it looks, you can always change it. But in my opinion, Solus looked great out of the box, I only had to change a few settings such as the default icon pack and wallpaper, mind you without installing anything 3^rd party, as some choices of themes and icon packs do come pre-installed.

There was a sense of uniformity to the OS, as all the applications followed a specific design language, which I felt was a problem plaguing other linux distros.

Applications

While Solus already has support for the essential apps such as Firefox and LibreOffice (in fact I wrote this on LibreOffice Writer), it lacks support for apps such as Steam, which is very important for many users. This is because Solus is supposedly built from scratch and as such it does not support the same apps that for example Ubuntu and its derivatives support.

Performance

For the short amount of time I used Solus, it felt snappy. While there were some hickups and slow downs here and there, it was nothing major and didn't severely affect workflow. Being a beta build there is also a lot of room for improvement.

Final Thoughts

Solus is a well-polished distribution that performs well and looks good (subjectively) while doing it, despite its beta status. The developers have scheduled a release date of the final version on the 1^st of October of this year. I would presume it is targeted at average users who would simply like to perform all tasks in the simple GUI without having to get their hands dirty in the terminal.

“The OS will keep out of your way, but do its job when it’s supposed to. How a desktop OS should be, and not having to worry about all the implementation details (sudo whatnow?)”

- Project Founder.

NOTE: I will update this thread if I find anything else that is noteworthy.

rtpb5642 · August 18, 2015

It looks good, i downloaded it to try in a VM

rtpb5642 · August 18, 2015

snip

Remember to follow ur topics

gluconolactone · August 18, 2015

It looks good, i downloaded it to try in a VM

Let me know how that goes for you.

Update: Like I said it is a beta and it shows in some places. For example, I am currently unable to connect a printer to the laptop I have this distro installed on, this is the error message:

1823alex · August 19, 2015

This actually reminded me I needed to throw this in a VM and test it out. It seems to run alright; however it seems extremely buggy: having to click drop downs multiple times or even click back and re-enter info again sometimes. I do like the look of it though.

gluconolactone · August 19, 2015

This actually reminded me I needed to throw this in a VM and test it out. It seems to run alright; however it seems extremely buggy: having to click drop downs multiple times or even click back and re-enter info again sometimes. I do like the look of it though.

It is kind of buggy. I would really wait till October 1st for the final release before using it day to day as a main OS.