Sunday, February 11, 2018

Continuing foray back into the linux world: Solus

So Elementary OS was fine!  Gorgeous linux.  I wanted something a little different.

Elementary OS is based on Ubuntu, all well and good as Ubuntu does excellent work to put out a version of linux that everyone can use, everyday.

So after I got ElementaryOS working juuuuuuuuust the way I wanted it to work, I scrapped it and installed Solus.

Solus is an equally pretty OS, very nice to look at and the UI is somewhat configurable/theme-able based on Gnome/GTK3+...  But Solus is not otherwise based on an existing distribution.  It is a hand-crafted linux (https://solus-project.com/home/) that has its strong and weak points as almost any linux does.

Strong points:
1. hand crafted with love
2. attractive
3. low resource usage
4. rolling updates
5. nothing set in stone

Weak points:
1. nothing set in stone
2. uses its own packaging system
3. limited applications/libraries in software store/repositories

Solus supports multiple UIs, including Mate, Cinnamon, etc.  I chose the home-crafted UI called Budgie.  It is pretty much gnome compatible (based on GTK3+).  I have read that in the future (next year?) it will be converted to QT (of KDE underpinnings fame).  That could have some serious "native" application repercussions, it will be interesting to see how it is handled.

To date I have been able to get my computer back to where I can do everything I want to do, email (though I preferred ElementaryOS's homegrown email application over Thunderbird), browsing, gaming (Star Stable Online and Diablo 3, plus native linux games on Steam), coding (some nice syntax editors available), and office-work (excel, word, etc.).

That is pretty much all I *need* to do on this computer and I am able to do it.

It has been pretty stable, except for one update that hosed my task bar a little, but that was very easy to fix.

INSTALLING Solus gave me a bit of a headache, but in the end it turned out that it was my fault for a lack of observance.  Once I looked CLOSELY at the installation application I figured out what I was doing wrong and remedied the situation.  Also, the fancy automated disk took isn't half bad... and I was able to mount my extra disks and shove my documents, and other large data folders off onto other drives, create a gaming drive, etc.

One weird thing, the choices of disk format support that comes with Solus was different from Elementary OS and is likely very different from Ubuntu.  It was a little annoying to not have the FULL RANGE of file system types to choose from when initializing my drives.  Like... why ReiserFS (3) and not Reiser4?  Why not XFS?  I don't NEED those and, in fact in the case of some Steam games cannot USE those file systems because of their addressing, so I just ended up using venerable ext4 for everything.  It works.  I would like to have tried btrfs though...

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