Solus 2017.01.01 Review

Installed Solus on my laptop as a secondary OS after Windows 10, replacing my Ubuntu Mate install.

Everything went quite smoothly. Package management is quite painless. One thing I'd like to see is when searching for packages in eopkg cli or the "software center" gui that it indicate to you if the package is already installed in the sort of overview mode.

Everything seems quick, clean and smooth in using the DE. It's not perfect, but it isn't buggy, and it's very usable. Pretty much stays out of the way and does what I want.

The only slight downside is package availability. I'm spoiled with Arch being able to get everything under the sun easily from the repos+AUR. With Solus, the package availability is much, much more limited. However, it is extremely well curated. I found I could find almost everything I wanted/needed because mostly all the best apps in the various categories were there. So I got 90% or so of what I needed, and I'm sure that in due time, the few things I'm missing will become available.

Overall, I'm quite impressed. I tried installing Suse Tumbleweed but as it was downloading and installing over a GB of packages I realized that I've come to appreciate the stripped down/minimalistic approach of Arch, and was regretting seeing a lot of backend utilities and other things getting installed that I didn't want. Also I was thinking about how much I didn't want Yast. On the one hand OpenSuse seemed like a very pro mainstream distro with lots of functionality, but for me it just felt like bloat. Fortunately the installer froze up after downloading and installing about a GB.

I burned Solus to a usb and installed it offline in 10 minutes. It's much more familiar to me in the sense of being streamlined and minimalistic. So far a great fit.