With the latest release of Solus, I feel I should ask. I have had my eye on this particular distro for some time now. I even did a test installation about two years ago, but it didn’t feel as complete as I needed it to be.
I am looking for a solid, beginner-friendly rolling Linux distribution for general use. Multimedia, gaming, coding etc. Do you recommend Solus? If so, why? Why not? Looking forward to your thoughts.
I used Solus for a while on my laptop. One day a minor kernel version bump caused my display to stay black. I reported it to the Solus bug tracker and they told me it’s not their problem, and I should deal with the kernel devs. But of course the kernel devs reasonably tell you to deal with your distribution if they’ve modified the kernel, which Solus had.
So I installed Tumbleweed and never looked back. I don’t miss Solus. It was fine, but I don’t trust it now, the way I do trust Tumbleweed.
Ikey being involved again doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence. Josh has been very reliable though.
Drama aside, Solus’ target userbase has always been exactly what you’re describing.
I used it as my main distro for about a year, and moved on right before the “abandonment saga” happened. It was a nice and performant distro, but lacked some stuff I needed, mostly support from a few projects and apps I needed to use.
I wouldn’t recommend it as a main distro for at least 5 years after what happened, but would keep an eye out to use on a spare machine or a VM.
Nowadays I’d either settle on openSUSE Tumbleeweed for rolling-release. I’m personally more insterested in stability though (and not having to update stuff every 2 days or so), so I’m going team Debian.
