
Solus 1.0 Released - forlorn
https://solus-project.com/2015/12/27/solus-1-0-released/
======
brianclements
Definitely looks beautiful. But most of the time I see another Linux distro, I
feel like the greater linux community is just spreading it's resources thinner
and thinner and wasting time on porting/recreating the file manager and other
various operating system components and major applications to the new system
just to justify cosmetic differences. I feel like there is so much redundant
work being done, especially in the packaging category. I feel like with the
new popularity of containers, the design of new operating systems should focus
on a plug-in system where package managers are obsolete and everyone only has
to make applications for architectures, not distros. That way all that energy
can be shared on common code that gets used exactly the same way. Only then,
can visual elements and gui things be layered on top. In other words, push the
all the forking away from the OS and onto the GUI or X11 layer.

~~~
michaelmrose
I feel like your suggestion is extremely naive and wasteful of both hard drive
space, transfer, and ram.

Please explain how you can put an entire system together that way in a non
stupid way.

~~~
nailer
> hard drive space, transfer, and ram

are all incredibly cheap when compared to human effort in dependency
management with dynamic libs. And most Linux packages managers don't elegantly
support installation of multiple versions of libs (libfoo and libfoo123 isn't
elegant). The way you'd fix that is similar to what the OP is proposing.

Of course, there's many other concerns: but it's not entirely unreasonable.

~~~
michaelmrose
Its entirely possible for an individual app to have its deps included without
forcing every app to work the same and I'm far from convinced that is a real
benefit. It would be far better to work towards standardization to make
producing a package for multiple distros easier.

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SwellJoe
I'm not convinced that much of the interesting work still to be done is on the
desktop side of things. Gnome is pretty competent. I am sympathetic to the "I
hate change" crowd who were upset by the 2->3 evolution, but I was able to
adapt to Gnome 3 almost immediately, and never had an urge to go back...in
many ways it is superior, and while it was annoying having so much of the
flexibility of Gnome 2 disappear, I've found that in Fedora 23, most of the
stuff that annoyed me with its absence is now available. There remains an
active Cinnamon branch which keeps the old start menu and task bar ideas from
earlier Gnome versions. Solus and Budgie appear to be sticking with the old
paradigm, with a couple of custom add-ons (which almost certainly could have
been simply Gnome add-ons for any distro), so nothing revolutionary there.
And, that's OK, we probably don't need more desktop revolutions at this
juncture.

But, it's just not a compelling story, IMHO. It's a Linux distro, with a
slightly different Gnome desktop. What could possibly compel me to get excited
about that?

It has a new package manager that I haven't heard of, but it seems to be a
very rudimentary thing that does roughly what every other major package
manager does, only without the decades of experience and bugfixing that have
gone into RPM/dnf or dpkg/apt. If it were based on nix or guix, or similarly
provided reproduce-able builds or some other novel concept, _that_ would be
interesting. I can't find any docs about the package manager to clarify if
maybe it actually does do something novel. The description on the website
makes me assume it is not merely simple but simplistic.

I guess I sound kinda harsh, and I don't really mean people shouldn't work on
stuff that they find fun. I just can't see from the description why it is
exciting or novel. I may just be jaded from having seen literally hundreds of
distros come and go in my 20 years of Linux usage.

~~~
iheartmemcache
I've been using Linux for about that long (both in recreational and
professional capacities), along with everything from IRIX 6.5 to back when
Solaris was SunOS.

On the desktop side of things this does offer something that XFCE, E, GNOME
2||3, or KDE has -- something pretty enough to ship to an end-user. This isn't
objective analysis, I'm not a UI expert, and I don't have metrics to back this
up. It looks pretty, in the same way that OS X looks pretty. I'm going to bet
I've tried as many distros as you, as many DE's, as many WM's. I bet you
remember RPM-hell after buying Red Hat at CompUSA too. This 'slightly
different' UI is _finally_ aesthetically pleasing enough where I'd feel
comfortable giving this to grandma, my niece, or use in a business environment
(lack of proper AD/GPO tooling that MS has is sorta problematic as YP/NIS and
mounting NFS doesn't seem like the right solution, but that's easy enough to
fix - the 'user adoption for those who don't know what GNU or what apt-get is'
issue is what I'm addressing here).

You're right, it's 'slightly different'. A Lexus ES300 is on the same chassis,
the same engine, and shares the same drive train with the higher end Toyota
Camry's. But those 'slight differences' (trim, maybe upgraded suspension for a
softer ride and less ambient cabin noise) are enough to get the consumer to
use it.

As happenstance, this would occur as Win10 advances into what I argue is a
really reliable, granularly secure, more-open-than-ever platform.

~~~
SwellJoe
That's a confusing assertion, to me. This is no more beautiful than recent
Fedora versions with Gnome 3.

The two are _extremely_ similar in appearance. Very simple, very clean, nice
little calendar, nice sidebar thingy. They are different in functionality
(sidebars on Gnome 3 are for apps...available shortcuts on the left, and
running apps and desktops on the right, and calendar is in the center and pops
out of the top bar), but they look so similar that I could easily mistake one
for the other, when the calendar and such is not open. The status bar and
start menu at the bottom is the only notable difference, and that's certainly
not the difference between "beautiful" and not.

I agree that this desktop looks nice. But, it looks nice in ways that current
Gnome on Fedora looks nice. Clean, unobtrusive menus and status info, etc.
And, I think both are (finally) nicer than Mac OS X. I find Mac OS X (and
Windows) too busy, in comparison. They both look a bit like Android, actually,
which I also like.

Edit: Screenshots of my current, stock, F23+Gnome 3 desktop, so we can be on
the same page about what I'm talking about.
[http://imgur.com/a/j2uRT](http://imgur.com/a/j2uRT)

~~~
iheartmemcache
Ah, I guess my reference point was old. There the discrepancy lay. I hadn't
tried Gnome since 3.1(?) (early 2014? does that sound right?) at which point
it wasn't nearly as clean as your DE (which is super pretty, I'll readily
admit). I think we're really on the same page for the most part.

How much tweaking went into that? Do you have a write-up with what sort of
steps you took to integrate that sort of functionality (added fonts/behavioral
changes/dbus integration type components, etc)?

I'm with you on the "beating OS X" threshold re: UI. Between the whole
Atom/Electron/LightTable type WebKit environments, you can develop on any
machine. Likewise IntelliJ(Cursive for Clojure), emacs and vim all work as
well if not better on Linux. Unless you are tied into Xcode, the development
experience for an engineer is finally desktop-ready as the (very challenging)
OSX-interface parity threshold has been broken.

~~~
SwellJoe
_" How much tweaking went into that?"_

Literally none. This is the default desktop. I installed Fedora 23 yesterday
(and it looks very similar to Fedora 21, which I had before, which I think
looks like default Gnome 3). The theme, background image, fonts, color scheme,
calendar settings, everything is from the standard Fedora Workstation install.
I'm lazy and rarely spend much time tweaking things (my terminal and my vim
have some customization, but even that's minimal), particularly now that it's
all very nice looking right out of the box.

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sciurus
It looks like they have developed their own desktop environment based on GNOME
technologies.

[https://solus-project.com/budgie/](https://solus-project.com/budgie/)

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ecaron
Softpedia has a good article about the history of Solus -
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qXMSxgM...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qXMSxgMeo7IJ:news.softpedia.com/news/Let-
s-Talk-Solus-the-Linux-Distribution-that-Wants-to-Change-the-
Game-482307.shtml+&cd=8&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us) (since Softpedia seems to be down
at the moment.)

~~~
qznc
Thanks, I knew the old SolusOS and was confused about the relationship.

In short: SolusOS became EvolveOS became Solus.

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vbit
Ok so what is Solus? Yes it's an OS as I can see from the home page but what's
the ancestry? Is it too much work to mention 'Linux distro' or 'Linux-based'
on the home page (or any other page of the site for that matter)?

~~~
akovaski
Well, in the blog post that is linked, it does state that

    
    
      Solus is a Linux-based operating system built from scratch for the modern desktop and targeting the x86_64 architecture.
    

Yeah, it should probably should say on the home page, but the site seems to be
partially unfinished in other aspects as well. (The "Why Solus?" and "Budgie"
pages even state that they aren't complete)

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rubyn00bie
I really like the design.

To be honest, a pleasant UI (by _my_ tastes) is what has kept me away from a
Linux desktop. I'll have to give it a shot sometime this week.

Though, one thought, maybe someone will use: I do wish people would do more of
these sorts projects based on a BSD variant than Linux.

