Review: Solus 4.7
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On the whole, my time with Solus went smoothly. The distribution provided great hardware support, the desktop was responsive, and the repositories had the applications I wanted to use.
While much of my trial with Solus was a positive experience, I ran into several minor issues which left a bad aftertaste in my mouth and prevented me from wanting to extend my time with the distribution. Looking back on the week I realized that the positive and negative experiences were easily divided into two groups. Almost everything positive I enjoyed about Solus - the hardware support, the quick package management, the system installer, the up to date packages, and the medium-sized collection of software - were all lower-level, mostly behind-the-scenes technical choices. The negative experiences almost all came from Budgie.
Budgie is, for me, far too inconsistent in its visual elements - the theme is all over the place. There are a few too many visual effects tugging at my eyes when I'm manipulating windows. The visual elements are too varied and the default fonts unusually small compared to other desktop environments. I wasn't a fan of the multi-layered window control menus (the menus which appear when right-clicking on an open application's task switcher icon). I also wasn't a fan of having two settings panels, one borrowed from GNOME and one for Budgie-specific settings, while most desktops just need one.
Using Solus felt like visiting a convention booth where the technical product sitting in the background is good, but the salesperson presenting it is fumbling. I want them to stop talking and get out of the way so I can focus on enjoying the product. Budgie sitting on top of Solus was like that for me - functional, but frequently annoying while the core technology behind the scenes was doing a good job.
I don't think Solus, the underlying distribution, does anything particularly different or eye-catching compared with other rolling release desktop distributions. It doesn't have boot environments or default to an advanced filesystem, or take any massive leaps forward. But that is what I grew to appreciate about Solus. It's an unusually stable, unusually simple to use rolling release distribution. Everything is pretty straight forward, everything works (at the lower levels), everything installed and updated smoothly. It's just a shame I was convinced to run Budgie instead of one of the other available desktop editions.