Solus 2017.04.18.0 is stable, fast and smooth; But how far it will go?

You can not see much negative comments about future of Solus despite of it's independent evolution. There were hundreds of Linux distributions which appeared in a morning and vanished in another. Even Solus OS, a predecessor of Solus is one among them. However, GNU/Linux enthusiasts apparently prefer to dream the long life of Solus, especially after considering the positive attitude shown by Ikey Doherty, core developer behind the project.


The DarkDuck blog has published a review on Solus 2017.04.18.0, an updated snapshot of Solus operating system. Though there are multiple desktops available (Budgie, GNOME and MATE) at the moment, the reviewer has considered the Budgie edition for the review, as it is expected to exhibit real nature of Solus being first member of Solus family. The review gives positive comments on aspects like boot time, minimal selection of packages, ability to customize budgie panel, out of the box multimedia support. The negative comment is mainly about memory. On first startup, gnome-sysetm-monitor is showing around 730MB memory usage, which quite huge for a desktop environment like budgie. Finally, the review praises the stability, smoothness and speed of the system, but discourages using it in production systems as it may go out of support at anytime, as many other awesome releases did.
The Live run of Solus was stable, fast and smooth. I especially liked the crispness of the fonts, windows and of all the elements.

At the same time, if you want to use Solus Budgie as a production OS, I'd recommend you to think twice. The main show-stopper for me would be the unknown format for supported packages. It locks down the number of available applications to whatever is available in official repositories, and there are already some gaps. Of course, there are some doubtful decisions on default set of applications and default desktop items, but that's easy to fix.
Read complete review in DarkDuck blog.

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