TBH, as a previous Solus user, I don’t think I’d go back.
Part of the rise of the Linux desktop is that I have options that are stable, supported, and likely won’t vanish into the ether anytime soon. Feels bad to think, but, eh, I’m just too old for anything else. 😀
I’m glad it’s back, but I don’t really see a reason to switch. What does it offer that alternatives don’t?
It’s a rolling community distro that’s also beginner-friendly. For instance, its package manager uses plain English terms instead of the unintuitive alphabet soup that Arch-based distros employ.
It also is the flagship distro for the Budgie DE.
I’ve tried it out a few times in a VM and there’s a lot to like about it, but IMO the downsides are package availability (especially when compared to the AUR) and the dev team’s rocky past. I’ll be keeping an eye on it, though.
That makes sense. Though I prefer the customizability of Plasma I really liked Budgie’s default experience when I last played around with it. Combined with the intuitive package manager, I can definitely see the potential - the current major simple / beginner-friendly distros feel a bit dated and/or have some frustrating design choices so I’m happy to have Solus as a competitor in that niche. I hope they’re able to make the move to Wayland and expand their package repo.
I daily drove it for a couple years on my last laptop before it broke, but the main draw was it’s the budgie DE and weekly updates that kept things recent but still pretty stable. Overall a good experience, but I felt like trying OpenSuSe when I got my new laptop.