To be clear, this blogpost has been in the works before that article came out and due to release this week. When Phoronix article came out, it was bad timing and Phoronix could just reach out to the devs asking why there is no update. Instead, they releaesed an article based of “looking at github contribution” charts.

👆 This is my advice as well. Switch all your apps to the one that is available on Linux. After you get used to it, then switch the OS. No need to do both at the same time.

I am not the technical guy, so I might explain some terminology wrong. So, I will give you a few article you can read in my answer. AerynOS tooling right now is focused on the “atomic” part, you can read about it here. The “immutable” part of the original proposition (when it is called Serpent OS) is not set in stone yet. Solus will adopt what make sense for us and right now we are very encouraged by atomic update that AerynOS tooling can already achieve.

TL;DR: Solus going immutable? No plan for it right now :)

I don’t agree with your assessment of Solus condition now. Granted I am biased as I am part of the staff. After the outage in early 2023, we have been going strong ever since. There are more contributors than ever. The bus factor problem has been mitigated by more people now have access to critical infrastructure.

Sure the old-heads are all gone but the future of Solus couldn’t be more clear than right now. eopkg was ported to python3 and now it is (finally) the default. We switch installer to calamares and in process of replacing our software center. Documentation also now looks better than ever. We already shed so many technical debts that is been going on for years, long before the outage. In the future the plan is for Solus to use AerynOS tooling and on their side development is going rapidly. You can read this all about this on our blog, devlog and forum.

I wrote the monthly “Contributor Roundup” in the forum, it summaries what the contributors been doing in the month. I would say we have pretty steady contribution rate and there is always new contributor coming in. If you have not tried Solus again after the outage, please do. You might be surprised on how things have changed and hopefully for the better. If you find anything that is not good, do not hesitate to tell us. We always appreciate a constructive feedback.

Anyway cheers!

We have pretty easy to use homegrown package manager (eopkg). We also have our own software center, though it is in the process of being replaced by Gnome Software and KDE Discover. You can install software from Solus repository or Flathub via those software center. We adopt what we called “curated-rolling” release, we only do software update on Friday. We also ensure that packages from our repositrory can be run OOTB without user configuration, using principle what is called “stateless”. You can find out more about Solus on the website, help center, and forum.

True, I just like start minimal and add on top of that. Truth be told, my experience with Garuda is minimal.

I would guess jumping from PopOS to Bazzite would be a challange becaue of it is immutable base. It is supposedly less prone to brekage, but certain guides won’t work on them.

I think Nobara (or Fedora KDE) will work for you to try. I would avoid Garuda. It has many GUI for helping new user but if learning is your purpose, that just gets in the way. I would suggest Endeavor OS for Arch-based distro.

This is a left field suggestion: Try Solus !solus@piefed.social , we have a pretty good KDE edition. :)

Cheers!

I use this too daily (I am a sucker for looks), but hands down Okular is better.

From what I read Preview is full suite of PDF reader right? If so Okular by KDE seems like a good alternative.

Canonically, they do eat pokemon but definitely not the one they raised 💀

I like game emulation and to manage my ROM library, I use Geode-GEM. It is simple but cusomizable app to manage your ROM based on console and emulator you have.

I hate it…hate it…really hate it

Most of them are just machine translated work with little editorial. The only good thing about them is they came out faster than the official translation (which usually will be free anyway).

This is not a fan translation anymore, just plain opportunistic business venture.

That is honestly surprising, I thought we were cautious about it at !solus@piefied.social . We already defaulted to Wayland on Plasma and Gnome for about a year (IIRC).