With the latest release of Solus, I feel I should ask. I have had my eye on this particular distro for some time now. I even did a test installation about two years ago, but it didn’t feel as complete as I needed it to be.
I am looking for a solid, beginner-friendly rolling Linux distribution for general use. Multimedia, gaming, coding etc. Do you recommend Solus? If so, why? Why not? Looking forward to your thoughts.
No, it was a small dev team and it died out. Stick to distros that are established and have been around for awhile. You’ll see a lot of small hobby distros that’ll disappear over night. For an easy beginner rolling release distro, I’d suggest openSUSE rolling. They are an established company and aren’t going anywhere. Their releases are very stable and have a very easy to use GUI installer and updater in the distro.
Solus didn’t die. Source: Solus Blog
Thank you for your suggestion of Tumbleweed (I assume you are writing about). Checking that out as well.
I think they mean the fact that the development team has seen some shuffling and the project stagnated for a bit. I love Budgie, which comes from Solus, but I’d rather use it on a different distro than using Solus, which seems a bit off-balance at the moment. Give them time to stabilize before trying them.
Tumbleweed is awesome! It’s really stable and polished while being rolling so you’ll get the latest and greatest.
I’ve just recently landed there myself (though I’ve liked Tumbleweed for a long time) in am attempt to see how long I can go without needing Windows. So far it’s getting great.
If you have an nvidia card you’ll have to install the drivers yourself but it’s not hard.
But how are new and small distros going to grow if no one uses them?
My advice is to experiment with distros you find interesting, but not on your main devices.
I don’t think the advice is that people should ignore small distros but that small distros won’t be as beginner friendly.
Really learning to function in Linux involves a lot of searching for what went wrong and being in a larger distro increases the chance that somebody has run into your problem before.
I agree. Perhaps I got confused when reading the other comment.
Small distros aren’t good ones for beginners, because support plays a great role into they first experiences.
That you should take them with a grain of salt and see their track record over time. If a distro is only up for a month and ran by one person, maybe don’t make that your daily driver. If that same one person keeps going for 3 years, maybe consider it having more legitimacy. Even mediumish size distros like Void Linux almost crashed over night. Big ones like Fedora, Ubuntu, and openSUSE won’t ever die over night.
Nice, I thought it died a year ago. Glad to see it back alive again. I checked the Wikipedia page to see what happened.
I had it on my subreddit list because it was a stable rolling release recommended for gaming.
I used it as my main distro for about a year, and moved on right before the “abandonment saga” happened. It was a nice and performant distro, but lacked some stuff I needed, mostly support from a few projects and apps I needed to use.
I wouldn’t recommend it as a main distro for at least 5 years after what happened, but would keep an eye out to use on a spare machine or a VM.
Nowadays I’d either settle on openSUSE Tumbleeweed for rolling-release. I’m personally more insterested in stability though (and not having to update stuff every 2 days or so), so I’m going team Debian.