solus

[revelator]

So id recently started dablling with linux derivatives as a main OS again after holding off for years due to some problems running my hardware when i stumbled upon Solus.

Solus is a distro that was developed independently from mainstream linux (from the ground up) and uses its own desktop model called budgie (also comes with a plasma gnome and XFCE dektop). Solus uses its own package manager called eopkg and it handles flatpak  and snap as well.

I been very impressed with it so far as things just worked out of the box for most parts, only real problem i had was getting steam running which turned out to be due to my machine loosing internet connection when it was installing it which left some broken files and after an uninstall / reinstall it worked quite nicely. one warning though Solus comes with a linux steam integration tool which while cool has a rather annoying bug if you try to use the intercept library no games will launch (well alledgedly one will and it was made for that because it wont launch without it on groan...), so do not enable that setting. lutris also works pretty much from the get go though i had to do some reading to find out how to get it to synch up with steam (steam profile must be set to public in pretty much everything).

So how does games work on it, well actually rather well proton has made strides in getting even the newest games to run on steam and the only games i so far have not been able to run is the division 1 and 2 but this a'int a problem with steam but with ubisoft connect which crashes and might get fixed in the future (damn launchers...).

So far i been plaing baldurs gate 3, callisto protocol, crysis remastered trilogy, DOOM, starfield and a wealth of older games with it and no problems besides having to run baldurs gate in DX11 mode (not really sure why the vulkan driver is not working for this game on linux ???).

I might actually step onto the linux platform for good when win10 goes out of support, and ill probably stay with solus since it is less cluttered than most other distros and main packages are built explicitly for it which again means stability as you dont get puckered into installing something which was newer meant for your OS (yeah i f.... up numerous linux distros over the years because you can install pretty much what you like even if it breaks everything, not so with Solus). This does not mean you cant have some nice app you need which was built against say gnome because you sit on a plasma desktop, you absolutely can but they are only avaliable as snap / flatpaks so each of them run in its own sandbox with all the dependencies only avaliable to said program and keept isolated from the system.

try it out :)

https://getsol.us/download/

[datiswous]

Thanks for the info, although I didn't read anything exciting over using Manjaro xfce. But nice to hear about another distro that is good.

I moved to Manjaro when Windows 7 got out of support. I find Windows 11 not that different from Windows 10 and worse in some (minor) places.

Edited January 25 by datiswous

[revelator]

yeah win11 is not that different from win10 except for some rather ludicrous hardware expectations like cpu and tpm.

i can get behind the tpm requirement though truth be told one could use an usb stick for the same (storing encrypted keys), but the cpu requirement is kinda fubar since i use a gen 4 for running win10 with no problems whatsoever and it also runs 11 just fine despite not being on the approved list. sure you can fool win 11 to install on it but there are no guarantees that microsoft wont disable that down the line so no thanks :).

manjaro was one of my earlier favorites in the linux world, sadly the last time i tried it, it would not play ball with my hardware and also had a bit of the same problem most other mainstream distros have where you could install stuff not native to the kernel and hence break everything, i find what solus did to be gratifying since a lot of people who have not grown up in the linux world and who are not able to identify and correct these annoyances should feel more at home.

sure theres still a bit of reading to be done but you dont need to be a rocket scientist to use it

[Jetrell]

Thanks for all of this helpful info. I've been thinking about installing Solus for quite sometime. I know they accept donations but is Solus actually free or is there a trail period with some sort of fee that kicks in after the trail period ends?

[revelator]

It is free no worries.

Donations probably goes into development, they dont have a huge staff .

[revelator]

Oh and for those who might like to participate in development some parts of Solus are actually written in D-lang.

https://dlang.org/

D-lang was written by walter bright (the dev who created the symantec C/C++ compiler later redubbed Digital Mars), it is a pretty fast statically typed C like language (well id probably call the syntax closer to C++ than C hehe).

They are also looking for developers so if you think you might have something to contribute give them a heads up

[jaxa]

Solus, or SteamOS 3.x if Valve ever makes an official version generally available?

Hey, wait a second... THREE?! NOOOOOO

[datiswous]

9 hours ago, revelator said:

manjaro was one of my earlier favorites in the linux world, sadly the last time i tried it, it would not play ball with my hardware and also had a bit of the same problem most other mainstream distros have where you could install stuff not native to the kernel and hence break everything

I think that's just a matter of selecting the right Kernel. You can install different kernels and then select the one that works for you.

The other issue is don't install AUR packages and you can revert your system back with Timeshift (or just a backup). You can boot up a Manjaro live usb stick and restore the local snapshot. Well anyway, I was always able to resolve issues up to now.

But I'll try Solus sometime. I see Solus is rolling, that's great. What do you think of Budgy WM?

[datiswous]

11 hours ago, revelator said:

This does not mean you cant have some nice app you need which was built against say gnome because you sit on a plasma desktop, you absolutely can but they are only avaliable as snap / flatpaks so each of them run in its own sandbox with all the dependencies only avaliable to said program and keept isolated from the system.

So you are saying that if you use for example the xfce edition, you can't install kde-specific software that is in the package manager of Solus? Snap and Flatpack don't count.

For my next install I'll might try a kde edition, because I use a lot of kde software. I don't like some of the default behavior of kde, so I would have to tweak it more. XFCE is almost perfect from the start in my experience.

Edited January 26 by datiswous

[revelator]

Quote

I think that's just a matter of selecting the right Kernel. You can install different kernels and then select the one that works for you.

The other issue is don't install AUR packages and you can revert your system back with Timeshift (or just a backup). You can boot up a Manjaro live usb stick and restore the local snapshot. Well anyway, I was always able to resolve issues up to now.

sadly for my part even the most ellaborate workarounds were a nogo at the time, and believe me i tried...

Quote

So you are saying that if you use for example the xfce edition, you can't install kde-specific software that is in the package manager of Solus? Snap and Flatpack don't count.

select packages might be avaliable if they behave but as a general rule no as far as i can see. isolation might have a grating sound to some who likes to have all software availiable (even if it is not built for say this kinda gui GTK/KDE) but for the most part the flatpak versions work just fine without messing up system libraries, hell i can even autostart packages like greenwithenvy (GTK) on the plasma version (KDE) with a trip into system settings. where it mostly fails is with themes if you use say the dark theme it might not work in that particular app atm, but they are working on it.

XFCE is a personal favorite  here to, it is lean fast and looks quite good, the Solus version is currently in beta so not sure how well it runs ?. Im using the plasma desktop version myself .

I also quite like OpenBox despite not being used in many distros, like XFCE it is lean and fast but lacks a bit of options for controlling things from the desktop by itself requiering knowledge most users dont have to setup the juicy parts.

[datiswous]

Lxqt is more comparable to xfce since they're both de's. I find only openbox (wm) a little too limited.

I once combined xfce with openbox as wm. But nowadays it doesn't give you enough extra speed I think.

[revelator]

Solus and SteamOS are not the same   https://www.slant.co/versus/2694/2714/~steamos_vs_solus

Solus is actually better according to reviews hehe.

And true OpenBox is a bit limited but i find it to be an ok alternative if you develop something from the ground up like NomadBSD.

BSD does not have a lot of active desktop Operating Systems but NomadBSD is quite nice though minimalistic. It uses OpenBox and the desktop is in the mac style, originally it used an XFCE port and there are still some traces of XFCE apps left -> atleast one i know of because if you try to access the color composer in the file manager it complains about the lack of several XFCE libraries minor whoopsie on the developers part i reckon since that part is now handled by OpenBox. Despite this it works fine and is mostly used as a live OS to boot from usb.

had a bit of a problem with it on this PC though as it seems to have problems with my hardware making it slower than molasses to boot.

An alternative is GhostBSD which is a more complete desktop for BSD using MATE. It unfortunatly does tend to break quite often, and the package manager seems a bit out of date which might be because a lot of the desktop system was ported from linux and the newer ones have not quite catched up yet on BSD.

Despite this i find the BSD kernel to be great, it focusses a lot more on security than most linux kernels and the main BSD distros tend to be quite stable (FreeBSD NetBSD OpenBSD etc.) you can still install a desktop on say FreeBSD if you know how to hammer it all together so that it boots into the desktop but for the most part the main BSD's are shell only.

[revelator]

So heres is the beast up and running the app in the screen is KDE Connect SMS in case you were wondering.

Only problem so far is one i had with several distros... the wifi driver for the broadcom BCM4360 is inherently unstable at times and does not even get close to the speeds it is capable of on windows 1.3gb vs 135mb yuck it also has a habit of random disconnects when moving a lot of data so not really a good wifi card to pair with it, sadly it is built in to my mainboard and i dont have a spare atm.

as for gaming the titles you can see in the screenshot all run quite fine with some performance deprecation due to being windows games but i have to say proton has come a long way allready.

older games are actually more irritating to get running sometimes, timeshift outright crashes and i have had no luck getting it to run yet, wheel of time runs but required some tinkering because the gog version uses a ddraw wrapper for the quicktime video codec so i had to make some alterations with lutris environment variables to get it running. eg. go into runner options DLL Overrides add a new key containing ddraw in field one and n,b in field two. this tell wine that the game uses its own ddraw.dll and to not touch. lutris strangely also set the game executable to the quicktime player so i had to correct that .

[jaxa]

That screenshot is bad OPSEC, bro.

[datiswous]

On 1/29/2024 at 1:26 AM, revelator said:

BSD does not have a lot of active desktop Operating Systems but NomadBSD is quite nice though minimalistic.

So you moved from Solus to NomadBSD, or.. ?

 

8 hours ago, revelator said:

as for gaming the titles you can see in the screenshot all run quite fine with some performance deprecation due to being windows games but i have to say proton has come a long way allready.

Do you also have the sound stuttering in System Shock? It's the only thing bothering me a bit.

Edited January 31 by datiswous

[revelator]

OPSEC ? sorry i ususally know most chat terms but newer heard that one .

no still on Solus but i do like the BSD kernel in general sadly not alot of ready made desktop system for it.

Sound stutter on system shock ? not that i could notice but i did have to do a few tweaks to dead space remake, it ran like a slideshow with the config from lutris. use proton experimental instead of wine ge and insert this in system options Game Execution, key VKD3D_DISABLE_EXTENSIONS value  VK_KHR_present_id,VK_KHR_present_wait. this fixes most of the lag.

i did notice a lot of warnings from the sound system in the syslog it seems related to jackd.

try running this in konsole.

sudo eopkg check | grep Broken | awk '{print $4}' | xargs sudo eopkg it --reinstall

it fixed most things for me, takes a while to run though. restart after it is finished.

still a few warnings after running this but the sound warnings have dissapeared.

the remaning warnings are related to KDE and is a known bug in the current version, a fix is underway.

[revelator]

ah operator security ofc replaced image with one without the phone numbers.

im another victim of PEBCAC obviously .

[revelator]

The KDE warnings are because the composer component is broken in the current KDE version, setting numlock to on at system start does not work currently because of this (configs still use the earlier format which are wrong for this version, the value for on is now 0 and 1 is off, the old values just used On/Off which do not work anymore since it was changed to an enumerator type instead.) there are also a few other bugs because of this which will hopefully be fixed with the upcomming update.

[revelator]

damn btw dont do this if you have problems with the current avaliable nvidia driver 435 since it is broken in some games.

So obviously i tried the beta version... well now i can reinstall

[datiswous]

44 minutes ago, revelator said:

well now i can reinstall

I said something about Timeshift. This could have saved you from a reinstall.

[revelator]

yeah newer got round to get it installed though kinda weird to have a beta driver avaliable that does not even work ?, and worse one that breaks the os...

[revelator]

well decided to have a look at setting it up on solus and ... it does not exist as a package. you can still build it yourself but there are some pitfalls.

timeshift relies on dcron which was removed from solus so you have to create the auto backup sequence with systemd yourself (i hope your good at scripting).

create a textfile, name it "timeshift.service" with following content:
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/timeshift --check

Create a second textfile, name it "timeshift.timer" with following content:
[Unit]
Description=Run timeshift --check

[Timer]
OnBootSec=10min
OnUnitActiveSec=60min

[Install]
WantedBy=timers.target`

copy both files to /usr/lib/systemd/system (-> sudo cp timeshift.service /usr/lib/systemd/system # same for timeshift.timer)

Now enable the timer:
sudo systemctl enable timeshift.timer

you might need these dependencies before building timeshift.

sudo eopkg install libgee libvte rsync dcron libjson-glib

even though dcron is listed as a dependency it does not work with solus because it is systemd based.