Solus 2017.04.18.
Shashank Sharma explains why Solus Budgie, with its home-grown desktop environment and various tools, has him excited like a gardener in spring.
With its Budgie desktop, should this easy-touse, good-to-look-at distro be your next adventure in Linux, asks Shashank Sharma.
As is the norm with most Linux distros, Solus ships multiple editions that suit different desktop environments. Apart from releases featuring Gnome and Mate, the flagship spin and the subject of our review is the one with the Budgie desktop environment.
The hybrid ISO is available only for 64-bit machines and supports both MBR and UEFI machines, but not UEFI Secure Boot. Unlike most other Live distros, Solus doesn’t give users the option to install the distro from the bootloader. Instead, you must fire up the live environment and then select the option to install the OS from the menu.
You also don’t need a swap partition when installing Solus. The installer insists on a 10GB or larger partition, but the installation itself is speedy. The user created during the installation is granted administrative privileges. Any other users you create can also optionally be granted admin rights.
Quirky’s good
The application menu has a search bar at the top and provides a list of apps. You have to click each category to view the included apps. Another quirk of the menu is that it reorganises the apps within each category, so that recently used ones are at the top. You also can’t pin favourite apps on to the panel.
Another unique feature of Budgie desktop is Raven, the all-in-one applet, notification and customisation center. The two-tabbed interface lists notifications in one, while the Applets tab houses the calendar, volume control and the sound devices. Click the gears icon to open up Budgie settings. You can tweak various settings from the General tab, while Panel-specific options such as positioning of the clock and icons are relegated to the Panels tab. The latest edition also features an updated and beautified Alt+Tab implementation for a faster experience.
For software management, users have the choice of the eopkg tool on the command line and the robust Software Center. This is a single window app that can be used to manage software, install updates, and even browse third-party applications that aren’t included because of proprietary licenses.
The Updates are split into three categories. Required updates are mandatory and are automatically selected for installation. Bug fixes and new releases for apps are available under Other Updates, while Security Updates are a separate category. You can also browse through the collection of software from the Home tab where the apps are split into various categories and sub-categories.
The eopkg utility provides the same functionality as apt-get and similar tools. Being a rolling release distro, you can also roll back to a previous state with a single command. The 2.0 release will see eopkg dropped in favour of Sol: another home-grown app written in C.
We were also pleasantly surprised with the Help Center, the documentation hub on the project’s website. It offers helpful guides on varied topics such as Budgie Tips & Tricks, Installation, Configuration, Repair & Recovery and many more.
Ubuntu has also shipped an edition featuring Budgie as part of its 17.04 releases. However it’s measurably slow when compared with Budgie on Solus.
Solus Linux is a rolling release distribution that aims to provide an elegant desktop experience while also focusing on simplicity. For most distros, this may seem like a tall ask, but with its home-grown Budgie desktop, Solus easily meets this goal and delivers a distro that’s simple to use, extremely robust and fun to work with.