Solus Linux 4.0
A user-friendly rolling release distro written from scratch sounds more like marketing hype than a usable product – or so Mayank Sharma thought.
A user-friendly rolling release distro written from scratch sounds more like marketing hyperbole than a usable product – or so thought Mayank Sharma…
Unlike mainstream desktop distros that have release cycles set in stone, small ones like Solus kind of just wing it – they ship when they are ready. Solus 4 had been simmering for over a year now and the final release delivers a solid and stable desktop that’s a change from the mainstream.
Solus 4 is available for 64-bit machines only but in three editions, each based around a different desktop environment. Besides the marquee Budgie-based edition, there’s one with Gnome and another with MATE. All editions ship with the usual bouquet of apps you’d typically use on a desktop. The distro uses its own installer, which is easy enough to navigate irrespective of the user’s experience. It does, however, have its peculiarities. For instance, it offers an option to encrypt the installation partitions, but only when you choose to create LVM partitions. There’s also no fancy slideshow to showcase the features of the distro while it’s busy copying the files to the hard disk.
The marquee feature of the distro is its Budgie desktop. It’s written from scratch using components from the Gnome stack. Its most noticeable feature is the unified notification and control centre sidebar called Raven, which also gives you quick access to the calendar and media player controls. The volume control in Raven now offers separate controls for controlling input and output sounds. You can also set different volume levels for individual apps from the sidebar.
Budge up
Budgie is easily customisable and offers enough options to help you mould it as you want. For example, by default Budgie doesn’t show icons on the desktop and has only one workspace, but both of these behaviours can be overridden easily from the Budgie Desktop Settings app. Several of the sections here have new options, and there’s also an entirely new one for customising how the Raven notification centre works.
Our only complaint with Budgie Desktop Settings is that it now offers so many options that the developers should seriously consider coding in a search function to help users find their way to the relevant ones. For instance, you need to add the Workspace Switcher applet to the panel before you can switch workspaces, which isn’t the most obvious place where a new user would look for this setting.
All the elements on the desktop are implemented as applets – including the application menu, which has been further refined in this release – along with the Icontasklist applet, which has new context menu options. There’s also a new applet called Caffeine Mode to prevent power-saving settings from kicking in when you don’t want them to.
The other major highlight of the distro is the Software Center, built around the eopkg package management system, itself a fork of the Pisi package manager that comes from Pardus Linux. The app is very user friendly and intuitive to operate, and besides Linux binaries also offers several third-party apps. It feels more responsive than other similar offerings from the Gnome and Ubuntu stables.
The project also has a sensible policy for software updates. The distro is a rolling release, as the installation will never reach end-of-life and will receive updates throughout the project’s existence. But its developers push updates to the stable repository only after they’ve gone through some testing in the unstable channel. We also like the way updates are exposed in the Software Center; besides the mandatory updates that are selected automatically, you have the option to easily view and pick any other updates that you want to install.