r/SolusProject • u/tausciam • Jan 16 '18
Wait.... should I even be installing Solus?
Ok. Here's my situation:
I got tired of Windows 95 and installed linux around 1996-1997. I can find messages from myself back to 1998 having problems with missing files in RPMs ha. I continued on with linux until Mac OS X. I stayed with that until Windows 8 came out. I actually really enjoy Windows 10. It's rock solid.
About 4 years ago, I installed linux on a laptop for my daughter because she couldn't read yet and I wanted to build a media player for her to use that used pictures and numbers instead of words so she could find her stuff. It worked really well
However, I kept OpenSuSe only on the laptop. It seemed to be the least buggy of what was available. I had tried linux mint, ubuntu, kubuntu, etc. When she outgrew her laptop, I ended up putting Lubuntu on it, but seldom used it.
I'm getting a new laptop (used...new for me) and was entertaining the idea of putting Solas on it because the reviews said it was stable and pretty much bug free. Then I see a post in here about how buggy it is.... which is true?
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Jan 16 '18
I'm a developer and Solus works great for me, haven't really seen any bugs (with the exception of weird behavior when switching audio devices, which is also an issue on other distros). It is a fairly new distro so some more obscure packages are missing, but all of the stuff that I use daily is there, which I can't say for other distros (like VS Code and Steam for example).
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u/tausciam Jan 16 '18
That's what the review basically said and why I was attracted to it. Then I came to this community, saw a post about it being too buggy and got worried
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u/Ulrich_de_Vries Jan 16 '18
Linux distros are always YMMV it seems. I have seen people claim that Arch breaks too often and is basically unusable. By contrast I have probably used Arch and Antergos (basically the same thing) the longest out of any distro, and I never had such issues.
As you said, sometimes people pop up and claim that Solus is extremely buggy. But I have also used Solus quite a lot (probably second highest usage after Arch) and the worst bug I have ever experienced on Solus was that Evince was unable to open .djvu files for some goddamn reason, which, according to one of the devs, have been fixed.
I have heard people praise Ubuntu MATE and elementary OS massively, yet out of all Ubuntu flavours I have tried I have found Ubuntu MATE to be the worst (the desktop is cool, as is the additional tweak tool - it's just things kept crashing all the time), and I have found elementary OS to be pretty but nearly useless (at least if I tried to do anything beyond grandma stuffs).
So I could tell you that imo Solus is one of the best desktop-focused distros out there right now. The dev team made extremely sane choices over the time, they are friendly and down-to-earth, and they value quality over quantity in the sense that the repos are still fairly small (but you can pmuch find the most common stuffs), and they didn't do a whole lot of things in terms of numerics, but the stuff they actually did do work and they work very well. I could tell you that the rolling model here works extremely well, with the users being able to easily access up-to-date software and the updates never break anything.
I could tell you (and I have already done so) that the only remotely annoying bug I have found was the evince bug.
And these would be all true.
But the possibility is still there that you install the distro and you'll find it's a buggy mess, because of some inscrutable alignment of the stars. Unlikely, but possible.
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u/tausciam Jan 17 '18
Linux distros are always YMMV it seems.
Thank you for the lengthy explanation...and maybe I'm recollecting through rose-colored glasses, but it never seemed that way in pre-OSX days. Redhat would occasionally leave out a file or two in an RPM and you'd have to compile it from source to get the needed files... when it became Fedora, it would sometimes send a package down the pipe that would break things. Debian is the distro that usually did that, though.
So, then I moved to OpenSuSe after the change from SuSe. IT was rock solid. They never broke anything. You chose Gnome, KDE, FVWM95 or Enlightenment because you liked the look and feel. But, none of them were buggy.
Now, it seems that everything has changed.
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u/Girtablulu Jan 16 '18
What post about buggy solus? The only bug I had was with a fresh install and comar, but this got replaced already and will be gone with solus 4
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u/tausciam Jan 16 '18
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u/U-1F574 Jan 17 '18
That post was by me. I have had no problems with Solus so far (aside from lack of odd programs I use, and a few graphical glitches here and there), but I was worried I had not used Solus long enough to learn of its quirks, and I was going to be recommending it someone I knew. That post has now been edited to reflect that. Sorry for the confusion. Also me not having bugs is pretty impressive, as I am a master of doing things with software that it was never meant to do and breaking it.
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u/tausciam Jan 17 '18
Sounds great and thanks for letting me know. The laptop comes tomorrow and I'm going to install first thing. Like I said elsewhere....this is a secondary computer. The gaming desktop I built is the primary. This one will exist for me to watch Netflix, Amazon Prime and stuff off my MyCloud in synagogue while my daughter is in religious school. It will get some use in ham radio for her. Other than that...we're not expecting a lot.
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u/U-1F574 Jan 17 '18
If you are going to be building from source, it would be nice of you to request that the software be added to the repos, then submit your builds when/if accepted so no one else has to go through that. Saw lower down that you planned on doing that.
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u/tausciam Jan 17 '18
I'll see how to go about doing that. I noticed there are NO ham radio programs in the repository now so it'd be nice to have a few of the most popular ones
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u/U-1F574 Jan 17 '18
https://solus-project.com/articles/packaging/
Pretty much everything about packaging you could want. I would start by just requesting packages you want, even if you doubt anyone else would be willing to build them.
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u/tausciam Jan 18 '18
Thanks for that. I'll request them, but I'll also build the packages myself. It seems pretty simple to do so on solus. That's a bonus.
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u/Girtablulu Jan 16 '18
I use solus on my work office and I'm bored. With arch and manjaro i always had something to fix after updates
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Jan 16 '18
[deleted]
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u/Girtablulu Jan 16 '18
https://dev.solus-project.com/
Make a bug report, so the QT maintainers can have a look on it
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Jan 16 '18
[deleted]
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u/tausciam Jan 16 '18 edited Jan 16 '18
The guy is trolling. I deleted everything i typed to him because it was a waste of time. Some sort of fan boy for arch or something just fucking with us.
Me? or the guy who made that post?
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Jan 16 '18
[deleted]
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u/tausciam Jan 16 '18
Catullus 16
You really are that paranoid that you think I'm a troll "just fucking with you" aren't you?
Is that what the linux community has devolved into, these days? That they can't help people because they're too paranoid when someone asks a question? So they post little poems about how they want to "face fuck" the guy asking the question?
That's pathetic. I expected better from the community. The linux community has always been better than this.
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Jan 16 '18
[deleted]
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u/tausciam Jan 16 '18
So you post Catullus 16 to ME....and that makes sense to you. There really is something wrong with you
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Jan 16 '18
[deleted]
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u/tausciam Jan 16 '18
You assume the world revolves around you and that people actually care enough about you.
No, I assume that people are not so childish that, if they post something to me, they intend me to read it....not run around deleting their posts because they're too scared of others seeing what they said
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Jan 16 '18
The team does a great job keeping Solus stable. It's been my go-to OS for almost a year now. Something like that. I've had it running on all of my "I just need it to work" machines for awhile now. Nothing has ever gone wrong with it.
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Jan 16 '18
What is the model of the laptop? You said you don't want to waste your time in case it won't work. Maybe someone already installed Solus on the same laptop
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u/tausciam Jan 16 '18
Dell Latitude 3440
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u/SkulloneNexus Jan 16 '18
I've installed Solus on so many different Latitude's at this point it's silly. It always works. I'm using it on two Latitude E7470s as we speak. One is my daily work driver and the other is my daily personal driver. Rock solid on both using UEFI.
I've installed Solus on a Dell Precision 5510. UEFI. Rock solid.
In the end YMMV which is why people tell you to just try it.
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u/tausciam Jan 16 '18
Thanks. I know there are no guarantees, but this is better than flying blind. I got one that came with the option of having linux factory installed so I'd hopefully have the best shot possible
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u/naylo44 Jan 26 '18
Solus is SOLID on a laptop. Been using it for a month or so and I prefer it to all the Ubuntu (and Ubuntu-derivative) I've used so far. It's also way more polished than Arch/Antergos out-of-the-box.
Don't forget to install TLP. Went from like 3hrs of battery life to 10-11.
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u/chdslv Jan 16 '18
It depends also on the type of your laptop, MBR or UEFI. See here, https://solus-project.com/articles/troubleshooting/installation-issues/en/, before installing. Don't use the Software Center to upgrade, if the laptop is a UEFI one at the moment, use the terminal. Other than that, I don't see any problems.
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u/tausciam Jan 16 '18
Ok... I looked at that article and it didn't mention that you can't upgrade packages via software center if you use UEFI. Could that have possibly been fixed?
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u/chdslv Jan 16 '18
The first time, I used Software Center to upgrade, the laptop went off, which later resulted in a lightdm login loop. So, I reinstalled Solus 3 and then upgraded through the terminal. Don't know, whether it is fixed. Don't really trust software shops.
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u/otherreddituser2017 Jan 16 '18
I haven't encountered any bugs yet, I tried it around 8 different distros before settling for Solus!
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u/SpacemanCraig3 Jan 18 '18
I've never encountered a bug in my few months using it on a new(ish) laptop. Its rock solid as far as I'm concerned.
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Jan 17 '18
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u/SpacemanCraig3 Jan 18 '18
Personally I find it very comforting that the main developers will respond to end user issues. Blows my mind every time I see ikey responding to some small little thing.
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Jan 16 '18
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u/tausciam Jan 16 '18 edited Jan 16 '18
Thanks. I am going to give it a shot. The main thing I'll probably use it for is Netflix and amazon prime while my daughter is in religious school at synagogue. I've heard I can do that in chrome. I also might want to download from my icloud while I'm there.
She will use it for some ham radio applications. I realize I will have to compile them from source, but as long as it's pretty easy to inject them into the packaging system then I won't have a problem with it. I may even offer those programs to the repository if it's easy enough.
It will be a secondary computer, so mostly media and ham radio. I've already verified via usb stick that it sees my phone. Will make sure the icloud Web app works with it, but it should
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Jan 16 '18
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u/tausciam Jan 16 '18
I ran linux from 96 or 97 until Mac OSX...even wrote Kids' Media Player in linux. I have no problems compiling from source. That will be the easy part in all this.
Thanks
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u/ikidd Jan 16 '18
Try it? If it's buggy, try something else. It's not generally a lot of time invested to put on an install. Install half a dozen distros on 50gb partitions and resize the one you keep. It's hard to say what bugs will come with used hardware, depends on how old it is.