What do you think of the Solus Budgie distro

I have not been reading this forum in a while because my Ubuntu 20.04LTS became unrecoverable last fall so I went back to Windows 10 for a while. However, my laptop was hit with a persistent virus so I tried to do a clean install of the latest Ubuntu and Mint distros: no luck on my HP Envy; the installation would hang during the kernel loading. Not being an advanced user, I gave up on them.

The problem with Ubuntu was related to Realtek drivers. I was able to recover the first time the system became nonoperational after a kernel update but after the last kernel update, I could not recover (or find any help to do so). It’s unclear why Mint would not install properly from either USB or CD.

They I tried loading Solus Budgie from a USB. The only difficulty was that it does not use GRUB to load but a kind soul created a video showing how to create partitions (ext a nd efi) for Solus so that I could keep Windows as well. It’s rated for beginners to moderate users and it’s fine for me. I tried to run the live (USB) vers ion on another laptop that Ubuntu would not support because the disk driver interface is not SATA (it is raid) and it worked perfectly.

I’d like any feedback on the distro you might have if you tried it. Their website has been down for > 1 week now and one of their developer resigned over slow (or lack thereof) resolutions of issues.

Hi @Elroy ,
I have had Solus/Budgie running for a couple of years now.
It is rolling release… you need to do an upgrade about once a month. It will drive new hardware like your Realtek chip. I recently got a new graphics card, and it coped with that where Debian failed.

I think Solus has some good design. Its software centre is the best I have seen in any distro. It does not have as big a repository as ,say, Debian, but there is a good choice of packages.

I have used Virtualbox in Solus. That was OK.

Yes It does have a peculiar install for efi systems. It is much easier to install on a legacy boot system.
But you only have to install it once… the rolling release keeps it updated. You dont have to keep installing new releases. I use it with grub in a multiboot computer… there were a few issues, but it works with grub.

Regards
Neville

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Thanks for the feedback!

I absolutely love SOLUS but what are you doing now that they have disappeared?

Solus has lost some leadership, but it has not disappeared.

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Solus website is back up after suffering some technical issues . Datadrake (Beatrice ) has become the lead in the USA after Josh left . She is currently working on updating the website . the forums and the dev tracker is still down but everything else is back up . The package repos were unaffected by the website outage .

Welcom Mark,
Thank you for letting us know the news on Solus.
I think it is a really well put together distro, and it is nice to know they have dealt with the loss of a leader. We all hoped Solus would survive because it is a unique intiative.
Regards
Neville