Looks like the 'Linux Steam Integration' project is being continued with Intel's Clear Linux

Great, I guess changes will get into Solus then ;)
Even without Doherty it seems to be going well and is probably one of the best Distros for gaming due to it's bleeding edge GPU driver support.

one of the best Distros for gaming due to it's bleeding edge GPU driver support.

Genuinely curious, how is this different from any other rolling distro? When new Nvidia drivers are announced, I'm getting those about a day later on Manjaro testing branch.

I'm not too up to date on what Doherty is doing now, but it seems he's doing stuff for Intel again

Yes, as part of the Solus drama recently, it was made clear he's back at Intel, although his role there hasn't been publicly announced from anything I've seen.

I was originally a Solus backer, and I had hoped that Solus Budgie would become a kind of performance oriented Clean Linux for the masses. Without him there, I'm not exactly sure what Solus' mission is at this point or how they'll differentiate themselves from any other rolling system...

I believe that I've used that tool before on Manjaro via AUR.
So far I didn't had any use for it, yet it's good that it's available anyway.

one of the best Distros for gaming due to it's bleeding edge GPU driver support.

Genuinely curious, how is this different from any other rolling distro? When new Nvidia drivers are announced, I'm getting those about a day later on Manjaro testing branch.

No idea :) Budgy as a DE is a nice GTK based option for those that do not like GNOME3 too much.
Not having tried Manjaro, I would guess the strong point of Solus is friendliness for people switching from Windows while the same time giving them all the latest software updates so that they don't complain about "outdated" software in the Ubuntu repos and then mess up their system by trying to update stuff manually.


Last edited by Julius on 4 Jan 2019 at 6:52 am UTC

I'm not too up to date on what Doherty is doing now, but it seems he's doing stuff for Intel again

Yes, as part of the Solus drama recently, it was made clear he's back at Intel, although his role there hasn't been publicly announced from anything I've seen.

I was originally a Solus backer, and I had hoped that Solus Budgie would become a kind of performance oriented Clean Linux for the masses. Without him there, I'm not exactly sure what Solus' mission is at this point or how they'll differentiate themselves from any other rolling system...

I knew he left Solus, but I didn't realize he was back at Intel. I think Solus's differentiation from other rolling release distros is that they have a very "curated" set of software that's supposed to be streamlined with the rest of the system. Meaning if you download something from the software center then it should just work with no dependency conflicts and accept the previous theme settings accordingly. I liked Budgie, but I despise Nautilus.

They have a lot to do if they want me to buy any Intel HW or use an Intel distro this year but maybe the ice will melt some day :P

I think Solus's differentiation from other rolling release distros is that they have a very "curated" set of software that's supposed to be streamlined with the rest of the system. Meaning if you download something from the software center then it should just work with no dependency conflicts and accept the previous theme settings accordingly. I liked Budgie, but I despise Nautilus.

I think that's *kind of* a point of it. It's perhaps too curated for me. My workplace's software doesn't work on Solus (but works on every other distro) and I had lots of gaming issues on Solus when I was on it. Solus also broke my system with updates 3 times in about 4 months of use, while Manjaro (on testing) has yet to do that once for me.

If people like the Budgie DE (which, actually, I do a lot) I personally prefer the Ubuntu flavor of it (Ubuntu Budgie) with the terrific applets they've designed for it. Manjaro Budgie if you want to use the AUR and the Manjaro apps is excellent as well. That said, I give credit to Solus for starting to focus on Budgie again as they move to version 10.5 and start fixing some problems.

Again, I'm pulling for Solus, but I want them to do something different and I'm just not completely sure how they stand out in the Linux world right now...

Rolling: Arch, Manjaro, Antergos
Curated: Elementary
Newbie friendly: Mint, Deepin, Elementary
Flexible with tremendous options: Ubuntu
Corporate: Fedora

What is Solus doing those don't?


Last edited by iiari on 1 Jan 2019 at 5:34 pm UTC

I think that's *kind of* a point of it. It's perhaps too curated for me. My workplace's software doesn't work on Solus (but works on every other distro) and I had lots of gaming issues on Solus when I was on it. Solus also broke my system with updates 3 times in about 4 months of use, while Manjaro (on testing) has yet to do that once for me.

If people like the Budgie DE (which, actually, I do a lot) I personally prefer the Ubuntu flavor of it (Ubuntu Budgie) with the terrific applets they've designed for it. Manjaro Budgie if you want to use the AUR and the Manjaro apps is excellent as well. That said, I give credit to Solus for starting to focus on Budgie again as they move to version 10.5 and start fixing some problems.

Again, I'm pulling for Solus, but I want them to do something different and I'm just not completely sure how they stand out in the Linux world right now...

Rolling: Arch, Manjaro, Antergos
Curated: Elementary
Newbie friendly: Mint, Deepin, Elementary
Flexible with tremendous options: Ubuntu
Corporate: Fedora

What is Solus doing those don't?

Usually when office software don't work it's because they are shipped only in .deb or .rpm package and usually rely on (quite old) libraries that are shipped with the releases of Ubuntu or Redhat for example. So I don't really understand why it would work on Arch-based distro but not on Solus.

Games usually work very well on Solus, issues reported on games where usually addressed quite fast and LSI has been originally created for this very specific purpose.

There are very few breakages on Solus because curated rolling means that all updates aren't just tested individually but the whole updates are tested globally before they are released on stable. In the same way Manjaro is also a kind of curated rolling in the sense that they wait a little to make sure there were no breakage on Arch before pushing the updates to their users. To my experience, most of the time the breakages affect individuals and the main causes are people cherry picking updates without knowing what they do and of course it ends by some shared libraries updated but keeping software built against older version of that libraries that don't work anymore, or people updating modifying the stateless configuration files that are of course overwritten by some updates (because most people don't know/understand that principle) and lastly hardware issues (the Solus team is small and doesn't have lot of different hardware to test against so it happens that such issue occurs). The question is did you report the problems you faced so they could be addressed and fixed for everyone?

Regarding Ubuntu Budgie applets & co, it's a pity that they kept working on their own and did not upstream their work and make it distro agnostic. It would have been nice to have Budgie as cross-distro collaborative project and it is sad imho that Solus had to take back the project under their umbrella.

I was originally a Solus backer, and I had hoped that Solus Budgie would become a kind of performance oriented Clean Linux for the masses. Without him there, I'm not exactly sure what Solus' mission is at this point or how they'll differentiate themselves from any other rolling system...

Solus (all flavors since they share the same core, toolchain, etc) is performance oriented in the sense that they use more aggressive settings that other distributions and that they borrow some of the optimizations made on ClearLinux. This is not going to change because the guy working on that Peter O'Connor (aka. sunnyflunk) is still there. It's funny how many people believe that only one guy does all the work alone (well there are plenty of them... on the dormant/discontinued distributions list of distrowatch because one or two people cannot develop, follow the updates and the vulnerabilities, handle bugs and resolves other problems, make roadmaps, etc... this 7/7 365 days a year meaning no holidays, no illness, nothing... it's just impossible).

Microsoft is making an partnership with qualcomm to make windows and windows applications run on arm, intel got pissed off that they were emulating x86 instructions to do that.

maybe this is the intel answer to the problem, if microsoft try to escape from their dependence, they will start investing on linux to try to survive in the desktop space and try to compete with microsoft before they ditch intel?

or maybe i'm just over thinking

I was originally a Solus backer, and I had hoped that Solus Budgie would become a kind of performance oriented Clean Linux for the masses. Without him there, I'm not exactly sure what Solus' mission is at this point or how they'll differentiate themselves from any other rolling system...

Solus (all flavors since they share the same core, toolchain, etc) is performance oriented in the sense that they use more aggressive settings that other distributions and that they borrow some of the optimizations made on ClearLinux. This is not going to change because the guy working on that Peter O'Connor (aka. sunnyflunk) is still there. It's funny how many people believe that only one guy does all the work alone (well there are plenty of them... on the dormant/discontinued distributions list of distrowatch because one or two people cannot develop, follow the updates and the vulnerabilities, handle bugs and resolves other problems, make roadmaps, etc... this 7/7 365 days a year meaning no holidays, no illness, nothing... it's just impossible).

Agreed. :) While Ikey did amazing work getting Solus off the ground, his vision for the project is shared by the entire core team, as well as the majority of the community. :) I, for one, have found a home in Solus, and have no intention of leaving any time soon. I find it sad how many people have been so quick to judge without knowing all the details of the situation.

I think Solus's differentiation from other rolling release distros is that they have a very "curated" set of software that's supposed to be streamlined with the rest of the system. Meaning if you download something from the software center then it should just work with no dependency conflicts and accept the previous theme settings accordingly. I liked Budgie, but I despise Nautilus.

I think that's *kind of* a point of it. It's perhaps too curated for me. My workplace's software doesn't work on Solus (but works on every other distro) and I had lots of gaming issues on Solus when I was on it. Solus also broke my system with updates 3 times in about 4 months of use, while Manjaro (on testing) has yet to do that once for me.

If people like the Budgie DE (which, actually, I do a lot) I personally prefer the Ubuntu flavor of it (Ubuntu Budgie) with the terrific applets they've designed for it. Manjaro Budgie if you want to use the AUR and the Manjaro apps is excellent as well. That said, I give credit to Solus for starting to focus on Budgie again as they move to version 10.5 and start fixing some problems.

Again, I'm pulling for Solus, but I want them to do something different and I'm just not completely sure how they stand out in the Linux world right now...

Rolling: Arch, Manjaro, Antergos
Curated: Elementary
Newbie friendly: Mint, Deepin, Elementary
Flexible with tremendous options: Ubuntu
Corporate: Fedora

What is Solus doing those don't?

What does Manjaro do what Solus does not? What does Arch what Solus does not? What does Antergos what Solus does not?
Answer: Nothing. Except maybe being more complicated for users.

I've had the exactly different experience, I switched to Solus after Manjaro managed to break my System 3 times in just 6 Month with updates. Have to have that on Solus yet (reinstalled once due to getting myself a new PC with SSD).

What makes Solus different?
They actually have their own package management, and do decisions on their own. Manjaro pulls from arch, and does not do changes to base packages provided by arch, which can lead to very user unfriendly experience (that's why in example kio/MTP never works on KDE on a default install in Manjaro/Arch, because Arch is defining an optional depend which gets not installed with KDE and Manjaro, just as one example, which may makes sense from an Arch perspective, but not a desktop perspective as Manjaro). Solus can do their own decisions and include/exclude depends on the pure desktop experience need - which Manjaro can't.

For Solus / Ikey. Ikey did a great Job, and started a lot new stuff, laid the ground work for Solus. There are others taking over those, as Josh seems now to work a lot on Budgie, and others on other parts of Solus. Solus is the distribution. Things like LSI were tools which were in the mantle of Solus, but basically distro independent projects by Ikey.

The distribution itself does still very well, Packaging and Releases work great. Of course it's felt that Ikey is missing simply in the progress of tools having one good dev less. That can probably be seen best on the progress made on solus-sc (including replacing the by me personally unloved 3rd party with snaps/flatpaks). Progress is there, just slowed down.


Last edited by STiAT on 2 Jan 2019 at 11:12 am UTC

I was literally just wondering what would happen to LSI without Ikey as there was no commit for months on the Solus git repo. Great to see not only Clearlinux pick this up but also Ikey back working on it. Also nice to know Ikey is working for Intel now.

I've been following Clear Linux for a while now. What I find most interesting here is that they're putting effort not only into the desktop user experience, but into gaming. What? I thought the focus of Clear Linux was to be a high-performance server operating system. I mean, this news is great for us, but I'm surprised.

What does Manjaro do what Solus does not?

Well, my workplace software (Citrix) works on Manjaro, and Ubuntu as well. I don't know why it doesn't work on Solus. Maybe the Citrix folks didn't build their .tar file well. Who knows, but it doesn't work on Solus for me and others (and yes, we reported it to the Solus folks and Citrix if anyone is wondering). And, relative to this gaming website, I had a few games that run on Manjaro and Ubuntu not run for me on Solus as well. Granted, this was almost a year ago and things might be different now with drivers and Proton, but just FYI. Also, I get your points on the AUR, but I've only found it to be wonderful at tracking down everything I need/want.

Again, I'm pulling for Solus. I only hope the best for the project and backed it for a year, I just don't find anything about the current user experience to be sufficiently differentiated to justify the hype, but I hope they get there.


Last edited by iiari on 2 Jan 2019 at 9:40 pm UTC

I was literally just wondering what would happen to LSI without Ikey as there was no commit for months on the Solus git repo. Great to see not only Clearlinux pick this up but also Ikey back working on it. Also nice to know Ikey is working for Intel now.

Yeah, seems he assumed a position in the CLearlinux team (again), probably same stuff he did before. Having a stable job being a new father is good.

What does Manjaro do what Solus does not?

Well, my workplace software (Citrix) works on Manjaro, and Ubuntu as well. I don't know why it doesn't work on Solus. Maybe the Citrix folks didn't build their .tar file well. Who knows, but it doesn't work on Solus for me and others (and yes, we reported it to the Solus folks and Citrix if anyone is wondering). And, relative to this gaming website, I had a few games that run on Manjaro and Ubuntu not run for me on Solus as well. Granted, this was almost a year ago and things might be different now with drivers and Proton, but just FYI. Also, I get your points on the AUR, but I've only found it to be wonderful at tracking down everything I need/want.

Again, I'm pulling for Solus. I only hope the best for the project and backed it for a year, I just don't find anything about the current user experience to be sufficiently differentiated to justify the hype, but I hope they get there.

I am using ICAClient on Solus, no issue except for the selfservice which requires libwebkitgtk-1, which is an issue on Manjaro as well. I can't find a bug report on dev.getsol.us either. We The devs can't provide ICAClient, and basically no distribution should, since you need to accept the EULA before downloading, so it would be illegal to provide a package and/or 3rd party without a special agreement with Citrix.

I have to confess there was one issue, I had to copy the PKI certificates to the ICAClient (or I rather linked it to my systems cacerts), but that's because we use our own PKI authority, which hardly anyone does :p.


Last edited by STiAT on 3 Jan 2019 at 5:28 pm UTC

I am using ICAClient on Solus... I have to confess there was one issue, I had to copy the PKI certificates to the ICAClient (or I rather linked it to my systems cacerts), but that's because we use our own PKI authority, which hardly anyone does :p.

So you may be the hero that ICAClient users on Solus need but don't deserve. I am not technically knowledgeable about this, but I and others only got it working by copying over contents from directories from our Ubuntu installs (including certificates) and that seemingly worked for a few weeks until the certificates expired? Nothing seemed to update automatically. We eventually gave up. The threads are still there on the Solus forums.

The legality of it being in the community supported repos aside, it's worked better and smoother for me on Manjaro than anywhere. Any idea of what's wrong on Solus? We were told there was no point in filing a bug report since with the EULA they wouldn't touch it. That made no sense to me at the time since they have a third party install system in their package manager for lots of proprietary apps (Chrome, Skype, etc).


Last edited by iiari on 4 Jan 2019 at 3:25 am UTC