I wouldn't say that Solus Linux is dead, but it is definitely not well. The distribution's original domain name of solus-project.com is gone, now replaced by getsol.us. As to why, well, it's a long read or listen to (available both in audio and text), but here you go.

To sum up: Solus 4 was originally due November 2017. That didn't happen. Ikey, the main and only full time Solus developer, began focusing on improving himself and withdrawing from the Late Night Linux podcast and social media. In July, he moved back to England. In late July, Ikey deleted the remainder of his social media presence and mostly vanished.

In late August, Solus suffered a major Internet outage. Unfortunately, the only person's name on the OVH hosting account is Ikey. The other core Solus Linux team members had/have no access. After five hours, Ikey came out of hiding and said that the OVH servers suffered hard freezes. Everything was back up again, but Ikey disappeared again.

In early September, Solus suffered a second major Internet outage. It turned out that Ikey stopped making payments to OVH. The other core team members opened up a new domain name and web site, getsol.us, and spread word on social media to people. On September 7th, Ikey made contact with the other core team members and said that he paid OVH for another thirty days, but that he was "very very sick." That was the last time anyone has heard from Ikey. I personally had no idea about any of this because the only social media I use is MeWe.

In mid-September, the entire Solus Linux project was moved over to the getsol.us domain name and new servers, and a new Solus Linux version 3.9999 was released.

Unfortunately, the two remaining core Solus Linux developers have no access to the original solus-project.com domain name, the G Suite e-mail service, nor the Patreon and PayPal accounts which are both in Ikey's name only.

Yesterday, the call went out by the remaining core Solus Linux developers asking people to cease donating to the Solus Linux Patreon. I've personally been donating $$ per month to it for a year now. It turns out they have no access to it and have no idea what the state of funding is. Posts went up on the Solus Linux Patreon page's community section yesterday telling people to pull their pledges.

So with Solus Linux's main developer gone without a trace, it certainly doesn't look good for what was my favorite Linux distribution. I am not sure what to do now. The obvious choice is Ubuntu MATE since I've been using MATE, but I do not care for Ubuntu for various reasons.