Solus 0.201529.4.0: Hold on, this is more beautiful than Elementary!

Solus, formerly Evolve OS, has started to make some splashes in the Linux pool recently. It introduces the new Budgie desktop, a simple desktop similar to Chrome OS. The distribution aims for beauty and also features a new, innovative package manager called eopkg. This review focuses on the daily 0.201529.4.0 build, released on July 16, 2015, rather than the May 17, 2015 Beta 2.

1. First impressions and ease of use

The live ISO is a petite 704 MB in size and can be downloaded from http://solus-project.com/download. The live desktop is similar to Chrome OS, and everything is pretty self explanatory. It’s also quite fast.

Ease of use score: 10/10

2. Installer

The installer is visually pretty, but functionally it could be a bit improved. Partitioning has to be done manually using GParted, which is confusing for newbies. It does offer to automatically set the location though, which is a nice feature.

It’s easy to slip up on the install if you don’t know what you’re doing (for example, the boot loader option is not selected by default). I’m only going to give leeway since this is a rough daily build. I haven’t tested the older beta, so I don’t know if this installer is used there.

There is no slideshow, either, which is a shame for such a beautiful distribution. However, it gets the job done very speedily, presumably by dumping the contents of a file onto the hard drive rather than installing packages one by one like it is done in most distros. This process is similar to that of Manjaro.

	Release date	ISO size (GB)	Distribution base	Install time	Boot time	Size of install	Desktop RAM use	Kernel Version
KaOS 2015.02	2/24/2015	1.4	Independent	18:03	0:36	4.6	415	3.18.7
Ubuntu MATE 15.04 Beta 1	2/25/2015	1.1	Ubuntu Vivid (15.04 Beta 1)	12:57	0:27	4.2	457	3.18.1
Manjaro 0.8.12 Xfce	2/6/2015	1.4	Arch	11:33	0:27	4.7	351	3.16.7
Netrunner 15	2/16/2015	1.9	Ubuntu Utopic (14.10)	16:20	0:41	6.4	714	3.16.0
openSUSE 13.2 KDE	11/4/2014	4.4	openSUSE Harlequin (13.2)	15:29	0:39	4.4	422	3.16.6
Bodhi Linux 3.0.0	2/17/2015	0.6	Ubuntu Trusty (14.04 LTS)	5:50	0:34	2.2	348	3.16.0
Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon	11/29/2014	1.4	Ubuntu Trusty (14.04 LTS)	8:45	0:42	4.5	343	3.13.0
Pinguy OS 14.04.2	3/22/2015	2.6	Ubuntu Trusty (14.04 LTS)	20:54	0:47	7.4	745	3.13.0
Korora 21 Cinnamon	2/6/2015	1.7	Fedora 21	13:24	1:04	5.0	602	3.18.3
Fedora 22 Beta	4/21/2015	1.3	Fedora 22 Beta	10:10	0:46	4.2	843	4.0.0
Lubuntu 15.04	4/24/2015	0.7	Ubuntu Vivid (15.04)	11:55	0:22	2.4	216	3.19.0
elementary OS 0.3	4/11/2015	0.9	Ubuntu Trusty (14.04 LTS)	11:20	0:26	2.6	392	3.16.0
Linux Lite 2.4	4/1/2015	0.8	Ubuntu Trusty (14.04 LTS)	4:31	0:23	3.5	416	3.13.0
Linux Mint 17.2 MATE RC	6/16/2015	1.6	Ubuntu Trusty (14.04 LTS)	12:37	0:38	4.8	303	3.16.0
Crunchbang++ 1.0	4/29/2015	0.6	Debian Jessie (8.0)	17:25	0:17	2.3	187	3.16.0
Mageia 5 KDE	6/20/2015	1.7	Independent	7:55	0:26	4.1	421	3.19.8
Solus 0.201529.4.0	7/16/2015	0.7	Independent	4:13	0:14	2.4	182	4.1.2
Average of all distros		1.5		11:57	0:33	4.1	433

Installer score: 8.5/10

3. Design

Solus is a beautiful distribution. It uses the Arc GTK theme, which has been my favorite for some time. It also uses the Faba Mono icons.

As seen above, webfont rendering is also quite good. However, font rendering on the desktop is quite jagged, although it can be improved by setting Hinting to Slight in gnome-tweak-tool.

The cursor theme is not consistent between the desktop and Firefox, because the X cursor theme is not set. To make it consistent, create /usr/share/icons/default/index.theme with the following contents:

[Icon Theme]

Inherits=Adwaita

Other than these minor problems which can be easily fixed, I didn’t have to make any customizations since it was beautiful out of the box, a rarity among distros.

The LightDM login screen is also quite nice.

Design score: 9.5/10

4. Applications

Solus comes with the usual GNOME applications.

Web Browser - Firefox

File Manager - Nautilus

Email Client - Thunderbird

Text Editor - gedit

Image Viewer - Eye of GNOME Image Viewer

Terminal Emulator - GNOME Terminal

Music Player - Rhythmbox

Office Suite - NONE

It would be much nicer if an office suite were included, since having the usual applications installed out of the box attracts new users. However, it can be installed by running:

sudo eopkg it libreoffice-writer libreoffice-calc libreoffice-impress libreoffice-draw

in the terminal.

Applications score: 9/10

5. Installing packages

As Solus comes with a relatively new package manager, there aren’t an abundance of packages for it like there are in the more popular and entrenched distributions like Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE, etc. However, it should do for a common use case. If you want more obscure packages, like those in PPAs/AUR, you’ll want to compile from source anyway.

There is also a nice GUI package manager. It’s relatively simple and similar to Linux Mint’s mintInstall.

Installing packages score: 9/10

Final Thoughts: Even though it’s in a rough pre-release state, Solus is generally polished and ready for mainstream use. I recommend the developers respond to some of the smaller annoyances that I’ve talked about in this review, but I can’t wait for the first production release and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it.

Final score: 46/50 = 92%

Distro name	Final Score
Manjaro 0.8.12 Xfce	99
Linux Mint 17.2 MATE RC	98
Ubuntu MATE 15.04 Beta 1	97
Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon	95
Fedora 22 Beta	94
openSUSE 13.2 KDE	93
Korora 21 Cinnamon	92
Solus 0.201529.4.0	92
elementary OS 0.3	91
Pinguy OS 14.04.2	91
Linux Lite 2.4	90
Netrunner 15	90
Lubuntu 15.04	88
Crunchbang++ 1.0	86
Bodhi Linux 3.0.0	84
KaOS 2015.02	80
Mageia 5 KDE	75
Average of all reviews	90