Solus Is Back
The Announcement
Today I woke up to find this reddit post from Josh Strobl, a developer I follow. This is a pretty big deal for meas Solus was my first distro experience where I honestly never felt that it was ever required for me to “use a terminal” This was well before the days of flatpak and snaps (which Solus still doesn’t have a graphical store for). The past six or so months have apparently really put a damper on the distribution with a website outage, and then the package build system went down which effectively means there’s been no package updates for months now. Which eventually resulted in content creators like DistroTube, The Linux Experiment. Not to mention blog, most notable BoilingSteam, and even the Budgie Desktop Upstream depreciating the once flagship distro for the project.
Sailing the Ship
So, how excited am I for this? Well I installed it
Yep i installed Solus, I had to pull the Arc GPU out to accomplish it and hook up a USB dongle to get a working network connection to update the ancient install image from July 2021. I then proceeded to join the IRC rooms and announcement my return, which then I’m pointed at the hot new Matrix Space they switched to.
Giving Back and Helping Solus
I honestly don’t want this distro to die, so I’m going to be commiting $25 per month to the Solus OpenCollective once I see their announcement on Tuesday. This should put me in a tier where I have access to early news announcements, weekly ISO snapshots, and early release builds for all versions. I’ll hopefully be able to help out as I promised to revive an old effort of mine to get the Calamares Installer working with eopkg, so hopefully we can enable an option for a network install, which installs any of the four releases and only publish a single image. The big issue is we would have to teahc calamares how to use eopkg as it doesn’t quite support it yet I announced my effort on the subreddit so maybe, just maybe I might pickup a new skill. Of course at the time of this writing this is purely a third party effort as I’m a member of the Solus Team.