Solus 1.0 Released | Hacker News Reader

Solus 1.0 Released

solus-project.com

47 pointsforlorn19 comments

Definitely looks beautiful. But most of the time I see another Linux distro, I feel like the greater linux community is just spreading it's resources thinner and thinner and wasting time on porting/recreating the file manager and other various operating system components and major applications to the new system just to justify cosmetic differences. I feel like there is so much redundant work being done, especially in the packaging category. I feel like with the new popularity of containers, the design of new operating systems should focus on a plug-in system where package managers are obsolete and everyone only has to make applications for architectures, not distros. That way all that energy can be shared on common code that gets used exactly the same way. Only then, can visual elements and gui things be layered on top. In other words, push the all the forking away from the OS and onto the GUI or X11 layer.

I feel like your suggestion is extremely naive and wasteful of both hard drive space, transfer, and ram.

Please explain how you can put an entire system together that way in a non stupid way.

> hard drive space, transfer, and ram

are all incredibly cheap when compared to human effort in dependency management with dynamic libs. And most Linux packages managers don't elegantly support installation of multiple versions of libs (libfoo and libfoo123 isn't elegant). The way you'd fix that is similar to what the OP is proposing.

Of course, there's many other concerns: but it's not entirely unreasonable.

Its entirely possible for an individual app to have its deps included without forcing every app to work the same and I'm far from convinced that is a real benefit. It would be far better to work towards standardization to make producing a package for multiple distros easier.

There's always a trade-off. A little extra space (which is cheap) for less developer time accounting for all the distro/library/arch combinations. I think it's a very fair trade since space gets cheaper by the year and time does the opposite.

One working example of this type of system is RacherOS[1] which I think could do what I'm proposing. I'm excited to see it mature. People can just package their app in a minimally sized container and be done with it. I think it's what the linux community really wants anyway (modularity and options) but adds the ability to switch without re-installation from scratch.

[1]http://rancher.com/rancher-os/

Unfortunately this is the big problem with the Linux-Community. So many energy is wasted. I am impressed what individuals achieve, but is it really necessary? KDE, GNOME, Pantheon, Xfce, Budgie ... There is to much competition in the Linux-Community. The mantra should be: Forking is eval.

I'm not convinced that much of the interesting work still to be done is on the desktop side of things. Gnome is pretty competent. I am sympathetic to the "I hate change" crowd who were upset by the 2->3 evolution, but I was able to adapt to Gnome 3 almost immediately, and never had an urge to go back...in many ways it is superior, and while it was annoying having so much of the flexibility of Gnome 2 disappear, I've found that in Fedora 23, most of the stuff that annoyed me with its absence is now available. There remains an active Cinnamon branch which keeps the old start menu and task bar ideas from earlier Gnome versions. Solus and Budgie appear to be sticking with the old paradigm, with a couple of custom add-ons (which almost certainly could have been simply Gnome add-ons for any distro), so nothing revolutionary there. And, that's OK, we probably don't need more desktop revolutions at this juncture.

But, it's just not a compelling story, IMHO. It's a Linux distro, with a slightly different Gnome desktop. What could possibly compel me to get excited about that?

It has a new package manager that I haven't heard of, but it seems to be a very rudimentary thing that does roughly what every other major package manager does, only without the decades of experience and bugfixing that have gone into RPM/dnf or dpkg/apt. If it were based on nix or guix, or similarly provided reproduce-able builds or some other novel concept, that would be interesting. I can't find any docs about the package manager to clarify if maybe it actually does do something novel. The description on the website makes me assume it is not merely simple but simplistic.

I guess I sound kinda harsh, and I don't really mean people shouldn't work on stuff that they find fun. I just can't see from the description why it is exciting or novel. I may just be jaded from having seen literally hundreds of distros come and go in my 20 years of Linux usage.

I've been using Linux for about that long (both in recreational and professional capacities), along with everything from IRIX 6.5 to back when Solaris was SunOS.

On the desktop side of things this does offer something that XFCE, E, GNOME 2||3, or KDE has -- something pretty enough to ship to an end-user. This isn't objective analysis, I'm not a UI expert, and I don't have metrics to back this up. It looks pretty, in the same way that OS X looks pretty. I'm going to bet I've tried as many distros as you, as many DE's, as many WM's. I bet you remember RPM-hell after buying Red Hat at CompUSA too. This 'slightly different' UI is finally aesthetically pleasing enough where I'd feel comfortable giving this to grandma, my niece, or use in a business environment (lack of proper AD/GPO tooling that MS has is sorta problematic as YP/NIS and mounting NFS doesn't seem like the right solution, but that's easy enough to fix - the 'user adoption for those who don't know what GNU or what apt-get is' issue is what I'm addressing here).

You're right, it's 'slightly different'. A Lexus ES300 is on the same chassis, the same engine, and shares the same drive train with the higher end Toyota Camry's. But those 'slight differences' (trim, maybe upgraded suspension for a softer ride and less ambient cabin noise) are enough to get the consumer to use it.

As happenstance, this would occur as Win10 advances into what I argue is a really reliable, granularly secure, more-open-than-ever platform.

> This 'slightly different' UI is finally aesthetically pleasing enough where I'd feel comfortable giving this to grandma, my niece, or use in a business environment

I've supported Ubuntu for grandmas and other people not very computer literate in my extended family for more than a decade. For some remotely (i.e. not having physical access to the machine except once every 3-4 years) and so far the most valuable things I found was stability (LTS releases), security updates, enough mind-share to find answers to problems online, enough mind-share to have makers of hardware possibly contemplate supporting drivers for the distro, having hardware that works out of the box, predictable and simple UI.

GUI aesthetics are nice and make a difference, but I found those other things to be more important. The predictable part broke when Ubuntu switched their UI to something else (Compiz/Unity?) I don't remember, but everyone got used to that eventually.

That's a confusing assertion, to me. This is no more beautiful than recent Fedora versions with Gnome 3.

The two are extremely similar in appearance. Very simple, very clean, nice little calendar, nice sidebar thingy. They are different in functionality (sidebars on Gnome 3 are for apps...available shortcuts on the left, and running apps and desktops on the right, and calendar is in the center and pops out of the top bar), but they look so similar that I could easily mistake one for the other, when the calendar and such is not open. The status bar and start menu at the bottom is the only notable difference, and that's certainly not the difference between "beautiful" and not.

I agree that this desktop looks nice. But, it looks nice in ways that current Gnome on Fedora looks nice. Clean, unobtrusive menus and status info, etc. And, I think both are (finally) nicer than Mac OS X. I find Mac OS X (and Windows) too busy, in comparison. They both look a bit like Android, actually, which I also like.

Edit: Screenshots of my current, stock, F23+Gnome 3 desktop, so we can be on the same page about what I'm talking about. http://imgur.com/a/j2uRT

Ah, I guess my reference point was old. There the discrepancy lay. I hadn't tried Gnome since 3.1(?) (early 2014? does that sound right?) at which point it wasn't nearly as clean as your DE (which is super pretty, I'll readily admit). I think we're really on the same page for the most part.

How much tweaking went into that? Do you have a write-up with what sort of steps you took to integrate that sort of functionality (added fonts/behavioral changes/dbus integration type components, etc)?

I'm with you on the "beating OS X" threshold re: UI. Between the whole Atom/Electron/LightTable type WebKit environments, you can develop on any machine. Likewise IntelliJ(Cursive for Clojure), emacs and vim all work as well if not better on Linux. Unless you are tied into Xcode, the development experience for an engineer is finally desktop-ready as the (very challenging) OSX-interface parity threshold has been broken.

"How much tweaking went into that?"

Literally none. This is the default desktop. I installed Fedora 23 yesterday (and it looks very similar to Fedora 21, which I had before, which I think looks like default Gnome 3). The theme, background image, fonts, color scheme, calendar settings, everything is from the standard Fedora Workstation install. I'm lazy and rarely spend much time tweaking things (my terminal and my vim have some customization, but even that's minimal), particularly now that it's all very nice looking right out of the box.

It looks like they have developed their own desktop environment based on GNOME technologies.

https://solus-project.com/budgie/

Softpedia has a good article about the history of Solus - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qXMSxgM... (since Softpedia seems to be down at the moment.)

Thanks, I knew the old SolusOS and was confused about the relationship.

In short: SolusOS became EvolveOS became Solus.

Ok so what is Solus? Yes it's an OS as I can see from the home page but what's the ancestry? Is it too much work to mention 'Linux distro' or 'Linux-based' on the home page (or any other page of the site for that matter)?

"Solus is a Linux-based operating system built from scratch for the modern desktop and targeting the x86_64 architecture."

In the linked page.

Well, in the blog post that is linked, it does state that

  Solus is a Linux-based operating system built from scratch for the modern desktop and targeting the x86_64 architecture.

Yeah, it should probably should say on the home page, but the site seems to be partially unfinished in other aspects as well. (The "Why Solus?" and "Budgie" pages even state that they aren't complete)

I really like the design.

To be honest, a pleasant UI (by _my_ tastes) is what has kept me away from a Linux desktop. I'll have to give it a shot sometime this week.

Though, one thought, maybe someone will use: I do wish people would do more of these sorts projects based on a BSD variant than Linux.

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