 It's time that we had a serious conversation about Solus OS because increasingly it looks like Solus OS is a dead project. So Solus is now being labeled as a dormant distro according to Distro Watch. It hasn't been removed from Distro Watch, it's still there, they're still tracking page hits. When it's completely dead the status will be changed to discontinue, but right now it's labeled as dormant meaning we haven't seen any activity from Solus in so long we're not sure if it's dead or alive but we're waiting a little bit longer before we actually market discontinued is what they're doing here. And I started getting some questions about Solus from viewers of my channel. I've had a couple of people reach out to me because they run Solus and they were concerned about it. I remember a couple of weeks back someone asked me about it on one of my live streams and I briefly said that you know I haven't used Solus in years. I haven't talked about Solus on the channel in at least two maybe three years because I kind of got the feeling even two years ago I had a strong feeling that Solus was not long for this world that it was not going to be around. And when this person was asking me a couple of weeks ago about Solus it was really dire because their website didn't load right now it is loading so as of today the website is back up but the website seriously for the last two weeks or so did not load meaning you couldn't get to the download link you couldn't go to the forums for help a matter of fact if I open the forums in a tab here we'll just wait I'll wait for about 60 seconds and I've waited for about a minute it's never going to load so the forums are dead I don't know if the forums are dead due to a technical issue or maybe they just took the forums offline because they probably got tired of people asking hey is Solus dead there are other parts of the Solus website that are also down for those of you wondering about you know packages what packages are available have any packages been updated which they had this portal here dev.getsol.us but kind of like the form link it's never going to load I'm just going to sit here and wait forever on that it appears if you go to downloads of course the last ISO that they put out was 4.3 and Solus 4.3 came out believe in early 2021 so it's a two-year-old ISO for a rolling release distribution I also notice that Solus has a subreddit I believe at star slash solus project is the name if you go to the subreddit pretty much all of the top I don't know 20 or 30 questions are all hey as Solus did it's it's kind of sad that you know these projects they come and go you know it was one of the things I often tell people about is so many hundreds of these linux distributions they just come and go right over the years most linux distributions that were created are no longer with us I have certainly seen many very popular linux distributions come and go over the years and this is just one of the things that the longer you're a part of the linux community the more you're going to see some of these very popular linux distributions maybe distributions you're currently running maybe you actually love the distribution but one day it'll probably end one of the things for me that really made solus stand out and I believe it's why solus gained such popularity a few years ago when it exploded on the scene and everybody fell in love with solus it's because it's its own independent distribution meaning they have their own package manager and package format their own repository of software they're not a fork of something else they're not a derivative of something else solus is its own thing and that was really interesting and it's rolling release but but it's not bleeding edge rolling release it's not gonna break on you the way arch or gen two might because they hold back a little bit it rolls but it's a slow roll the other thing that really made solus stand out is their desktop environment because they created their own desktop environment the budgie desktop environment and before we continue I should mention that budgie is not going to die with solus actually solus hasn't really been that active in budgie development in a long time it's been given over to the community and there are other people driving development of the budgie desktop environment so don't worry about budgie and solus they are no longer tied at the hip you know they're no longer the same people running both programs budgie is its own thing and development of the budgie desktop environment is just fine it's very active not to mention you have another major budgie Linux distribution out there a boon to budgie edition which does heavily drive a budgie development on its own and because of that you guys that love the budgie desktop environment you're going to be just fine so such a beautiful distribution clean polished very opinionated on what it does and that's part of why I think solus gained a lot of popularity in the early days I also think it's why solus is kind of a dead project now it's because I think some of the reasons why solus existed in the first place are aren't as relevant now as they were a few years ago one of the biggest reasons that solus is dying is because the person that created this project was a fellow named and he left the project pretty much shortly after it got started and became popular you know all of these people started using solus and it became a big thing and then he just walked away and that's that was a big deal because it's a lot of work right maintaining a distribution especially independent distribution he created so much stuff with it you know as far as again it's got its own package management system and the desktop environment the budgie desktop environment was created for solus etc and then this guy he just walked away and he kind of left everybody in a lurch because it wasn't like hey I'm going to stick around and help people with the transition it was kind of like I'm gone I hope somebody steps up to maintain this thing and unfortunately people did step up but they weren't the ones that created this thing right they weren't the ones that originally signed up for all of that work all of that headache and I think it's possible that the original creator of solus he knew that solus was going down a road that was eventually going to lead to its demise and maybe that's why he got out I I really think being an opinionated Linux distribution kind of hurt it because one of the things that really hurt solus was the fact that the repositories are so small you will not find a lot of software in the solus repositories it's the worst repositories of any Linux distribution I've ever used and I'm not kidding as far as software availability it's an incredibly small repository of software and part of that is they just don't want to package everything in some cases they're not looking for extra people to help maintain packages and build packages and because of that there is a ton of stuff that I run on a daily basis that is not in the solus repositories for example there are a ton of programs I use every single day that I can't get on solus unless I want to build it myself that's a problem and people have complained about this for years I complained about it from day one when I first took a look at solus and I'm impressed by the desktop environment and everything but I always warned them hey this repository of software it's small way too small you're missing so much stuff that people are going to want and you know that that small repository of software you know the kind of people that it hurts the most nerds people like you and me Linux enthusiasts especially those of us that often help with Linux development you know how are we going to use your Linux distribution if a lot of the development tools you know are not in your repository things that I would use on a daily basis now if I can't use your distribution for development then chances are I'm probably not helping your distribution right because I'm probably on another distribution that has all that stuff and if I'm going to contribute to a distribution I'm going to contribute to the one I'm using and I'm not using yours you can see that that's a problem and I really think that has led to this situation if I open a terminal because I remember a few years ago one of the big reasons that I just couldn't run solus is you know I don't necessarily want to run the budget desktop environment but you know you could install anything on any Linux distribution as far as desktop environments window managers so why don't I just install Xmonad so if I do a EOPKG and I do a search for Xmonad it's in their repositories or at least it was four or five years ago when I ran the search on it yeah so Xmonad is there and Xmonad contrib is there and you have to have both so it is packaged but you got to have a panel right so is Xmobar packaged for solus no though they give me the window manager but not the bar that goes with it and I could probably search for a dozen other things that I would want as far as window managers and related tools panels bars and other little bits and pieces that I would use to create my own desktop environment if you will and a lot of that stuff it's just not in the repos another thing we should mention is because the project hasn't seen any activity here recently websites been down the development team or that you can't contact you know there's a there's a lot of weird stuff going on with it some of the packages on solus right now are incredibly out of date so really old stuff right you're not going to be on the latest kernel and your browser is probably not going to be on the latest version things like that so should you be running solus at this point honestly I would have told you two years ago you probably shouldn't be running solus again that's kind of why I quit talking about it is because this situation even back then looked kind of scary to me it's not something that I personally would have invested a lot of time and effort into and really I should give a recommendation for those of you that are running solus and those of you that are not running solus those of you that are running solus should you be running solus or should you move to another distribution yes you should move to another distribution and honestly even if solus eventually gets their act together and comes back strong still move to another distribution until they prove that because this is not something that's just happened today or in the last couple of weeks this has been ongoing for months if not years some of the problems with the repos and the development team is pretty much non-existent there's no leadership to solus at all and that's dangerous because you're going to find yourself if the repositories are not working especially you can't get the latest packages nobody's building packages if you can't get the latest kernel what if you're on newer hardware you're not going to have the kernel that has the drivers for that new piece of hardware because they're using an ancient kernel it's it's going to cause you problems right so if you're running solus right now and you're wondering should i just install another distribution i would strongly urge you yes there's there's no reason not to if you're just hanging on to your installation because you don't want to reinstall and you're just hoping that things will at least keep working for you maybe they will but honestly i think that's kind of a pipe dream i that's probably not going to be the case you're going to have to move eventually you might as well start looking for something now and then my recommendation for those of you that are not running solus because i've had people ask me this as well i'm not on solus people are saying it's dead but it looks like a fun project should i install it well not on a production machine if you want to install it in a virtual machine and just take it for a spin and just play with it like i'm doing you know this is a vm we're looking at right now yeah go ahead but obviously if you're not already on solus definitely don't jump on it on physical hardware as far as a main production workstation or something like that because you're getting in on it when everybody else is pretty much saying hey this distribution is dead and you're never going to get any updated software or anything like that right you would essentially you're going to have to reinstall within a few weeks at most so yeah i wouldn't right now i would just say solus solus is dead until proven otherwise and that is my opinion but really i think everyone in the linux community should probably take that stance for right now because it would be irresponsible for any of us any of us video content creators for those of you that write articles and blogs about linux it would be irresponsible for any of us to talk about solus in any other light other than right now it is an inactive dormant distribution that nobody is in charge of and nobody's working on so just some of my thoughts on that now of course before i go i do need to thank the producers of this episode i need to thank gabe james maxim the homies to bald matt mimit michael paul roe west armor dragon bash potato chuck commander angry george lee met those nate urion paul peace arch from door polytech realities for less red profit roland tool steveller williams in a bit these guys they're my highest tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys this ran about what looks like the death of solus would not have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on patreon because i don't have any corporate sponsors i'm sponsored by you guys the community if you like my work and want to see more videos about linux and free and open source software subscribe to distro tube over on patreon all right guys peace