 One of the Linux distributions that I've always found interesting is Solus. Solus is one that every time they have a new release, I typically take a look at it. Maybe not on camera, but I typically install it on some of my test equipment, such as my laptops. That laptop behind me is running the recently released Solus 4.2 Budgie Edition. And every time I install Solus, I'm always really impressed with how beautiful and clean and polished a distribution it is. It's not the kind of distribution for everybody. I wouldn't say Solus is a distribution for the power user. For those of you that love tiling window managers and command line programs and stuff like that, because a lot of the programs that those types of people want to run, the Solus repositories are not that big. They don't have some of the strange software that people like me sometimes want to run. But if you're a traditional Linux desktop user that likes to run the Budgie desktop or GNOME or KDE Plasma or Mate, Solus may be the distribution that you've been looking for. So today, what I wanted to do is I did that installation on that laptop, but I'm going to run through a second installation inside a virtual machine. That way I can record it on camera. And we're going to take a quick first look here at the recently released Solus 4.2 Budgie Edition. So let me switch over here to my desktop. And again, this is a VM I created. This VM I'm running inside Vert Manager. I gave the VM 25 gigabytes of space, and I gave it two threads of my 24 thread threadripper. So plenty of resources for this VM. So it should run just fine. And let's go ahead and run through the installation. So I'm going to click on the icon here that says Install the OS. And the Solus installation process has always been one of those very quick, very easy installations, much like Ubuntu and Mint and a lot of these other user-friendly distributions. Typically you click OK three or four times and in 10 minutes you're done. So let's run through this very fast here. I'm going to choose my language, English, United States. Do I want it to find my location automatically? No, I'll just give it my location. Keyboard layout, English US is the default and that's fine for me. For my location I'll just click somewhere in the central time zone here in the US. Chicago works for me. All right. And then where should we install it to? So do you need to install it alongside another OS such as Windows? Do you need it to erase the entire disk? You know, if you're only installing Solus as the sole operating system on a disk, do you want to manually partition drives, et cetera? So what I'm going to do is just let it do the automatic partition and give Solus the entire 25 gigabytes of virtual disk space here in this virtual machine. Do we want to use LVM? No. There was an encrypt the new installation option here too. We're not going to do any encryption. What should the name of this computer be? I'm just going to call it VIRT for virtual machine. All right. And then we need to create our username and our password. So my username, I'm going to call my user DT. His real name is also DT. His password. Now we need to create a strong and complicated password for privacy reasons. All right. And then it will not let me add now. I guess it did not like my super secure password. So I guess I have to do something else. How about it still does not like my password. I hate these installations that do not allow me to use the password that I want to use. Let me actually create a normal kind of password. Something that's got numbers and letters. And yeah, now it'll actually let me go on. So anyway, we get a little summary of everything we've chosen language and partition scheme, the user system details. Let's go ahead and click install. It's going to warn us that it's about to format the drive and right to the disk. I'm going to click OK. And then this portion of the installation typically takes about five to 10 minutes. I'm going to pause the video and I'll be back once Solis has finished installing. And that installation finished very fast. That probably took two minutes. I stepped away. I paused the video. I stepped away to take a tinkle. By the time I got back from that tinkle, it already finished installing. So a very fast install. Let me go ahead and restart the VM. And it is rebooting. All right. We get to a login manager. I hope I can remember that strong and complicated password that I had to enter. Since it didn't let me use the normal password. All right. And let me quickly get a better screen resolution here. So let me search for the terminal application here. And I'm going to run a quick Xrander dash S 1920 by 1080 and get a 1920 by 1080 screen resolution. So one of the things I really love about the budgie desktop environment and about Solis, their budgie edition is this is a really great desktop environment for those wanting a traditional kind of desktop computing experience. So say the traditional kind of windows paradigm budgie is much more in line with that kind of user experience than what GNOME 3 and GNOME 40 have become. So, you know, budgie is kind of what GNOME 3 should have been from the beginning. Budgie is, I often say, budgie is a fork of GNOME 3. That's not exactly what budgie is, but budgie is a GTK desktop. It uses mostly the GNOME applications, but it just does not use the GNOME shell, right? Budgie is its own desktop environment with a traditional kind of menu system with categories with a search bar. Unlike the GNOME desktop environment, we have icons on the desktop. I personally don't like icons on the desktop, but for many people that is a complete deal breaker with the GNOME desktop. Isn't the fact that GNOME does not allow you to have desktop icons. That's not a problem in budgie. You can have your desktop icons. They're enabled by default. You can turn them off if you so choose. One of the things I've always liked about the budgie desktop on Solis is the theming. I love the dark theme. It's a very dark theme. The panel and the menu system are almost black. They're not solid black, but they're pretty close. It's a very dark theme, the GTK theme. Let's open up the file manager here. I believe this is the Nautilus file manager. They're using the GNOME file manager. Yeah, files, but it's really Nautilus. It's a very black theme, which looks stunning, especially against a light wallpaper, which they're using a very light wallpaper by default. It's a really sharp looking desktop. It's the kind of desktop that if you are a Windows user or a Mac user and you've never seen desktop Linux, when somebody shows you this, you're like, oh, wow, I didn't know Linux could be that. I thought Linux was just a server operating system. I thought it was one of those operating systems for hackers. No, no, it's for normal people, for normal use as well. So typically on these reviews, I go through the menu system and show you guys what are the default applications installed on the system. So that's what I'm going to do. Now the budget edition of Solus, the ISO that I downloaded was 1.9 gigabytes in size. So not a terribly small ISO. So I expect there to be a number of applications already installed by default here in Solus. So if I go into the accessories category, we have files, which is the Nautilus file manager that we just took a look at. We have text editor, which should be GNOME's gEdit text editor, which is a really fine plain text editor. I quite like gEdit. It's not bad. Of course, you know, I typically like more powerful text editors such as if I want a graphical text editor, things like Genie, for example, or Notepad QQ. Or of course, if I don't mind, you know, real power editors, Vim and Emacs, of course, is what I use most of the time. But gEdit is not bad. If you force me to use gEdit, I quite like it. Under the Graphics category, we have our image viewer, we have LibreOfficeDraw, and we have Photos. Let me click on Photos because I believe this is one of the GNOME applications as well. Yeah, and this is Photos 3.38. This is GNOME Photos. This is one of the standard GNOME applications. For those of you that have a photo collection, if you're a photographer, you've got a very large category of photos to manage that. That would be an application you might want to use under the Internet category. We have Firefox as our default browser. Let's check what version they're on. Now, this is a very recent release of Solace, so I would expect this to be a very recent release of Firefox. So if I go to Help and about Firefox, they are on version 85.0. So yes, that's a very recent release of Firefox. And let me close out all of that. Back to the Internet category, we have HexChat, which is the IRC chat client. And if I just use the default settings, which is my username for a nickname, and I click Connect, will it actually go straight to like the Solace IRC channel, or where does it log us into here? Yeah, and it says Join Hashtag Solace. So it will automatically get you into the Solace support channel over on IRC if you need a support. I really like that. I wish every Linux distribution did that. I think that's a really nice feature. Also, under the Internet category, we have Thunderbird as our email client. Under the Office category, we have a few programs from the LibreOffice suite. We have Calc, which is the spreadsheet program, Impress, which is the presentation program, and Rider, which is the word processing program. LibreOffice is our free and open source alternative to something like Microsoft Office. So let me open up LibreOffice Impress. This is the presentation software, and I occasionally do use LibreOffice Impress to make, you know, simple little presentations, especially if I'm doing, like, a video presentation. You know, you got some templates that you could choose from here, and of course, then you could build your little slideshow and everything here in LibreOffice Impress. Let's see what version we're on here. This is LibreOffice version 7.0.4.2. Let me close that out. All right, and under the other category, we have onboard settings. I'm assuming that some of the accessibility programs, such as your on-screen keyboard and things like that, the typing assistant, universal access, I'll close that out. Also, under other, we had print settings and just settings. Settings, I believe, is the settings manager. Those of you that are used to, like, a control panel or a settings manager, those of you familiar with this inside the GNOME desktop environment, it's basically all of your preference settings, right? You can click on preferences. For example, maybe you need to change, maybe you need to add or delete a user. You can click on users or default application or date and time if you need to adjust the date and time or your time zone is incorrect or something. Displays. Display, of course, would be where we would go to change the screen resolution. So instead of using the terminal command, Xrander, like I did earlier, I could have just opened up the settings manager and went to displays and then click the dropdown and got a list of resolutions. These are the same resolutions that Xrander displays. It's just this is a graphical, I guess, front end to that kind of thing that Xrander does. Under the sound and video category, we only have two programs here. We have GNOME MPV, which is your video player. This is GNOME's front end to the MPV video player. And it's GNOME MPV 0.16. Not much to see with that. Also under sound and video, there is the rhythm box music player. Rhythm box is a fantastic audio player. It's one of the best available on Linux if you like GTK based applications. And of course, Budgie is using mainly GNOME applications and GTK based applications. Let's see what version of rhythm box we're on. We're on version 3.4.4. I really love the interface. And of course, the interface is very customizable. Let's see what they are using here. If I go to the menu system, I go to view. You can see what the soulless guys have ticked on here. They have the side pane ticked on. So, you know, you could adjust the interface, the song position slider. We could turn that on and off album art, follow tracking and all of that under system settings. We've already seen the system settings. So everything you see in this list is the same stuff you saw in the settings manager when we clicked on that earlier. So if I go back to other and click settings, everything you see here in this left hand pane in the category system settings, you could click on those and you would go straight to that particular category in the settings manager. I hope that makes sense. So I'm going to close out that. And then we have system tools, system tools. We have the budget desktop settings. So this is where you can tweak the look and feel of the budget desktop. So you change the theming, maybe the icon set and things like that was the style right here. We have widgets, icons, cursors. You can change all of that. The fonts, we have desktop. And this is where we can turn on and off the desktop icons for me personally. I'll turn them off. I don't like having desktop icons. Those of you that like them, you don't have to do anything. Just leave that on. You can also adjust the Raven menu. So the Raven menu for those that are not familiar with the budget desktop, you see this icon in the very bottom right hand corner. Click on that. And this side panel pops out. This is your Raven panel here, your Raven menu, Raven panel. And this is where you get things like notifications. You'll also have applets. For example, I don't have any music in this VM. But if I was playing a piece of music in rhythm box, you would have a rhythm box applet also appearing here with control buttons and everything. It's a really neat feature to solace this Raven pop out panel here. We can also play with the budget panel itself. Right now we have this bottom panel, but we could move it. We could delete it. Whatever it is you want to adjust and maybe you want to add different widgets to the panel. You can do all that here in the budget desktop settings. Also under system tools, we have the G-parted partition editor. Typically, you don't need that. Most Linux distributions have that on the live ISO, but typically after you install the distribution, they remove G-parted because it's kind of dangerous. You typically don't want to be partitioning your drive, other than when you're formatting the disk and installing a distribution. So I wouldn't play with G-parted unless you know what you're doing there. Under universal access, we have the onboard settings once again. And under utilities, we have our archive manager. So that's the tool for zip, unzip, tar-gz, and all of that. We have our calculator, which I'm sure is the standard GNOME calculator. Let's see. This is, yeah, the GNOME calculator, 3.38.2. And of course this is in basic mode. Most people, if you actually want a nice calculator, are going to put it in advanced mode. So you get sign, cosine, tangent, and all of those really nice functions that most people need in a calculator. Also under utilities, we have our disk tool, disk usage analyzer, document viewer, and that's for viewing PDFs of your passwords and keys tool. A screenshot tool, system monitor. Let's take a look at the system monitor. Let's take a look at how much system resources we are using. And CPU usage is a little high because we're not doing much here. I mean, it's using about 7%, 8% of the CPU. Now I did open a ton of programs here recently. So maybe that's got something to do with it. Also we're in a VM, so I wouldn't put too much stock in the CPU reading here inside the VM. I'm much more interested in the RAM usage. And the RAM usage is 968 megs of the 4 gigs of RAM that I gave this VM. That's not a lightweight desktop environment, but that's pretty normal for GNOME, for example. GNOME typically is a gig or more. So this is kind of like GNOME. And it's using 968 megs of RAM. So it's probably not a desktop environment that you want to use on really ancient hardware. You've got a machine that's 10, 15 years old and you only have 2 gigs of RAM in it, for example. I probably wouldn't install Solus Budgie on that machine. Next thing I want to do, let's see what kernel they have installed. So if I hit the super key on the keyboard, it'll bring up our menu system. I'm just going to start typing term and hit enter and we get our terminal. And I'll make it full screen. Can I zoom in? See how we zoom in here in the GNOME terminal. There we go. I figured it out. Let's do a uname dash R. And that will give us our kernel and we are using kernel 5.10.12. That is a very recent kernel. Matter of fact, I don't think there's anything more recent. I just updated my main production machine, which runs ARCO, an Arch-based system. If I do a uname in it. Let me... Yeah, Arch is on 5.10.13. So it's almost the absolute latest kernel. Also is Htop installed. Let's see if we can get a better system monitor than the graphical one. Htop is not installed. That's fine. I can show you how to use a little bit of the EOPKG package manager. So if I do sudo EOPKG because that's the package manager for Solus, IT for install is just short for install. I think the full word install also works. But I'm going to do IT, Htop. And then of course we have to enter our super secret password. And let's see how long Htop takes to install. That's actually pretty fast there. And then let's run Htop. Just to get another reading for RAM usage. It's only 820 megs of RAM being used inside Htop. And I like doing all of my distro videos. I like looking at system resource usage in Htop for all of them. That way I'm using the same tool for every single distribution instead of each distribution's own graphical tool because there's going to be discrepancies. Let me do a sudo EOPKG believe it's upgrade to upgrade the system. This was just released so I wouldn't expect there to be a ton of packages to upgrade. Yeah, it's only 11 packages that needed an update. And it didn't ask me to confirm it. So no yes or no, it just does it. It just assumes if you ran the command you needed to do that. So that's fine. I'm just going to minimize this and let it run in the background here. And of course the last thing I want to do is check out the wallpapers. You guys know I'm a sucker for wallpapers. So I'm going to right click on the desktop. Going to go to system settings. Not sure where we need to go here. Yeah, it's in system settings background. And this is where we find all of our wallpapers. And it looks like it's the same wallpaper pack I've seen in the previous distributions of Solus. Now this is Solus 4.2, so it's the third point of the 4.series. So it's probably the same wallpaper pack that was in 4.0, 4.1. It looks like I've seen all these wallpapers before but there's some nice ones in here. I really like minimal wallpapers and Solus always has some of the neatest wallpapers. I really like that, you know, just the yellow leaf here on some asphalt. That's really nice. Of course with the dark theming, you probably want a light wallpaper. So let's look for a minimal light wallpaper. Here's one. It's a winter right now, so that's very appropriate. Yeah, I think I would probably go with it. Anyway, just a beautiful desktop. Everything about Solus just is clean, polished. It looks good. Now I think Solus is one of those distributions that if you're wanting to move, especially from Windows or Mac over to Linux, I think most people would be very comfortable living in Solus budget. I've always been happy running Solus on my test laptops. I've installed it several times over the past three or four years on my test laptops and it's always run great. I've always been impressed with it. Now me personally, I would never run Solus on my main production machine, my workstation because you guys know I do a ton of stuff with various tiling window managers and command line programs and stuff like that. And a lot of the programs that I demonstrate to you guys on my videos, they're not going to be found in the Solus repositories. The Solus repositories are really small compared to things, for example, like Debian and Arch. That's why I run Arch, just because Arch has all the software, the AUR especially. Practically anything that's packaged for Linux is going to be in the Arch repositories. That's why I need to run an Arch-based system where Solus, there would be a ton of stuff that I want to run that would not be found in the Solus repositories. And at that point, what are you left with? Well, you have to build it from source. You have to compile it yourself. And I just don't like doing that. But for most desktop Linux users, Solus is probably exactly what you're looking for. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode, Absi, Dallas, Devin, Fran, Gabe, Lou, Corbinion, Mitchell, Akami, Arch55, Therdy, Chris, Chuck, David, the other David, Donnie, Dylan, Gregory, Lewis, Paul, PickVM, Scott, Wes, and Willie. They are the producers of the show. They are my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at the recently released Solus 4.2 budget edition, it wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because this channel is sponsored by you guys, the community. We have no corporate sponsors here. If you'd like to support my work, look for DT over on Patreon. Alright guys, peace.