A brief overview of the Linux distribution Solus
Greetings to all readers of Habr! Today I would like to share my experience of installing and partially configuring the little-known Linux distribution Solus. As a matter of fact, I am writing this article using this distribution. According to Wikipedia, the Solus distribution does not depend on other branches of distributions such as Debian, Gentoo, Cent OS. This is an independent distribution built from scratch on the Linux kernel.
In fact, let's start practicing
The distribution can be downloaded from the official website
There are 4 graphical environments to choose from: Budgie, Gnome, Plasma (KDE), xfce. I chose the very first one (and this is the best option). Gnome is a rather voracious environment, where the sophisticated xfce is too minimalistic. Budgie is an interesting interface because it can combine elements of the other three environments, plus it is lightweight like xfce.
By the way, I created a bootable USB flash drive using the Ventoy program. This utility is good because it allows you to burn one flash drive with several operating systems (I was choked by a toad – the flash drive is 8 gigs, the distribution weighs only 2.5 GB). On this flash drive I store Solus, CorePlus (Tiny core linux) and master (windows 7).
You can download Ventoy here:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/ventoy/files/v1.0.99/
There is a version for mastday too. Download the tar.gz archive (for Linux, you can of course use .exe for mastday), unpack it, inside the folder from the archive there will be a VentoyGUI.x86_64 executable file. Its execution must first be allowed with the chmod utility, and then run:
chmod ugo+x VentoyGUI.x86_64
./VentoyGUI.x86_64After which the program window will open. This window will open the option to “burn” the flash drive. After burning onto the flash drive, you can safely throw the OS images that you want to run from the flash drive. There is no need to restore ISO images; you can safely transfer them to such a flash drive (burnt Ventoy).
After I uploaded the image of Solus (and other OS) onto the burnt flash drive, I restarted the computer and booted from the flash drive through the BIOS (F12 in my case).
Solus comes as a live iso image. That is, you can not only install it, but also run it from a flash drive. However, I installed this image on my computer next to Kali GNU/Linux. This installation is elementary and intuitive (and if it’s not clear, Google or Dakdakgo will help you “installing a live-iso linux image”).
Now for a quick overview.
This system is damn beautiful! They write the truth about it in RuNet, that this distribution is one of the most beautiful Linux.
On the right are very convenient widgets (apparently borrowed from KDE). Below is a panel with some settings, some media utilities and a launch window.
The pool of programs is relatively small, there is no unnecessary “garbage”. I was very pleased with the presence of such utilities in the starting stack as: gparted, gnome-disk-utility, gedit, libreoffice, gnome-system-monitor.
The system is VERY lightweight, as evidenced by the system monitor:
What made me very happy is that the file system format is ext4 (unlike Ubuntu or Mint where fat32)
Solus has its own application center, and you can install both graphical programs and console programs (for the terminal) from it.
System settings from the gnome graphical environment, which was also very pleasing, since this program is very convenient
Now a little about the terminal and installing packages.
Since the distribution is independent from other branches of Linux, the package manager is different – eopkg
To update packages, a command is required (I first entered sudo -s)
eopkg update-repo
Install packages:
eopkg install <package>
For example:
eopkg install <gufw>
Successfully.
Calling package manager help:
eopkg help
Afterwards I opened the graphical firewall gufw
From the screenshots you can see that the firewall provided a report that the distribution comes pre-installed with services that listen on some ports – the standard Network Manager, the avahi daemon, and systemd-resolved. Disable (and/or delete) these services and programs at the user's discretion, depending on his needs. Personally, these services do not bother me.
As you can see in the following screenshot, I have enabled the firewall.
Let's summarize. Definitely Solus is a self-sufficient, independent Linux distribution with many advantages. It is beautiful, concise, flexible and lightweight. It has an extremely user-friendly interface and all the necessary utilities out of the box. It can definitely be used as an OS for a home PC or for office work (fortunately, the office suite is installed).
By the way, for game lovers, in this distribution you can install games through the application center (and there is a huge selection there). There is even the famous Morrowind (the old people will remember it, and a stingy tear will run down their faces).
And that’s all for today, thank you all for your attention.
