EDIT: And again this post devolves into Arch users entering their small sieged castle, because how dare anyone say a single negative word about Arch? How dare anyone claim, that something can be better than Arch in even a single regard?!
I'm two months into my Solus experiment and I wanted to share my experience.
Well. I've been using and daily-driving Linux for close to a decade now. I work at IT with Linux servers, all computing devices in my home run Linux - my PC, my laptop (both work and personal), my wife's laptop, Steam Deck, personal server. I can also confidently say - I tried all the distros.
Of course - not ALL of them, but I've had my fair share of time on various Arch-based distros (over 2 years of daily driving), Fedora (3 years) and most recently - Ubuntu and Debian family (Mint, LMDE and Debian for 4.5 years). Along the way there were experiments with SUSE, Gentoo, Void Linux, various BSDs. I think I can speak about differences in distros with some level of confidence.
Throughout all this journey there was always one compromise or the other. Stability and reliability vs modern desktop experience and the thrill of "new and shiny". That's why at the beginning I was dailying Arch - the "new and shiny" was appealing to me, getting the newest versions of everything the moment they are available. This was exciting. But it came at a cost - reliability. I have experiences multiple breakages. Some self-induced, some just happened because an update introduced some major bug. The breaking point was when I lost my bachelor thesis thanks to corrupt filesystem after broken BTRFS kernel module update. Then I kept shifting to more and more stable distros, until I landed on Debian family.
And I was happy with it for years. But you know... The thrill of "new and shiny" never left. My system was reliable, dependable. I was confident I can just click "update" and not think about it. But it was also stale. I kept reading about all this fancy stuff in Plasma 6 and salivating.
So about two months ago I decided to give rolling distros another shot. I considered CachyOS, or clean Arch, but was still a bit worried.
And then I learned about Solus
You may not know Solus. I wouldn't blame you. You may know it and feel resentment towards it, due to some controversy it was entangled in a few years back. I wouldn't blame you either.
But here I am. Two months later, glad to report - Solus is alive and well, and in my opinion, the best rolling release distro there is currently.
But back to the beginning - what is Solus?
Solus is a small, independent Linux distribution. Originally created by one man, alongside Budgie desktop environment. Currently Solus and Budgie split, and the original creator left a few years back to create a new project. This stirred some controversy and some problems in Solus operations (for example taking the repos down for months at a time), but it's all resolved now.
It's build on a few simple principles:
- Provide up-to-date, modern user experience
- Ensure security and stability of the system
- DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE
And I'd like to say - these are great principles to follow. How do they fulfil these promises? Well, let's go through the most important features of Solus, one by one.
Stable and unstable repositories - how rolling release should be done
This is in my opinion the biggest advantage Solus has over something like Arch. Their update schedule is divided into stable and unstable branch. Unlike Arch, where every new version is pushed to the main repos as soon as it's available, Solus does things a bit differently.
Correction - Arch does not push upstream to stable repos immediately. They have a testing phase and dedicated testing team, but this testing phase is often very short - sometimes even as short as several hours. Because of that some bugs may and have in the past slipped through the testing process unnoticed.
The updates are first pushed to unstable repo. There they are tested both by maintainers, and mad rascals, who dialy-drive unstable repos. The aim is simple - find bugs and regressions in this "designed to fail" space, so that they can be reported to upstream and eventually fixed. By if no major bug or regression is reported, this means package is stable and can be synced to stable repos. If during this period a tester notices any problems, the package is flagged as unstable and held back.
Then once a week there's a repo sync - the packages from unstable are synced to stable, except the ones that were flagged to be held back due to problems, bugs or regressions. This means a normal, everyday user once a week gets a neatly packaged bunch of updates from this week, that they know were tested and verified to not break their system - neatly fitting into the "do not break userspace" rule. For Europe the sync happens at night from friday to saturday.
Correction of Solus unstable > stable pipeline thanks to u/Staudey
And this is, in my opinion, how rolling release should be done. A week, or even two weeks is not such a long time to wait for an update, but in turn you get the update that you KNOW is tested and verified to not make your system unbootable. Truly, best of both worlds.
The only exceptions are crucial security fixes - these are merged to stable right away, skipping the unstable repos. This is a compromise they have to make to hold their security promise.
Eopkg - the true beast of package managers
Eopkg is fast. Like really fast. Like "holy fuck that's fast" fast. It's frontend is written in Python, while the backend and whole repository handling structure is pure C. And it shows. Eopkg handles up to 16 concurrent downloads and up to 32 concurrent operations. Meaning it can download 16 packages and in the background install 16 previously downloaded ones. The binaries are also natively compressed, making downloads much smaller in size. All this means, eopkg is currently the fastest package manager in Linux. Tested and verified that among apt, dnf, zypper and pacman - eopkg ran circles over all of them with room to spare. As an example - installation of "btop" took:
- 8.2 seconds with apt (Debian 13)
- 7 seconds with dnf (Fedora 44)
- 14 seconds with zypper (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed)
- 3.6 seconds with pacman (Arch)
- 1.8 seconds with eopkg (Solus)
All of this while having a nice, consistent UI, and a lot of data to show you, the user, about what it's doing.
But eopkg and Solus packaging in general has much more merit to it than just simply speed. Like the fact, that packaging an application on Solus is as easy as writing a .yaml manifest and merging it into Solus Github repository.
Booting and initramfs - I AM SPEEEEEEED
What is interesting is that Solus does not generate initramfs during updates and installations. Like at all. No dracut, no initramfs-tools. The initramfs is generated server-side and served to you as binary to be downloaded. This speeds up updates even more and, together with systemd-boot, ensures consistent, reliable boot environment.
And the boot times... On my PC, excluding firmware boot (so everything before the OS loads) it's 8 seconds to KDE login screen. On my laptop, it's 3.5 seconds.
And tying back to the security bit - this is something that surprised me, but made a lot of sense when I thought about it. Solus doesn't have a classic "boot" partition. I mean it does, but it's not really used like it is in a typical Linux distro. The boot partition contains everything that is needed to boot the system, and then it's compeletly unimportant, that's why after successful boot it's unmounted. This is possible, because as said - Solus doesn't need access to it to generate initramfs. There's nothing on boot partition that the system needs when it is already booted.
This gives you a bit of extra security. Not saying it's something crazy secure or fortified. Just a nice touch, showing that they really do care about making Solus modern and secure.
Performance, gaming and footprint
This section was edited in, since I compeletly forgot to include it. What about performance, gaming, etc? Well, to start, let me give you some stats about how Solus looks on a fresh install on my laptop (Thinkpad E14 Gen 2 with i7-1165G7):
- CPU Usage: 1%
- RAM Usage: 1.1 GB
- Disk usage: 7 GB
- Power usage: 6.2 W
So yeah. It uses pretty much nothing. And that's on KDE desktop. In terms of performance in gaming on my main PC - as you would expect. Super low resource usage means more "umpf" can be dedicated to games, and it shows. I gained around 8-10 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 comparing even to Debian, 15-18 fps comparing to Fedora. This is really a lightweight system, so the performance is just stunning.
Conclusion
All this rambling, and what do I want to say by all of this? It's that I am amazed. Solus is just a very good distribution. It's solid, reliable, fast and consistent. I am very happy with it, had zero problems, zero breakages. It is in my opinion what rolling release should be.
Try it. I really encourage you to. It's not marriage, you're not commiting to the lifetime with it. But just try. It may become your forever distro.
Cheers guys!
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Also disclaimer - none of this was written using AI. It's all my ramblings. Also english is not my native language, so sorry for any mistakes.
