Solus 4.0

A user-friendly rolling release distro written from scratch sounds more like marketing hype than a usable product – or so Mayank Sharma thought.

Unlike mainstream desktop distros that have release cycles set in stone, small ones like Solus kind of just wing it – they ship when they are ready. Solus 4 had been simmering for over a year now and the final release delivers a solid and stable desktop that’s a change from the mainstream.

Solus 4 is available for 64-bit machines only but in three editions, each based around a different desktop environment. Besides the marquee Budgie-based edition, there’s one with Gnome and another with MATE. All editions ship with the usual bouquet of apps you’d typically use on a desktop. The distro uses its own installer, which is easy enough to navigate irrespective of the user’s experience. It does, however, have its peculiarities. For instance, it offers an option to encrypt the installation partitions, but only when you choose to create LVM partitions. There’s also no fancy slideshow to showcase the features of the distro while it’s busy copying the files to the hard disk.