Solus 1.0 Released
I&#x27;m not convinced that much of the interesting work still to be done is on the desktop side of things. Gnome is pretty competent. I am sympathetic to the &quot;I hate change&quot; crowd who were upset by the 2-&gt;3 evolution, but I was able to adapt to Gnome 3 almost immediately, and never had an urge to go back...in many ways it is superior, and while it was annoying having so much of the flexibility of Gnome 2 disappear, I&#x27;ve found that in Fedora 23, most of the stuff that annoyed me with its absence is now available. There remains an active Cinnamon branch which keeps the old start menu and task bar ideas from earlier Gnome versions. Solus and Budgie appear to be sticking with the old paradigm, with a couple of custom add-ons (which almost certainly could have been simply Gnome add-ons for any distro), so nothing revolutionary there. And, that&#x27;s OK, we probably don&#x27;t need more desktop revolutions at this juncture.<p>But, it&#x27;s just not a compelling story, IMHO. It&#x27;s a Linux distro, with a slightly different Gnome desktop. What could possibly compel me to get excited about that?<p>It has a new package manager that I haven&#x27;t heard of, but it seems to be a very rudimentary thing that does roughly what every other major package manager does, only without the decades of experience and bugfixing that have gone into RPM&#x2F;dnf or dpkg&#x2F;apt. If it were based on nix or guix, or similarly provided reproduce-able builds or some other novel concept, <i>that</i> would be interesting. I can&#x27;t find any docs about the package manager to clarify if maybe it actually does do something novel. The description on the website makes me assume it is not merely simple but simplistic.<p>I guess I sound kinda harsh, and I don&#x27;t really mean people shouldn&#x27;t work on stuff that they find fun. I just can&#x27;t see from the description why it is exciting or novel. I may just be jaded from having seen literally hundreds of distros come and go in my 20 years of Linux usage.