Solus DE observations

[Linux for blind general discussion]

Since Solus came up again, I'll share my observations of the three DEs 
I've used. I'm leaving Plasma out since it doesn't work too well for me, 
but yMMV on that


Budgie:
It's, boiling it down. Gnome with a fancy coat of paint and is the Solus 
flagship one. It works well enough given it's Gnome 40 based and is very 
much useable. Now if I could assign keyboard shortcuts, that'd be handy. 
Maybe I can and haven't found it yet, I dunno. One note I do have is 
that LightDM is the login manager and is insanely /loud/ on startup once 
you enable Orca with the usual shortcut. So just have a long, long 
keyboard cable, and Budgie/Gnome have a nice startup sound when you log 
in, which is always a nice touch. The Solus team have put a lot of care 
into the DE from what I've found.

Gnome:

It's Gnome. It's Gnome 40. Need I say more? One note is I couldn't get 
speech at a login manager on my system. It does have a nice startup 
sound to a la Budgie.


Mate:

Oh this is going to be disappointing. There's a few issues with Mate as 
far as Solus goes.


1. The Orca shortcut isn't set. Which isn't a big deal since alt+f2 and 
orca sorts that then when you get the system installed it's two seconds 
work to set the shortcut and set Orca to autostart.


2. THe much, much, MUCH bigger issue is the desktop loses focus and 
requires a GTK dialog to be loaded. Quit Chromium? Yeah Orca+H, F2, and 
then keep going. Now. If there's a compyz setting I've overlooked to fix 
this...then sure, I'll give it another shot. Don't get me wrong. Mate is 
fantastic when it works. It's just....when it breaks on Solus and needs 
workarounds, it's kind of a bugbear for me, as well as the bottom panel 
being unlabeled, but you can get around most of that As with Budgie it 
uses LightDM so you get Orca working on the login screen, again, 
stupidly loud. If the focus loss issue can be fixed, then I'm liable to 
switch back to Mate full time instead of Budgie.

And, there's no startup sound either which, really, disappointing given 
the other two have one and I don't know bout Plasma, but it feels to me 
like the Mate one isn't fully finished up vs the other DE.


And related note, I'm hunting down an nmtui which doesn't seem to be 
shipped with Solus. I may just request it or ask on their forums if 
one's in and I'm using the wrong name.


Related note #2:

Somehow it's more stable for me than Ubuntu, which I didn't think possible.


For installed things?

Mate didn't come with a mail client and came with Firefox which I've 
replaced with Brave, and installed Thunderbird. Each distro ships with 
Orca 40.0, but I've not tried building Orca from git yet, I'm wary of 
installing the build deps on an already working system