Solus DE observations

[Linux for blind general discussion]

Matthew



What is solus exactly?  is this a flaver of ubuntu meeing based off of 
it or some thing else?  How is the installer.  Thanks.



Hi,




On 8/1/2021 5:38 AM, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
> 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
>
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