Solus DE observations

[Linux for blind general discussion]

If nmtui isn't available, you may need to use netctl but make sure dialog
is pre-installed or netctl won't work.


On Sun, 1 Aug 2021, 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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