Over the past 12 months or so, I’ve been playing around with Solus. It’s not my daily driver, but I’ve definitely installed it on another computer and set up a whole user profile on there with everything that I would actually use if I made it my daily driver. I was really warming up to Solus as a distro. I love the Budgie desktop environment. It’s all I really want. It’s so simple and clutter free. I also admire any distro that breaks away from being a fork and just tries to be a distro in it own right. Solus ticked so many boxes for me.
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Solus Was a Potential Daily Driver
I’ve been busy for the past several months. I haven’t had time to load up by Solus installation and hang out with it for a while. That’s what I do with distros when I’m genuinely considering the possibility of making them a future daily driver. I just install everything I need and I spend a few evenings kind of pretending like that’s my main computer. So today, I decided to spend some time with Solus. After booting it up I decided to go the the website and find out what the latest developments are. However, the website was down. Again. The Solus website has a history of being down, so I decided to investigate.
A Little Bit of History About Solus
A quick read over at Wikipedia reveals that Solus used to be called Evolve OS which used a package manager called eopkg which is based on the PiSi package management system from Pardus Linux. Solus was initially created by Ikey Doherty who has left Solus and is now working on Serpent OS. Some say that we should all support Ikey, but my question is: What happened to his Solus creation and why did he basically just walk off from it? I continued my research.
The Solus Project Was Handed Over to Joshua Strobl but He Quit Too
After a bit more research I came across some some info saying that the Solus project had been handed over to Joshua Strobl, who was previously a developer. I had no idea who this Stroble character is, so I looked him up and came across his Twitter feed. After a few minutes reading his Tweets, I could see why no one can get along with him. He’s an obvious rabid lefty. It took only seconds before I came across insulting Tweets about Elon Musk. Not that I am an Elon fanboy or anything, but his comments are just immature and lacking in basic common sense.
There’s a whole heap of whining about Elon Musk:
Apart form whining about Elon Musk and Twitter, “on Twitter” the rest of his posts are primarily about gaming. So I can’t see how the Solus team, what ever was left of it, wouldn’t actually miss him. He seems like a real slacker from what I can gather.
He made a Tweet saying that he’s resigning from Solus on Jan 02 2022:
In a 2018 article, someone named John Paul wrote an article for itsfoss.com saying that Solus is under new management. Read the article for the full story — but it speaks of server outages, Ikey withdrawing form his social accounts and not being contactable. There were payment issues with PayPal and the hosting company and all kinds of what appear to be the beginnings of the downfall of Solus due to a really dysfunctional team. John Paul obviously likes Ikey, because in the article he chalks the problems up to be due to a poor internet connection and Ikey getting the flu. But even as nicely John words the article it seems blatantly obvious that Ikey Doherty simply went AWOL. His team couln’t even contact him to get some basic hosting paid for. Meanwhile, they had financial backers and contributors.
After Strobl Quit Solus Was Handed Over to “Beatrice T. Meyers”
So, quite dismayed with what I’d learned about the Solus project at this point, I decided to research just a little further. I looked up Beatrice T. Meyers in hopes that maybe there was someone in the team that had the leadership skills to save the project. I mean, I work in IT myself. I know that quite often there are some very high performing team members that can’t get anything done due to slackers above them, making dodgy decisions. So with hopes Beatrice might be able to save the day, a quick search on the Internet took me to Linkedin. Beatrice hasn’t posted anything for a year and this is the last post; about pronouns.
After seeing that profile which was quite unhelpful in my search on info about Solus, I decided to look on Twitter. I came across this profile, with a pinned Tweet to this post. Below that there are some retweeets of the Solus account, which appear to be posted by Beatrice, which links to a string of threads saying that Beatrice is unwell and therefore can’t get the site back up and running, etc. Pretty much what Ikey Doherty was saying before he went AWOL without paying the bills. So history repeats. At least within the Solus “team” anyway. Anyway, I’m done so lets get this depressing post concluded..
Solus Is Dead
The Whole Project Turned Into a Diabolical and Terminal Failure
The Solus website is still down at the time I’m typing right now. Apparently it’s been down for over a month, since Janaury. The distribution actually relies on the website being up and running for various functions. So, yeah. I stopped searching for info about Solus. I deleted it from my computer just before I came to write this post.
So in conclusion I’ve written Solus off as a dead distro. It appears that a perfectly good distro just went down the drain. It’s such a shame because it was actually REALLY good and had a world of potential. I’m not interested in Serpent OS. If only for the reason that “Serpent OS” just sounds stupid. It’s the kind of name a teenage gamer would think up for an OS, while listening to Dark Synth or something. But also, because Ikey Doherty can’t seem to stick with projects or run a team. Everyone involved in the Solus project, while probably all very intelligent people, should actually take a good look in the mirror, because they were accepting donations and contributions for all this. Maybe that’s the real problem? Maybe the funding tried up so everyone jumped ship? Who knows!?