With the latest release of Solus, I feel I should ask. I have had my eye on this particular distro for some time now. I even did a test installation about two years ago, but it didn’t feel as complete as I needed it to be.
I am looking for a solid, beginner-friendly rolling Linux distribution for general use. Multimedia, gaming, coding etc. Do you recommend Solus? If so, why? Why not? Looking forward to your thoughts.
I used Solus for a while on my laptop. One day a minor kernel version bump caused my display to stay black. I reported it to the Solus bug tracker and they told me it’s not their problem, and I should deal with the kernel devs. But of course the kernel devs reasonably tell you to deal with your distribution if they’ve modified the kernel, which Solus had.
So I installed Tumbleweed and never looked back. I don’t miss Solus. It was fine, but I don’t trust it now, the way I do trust Tumbleweed.
The nice thing about a decent sized distro is when something specific about your hardware or config causes you a problem like that there will be others who experience the same thing, and it is easier to get help. And if you want to be cautious, you can even wait a bit for updates and watch the forums to see what pops up.
That said, I used to use a smaller distro (also a Tumbleweed user now) and they were always good about helping users troubleshoot such issues, so your experience doesn’t speak well for Solus. The character of the user forums is an important thing to look at when choosing a disto.