Manjaro vs Solus?

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I’m an expert. I can break anything.

If you want simple/stable/secure and aren’t bothered about keeping up to date with the new stuff, then why leave Mint?

Give it a go - if you want simple then get the Cinnamon edition and import your Mint dotfiles for a quick setup… otherwise go for a shiny KDE for something a bit swish.

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Absolutely agree. To maintain your system healthy, I can recommend reading this arch wiki page System maintenance - ArchWiki.

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I always start with distrowatch.org. I noticed Solus doesn’t have XFCE. Package management is something called eopkg (Manjaro - pacman; Mint - deb).

There is a software comparison tool.

I’d rather have to choose between Manjaro and Tumbleweed. And I’m not sure if I would choose Manjaro now.
Frankly speaking, I’d rather choose something non-rolling given that I’ve played with rolling distros for a quite large amount of time and I kinda tired of never-ending maintenance of such systems. What drives me nuts is a regular breakage of some drivers with nearly every kernel version especially when so-called “fixes” are backported from fresh mainline to the previous stable releases. Sometimes it has really bizarre forms: a harmless nvme hwmon hasn’t been backported to 5.4, but a breaking change to hdmi behaviour (which wasn’t necessary in the first place) did slip from 5.11 to 5.10. Ridiculous.

Well I put Solus 4.2 on from the .iso, no idea what happened, but Solus started to just black screen and not boot. Did not change a thing before it started. No drivers installed also. Anyway I put the 4.2 ISO on & it is good again. I had Mint, but I don’t really like how the updates stopped & you had to download the next .ISO to upgrade. I do miss YaST thought, that is a major reason to use SuSE. I just don;t want a easy sys to brake, Solus seems user friendly & rolling.

The biggest plus for Solus is, in my opinion their apps. They have probably the best set of visually coherent apps in the Linux world. And somehow it seemed to perform fastest on my laptop among the distros I tried.
However their biggest problem is limited app availability.
As far as user friendliness goes - IMHO except Slackware/ Gentoo/ Arch etc all are equally user friendly…

The apps is why I first thought of Manjaro, really Solus is fine besides that & really I don’t do that much in Linux. I do like the .appimage thing though, just get 1 of them & that will do.

Solus is compared to Arch and Manjaro still a young distro, and being independent you shouldn’t expect the same quality and quantity of documentation, nor the same amount of active users that can help you that quickly when something goes wrong. For that reason alone I would prefer Manjaro if I were new to Linux.

Yes - it is - in the hand of a novice - every tool has the possibility to cause havoc - just think kitchen tools or matches in the hand of child.

That doesn’t imply a faulty tool - on contrary - it is the lack of knowledge and experience of the user which makes to tool fail.

Don’t follow random tutorials found on youtube or blogs - they are often irrelevant or your system is slightly different - especially when it comes to graphics and network.

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I don’t really install the GPU drivers on Linux, I game in Windows.

As far as a rolling release, I don’t think you’ll get a much more stable disto than manjaro. Of course anything can “break”. I’ve broken Mint. You can’t really go wrong with manjaro though.

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That is 200% true.
Not just because of more active users, I would say more users eager to help others in Manjaro forums. I have used Ubuntu forums (for work purpose, I personally don’t like/ use Ubuntu), Fedora, OpenSUSE, Solus Forums.
And found out Manjaro forums head and shoulders above others when it comes to helping others.

As far as a rolling release, I don’t think you’ll get a much more stable disto than manjaro. Of course anything can “break”. I’ve broken Mint. You can’t really go wrong with manjaro though.

I guess we are too critical in Linux about ‘system getting broken in rolling releases’. MS breaks Windows every 6 months (at least) :grin: … But for some weird reason, we use other ‘terms’ for proprietary OSes/ Software. And Linux community publishes patch to fix those ‘broken’ systems much sooner than MS or Apple.

Ya the Solus forum sucks, my usb stick was only 2 gigs so Manjaro didn’t fit. So reinstalled Solus. I do wish Solus used ButterFS if this drive ever dies, I would like a snapshot to save & move over. Is there a net install? I mean I Solus is working again for me, but if I ever have to reinstall again because of something happening & becoming unbootable, No idea, I changed nothing, it just black screened at boot, had to reinstall.

I don’t really agree.

For Manjaro, you still need to check update announcements in case a particular update has some issue you need to be aware of. See the recent grub and os-prober issues, and manual intervention for CUPS service links, etc.

In comparison, Solus and Void updates are pretty brainless, no need to check any update announcements. I installed Void from a 9-month-old iso then updated without checking any update notes. Updates installed fine. Not sure what will happen if you do that with Manjaro without checking update notes! Similarly for Solus: you can go long periods before updating, without causing issues.

Cons of Solus:

  1. limited repos
  2. the GUI package manager can only do one task at a time (e.g. you can only install 1 package at a time)
  3. I don’t think their GUI package manager works very well with the third party (proprietary) packages listed therein. You end up having to update those using CLI commands which you can get from a wiki link on their site
  4. their kernels are found in /usr/lib64/kernel and not /boot for some reason. If you’re using it as your only distro on your system, that’s not an issue.

But if you’re a dual- or multibooter like me and your PC is set up such that you have MBR/msdos partition table on your booting drive, but you wish to install Solus on a GPT 2nd drive, their installer can’t figure that out and keeps giving you an error at the final install-bootloader stage. Since the rest of the install was done, I created custom grub entries in custom.cfg of my main booting distro. And I had to create symlinks from the kernel and headers in /usr/lib64/kernel to the main /boot of Solus. OS-prober and update-grub command from your grub-controlling distro won’t be able to detect the kernels in that unfamiliar location.

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That just about nails it IMO!

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I just am lucky maybe, accept for the odd black screen at boot & had to reinstall 1 time didn’t have any probs. Maybe that kernal was it, no error or anything though. I have it on drive 2 & no issues. It is odd how every distro (well most) have a different directory structure.

Cons of Solus:

their kernels are found in /usr/lib64/kernel and not /boot for some reason. If you’re using it as your only distro on your system, that’s not an issue.(That is odd)

The age-old debate I see in the Linux world. Which distro is more stable?

Honestly, just as someone else here already said, you can break anything in any Linux distro. There is no such thing as a “rock solid” distro if you’re the kind of person who likes to tinker. It’s not a matter of “if”, it’s a matter of… you guessed it… “when”.

And even if you don’t tinker, stuff happens. Screen tearing, NVIDIA drivers, other drivers, major release upgrades… Even regular updates can break your *buntu machine too. Go look at their forums, or the various subreddits. “OMG I changed my wallpaper, now my computer won’t boot wtf linux sux lol? =(”

I’m just so tired of all this talk about “X distro isn’t stable”. “X distro is rock solid”. People only speak of their own experience screwing up systems. I’ve done it. It all comes down to A) How you use your computer, and 2) Plain ol’ luck. We all know this is true, don’t lie. Also like someone said, MS and Apple OS’s also break all the time (for the same reasons Linux can break… because that’s just how computers work), but they have so much market share and PR that hardly anyone minds.

Are some distros just put together better than others? Of course. You wouldn’t find me using Hannah Montana Linux in a million years (no diss to those who like it, just ain’t my cup of tea :wink: ).

Alright, I’m done.

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3 posts were split to a new topic: Is a rolling release suitable for my system