[REVIEW] You should try Solus - rolling release done right!

*I'm two months into my Solus experiment and I wanted to share my experience.*

Well. I've been using and daily-driving Linux for close to a decade now. I work at IT with Linux servers, all computing devices in my home run Linux - my PC, my laptop (both work and personal), my wife's laptop, Steam Deck, personal server. I can also confidently say - I tried all the distros.

Of course - not **ALL** of them, but I've had my fair share of time on various Arch-based distros (over 2 years of daily driving), Fedora (3 years) and most recently - Ubuntu and Debian family (Mint, LMDE and Debian for 4.5 years). Along the way there were experiments with SUSE, Gentoo, Void Linux, various BSDs. I think I can speak about differences in distros with some level of confidence.

Throughout all this journey there was always one compromise or the other. Stability and reliability vs modern desktop experience and the thrill of "new and shiny". That's why at the beginning I was dailying Arch - the "new and shiny" was appealing to me, getting the newest versions of everything the moment they are available. This was exciting. But it came at a cost - reliability. I have experiences multiple breakages. Some self-induced, some just happened because an update introduced some major bug. The breaking point was when I lost my bachelor thesis thanks to corrupt filesystem after broken BTRFS kernel module update. Then I kept shifting to more and more stable distros, until I landed on Debian family.

And I was happy with it for years. But you know... The thrill of "new and shiny" never left. My system was reliable, dependable. I was confident I can just click "update" and not think about it. But it was also stale. I kept reading about all this fancy stuff in Plasma 6 and salivating.

So about two months ago I decided to give rolling distros another shot. I considered CachyOS, or clean Arch, but was still a bit worried.

**And then I learned about Solus**

You may not know Solus. I wouldn't blame you. You may know it and feel resentment towards it, due to some controversy it was entangled in a few years back. I wouldn't blame you either.

But here I am. Two months later, glad to report - Solus is alive and well, and in my opinion, the best rolling release distro there is currently.

**But back to the beginning - what is Solus?**

Solus is a small, independent Linux distribution. Originally created by one man, alongside Budgie desktop environment. Currently Solus and Budgie split, and the original creator left a few years back to create a new project. This stirred some controversy and some problems in Solus operations (for example taking the repos down for months at a time), but it's all resolved now.

It's build on a few simple principles:

* Provide up-to-date, modern user experience
* Ensure security and stability of the system
* DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE

And I'd like to say - these are great principles to follow. How do they fulfil these promises? Well, let's go through the most important features of Solus, one by one.

**Stable and unstable repositories - how rolling release should be done**

This is in my opinion the biggest advantage Solus has over something like Arch. Their update schedule is divided into stable and unstable branch. Unlike Arch, where every new version is pushed to the main repos as soon as it's available, Solus does things a bit differently.

The updates are first pushed to unstable repo. There they are tested both by maintainers, and mad rascals, who dialy-drive unstable repos. The aim is simple - find bugs and regressions in this "designed to fail" space, so that they can be reported to upstream and eventually fixed. Packages stay in unstable repo until they are deemed stable enough to be given to normal, everyday user. No major breaking bugs or regressions.

Once package has been flagged as stable, it is added to the sync list. Once a week maintainers go through this list and sync all the packages from *unstable* repository marked as *stable* to the *stable* repository.