This means a normal, everyday user once a week gets a neatly packaged bunch of updates from this week, that they know were tested and verified to not break their system - neatly fitting into the "do not break userspace" rule. For Europe the sync happens at night from friday to saturday.

And this is, in my opinion, how rolling release should be done. A week, or even two weeks is not such a long time to wait for an update, but in turn you get the update that you KNOW is tested and verified to not make your system unbootable. Truly, best of both worlds.

The only exceptions are crucial security fixes - these are merged to stable right away, skipping the unstable repos. This is a compromise they have to make to hold their security promise.

**Eopkg - the true beast of package managers**

Eopkg is fast. Like really fast. Like "holy fuck that's fast" fast. It's frontend is written in Python, while the backend and whole repository handling structure is pure C. And it shows. Eopkg handles up to 16 concurrent downloads and up to 32 concurrent operations. Meaning it can download 16 packages and in the background install 16 previously downloaded ones. The binaries are also natively compressed, making downloads much smaller in size. All this means, eopkg is currently the fastest package manager in Linux. Tested and verified that among apt, dnf, zypper and pacman - eopkg ran circles over all of them with room to spare. As an example - installation of "btop" took:

* 8.2 seconds with apt (Debian 13)
* 7 seconds with dnf (Fedora 44)
* 14 seconds with zypper (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed)
* 3.6 seconds with pacman (Arch)
* 1.8 seconds with eopkg (Solus)

All of this while having a nice, consistent UI, and a lot of data to show you, the user, about what it's doing.

But eopkg and Solus packaging in general has much more merit to it than just simply speed. Like the fact, that packaging an application on Solus is as easy as writing a .yaml manifest and merging it into Solus Github repository.

**Booting and initramfs - I AM SPEEEEEEED**

What is interesting is that Solus does not generate initramfs during updates and installations. Like at all. No dracut, no initramfs-tools. The initramfs is generated server-side and served to you as binary to be downloaded. This speeds up updates even more and, together with systemd-boot, ensures consistent, reliable boot environment.

And the boot times... On my PC, excluding firmware boot (so everything before the OS loads) it's 8 seconds to KDE login screen. On my laptop, it's 3.5 seconds.

And tying back to the security bit - this is something that surprised me, but made a lot of sense when I thought about it. Solus doesn't have a classic "boot" partition. I mean it does, but it's not really used like it is in a typical Linux distro. The boot partition contains everything that is needed to boot the system, and then it's compeletly unimportant, that's why after successful boot it's unmounted. This is possible, because as said - Solus doesn't need access to it to generate initramfs. There's nothing on boot partition that the system needs when it is already booted.

This gives you a bit of extra security. Not saying it's something crazy secure or fortified. Just a nice touch, showing that they really do care about making Solus modern and secure.

**Performance, gaming and footprint**

This section was edited in, since I compeletly forgot to include it. What about performance, gaming, etc? Well, to start, let me give you some stats about how Solus looks on a fresh install on my laptop (Thinkpad E14 Gen 2 with i7-1165G7):

* CPU Usage: 1%
* RAM Usage: 1.1 GB
* Disk usage: 7 GB
* Power usage: 6.2 W

So yeah. It uses pretty much nothing. And that's on KDE desktop. In terms of performance in gaming on my main PC - as you would expect. Super low resource usage means more "umpf" can be dedicated to games, and it shows. I gained around 8-10 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 comparing even to Debian, 15-18 fps comparing to Fedora. This is really a lightweight system, so the performance is just stunning.

**Conclusion**

All this