Ikey left Solus in 2018, which was over 3 years ago now. In that time Solus has added the Plasma edition to their lineup, secured an Open Collective partnership to accept donations, maintains an active forum as well as their social media between Reddit, Twitter, Mastodon, etc. Solus currently has Gnome 41 in their stable repos, Plasma/KDE Applications/Frameworks etc, is usually updated a week or two after a release, and also most of the team will do a Twitch stream every other week or so to work on their projects and interact with the community.
As a personal user of Solus over the years, Iāve only ever witnessed the devs dedicated and motivated to creating a distro they want to use. It isnāt so much about creating a distro for X,Y, Z type of user, itās about creating a distro they themselves as developers would want to use. Of course they take plenty of users suggestions and feedback into consideration, but ultimately they work on Solus because they enjoy it. Iāve not seen any developer on the current team waiver or show signs of burn out, or express concerns to scale things back. Quite the opposite, theyāve been just as passionate about Solus for the years that Iāve been around the project and that is still true to this day.
Over the recent years the devs have had to rewrite a lot of their underlying infrastructure to help future proof their in-progress projects, and also one of the devs went to school to finish their PhD while still working on Solus. Progress is always going to be slow when a team is only a few individuals doing this on their free time after their work and family life of course. For day to day operations updates still get pushed every Friday, their dev tracker is very active for reporting issues also, and they did release a new version Solus 4.2 just earlier this year.
Solus is simply a distro created by a few passionate individuals that in my experience continue to put in a lot of time, effort, and skill to manage what many users have called a great stable rolling release. Now Solus isnāt for every single user out there, nor does it try to be, itās very desktop focused after all, but that is quite an okay thing. We all have the freedom to use which ever distro/software suits our needs the best. And there are users out there that Solus feels like home to them, much like how there are a lot of users here that feel at home on EndeavourOS.
Is Solus dying a slow death? Nah, not by a long shot.
Side note: I am a bit biased toward Solus, but I tried my best to be as objective and informative as I could and I hope this was helpful