Solus Team Plans to Exit GTK and Adopt Enlightenment Desktop (EFL)

DO the KDE devs care any different really Gnome is Gnome,KDE is well KDE, neither is interested in what others do, the user experience is Gnome, KDE. EFL is about as stable as KDE4 Most WMs are dead or updated every 5 years or so, XFCE as fine as it may or may not is not in fashion these days, Mate Cinnamon are just hanging on to the past.

My old friend KDE is only viable because it allows hobbists to play with every setting to their hearts content.
Then we have JWM, the user can make it anything they want as it is 100% customisable the user writes the code, now we are talking of real Linux users that can code.

The fundamental difference is that the KDE devs donā€™t control the underlying toolkit. The issue isnā€™t what the gnome devs choose to do with the gnome DE, the issue is they are modifying the underlying toolkit to suit the preferences of gnome. There are many, many gtk applications and DEs that have nothing to do with gnome which end up as collateral damage.

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It definitely feels like GNOME is separating itself from other Linux experiences. KDE is all about choice and option, and xfce doesnā€™t change enough to really deviate from what theyā€™ve done for a long time either.

GNOME doesnā€™t care about choice, their settings options get more minimal in each iteration. They force people to make extensions that continually break with each update. Itā€™s definitely the FOSS version of a big company mindset. It becomes more and more clear with each update.

I think youā€™re right, a lot of folks are going to just keep running gtk3 for a very long time. GTK 4 will likely just be GNOME.

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This would be mitigated if enough developers with other interests were contributing. It all comes down to ā€œThose who contribute, choose the path.ā€ If that canā€™t work then it is time to fork, but that has not happened for the same reasons the GTK toolkit caters to Gnome.

Life is too short. I just wish that the Gnome developers would realise that sometimes ā€œperfect is the enemy of goodā€.

It will be interesting to see how Ubuntu respond to this.

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IDK, if all the disgruntled GTK based DE developers worked together maybe a GTK3 fork could become viable.

The Solus devs seem determine to stubbornly plough on down this ā€œfoundational distroā€ path, complete with distro specific DE.

What tangible benefits would a Budgie-lightenment DE provide for users over other existing DEs?

Solus tends to talk a lot and deliver very little, time will tell but Iā€™m not holding my breath.

:joy:

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I personally think Solus is dieing a slow death Ikey was the only real coder he left trying to change to QT and failed in his attempt
its just a dead duck.

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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, Iā€™ve only ever witnessed the devs dedicated and motivated to creating a distro they want to use. It isnā€™t so much about creating a distro for X,Y, Z type of user, itā€™s 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. Iā€™ve 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, theyā€™ve been just as passionate about Solus for the years that Iā€™ve 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 isnā€™t for every single user out there, nor does it try to be, itā€™s 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 :wink:

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@Scotty_Trees actually solus has had gnome 41 in its stable repos since last wednesday (yes wed, not fri - unusual but true)

Iā€™m not criticising the devs they do a fine job after the mess and promises Ikey made that is the problem, I liked the budgie Desktop at 1st but then it was dumbed down and for me and many others the decline started. its nothing more than LXDE with raven very heavy on ram. Gnome, KDE, mate, desktops are solid need little in the way of basic packaging. Budgie on the other hand needs constant maintenance as its not built on its own toolkit changing toolkits to EFL will make matters worse not better i feel that is a wrong move they should of fork gnome or used the same as Cinnamon for the the tool kit or learn to code gtk4

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Yes you are correct, edited my post to reflect stable. Something having to do with Discord I think so they pushed the sync earlier than usual or something like that. Thanks for pointing that out!

No worries, I wasnā€™t saying you were criticizing, I just wanted to provide as much information as I knew on the matter.

Itā€™s been stated by the devs that Budgie is in maintenance mode, so only bug fixes and refinement tweaks are being added. They did add desktop icons earlier, a feature that Gnome striped away so they had to develop it from scratch. Everything else will wait until development of Budgie 11, which the plan was always to build it from the ground up.

Whether itā€™s Cinnamon, Xfce, Mate, etc, any desktop environment based on GTK will have to figure out how to handle the changes Gnome is proposing eventually when they update their GTK stack. Itā€™s only a matter of time, so for Budgie to go to GTK4 doesnā€™t solve anything for the devs and a fork wouldnā€™t work either with their plans being to decouple from aspects of Gnome and gnome-shell anyways, so building Budgie from the ground up under a different toolkit is work their going to have to do eventually, so might as well do it without the Gnome devs dictating what GTK can and canā€™t do because theming is important to the Solus devs. Itā€™s all too early to tell and remains to be seen, but there could be some collaborations with other distros with Solus, like Ubuntu and PopOS to provide some support or direction, but for now Iā€™m just curious to see how things play out.

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Yesā€¦all this. I have been saying this for ā€¦well a long time. Just wanted to highlight it.

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Gnomeā€™s approach is similar to that of Elementary OS in some ways. Theyā€™re both trying to come up with a new design paradigm that seeks perfection, and for apps and developers to fit in with their approach. Thatā€™s fine with Elementary OS because theyā€™re not upstream of anything, and itā€™s interesting to follow their development.

With Gnome and libadwaita, it will be very interesting to see how Ubuntu respond. Their theming has always been a big part of their brand, and I canā€™t see them being happy with being forced to use Adwaita for key apps like Nautilus.

My personal view is that a fork would benefit everyone - Gnome could continue to pursue their ideal, and everyone else could deliver the desktop experience that they want to.

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I always like to test out new versions of elementary OS from time to time, but Iā€™m not an expert on their distribution by any means. The elementary devs have stated they build their own applications using the GTK toolkit as well (source), so they are in the crossfires as well so to speak. The only real difference being that Gnome and elementary devs have worked together in some regards since they share some of the same goals/ideals/philosophies/etc.

Thereā€™s a recent podcast Linux Unplugged, where Josh from Solus expands on the whole Gnome/GTK matter, itā€™s well worth a listen. It starts from 3 min to 23 min marker if you just want to get right into it btw: Space for Theming | LINUX Unplugged 424 - YouTube

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I fear a future where if one has 8-9 applications open, there may be 5+ more graphic libraries loaded to cover most of them. Each window will look different, and memory usage will increase.

I do look forward to see what Budgie looks like under EFL. The Budgie UI is great for end users who just want to use the web, surf, maybe a calculator and watch some videos.

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Personally i canā€™t wait to see what Solus does. :+1:

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Me too! I have never used it but followed interviews and videos back when ikey started and left. I would expect them to focus on budgie if they swap out gtk, so they have more time and focus on their homegrown DE.

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I know the whole story of Ikey and Solus since way back. Hope heā€™s doing well. Havenā€™t run Solus for extended periods but i do like it. It would be a choice for me for sure. I like Solus Budgie a lot. What i like about it is itā€™s unlike any other distro. There are so many out there that are just forks of something else. Why do i want another buntu! Or what ever.

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I only know ikey is pretty flamboyant :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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For balance, hereā€™s an alternative perspective from GNOMEā€™s point of view:

https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2021/09/18/the-truth-they-are-not-telling-you-about-themes/

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