Yesterday, we were made aware of a post over at LinuxInsider, entitled The New Solus: Putting The Pieces Together Again.
Last night, I sent an email to the author with some factual adjustments, in the hopes that this issue would’ve been resolved by now, and the misconceptions, inaccuracies and random new “facts” were addressed. However, a good 24h has passed with no response or amendments, and I believe it is in the interest of the project to deal with the misinformation-damage inflicted on Solus.
We, being an open source project, believe in transparency. Thus, misinformation works completely counter to our interests.
A copy of the email is provided bellow, addressing some of the various issues in this post. We provide this publicly in the hope it will dispel concerns for existing or future users, who read the LinuxInsider article. If users have other questions they are free to contact us via root AT solus-project DOT com
Editors Note: This post is provided simply to clear up facts, given the relatively unknown nature of Solus :] As indicated in the email, we assign no blame.
Hi Jack,
I'm Ikey Doherty, project founder/manager/etc for Solus. I enjoyed your
article, but would like to point out some misconceptions/inaccuracies.
Firstly, let me start by saying I can hardly blame you. The Solus
history is one that's quite hard to follow!
Lineage:
SolusOS 1 - based on Debian. The "original SolusOS"
SolusOS 2 - built from scratch. Forerunner to all current work. This is
where SolusOS was officially shut down, the "closing doors" times.
Evolve OS - deliberately left until some time after SolusOS 2, but still
utilising the same codebase as SolusOS 2.
"Solus Operating System" - is still Evolve OS, but rebranded. There was
not a project restart here, development did not stop. We had one legal
skirmish, by which we could not use the "OS" suffix in "Evolve OS".
Renaming to "Evolve" was not possible due to other products using that
name (A game, as indicated), thus I sought for a name I could use that
held prior art. Thus, "Solus Operating System" became the new name,
operating under "Solus Project" umbrella to encompass all of the work
owned/maintained by the project. (And thus, mitigate legal concerns)
The screenshots you've shown indicate the old beta2 release, I wonder
if you've taken the time to explore the latest unstable daily ISOs?
The current GTK theme is Arc Darker. We're certainly not interesting
in staying on the material design bandwagon.
Right click behaviour actually does exist, on the windows, the desktop
and the panel itself.
Sadly the software center is really not up to par yet, and does not
show all available packages, however running "eopkg la" will.
We actually moved away from GitHub, you can see our infrastructure
at these 2 links:
https://git.solus-project.com/
https://build.solus-project.com/
Lastly, to quote:
"I liked what this developer did with SolusOS and Evolve OS. Budgie is still an interesting desktop environment. I look forward to trying the new Solus distro."
Solus and Evolve OS are one and the same thing. This "same one thing"
is forked from SolusOS 2, thus there is a direct lineage that can
be followed, even if it is somewhat complicated :]
You are more than welcome to include my response in your article, in
whole rather than edited, in order to provide clarification to readers.
Many thanks,
- Ikey Doherty