Clr-boot-manager now available in Solus | Hacker News Reader

Clr-boot-manager now available in Solus

solus-project.com

31 pointstheSoenke12 comments

It's a cool idea but I almost wonder if they would have gotten more functionality and the same end result by making use of ZFS snapshots and boot environments. Configuration could have even been kept in ZFS properties. Ikey has previous talked about ZFS not being right for a desktop distribution but I don't agree. Snapshots, rollbacks and checksums benefit everyone everywhere. It could be used transparently in the background so the users of Solus wouldn't even need to know it was being used if they didn't want to. That said, if ZFS can't be used, I can see 'clr-boot-manager' being useful, and I like the fact that Ikey works on projects that can be used outside of just Solus. I've been using Solus on one of my laptops and following along with its development and it's quite interesting project. They seem to be happy to try new things and do things in a different way if it seems like it will benefit the users, but they seem to still be content to use existing software if it looks like it will do what they are looking for.

ZFS is pain if you aren't actively aware of it, and tuning it. With heterogenous workloads and containers on Linux, it fails in interesting ways. A lot of this is due to the SPL, and the opaque model of memory management it maintains.

I don't know if I'd agree. It can be a bit of a pain to set up and get right if you've never done it before and if you don't know what you're doing, but with Solus they pride themselves on managing the whole stack and I'm sure they could easily figure it out. Also, i'm not sure what kind of workloads you're describing that it fails in - i've used ZFS on everything from servers, and big desktops to small laptops, and even mini sd cards on tablets. It hasn't once let me down and has multiple times found corruption that I would never have found had it not been for ZFS. I think most people do not realize how often corruption actually happens because they have no way of finding out about it.

I've not used it, but afaik Suse linux default install have btrfs+snapper (http://snapper.io) It snapshots before every install and yast configuraton step and have a boot to snapshot feature..

Great tool - it's also available for the most common distros (RedHat, Debian, Ubuntu...) and it supports LVM, EXT4...

Cool, I didn't realize it supported more than btrfs.

I used snapper on Arch Linux before I eventually moved to ZFS, it worked quite well. Now I'm happier with ZFS and zfs-auto-snapshot though to be honest.

I dug around the site, I have no idea what this is. A linux distro? a solaris one? why is their barely any info except a download link?

Solus is a rolling release linux distribution aimed at desktops. Its really very impressive. Its starting to feel a bit like a game-changer for linux desktops. Its run by Ikey Doherty who works for Intel's Clear Linux.

What makes it a game changer? The website is very sparse -- couldn't even find screenshots for budgie!

Solus is an interesting recent distro in that it's written entirely from scratch, not built on top of Debian/Ubuntu/Arch, etc. It also made its own DE, Budgie, which has since been ported to Ubuntu. It's also become the go-to distro for Linux Steam enthusiasts, because the developers put a huge amount of work into making their own package of Steam that seems to work better than many of the existing ones.

You can check out a DistroWatch review of it here: https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20170206#solus

Also, you may wish to listen to an episode or two of Late Night Linux, on which Ikey is one of the hosts. It's not solely about Solus, but it does get quite a bit of screentime by virtue of his connection to it: https://latenightlinux.com/about/

It's such an absurdly awful website. "Solus is an operating system that is designed for modern personal computing devices, every tweak enabling us to deliver a singular, cohesive desktop experience." Um, okay. It's an operating system. Where do I find Solus programs?

Oh, so you're a Linux distribution with a custom DE. But you won't acknowledge that. The only mention of Linux I can find on the website is instructions on how to use Linux to make a bootable media from the ISO installer to install it. Why? Who does this subterfuge serve?

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